What I had seen was this. Lying on the floor in front of my chair was one of the little sparkling diamond things which were sewn all over Anna’s dress. I put my foot on it, because I didn’t think she’d seen it, and I didn’t want her to see it. It meant that Anna had been up in this gallery already to-night. She hadn’t just come-she’d been up in the gallery in one of these screened seats, watching us all. It looked very much to me as if I had found my employer all right, because if she wasn’t watching me, why should she first say she couldn’t come, and then pretend she’d only just arrived, when, as a matter of fact, she must have been here some time? I felt most awfully sick about the whole thing, and I was determined to have an explanation.
All this takes a long time to write, but it didn’t take any time to think. I just saw it in my mind like you see a picture hanging on a wall. By the time Anna had finished settling herself and getting into a becoming attitude, I was ready.
“I was very glad to see you,” I said.
“Were you? How nice of you!”
“Not very. I’m glad to see you because I want an explanation.”
“Do you? How unpleasant!”
Anna does annoy me when she talks like that. I wish she’d realize that making her voice sweet and arching her eyebrows at me simply doesn’t cut any ice at all. If we were only happily uncivilized, I should shake her when she does it. Unfortunately one can’t go about shaking people in modern evening dress-I think it’s rather a pity myself. I expect I glowed a bit, but I wasn’t going to let her put me off. I said,
“Look here, Anna, I want to know straight out whether you’re my employer?”
Her eyebrows went nearly up to the roots of her hair.
“My-dear-Car!”
“Yes or no-are you?”
“No.” She began to laugh. “No, no, no, no.”
“I don’t see anything to laugh at.”
She stopped laughing so suddenly that there was something startling about it. Her face turned tragic. She doesn’t really look her best when she laughs, and I expect she remembered that and switched off into being the tragic muse.
“Why did you say that?” she asked.
“Because I wanted to know. The other day I had an appointment to meet some one with a view to earning five hundred pounds. You and Bobby Markham kept the appointment and took me down to Linwood. You offered me five hundred pounds to do something which I refused to do.” I stopped because I wasn’t sure how much to tell her-I’ve never had what you might call an urge to tell Anna anything about my private affairs. At the same time I’d got to find out whether I was being jockeyed into taking money from her.
She looked at me rather strangely, leaning a little forward in her low chair.
“Yes, Car,” she said; and then, “You refused. I went home. That was all.”
“Was it? That’s what I want to know. You see, next morning I got a letter saying that my original correspondent had not kept his appointment. He made another.”
“You went?” Her voice shook.
“Yes, I went.”
She had turned pale-I swear she had.
“And-”
“Don’t you know?”
“No. Car, can’t you see that I don’t? You must see.” If it had been any one else, I should have said she was speaking the truth. “Tell me what happened.”
“No-I don’t think I will. If you’re not mixed up in it, you’re not. But what I want to know is-why did you butt in on that first appointment of mine? If you’re not in the affair now, what brought you into it then? You say you’re not in it now. Well then, it was a private affair between me and some one else-a very private affair. How did you come to know about it? Why did you keep that appointment? Where, in fact, do you come in?”
She leaned back in her chair as soon as I began to ask my questions. This brought her face into shadow. The little sparkles on her dress caught the light when she moved. Then she stopped moving and there was one of those silences that feel as if they might go on forever. I wasn’t going to break it. I wondered if she was thinking up a lie, or trying to make up her mind to tell the truth. Anyhow, it was up to her.
After a long time she sighed as if she was tired. Then she said,
“Car, if I tell you the truth, will you believe me?”
“Yes-if you tell me the truth,” I said.
“I don’t suppose you will believe me, but this is what happened. I had come up to town, and I was looking for a place in the City where a friend of mine had told me you can get a marvelous reduction on Persian rugs-I wanted one for my bedroom. I couldn’t find the number.”
I wondered what all this rigmarole was about. It sounded to me as if she was giving herself time to invent something, or to put the finishing touches to what she had invented. She looked at me all the time-the dark, mournful gaze stunt.
“There were two men walking just in front of me, and one of them said your name-he really did, Car. So of course I was startled and interested, and I came up a little nearer and listened to what they were saying. You know how people will talk in a London street when they think no one knows them.”
“What did they say?” I asked.
“One of them said, ‘I’ve talked to him on the telephone and made an appointment to meet him to-night at ten o’clock at the corner of Churt Row and Olding Crescent.’ The other man said, ‘Will he come?’ and the first man laughed and said, ‘He’d go farther than Putney for five hundred pounds! So would I if I were in his shoes!’ ”
“Well?” I said.
“They went on talking,” said Anna. “One of them was a little man in glasses, and the other was tall and thin. It was the little man who was going to meet you.”
I wondered about this little man. For the first time, I thought Anna might really be speaking the truth. Z.10 had kept under the shadow of the wall in Olding Crescent; but even in the dark you can tell a little man from a tall one, and I put him down at five foot five or so. And he wore glasses, because he kept putting up his hand and fiddling with them whilst we were talking. It wasn’t so dark but that I could see when we moved.
I said, “A little man with glasses?”
“He had gray hair and a pointed ferrety nose,” said Anna. “He said, ‘Mind you, I shall test him very carefully before I use him. To begin with, I have made an appointment with him for to-night. But I shall not keep it-I shall leave him to kick his heels, and then make another appointment. That will test his temper and his keenness.’ ”
I was getting interested. Anna stopped, so I said,
“Go on.”
“There isn’t any more,” she said. “The tall man looked round, saw how near I was, and said something that I didn’t catch. They began to talk about other things, and a moment later they separated.”
I thought about that. It might have happened. A month ago I was walking down the Strand, and a man and a girl in front of me whom I had never seen before in my life were talking about Billy Rogers who was at my prep school. Things like that happen.
Anna went on looking at me as if she expected me to say something. After a bit I said,
“Why did you keep that appointment?”
She said “Oh!” as if I had made her angry.
“Well,” I said, “it seems to me it’s a very natural thing for me to ask. What made you butt in on a business affair between me and some one you didn’t know anything about?”
She lifted her hand and let it fall again on to her knee.
“I hadn’t seen you for three years.”
That’s the sort of thing that’s most frightfully difficult to answer. It made me angry, and she said quickly,
“You don’t believe that.”