THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS
"Let us have a quiet hour,
Let us hob-and-nob with Death."
--_Tennyson._
Three weeks passed. There was no change in the relations of Rita
Wallace and Gilbert Lothian.
She was gay, tender, silent by turns, and her thirst for pleasure
seemed unquenchable. She yielded nothing. Things were as they were. He
was married: there was no more to be said, they must "dree their
wierd"--endure their lot.
Often the man smiled bitterly to hear her girlish wisdom, uttered with
almost complacent finality. It was not very difficult for _her_ to
endure. She had no conception of the dreadful state into which he had
come, the torture he suffered.
When he was alone--during the long evil day when he could not see
her--the perspiration his heated blood sent out upon his face and body
seemed like the very night dews of the grave. He was the sensualist of
whom Ruskin speaks, the sensualist with the shroud about his feet. All
day long he fought for sufficient mastery over himself to go through
the evening, fought against the feverish disease of parched throat and
wandering eyes; senseless, dissolute, merciless.
And one dreadful flame burned steadily in the surrounding gloom--
"_Love, which is lust, is the lamp in the tomb.
Love, which is lust, is the call from the gloom._"
"Je me nourris de flammes" was the proud motto of an ancient ducal
house in Burgundy. With grimmer meaning Lothian might have taken it for
his own during these days.
He had heard from his wife that she was coming home almost at once.
Lady Davidson had rallied. There was every prospect of her living for a
month or two more. Sir Harold Davidson was on his way home from India.
He would go to her at once and it was now as certain as such things can
be that he would be in time.
Mary wrote with deep sadness. To bid her beloved sister farewell on
this earth was heart-rending. "And yet, darling,"--so the letter had
run--"how marvellous it is to know, not to just hope, but to _know_
that I shall meet Dorothy again and that we shall see Jesus. When I
think of that, tears of happiness mingle with the tears of sorrow.
Sweet little Dorothy will be waiting for us when we too go, my dearest,
dearest husband. God keep you, beloved. Day and night I pray for my
dear one."
This letter had stabbed the man's soul through and through. It had been
forwarded from Mortland Royal and was brought to him as he lay in bed
at breakfast time. His heavy tears had bedewed the pillow upon which he
lay. "Like bitter wine upon a sponge was the savour of remorse."
Shuddering and sobbing he had crawled out of bed and seized the whiskey
bottle which stood upon the dressing table--his sole comforter,
hold-fast and standby now; very blood of his veins.
And then, warmth, comfort--remorse and shame fading rapidly
away--oblivion and a heavy sleep or stupor till long after midday.
He must go home at once. He must be at home to receive Mary. And, in
the quiet country among familiar sights and sounds, he would have time
to think. He could write to Rita again. He could say things upon paper
with a force and power that escaped him _à vive voix_. He could pull
himself together, too, recruit his physical faculties. He realised,
with an ever growing dread, in what a shocking state he was.
Yes, he would go home. There would be peace there, some sort of kindly
peace for a day or two. What would happen when Mary returned, how he
would feel about her, what he would do, he did not ask. Sufficient for
the day!
He longed for a few days' peace. No more late midnights--sleep. No
nights of bitter hollow pleasure and longing. He would be among his
quiet books again in his pleasant little library. He would talk
wildfowling with Tumpany and they would go through the guns together.
The Dog Trust who loved him should sleep on his bed.
It was Saturday. He was going down to Norfolk by the five o'clock train
from St. Pancras. He would be able to dine on board--and have what
drinks he wanted en route. The dining-car stewards on that line knew
him well. He would arrive at Wordingham by a little after nine. By ten
he might be in bed in his peaceful old house.
The Podley Library closed at 12:30 on Saturday. He was to call for
Rita, when they were to lunch together, and at five she would come to
the station to see him off. It was a dull, heavy day. London was
chilly, there was a gloom over the metropolis; leaden opaque light fell
from a sky that was ashen. It was as though cold thunder lurked
somewhere up above, as Lothian drove to Kensington.
He had paid for his rooms and arranged for his luggage to be taken to
the station where a man was to meet him with it a little before five.
Then he had crossed St. James' Street and spent a waiting hour at his
club. For some reason or other, this morning he had more control over
his nerves. There was a lull in his rapid physical progress downwards.
