“No,” she said, without any change of expression, with not the slightest
animation of manner, “but it did n't catch in the matting that time.”
I walked toward the door, with my coat thrown over my arm. It was
hard to go away like that. I wonder why it is that I seem always to be
walking away from women.
At the door I turned and glanced back at her. She was still there by the
bureau, watching me go. I felt that she was looking rather intently at
the coat on my arm, and it suddenly occurred to me that I must not leave
her room like that, in my shirt sleeves. I felt the color come rushing
to my face as I struggled into the coat.
I have read in works on the psychology of women that they often tell
with a look what they are unable or unwilling to frame in spoken words.
Certainly I knew that she had told me to put my coat on, and she knew
that I had understood. And so, even as she drove me out of her room
there was an understanding between us that was not wanting in subtlety.
She had even asked me to make an effort to protect her; and she was no
longer angry.
I had my coat on now, and was reaching for the door knob when a sound
outside arrested my hand. Men were coming up the stairs to our hall.
She heard them too. She was rigid again, her hand resting on the bureau.
I could hear the Chinese porter talking pidgin-English as he came along
the hall. Behind him sounded a ponderous step. Then came another voice,
as the heavy step paused right near us--at my door, I thought.
“Here, boy, this is number nineteen.”
It was a loose throaty voice, unlike any other in the wide world. I
should have recognized it anywhere, in a drawing-room or blindfolded at
the bottom of a mine. It brought rushing to my mind pictures of a ship's
smoking-room where sat an old man with a wrinkled skin and one drooping
eyelid who held forth on every subject known to man--pictures of the
absurdly Anglo-Saxon hotel at Yokohama, and of a strange evening at the
notorious “Number Nine” where an old man had smiled cynically at me.
Sir Robert had arrived at Peking. He had come to this hotel. He was to
occupy room number nineteen, directly opposite the closed door behind
which I stood, motionless, breathless.