FROM FOUR TO FIVE
The Princess Mistchenka and Rue Carew had retired to their respective
rooms for that hour between four and five in the afternoon, which the
average woman devotes to cat-naps or to that aimless feminine fussing
which must ever remain a mystery to man.
The afternoon had turned very warm; Neeland, in his room, lay on the
lounge in his undershirt and trousers, having arrived so far toward
bathing and changing his attire.
No breeze stirred the lattice blinds hanging over both open windows;
the semi-dusk of the room was pierced here and there by slender shafts
of sunlight which lay almost white across the carpet and striped the
opposite wall; the rue Soleil d'Or was very silent in the July
afternoon.
And Neeland lay there thinking about all that had happened to him and
trying to bring it home to himself and make it seem plausible and
real; and could not.
For even now the last ten days of his life seemed like a story he had
read concerning someone else. Nor did it seem to him that he
personally had known all those people concerned in this wild,
exaggerated, grotesque story. They, too, took their places on the
printed page, appearing, lingering, disappearing, reappearing, as
chapter succeeded chapter in a romance too obvious, too palpably
sensational to win the confidence and credulity of a young man of
today.
Fed to repletion on noisy contemporary fiction, his finer perception
blunted by the daily and raucous yell of the New York press, his
imagination too long over-strained by Broadway drama and now flaccid
and incapable of further response to its leering or shrieking appeal,
the din of twentieth-century art fell on nerveless ears and on a brain
benumbed and sceptical.
And so when everything that he had found grotesque, illogical,
laboured, obvious, and clamorously redundant in literature and the
drama began to happen and continued to happen in real life to him--and
went on happening and involving himself and others all around him in
the pleasant July sunshine of 1914, this young man, made
intellectually _blasé_, found himself without sufficient capacity to
comprehend it.
There was another matter with which his mind was struggling as he lay
there, his head cradled on one elbow, watching the thin blue spirals
from his cigarette mount straight to the ceiling, and that was the
metamorphosis of Rue Carew.
Where was the thin girl he remembered--with her untidy chestnut hair
and freckles, and a rather sweet mouth--dressed in garments the only
mission of which was to cover a flat chest and frail body and limbs
whose too rapid growth had outstripped maturity?
To search for her he went back to the beginning, where a little girl
in a pink print dress, bare-legged and hatless, loitered along an
ancient rail fence and looked up shyly at him as he warned her to keep
out of range of the fusillade from the bushes across the pasture.
He thought of her again at the noisy party in Gayfield on that white
night in winter; visualised the tall, shy, overgrown girl who danced
with him and made no complaint when her slim foot was trodden on. And
again he remembered the sleigh and the sleighbells clashing and
tinkling under the moon; the light from her doorway, and how she stood
looking back at him; and how, on the mischievous impulse of the
moment, he had gone back and kissed her----
At the memory an odd sensation came over him, scaring him a little.
How on earth had he ever had the temerity to do such a thing to her!
And, as he thought of this exquisite, slender, clear-eyed young girl
who had greeted him at the Paris terminal--this charming embodiment of
all that is fresh and sweet and fearless--in her perfect hat and gown
of _mondaine_ youth and fashion, the memory of his temerity appalled
him.
Imagine his taking an unencouraged liberty now!
Nor could he dare imagine encouragement from the Rue Carew so
amazingly revealed to him.
Out of what, in heaven's name, had this lovely girl developed? Out of
a shy, ragged, bare-legged child, haunting the wild blackberry tangles
in Brookhollow?
Out of the frail, charmingly awkward, pathetic, freckled mill-hand in
her home-made party clothes, the rather sweet expression of whose
mouth once led him to impudent indiscretion?
Out of what had she been evolved--this young girl whom he had left
just now standing beside her boudoir door with the Princess Naïa's arm
around her waist? Out of the frightened, white-lipped, shabby girl who
had come dragging her trembling limbs and her suitcase up the dark
stairway outside his studio? Out of the young thing with sagging hair,
crouched in an armchair beside his desk, where her cheap hat lay with
two cheap hatpins sticking in the crown? Out of the fragile figure
buried in the bedclothes of a stateroom berth, holding out to him a
thin, bare arm in voiceless adieu?
And Neeland lay there thinking, his head on his elbow, the other arm
extended--from the fingers of which the burnt-out cigarette presently
fell to the floor.
He thought to himself:
"She is absolutely beautiful; there's no denying that. It's not her
clothes or the way she does her hair, or her voice, or the way she
moves, or how she looks at a man; it's the whole business. And the
whole bally business is a miracle, that's all. Good Lord! And to think
I ever had the nerve--the _nerve_!"