Perhaps it was that he had at any rate made some decision in his mind.
He was going to do something definite. He was going home. That was
something to grasp at--a real fact--and it steadied him a little.
He had smoked a cigar in the big smoking room of the club. It was
rather early yet and there was hardly any one there. Two whiskies and
sodas had been sufficient for the hour.
The big room, however, was so dark that all the electric lamps were
turned on and he read the newspapers in an artificial daylight that
harmonised curiously with the dull, numbed peace of the nerves which
had come to him for a short time.
He opened _Punch_ and there was a joke about him--a merry little
paragraph at the bottom of the column. It was the fourth or fifth time
his name had appeared in the paper. He remembered how delighted he and
Mary had been when it first happened. It meant so definitely that one
had "got there."
He read it now without the slightest interest.
He glanced at the _Times_. Many important things were happening at
home and abroad, but he gazed at all the news with a lack-lustre eye.
Usually a keen and sympathetic observer of what went on in the world,
for three weeks now he hadn't opened a paper.
As he closed the broad, crackling sheet on its mahogany holding rod,
his glance fell upon the Births, Deaths and Marriages column.
A name among the deaths captured his wandering attention. A Mr. James
Bethune Dickson Ingworth, C.B., was dead at Hampton Hall in Wiltshire.
It was Dicker's uncle, of course! The boy would come into his estate
now.
"It's a good thing for him," Lothian thought. "I don't suppose he's
back from Italy yet. The old man must have died quite suddenly. I hope
he'll settle down and won't be quite so uppish in the future."
He was thinking drowsily, and quite kindly of Dickson, when he suddenly
remembered something Mary had said on the night before she went to
Nice.
He had tried to make mischief between them--so he had! And then there
was that scene in the George at Wordingham, which Lothian had forgotten
until now.
"What a cock-sparrow Beelzebub the lad really is," he said in his mind.
"And yet I liked him well enough. Even now he's not important enough to
dislike. Rita likes him. She often talks of him. He took her out to
dinner--yes, so he did--to some appalling little place in Wardour
Street. She was speaking of it yesterday. He's written to her from
Milan and Rome, too. She wanted to show me the letters and she was
cross because I wasn't interested. She tried to pique me and I wouldn't
be! What was it she said, oh, 'he's such nice curly hair.'"
He gazed into the empty fireplace before which he was sitting in a huge
chair of green leather. The remembered words had struck some chords of
memory. He frowned and puzzled over it in his drowsy numbed state, and
then it came to him suddenly. Of course! The barmaid at Wordingham,
Molly what's-her-name whom all the local bloods were after, had said
just the same thing about Ingworth.
Little fools! They were all alike, fluffy little duffers. . . .
He looked up at the clock. It was twenty minutes to one. He had to meet
Rita at the library as the hour struck.
He started. The door leading into the outside world shut with a clang.
His chains fell into their place once more upon the limbs of his body
and soul.
He called a waiter, gulped down another peg, and got into a cab for the
Podley Institute.
The pleasant numbness had gone from him now. Once more he was upon the
rack. What he saw with his mental vision was as the wild phantasmagoria
of a dream . . . a dark room in which a magic lantern is being worked,
and fantastic, unexpected pictures flit across the screen. Pictures as
disconnected as a pack of cards.
Rita was waiting upon the steps of the Institute.
She wore a simple coat and skirt of dark brown tweed with a green line
in it. Her face was pale. Her eyes were without sparkle--she also was
exhausted by pleasure, come to the end of the Arabian Nights.
She got into the taxi-cab which was trembling with the power of the
unemployed engines below it.
Tzim, tzim, tzim!
"Where shall we go, Gilbert?" she said, in a languid, uninterested
voice.
He answered her in tones more cold and bloodless than her own. "I don't
know, Rita, and I don't care. Ce que vous voulez, Mademoiselle des
livres sans reproche!"
She turned her white face on him for a moment, almost savage with
impotent petulance. Then she thrust her head out of the window and
coiled round to the waiting driver.
"Go to Madame Tussaud's," she cried.
Tzim, tzim, bang-bang-bang, and then a long melancholy drone as the
rows of houses slid backwards.
