Now the broad long corridor loomed before him. A few more electric bulbs kindled the same decorative scheme. Concrete ribs and steam pipes were white, as in a silent and deserted garage. On his right he saw a line of doors, set at broad intervals apart, each door painted the same fire-bucket red.
Cy approached one door to see the gilt lettering on one of the doors.
"'Myron T. Kirkland,'" he read. Who the devil was Myron T. Kirkland? The next door bore the name of a well-known picture magazine. Cy, strolling slowly down the lofty corridor, noticed that most of these places seemed to house photographic studios or perhaps commercial artists.
Wrong! All wrong! And yet...
Why did H.M. need to find Irene Stanley in such a hurry? There were two possible explanations. Manning, according to H.M., meant to run away with the woman. In that case, she probably knew his plans. She knew of that appointment in the cenotaph, knew the person Manning was to meet there: she could be dangerous to the murderer.
On the other hand, Irene Stanely might be herself the murderer...
A rush and shuffle and clatter of footsteps, striking across Cy's nerves as well as his ears, woke him up. The three Mannings, Bob between Crystal and Jean, seemed to appear out of the right-hand wall, from behind a deep projection of this wall beyond.
"Cy!" Crystal appealed to him. Even her soft voice sounded too loud in that girdered place. "I'm glad you've got here! I can't hold these two in check!"
Jean spoke in a high voice, with attempted calm.
"I am going to be insolent," she said, "and show I mean it."
Bob, shuffling his feet, stared at the floor and clenched his big hands.
"Haven't you seen her yet?" asked Cy.
"No. If s like"—Crystal groped—"if s like waiting for the dentist. Look there!"
Where the projection ended, a deeper length of wall indicated smaller rooms now. The red door was inscribed in gilt letters, Stanley Studio.
"H.M., it seems, is having a preliminary conference," said Crystal. "That woman is..."
"For God's sake, take it easy!"
"Oh, I know." Crystal's eyes were a still darker blue in a white face. She tapped her foot on the floor. "I made all sort of civilized excuses, didn't I? I showed how inevitable it was."
Here she paused for a moment because she was breathless.
"But the plain fact is," Crystal went on, "that she's persuaded Dad to run away, she's let him smash his work, she's at least the indirect cause of why he's within an inch of death now. Do you expect us to be civilized about that"
Embarrassment, hatred, even a sort of fright, these swirled now like physical currents. Cy could feel them. Then H.M. opened the red door.
"Right," he growled. "Will you come in?"
Crystal marched first, with an affectation of poise. Jean followed swiftly, then the hesitating Bob. Cy, who dreaded scenes more than he dreaded death, held his shoulders stiffly and went after them. H.M. closed the door.
Cy, attempting to keep his gaze roving round the baseboard of the walls, had only the impression of a high but not too large room with some grey walls. But he was top shaken. He had to glance up briefly.
A soft and quiet-looking woman, with something of real beauty in her face, sat on a sofa against the opposite wall Her legs were tucked up under her; her hands trembled on an open book. There was no light except a lamp at her right, which left the other side of her face in shadow.
And, if a flood of embarrassment or fright poured out from the three Mannings, it was equalled by the embarrassment or fright of the woman.
Then each of the Mannings spoke out, instinctively, with what was in his or her mind. The words followed and tumbled over each other, struggling in an emotional sea. The first to speak was the inarticulate Bob.
There was Bob's blurted: "There's something wrong here. I thought..
There was Jean's high loftiness: "I want it understood I didn't want to come here at all."
There was Crystal's cold: "I'm afraid, Miss Stanley, we've intruded on..
And H.M.'s bellow: "Shut up!"
It was as though, in the middle of a symphony orchestra concert, every instrument stopped dead on a beat.
Then H.M. pointed to the woman sitting on the sofa.
"That's the woman," he said, "called Irene Stanley. That's the woman who was goin' to run away with your father. That's the woman you've though was so degraded. That's the only woman he's ever loved."
After a pause H.M. added, "That's your mother."
15
How long they stood there, stunned and incapable of speech, Cy could never afterwards compute. It seemed a very longtime, since his own wits took time to accept the situation.
Yet on his first glance at the woman, in the grey-draped studio with the one lamp burning, Cy had sensed a resemblance to somebody he knew. Now he saw it plainly. It was a resemblance to Crystal.
The same dark brown hair. The same dark blue eyes. Irene Stanley (to call her that) was taller than Crystal. Crystal's maturity was only a maturity of body. This woman, in her early forties, had that same quality together with a deeper, perhaps more attractive maturity.
And, of all the persons there, she was the most frightened and shy. She wore a plum-coloured silk dress, and a painter's smock was thrown over the back of the sofa. Through Cy's mind darted a remark Crystal had once made about her mother:
"Her hobby was painting." Irene Stanley, instinctively touching her left cheek and darting back her hand again, sat up on the sofa.
The book spilled out of her hands.
"I—I don't know what to say," she told them in her fine voice, helplessly. Hesitantly she looked from one to the other. "I'm terribly ashamed. And I'm terrified of you. Please! Won't any of you help me by saying you're embarrassed too?"
Something seemed bound to explode. And yet it -did not.
"I just don't understand," muttered Bob.
It was Jean, white as a ghost, who acted first. She turned round and pointed her finger at H.M.
"You knew it!" she cried. "You knew it all the time! You had no right to do this!"
H.M., who was standing there in modest pride with one fist on his hip, opened his little eyes wide.
"Well, lord love a duck," he breathed.
Whereupon, with an expression of acute martyrdom on his face, H.M.'s powerful voice rose as though from the dock.
"Will you just tell me " he bellowed, "why it is that I'm the one who's always being persecuted? I try to help people, so help me I do. Just a little. And then, when I do, they look at me sort of surprised-like, and they say, 'The old so-and-so! What's he doin' here? Kick him in the pants!
"Now I'm mad," said H.M., seizing his Panama hat. "I'm good and mad. I'm not going to stay here and..."
They were all, of course, taking it out on H.M. because they had to take it out on somebody, and they sensed that in his heart he probably wouldn't mind as much as he said. But it was Irene Stanley who stopped him. "Sir Henry!" she said.
Again she looked round at her children with that uneasiness, as though a touch would make her shy away. Cy Norton realized that in her own way she was dangerously more attractive than Crystal herself.
"I—want to show you something," she said. "It may help you to understand."
Irene Stanley paused for a moment, moistening her lips.
"You've seen the right side of my face," she added. "Now look at the left side."
Slowly, fearfully, she began to turn her neck, so that the lamplight on her right brought the other side of the face fully out of shadow. She was like an invalid who dares not try her first step. But it was anticlimax. The others looked puzzled.