On the other hand, I soon loved her to distraction. The hell of it was, I had a shrewd suspicion she did not love me. How could she?
At night, while she slept in an appealing attitude, I crept downstairs, and into the kitchen, where I cleaned up the crockery, her shoes, and some chicken I found in the icebox. "There is," she said to a friend, "a pixie in this studio." "Leave out some milk," said her friend.
Everything went swimmingly. Nothing could have been more delicate than the unspoken love that grew up between the disillusioned world-weary poet and the beautiful young girl-artist, so fresh, so natural, and so utterly devoid of self-consciousness.
On one occasion, I must admit, I tripped over the corner of a rug. "Who is there?" she cried, waking suddenly from a dream of having her etchings lovingly appraised by a connoisseur.
"A mouse," I telepathed squeakingly, standing very still. She sank into sleep again.
She was more rudely put to sleep some days later. She came in, after being absent most of the evening, accompanied by a man to whom I took an immediate dislike. My instinct never fails me; he had not been in the studio half an hour before he gave her occasion to say, "Pray don't!"
"Yes," said he.
"No," said she.
"I must," said he.
"You mustn't," said she.
"I will," said he.
"You won't," said she.
A vestige of refined feeling would have assured him that there was no possibility of happiness between people so at variance on every point. There should be at least some zone of enthusiastic agreement between every couple; for example, the milk. But whatever his feelings were, they were not refined.
"Why did you bring me here?" said he with a sneer.
"To see my etchings," she replied, biting her lip.
"Well, then "
I thought you were a customer."
"I am. A tough customer." With that he struck her on the temple. She fell, mute, inanimate, crumpled.
"Damn it!" said he. "I've killed her. I've done her in. I shall swing. Unless I escape."
I was forced to admire the cold logic of it. It was, momentarily, the poet's unreasoning prostration before the man of action, the worldling.
Quickly he undressed her. "Gosh!" he said. "What a pity I hit so hard!" He flung her over his shoulder, retaining her legs in his grasp. He bore her up the stairs, onto the shadowy balcony. He opened the trunk and thrust her inside. "Here is a fine thing!" I thought. "Here she is, in her condition, alone with me, in my condition. If she knew she was dead she'd be glad." The thought was bitter.
With the dawn he went for a taxi. The driver came in with him; together they bore the trunk to the vehicle waiting outside.
"Strewth, it's heavy!" said the driver. "What yer got in it?"
"Books," said the murderer, with the utmost calm.
If I had thought of saying, "Paradise Lost, in two volumes," I should have said it, then and there, and this story would have come to an end. As it was, we were hoisted on to the cab, which drove off in the direction of Victoria.
A jet of cool night air flowed through the air-hole. She, whom I had mourned as dead, inhaled it, and breathed a sigh. Soon she was fully conscious.
"Who are you?" she asked in alarm.
"My name," I said tactfully, "is Emily."
She said, "You are kidding me."
I said, "What is your name?"
She said, "Stewart."
I could not resist the reply, "Then I am Flora MacDonald."
Thus by easy stages I approached the ticklish question of my hitherto hopeless love.
She said, "I would rather die."
I said, "In a sense you have died already. Besides, I am your pixie. Or it may be only a dream, and you could hardly blame yourself for that. Anyway, I expect he will take us to Paris."
"It is true," she said, "that I have always dreamed of a honeymoon in Paris."
"The Paris moon!" I said. "The bookstalls on the quais. The little restaurants on the Left Bank!"
"The Cirque Medrano!" she cried.
"L'Opra!"
"Le Louvre! Le Petit Palais!"
"Le Buf sur le Toit!"
"Darling," she cried, "if it were not so dark, I would show you my etchings, if I had them with me."
We were in absolute raptures; we heard the ticket being taken, for Paris. We were registered; it was next door to being married, and we laughed at the rolling of the vessel. Soon, however, we were carried up an endless flight of stairs.
"Mon Dieu, mais que c'est lourd!" gasped the hotel porter. "Qu'est-ce qu'il y a dans cette malle?"
"Des livres," said the murderer, with the utmost sang-froid.
"Paradis Retrouv, dition complte," I whispered, and was rewarded with a kiss.
Alone, as he thought, with his lifeless victim, the murderer sneered, "H'ya keeping?" said he coarsely, as he approached the trunk.
He lifted the lid a little, and thrust his head within. A rim ran round inside: while yet he blinked, we seized it, and brought the lid down with a crash.
"La guillotine?" I said cuttingly.
"La Defarge!" observed my adored one, knitting her brows.
"Vive la France!"
We stepped out; we put him inside. I retained his clothes. With a sheet from the bed, the bell rope, and a strip of carpet from before the washstand, she made a fetching Arab lass. Together we slipped out into the street.
Night! Youth! Paris! And the moon!
THE STEEL CAT
The Hotel Bixbee is as commercial an hotel as any in Chicago. The brass-rail surmounts the banisters; the cuspidor gleams dimly in the shade of the potted palm. The air in the corridors is very still, and appears to have been de-odorized a few days ago. The rates are moderate.
Walter Davies' cab drew up outside the Bixbee. He was a man with a good deal of grey in his hair, and with a certain care-worn brightness on his face, such as is often to be seen on the faces of rural preachers, if they are poor enough and hopeful enough. Davies, however, was not a preacher. The porter seized his suitcase, and would have taken the black box he held on his knees, but Davies nervously put out his hand. "No," he said. "Leave this one to me." He entered the hotel carrying the box as if it were a baby. It was an oblong box, nearly two feet long, and perhaps a foot wide and a foot in depth. It was covered with a high-grade near-leather. It had a handle on the top side, but Davies preferred to cradle it in his arms rather than to swing it by this handle.
As soon as he had checked in and was shown to his room, he set the box on the bureau and made straight for the telephone. He called Room Service. "This is Room 517," said he. "What sort of cheese have you?"
"Well, we got Camembert, Swiss, Tillamook . . ."
"Now, the Tillamook," said Davies. "Is that good and red-looking?"
"Guess so," said the man at the other end. "It's like it usually is."
"All right, send me up a portion."
"What bread with it? Roll? White? Rye?"
"No bread. Just the cheese by itself."
"Okay. It'11 be right up."
In a minute or two a bell-hop entered, carrying a platter with the wedge of cheese on it. He was a coloured man of about the same age as Davies, and had a remarkably round face and bullet head. "Is that right, sir? You wanted just a piece of cheese?"
"That's right," said Davies, who was undoing the clasps of his black box. "Put it right there on the table."
The bell-hop, waiting for him to sign the check, watched Davies fold down the front side of the box, which carried part of the top with it. Thus opened, it displayed an interior lined with black velvet, against which gleamed an odd-looking skeletal arrangement in chromium-plated metal. "Now look at that!" said the bell-hop, much intrigued. "Wouldn't be surprised if that ain't an invention you got there."