Gilbert turned on her. "Why did you say that?" he asked bitterly.
"What difference _does_ it make?" she replied. "You didn't seem to
care where we went for this last hour or two. I said the first thing
that came into my mind. I suppose we can get lunch at Madame Tussaud's.
I've never been there before. At any rate, I expect they can manage a
sponge cake for us. I don't want anything more."
--"Yes, it's better for us both. It's a relief to me to think that the
end has come. No, Rita dear, I don't want your hand. Let us make an end
now--a diminuendo. It must be. Let it be. You've said it often
yourself."
She bit her lips for a second. Then her eyes flashed. She put her arms
round his neck and drew him to her. "You shan't!" she said. "You shan't
glide away from me like this."
Every nerve in his body began to tremble. His skin pricked and grew
hot.
"What will you give?" he asked in a muffled voice.
"I? What I choose to give!" she replied. "Gillie, I'll do what I like
with you."
She shrank back in the corner of the cab with a little cry. Lothian's
face was red and blazing with anger.
"No names like that, Rita!" he said roughly. "You shan't call me that."
It was a despairing cry of drowning conscience, honour bleeding to
death, dissolving dignity and manhood.
However much he might long for her: however strongly he was enchained,
it was a blot, an indignity, an outrage, that this girl should call him
by the familiar home name. That was Mary's name for him. Mrs. Gilbert
Lothian alone had the right to say that.
Just then the taxi-metre stopped outside the big red erection in the
Marylebone Road, an unusual and fantastic silhouette against the heavy
sky.
They went in together, and there was a chill over them both. They felt,
on this grey day, as people who have lived for pleasure, sensation, and
have fed too long on honeycomb, must ever feel; the bitterness of the
fruit with the fair red and yellow rind. Ashes were in their mouths, an
acrid flavour within their souls.
It is always and for ever thus, if men could only realise it. Since the
Cross rose in the sky, the hectic joys of sin have been mingled with
bitterness, torture, cold.
The frightful "Colloque Sentimental" of Verlaine expresses these two
people, at this moment, well enough. Written by a temperamental saint
turned satyr and nearly always influenced by drink; translated by a
young English poet whose wings were always beating in vain against the
prison wall he himself had built; you have these sad companions. . . .
_Into the lonely park all frozen fast,
Awhile ago there were two forms who passed.
Lo, are their lips fallen and their eyes dead,
Hardly shall a man hear the words they said.
Into the lonely park all frozen fast
There came two shadows who recall the past.
"Dost thou remember our old ecstasy?"
"Wherefore should I possess that memory?"
"Doth thy heart beat at my sole name alway?
Still dost thou see my soul in visions?" "Nay!"--_
And on such a day as this, with such a weight as this upon their tired
hearts, they entered the halls of Waxwork and stood forlorn among that
dumb cloistered company.
They passed through "Room No. 1. Commencing Right-hand side" and their
steps echoed upon the floor. On this day and at this hour hardly any
visitors were there; only a few groups moved from figure to figure and
talked in hissing whispers as if they were in some church.
All around them they saw lifeless and yet half convincing dolls in rich
tarnished habiliments. They walked, as it were, in a mausoleum of dead
kings, and the livid light which fell upon them from the glass roof
above made the sordid unreality more real.
"There's Charles the First," Rita said drearily.
Gilbert glanced at the catalogue. "He was fervently pious, a faithful
husband, a fond parent, a kind master, and an enthusiastic lover and
patron of the fine arts."
"How familiar that sort of stuff sounds," she answered. "It's written
for the schools which come here to see history in the flesh--or wax
rather. Every English school girl of the upper middle classes has been
brought here once in her life. Oh, here's Milton! What does it say
about him?"
--"Sold his immortal poem 'Paradise Lost' for the sum of five pounds,"
Lothian answered grimly.
"_Much_ better to be a modern poet, Gilbert dear! But I'm disappointed.
These figures don't thrill one at all. I always thought one was
thrilled and astonished here."
"So you will be, Cupid, soon. Don't you see that all these people are
only names to us. Here they are names dressed up in clothes and with
pink faces and glass eyes. They're too remote. Neither of us is going
to connect that thing"--he flung a contemptuous movement of his thumb
at Milton--"with 'Lycidas.' We shall be interested soon, I'm sure. But
won't you have something to eat?"