He swung himself to a sitting posture, sat gazing into space for a few
moments, then continued to undress by pulling off one shoe, lighting a
cigarette, and regarding his other foot fixedly.
That is the manner in which the vast majority of young men do their
deepest thinking.
However, before five o'clock he had scrubbed himself and arrayed his
well constructed person in fresh linen and outer clothing; and now he
sauntered out through the hallway and down the stairs to the rear
drawing-room, where a tea-table had been brought in and tea
paraphernalia arranged. Although the lamp under the kettle had been
lighted, nobody was in the room except a West Highland terrier curled
up on a lounge, who, without lifting his snow-white head, regarded
Neeland out of the wisest and most penetrating eyes the young man had
ever encountered.
Here was a personality! Here was a dog not to be approached lightly or
with flippant familiarity. No! That small, long, short-legged body
with its thatch of wiry white hair was fairly instinct with dignity,
wisdom, and uncompromising self-respect.
"That dog," thought Neeland, venturing to seat himself on a chair
opposite, "is a Presbyterian if ever there was one. And I, for one,
haven't the courage to address him until he deigns to speak to me."
He looked respectfully at the dog, glanced at the kettle which had
begun to sizzle a little, then looked out of the long windows into the
little walled garden where a few slender fruit trees grew along the
walls in the rear of well-kept flower beds, now gay with phlox,
larkspur, poppies, and heliotrope, and edged with the biggest and
bluest pansies he had ever beheld.
On the wall a Peacock butterfly spread its brown velvet and gorgeously
eyed wings to the sun's warmth; a blackbird with brilliant yellow bill
stood astride a peach twig and poured out a bubbling and incessant
melody full of fluted grace notes. And on the grass oval a kitten
frisked with the ghosts of last month's dandelions, racing after the
drifting fluff and occasionally keeling over to attack its own tail,
after the enchanting manner of all kittens.
A step behind him and Neeland turned. It was Marotte, the butler, who
presented a thick, sealed envelope to him on his salver, bent to turn
down the flame under the singing silver kettle, and withdrew without a
sound.
Neeland glanced at the letter in perplexity, opened the envelope and
the twice-folded sheets of letter paper inside, and read this odd
communication:
* * * * *
Have I been fair to you? Did I keep my word? Surely you must now, in
your heart, acquit me of treachery--of any premeditated violence
toward you.
I never dreamed that those men would come to my stateroom. That plan
_had_ been discussed, but was abandoned because it appeared impossible
to get hold of you.
And also--may I admit it without being misunderstood?--I absolutely
refused to permit any attempt involving your death.
When the trap shut on you, there in my stateroom, it shut also on me.
I was totally unprepared; I was averse to murder; and also I had given
you my word of honour.
Judge, then, of my shame and desperation--my anger at being entrapped
in a false position involving the loss in your eyes of my personal
honour!
It was unbearable: and I did what I could to make it clear to you that
I had not betrayed you. But my comrades do not yet know that I had any
part in it; do not yet understand why the ship was not blown to
splinters. They are satisfied that I made a mistake in the rendezvous.
And, so far, no suspicion attaches to me; they believe the mechanism
of the clock failed them. And perhaps it is well for me that they
believe this.
It is, no doubt, a matter of indifference to you how the others and I
reached safety. I have no delusions concerning any personal and kindly
feeling on your part toward me. But one thing you can not--dare
not--believe, and that is that I proved treacherous to you and false
to my own ideas of honour.
And now let me say one more thing to you--let me say it out of
a--friendship--for which you care nothing--could not care anything.
And that is this: your task is accomplished. You could not possibly
have succeeded. There is no chance for recovery of those papers. Your
mission is definitely ended.
Now, I beg of you to return to America. Keep clear of entanglement in
these events which are beginning to happen in such rapid succession in
Europe. They do not concern you; you have nothing to do with them, no
interest in them. Your entry into affairs which can not concern you
would be insulting effrontery and foolish bravado.
I beg you to heed this warning. I know you to be personally
courageous; I suppose that fear of consequences would not deter you
from intrusion into any affair, however dangerous; but I dare hope
that perhaps in your heart there may have been born a little spark of
friendliness--a faint warmth of recognition for a woman who took some
slight chance with death to prove to you that her word of honour is
not lightly given or lightly broken.
So, if you please, our ways part here with this letter sent to you by
hand.
I shall not forget the rash but generous boy I knew who called me
Scheherazade.