"No. I don't want food. After all, this is strange and fantastic. We've
lots more to see yet, and these kings and queens are only for the
schools. Let's explore and explore. And let's talk about it all as we
go, Gilbert! Talk to me as you do in your letters. Talk to me as you
did at the beginning, illuminating everything with your mind. That's
what I want to hear once again!"
She thrust her arm in his, and desire fled away from him. The Dead Sea
Fruit, the "Colloque Sentimental" existed no more, but, humour, the
power of keen, incisive phrase awoke in him.
Yes, this was better!--their two minds with play and interplay. It
would have been a thousand times better if it had never been anything
else save this.
They wandered into the Grand Saloon, made their bow to Sir Thomas
Lipton--"Wog and I find his tea really the best and cheapest," Rita
said--decided that the Archbishop of Canterbury had a suave, but
uninteresting face, admired the late Mr. Dan Leno, who was posed next
to Sir Walter Scott, and gazed without much interest at the royal
figures in the same room.
King George the Fifth and his spouse; the Duke of Connaught and
Strathearn--Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, K.G., K.T., K.P.,
G.C.M.C.; Princess Royal of England--Her Royal Highness Princess
Louise Victoria Alexandra Dagmar; and, next to these august people,
little Mr. Dan Leno!
"Poor little man," Rita said, looking at the sad face of the comedian.
"Why should they put him here with the King and the Queen? Do they just
plant their figures anywhere in this show?"
Gilbert shook his head. In this abnormal place--one of the strangest
and most psychologically interesting places in the world--his freakish
humour was to the fore.
"What a little stupid you are, Rita!" he said. "The man who arranges
these groups is one of the greatest philosophers and students of
humanity who ever lived. In this particular case the ghost of Heine
must have animated him. The court jester! The clown of the monarch--I
believe he did once perform at Sandringham--set cheek by jowl with the
great people he amused. It completes the picture, does it not?"
"No, Gilbert, since you pretend to see a design in the arrangement, I
don't think it _does_ complete the picture. Why should a mere little
comic man be set to intrude--?"
He caught her up with whimsical grace. "Oh, but you don't see it at
all!" he cried, and his vibrating voice, to which the timbre and life
had returned, rang through "Room No. 2."
--"This place is designed for the great mass of the population. They
all visit it. It is a National Institution. People like you and me only
come to it out of curiosity or by chance. It's out of our beat.
Therefore, observe the genius of the plan! The Populace has room in its
great stupid heart for only a few heroes. The King is always one, and
the popular comedian of the music halls is always another. These, with
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Toftrees, satisfy all the hunger for symbols to be
adored. Thus Dan Leno in this splendid company. Room No. 2 is really a
subtle and ironic comment upon the psychology of the crowd!"
Rita laughed happily. "But where are the Toftrees?" she said.
"In the Chamber of Horrors, probably, for murdering the public taste.
We are sure to find them here, seated before two Remingtons and with
the actual books with which the crime was committed on show."
"Oh, I've heard about the 'Chamber of Horrors.' Can we go, Gilbert? Do
let's go. I want to be thrilled. It's such a funereal day."
"Yes it is, grey as an old nun. I'm sorry I was unkind in the cab,
dear. Forgive me."
"I'll forgive you anything. I'm so unhappy, Gilbert. It's dreadful to
think of you being gone. All my days and my nights will be grey now.
However shall I do without you?"
There was genuine desolation in her voice. He believed that she really
regretted _his_ departure and not the loss of the pleasures he had
been giving her. His blood grew hot once more--for a single moment--and
he was about to embrace her, for they were alone in the room.
And then listlessness fell upon him before he had time to put his wish
into action. His poisoned mind was vibrating too quickly. An impulse
was born, only to be strangled in the brain before the nerves could
telegraph it to the muscles. His whole machinery was loose and out of
control, the engines running erratically and not in tune. They could
not do their work upon the fuel with which he fed them.
He shuddered. His heart was a coffer of ashes and within it, most evil
paramours, dwelt the quenchless flame and the worm that dieth not.
. . . They went through other ghostly halls, thronged by a silent
company which never moved nor spake. They came to the entrance of that
astounding mausoleum of wickedness, The Chamber of Horrors.
There they saw, as in a faint light under the sea, the legion of the
lost, the horrible men and women who had gone to swell the red
quadrilles of hell.
In long rows, sitting or standing, with blood-stained knives and
hangmen's ropes in front of them, in their shameful resurrection they
inhabited this place of gloom and death.
Here, was a man in shirt-sleeves, busy at work in a homely kitchen lit
by a single candle. Alone at midnight and with sweat upon his face he
was breaking up the floor; making a deep hole in which to put something
covered with a spotted shroud which lay in a bedroom above.
There, was the "most extraordinary relic in the world," the knife of
the guillotine that decapitated Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, and
twenty thousand human beings besides.
The strange precision of portraiture, the somewhat ghastly art which
had moulded these evil faces was startlingly evident in its effect upon
the soul.
When a _great_ novelist or poet creates an evil personality it shocks
and terrifies us, but it is never wholly evil. We know of the monster's
antecedents and environment. However stern we may be in our attitude
towards the crime, sweet charity and deep understanding of the motives
of human action often give us glimmerings which enable us to pity a
lamentable human being who is a brother of ours whatever he may have
done.
But here? No. All was sordid and horrible.
Gilbert and Rita saw rows upon rows of faces which differed in every
way one from the other and were yet dreadfully alike.
For these great sinister dolls, so unreal and so real, had all a
likeness. The smirk of cruelty and cunning seemed to lie upon the waxen
masks. Colder than life, far colder than death, they gave forth
emanations which struck the very heart with woe and desolation.
To many visitors the Chamber of Horrors is all its name signifies. But
it is a place of pleasure nevertheless. The skin creeps but the
sensation is pleasant. It provides a thrill like a switchback railway.
But it is not a place that artists and imaginative people can enter and
easily forget. It epitomises the wages of sin. It ought to be a great
educational force. Young criminals should be taken there between stern
guardians, to learn by concrete evidence which would appeal to them as
no books or sermons could ever do, the Nemesis that waits upon
unrepentant ways.
The man and the girl who had just entered were both in a state of
nervous tension. They were physically exhausted, one by fierce
indulgence in poison, the other by three weeks of light and feverish
pleasure.
And more than this.
Each, in several degree, knew that they were doing wrong, that they had
progressed far down the primrose path led by the false flute-players.
"I couldn't have conceived it was so, so unnerving, Gilbert," Rita
said, shrinking close to him.
"It is pretty beastly," Lothian answered. "It's simply a dictionary of
crime though, that's all--rather too well illustrated."
"I don't want to know of these horrors. One sees them in the papers,
but it means little or nothing. How dreadful life is though, under the
surface!"
Gilbert felt a sudden pang of pity for her, so young and fair, so
frightened now.--Ah! _he_ knew well how dreadful life was--under
the surface!
For a moment, in that tomb-like place a vision came to him, sunlit and
splendid, calm and beautiful.
He saw his life as it might be--as doubtless God meant it to be, a
favoured, fortunate and happy life, for God does not, in His
inscrutable wisdom chastise all men. Well-to-do, brilliant of mind,
with trained capacity to exact every drop of noble joy from life;
blessed with a sweet and beautiful woman to watch over him and
complement him; did ever a man have a fairer prospect, a luckier
chance?
His Hell was so real. Heaven was so near. He had but to say, "I will
not," and the sun would rise again upon his life. To the end he would
walk dignified, famous, happy, loving and deeply-loved--if only he
could say those words.
A turn of the hand would banish the Fiend Alcohol for ever and ever!
But even as the exaltation of the thought animated him, the dominant
false Ego, crushed momentarily by heavenly inspiration, growled and
fought for life.
Immediately the longing for alcohol burned within him. They had been
nearly an hour among the figures. Lothian longed for drink, to satisfy
no mere physical craving, but to keep the Fiend within quiescent.
He had come to that alternating state--the author of "Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde" has etched it upon the plate for all time--when he must drug
the devil in order to have a little license in which to speak the words
and think the thoughts of a clean man leading a Christian life.
So the vision of what might be faded and went. The present asserted
itself, and asserted itself merely as a brutish desire for poison.
All these mental changes and re-adjustments took place in a mere second
of time.
Rita had hardly made an end of speaking before he was ready with an
answer.
"Poor little Rita," he said. "It was your choice you know. It _is_
horrible. But I expect that the weather, and the inexorable fact that
we have to part this afternoon for a time, has something to do with it.
Oh, and then we haven't lunched. There's a great influence in lunch. I
want a drink badly, too. Let's go."
Rita was always whimsical. She loved to assert herself. She wanted to
go at least as ardently as her companion, but she did not immediately
agree.
"Soon," she said. "Look here, Gilbert, we'll meet at the door. I'm
going to flit down this aisle of murderers on the other side. You go
down this side. And if you meet the Libricides--Toftrees et femme I
mean, call out!"
She vanished with noiseless tread among the stiff ranks of figures.
Gilbert walked slowly down his own path, looking into each face in
turn.
. . . This fat matronly woman, a sort of respectable Mrs. Gamp who
probably went regularly to Church, was a celebrated baby farmer. She
"made angels" by pressing a gimlet into the soft skulls of her
charges--there was the actual gimlet--and save for a certain slyness,
she had the face of a quite motherly old thing. Yet she, too, had
dropped through the hole in the floor--like all her companions
here. . . .
He turned away from all the faces with an impatient shudder.
He ought never to have come here. He was a donkey ever to have let Rita
come here. Where was she?--he was to meet her at the end of this horrid
avenue. . . .
But the place was large. Rita had disappeared among the waxen ghosts.
The door must be this way. . . .
He pressed onwards, walking silently--as one does in a place of the
dead--but disregarding with averted eyes, the leers, the smiles, the
complacent appeal, of the murderers who had paid their debt to the
justice of the courts.
He was beginning to be most unpleasantly affected.
Walking onwards, he suddenly heard Rita's voice. It was higher in key
than usual--whom was she speaking to? His steps quickened.
. . . "Gilbert, how silly to try and frighten me! It's not cricket in
this horrid place, get down at once--oh!"
The girl shrieked. Her voice rang through the vault-like place.
Gilbert ran, turned a corner, and saw Rita.
She was swaying from side to side. Her face was quite white, even the
lips were bloodless. She was staring with terrified eyes to where upon
the low dais and behind the confining rail a figure was standing--a
wax-work figure.
Gilbert caught the girl by the hands. They were as cold as ice.
"Dear!" he said in wild agitation. "What is it? I'm here, don't be
frightened. What is it, Rita?"
She gave a great sob of relief and clung to his hands. A trace of
colour began to flow into her cheeks.
"Thank goodness," she said, gasping. "Oh, Gilbert, I'm a fool. I've
been so frightened."
"But, dear, what by?"
"By that----"
She pointed at the big, still puppet immediately opposite her.
Gilbert turned quickly. For a moment he did not understand the cause of
her alarm.
"I talked to _it_," she said with an hysterical laugh. "I thought _it_
was you! I thought you'd got inside the railing and were standing there
to frighten me."
Gilbert looked closely at the effigy. He was about to say something and
then the words died away upon his lips.
It was as though he saw himself in a distorting glass--one of those
nasty and reprehensible toys that fools give to children sometimes.
There was an undeniable look of him in the staring face of coloured
wax. The clear-cut lips were there. The shape of the head was
particularly reminiscent, the growing corpulence of body was indicated,
the hair of the stiff wig waved as Lothian's living hair waved.
"Good God!" he said. "It _is_ like me! Poor little girl--but you know
I wouldn't frighten you for anything. But it _is_ like! What an
extraordinary thing. We looked for the infamous Toftrees! the egregious
Herbert who has split so many infinitives in his time, and we
find--Me!"
Rita was recovering. She laughed, but she held tightly to Gilbert's arm
at the same time.
"Let's see who the person is--or was--" Gilbert went on, drawing the
catalogue from his pocket.
"Key of the principal gate of the Bastille--no, that's not it. Number
365, oh, here we are! Hancock, the Hackney Murderer. A chemist in
comfortable circumstances, he----"
Rita snatched the book from his hand. "I don't want to hear any more,"
she said. "Let's go away, quick!"
In half an hour they were lunching at a little Italian restaurant which
they found in the vicinity. The day was still dark and lowering, but a
risotto Milanese and something which looked like prawns in _polenta_,
but wasn't, restored them to themselves.
There was a wine list in this quite snug little place, but the
proprietor advanced and explained that he had no license and that money
must be paid in advance before the camerière could fetch what was
required from an adjacent public house.
It was a bottle of whiskey that Gilbert ordered, politely placed upon
the table by a pathetic little Genoese whose face was sallow as
spaghetti and who was quite unconscious that for the moment the Fiend
Alcohol had borrowed his poor personality.
. . . "You must have a whiskey and soda, Rita. I dare not let you
attempt any of the wines from the public house at the corner."
"I've never tried it in my life. But I will now, out of curiosity. I'll
taste what you are so far too fond of."
Rita did so. "Horrible stuff," she said. "It's just like medicine."
Gilbert had induced the pleasant numbness again. "You've said exactly
what it is," he replied in a dreamy voice.--"'Medicine for a mind
diseased.'"
They hardly conversed at all after that.
The little restaurant with its red plush seats against the wall, its
mirrors and hanging electric lights, was cosy. They lingered long over
their coffee and cigarettes. No one else was there and the proprietor
sidled up to them and began to talk. He spoke in English at first, and
then Gilbert answered him in French.
Gilbert spoke French as it is spoken in Tours, quite perfectly. The
Italian spoke it with the soft, ungrammatical fluency of his race.
The interlude pleased the tired, jaded minds of the sad companions, and
it was with some fictitious reconstruction of past gaiety and animation
that they drove to St. Pancras.
The train was in.
Gilbert's dressing-case was already placed in a first-class
compartment, his portmanteau snug in the van.
When he walked up the long platform with Rita, a porter, the Guard of
the train and the steward of the dining-car, were grouped round the
open door.
He was well known. All the servants of the line looked out for him and
gave him almost ministerial honours. They knew he was a "somebody," but
were all rather vague as to the nature of his distinction.
He was "Mr. Gilbert Lothian" at least, and his bountiful largesse was
generally spoken of.
The train was not due to start for six minutes. The acute guard,
raising his cap, locked the door of the carriage.
Gilbert and Rita were alone in it for a farewell.
He took her in his arms and looked long and earnestly into the young
lovely face.
He saw the tears gathering in her eyes.
"Have you been happy, sweetheart, with me?"
"Perfectly happy." There was a sob in the reply.
"You really do care for me?"
"Yes."
His breath came more quickly, he held her closer to him--only a little
rose-faced girl now.
"Do you care for me more than for any other man you have ever met?"
She did not answer.
"Tell me, tell me! Do you?"
"Yes."
"Rita, my darling, say, if things had been different, if I were free to
ask you to be my wife now, would you marry me?"
"Yes."
"Would you be my dear, dear love, as I yours, for ever and ever and
ever?"
She clung to him in floods of tears. He had his answer. Each tear was
an answer.
The guard of the train, looking the other way, opened the door with his
key and coughed.
"Less than a minute more, sir," said the guard.
. . . "Once more, say it once more! You _would_ be my wife if I
were free?"
"I'd be your wife, Gilbert, and I'd love you--oh, what shall I do
without you? How dull and dreadful everything is going to be now!"
"But I shall be back soon. And I shall write to you every day!"
"You will, won't you, dear? Write, write--" The train was almost
moving.
It began to move. Gilbert leaned out of the window and waved his hand
for a long time, to a forlorn little girl in a brown coat and skirt who
stood upon the platform crying bitterly.
The waiter of the dining-car, knowing his man well, brought Lothian a
large whiskey and soda before the long train was free of the sordid
Northwest suburbs.
Lothian drank it, arranged about dinner, and sank back against the
cushions. He lit a cigarette and drew the hot smoke deep into his
lungs.
The train was out of the town area now. There was no more jolting and
rattling over points. Its progress into the gathering night was a
continuous roar.
Onwards through the gathering night. . . .
"_I'd be your wife, Gilbert, and I'd love you--if you were free._"