Part 12

“Only you see,” and this was Oliver doing his best at the ingenuous boy, “Ted Billett, you know--he said he might be having dinner with you this evening--and I've got a very important letter for him--awful nuisance--don't see why it couldn't have gone in the mail by itself--but the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand.” “A letter? Oh yes. And they want an answer right away?” Again Oliver realized grudgingly that whatever Mrs. Severance might be she was certainly not obvious. For “I'm so glad you came then,” she was saying with what seemed to be perfect sincerity. “Won't you come in?”

That little pucker that came and went in the white brow meant that she was sure that she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Oliver imagined--and he was frank enough with himself to admit that he was not at all sure that she couldn't.

“Oh Ted--” he heard her say, very coolly but also with considerable distinctness, as if her voice had to carry, “there's a friend of yours here with a letter for you--”

And then she had brought him inside and was apologizing for having the front room so badly lighted but one had to economize on light-bills, didn't one, even for a small apartment, and besides didn't it give one a little more the real feeling of evening? And Oliver was considering why, when if as he pressed the bell, he had felt so much like a modern St. George and wholly as if he were doing something rather fine and perilous, he should feel quite so much like a gauche seventeen-year-old now. He thought that he would not enjoy playing chess with Mrs. Severance. She was one of those people who smiled inoffensively at the end of a game and then said they thought it would really be a little evener if they gave you both knights.

Ted reassured him though. Ted, stumbling out of the dining-room, with a mixture of would-be unconcern, compound embarrassment and complete though suppressed fury at Oliver on his face. It was hardly either just or moral, Oliver reflected, that Mrs. Severance should be the only one of them to seem completely at her ease.

“Hello, Ollie,” in the tone of “And if you'd only get the hell out as quickly as possible.” “Mrs. Severance--” a stumble over that. “You've got a letter for me?”

“Yes. It's important,” said Oliver as firmly as he could. He gave it, and, as Ted sat down near a lamp to read it, Oliver saw by one sudden momentary flash that passed over Mrs. Severance's face that she had seen the address and known instantly that the handwriting was not that of a man. And then Oliver began to think that he might have been right when he had thought of the present expedition as something rather perilous--he found that he had moved three steps away from Mrs. Severance without his knowing it, very much as he might have from an unfamiliar piece of furniture near which he was standing and which had instantaneously developed all the electric properties of a coil of live wire. Then he looked at Ted's face--and what he saw there made him want to kick himself for looking--because it is never proper for even the friendliest spectator to see a man's private soul stripped naked as a grass-stalk before his own eyes. It was horribly like watching Ted lose balance on the edge of a cliff that he had been walking unconcernedly and start to fall without crying out or any romantic gestures, with only that look of utter surprise struck into his face and the way his hands clutched as if they would tear some solid hold out of the air. Oliver kept his eyes on him in a frosty suspense while he read the letter all through three times and then folded it and put it carefully away in his breast pocket--and then when he looked at Mrs. Severance Oliver could have shouted aloud with immense improper joy, for he knew by the way Ted's hands moved that they were going back in the car together.

Ted was on his feet and his voice was as grave as if he were apologizing for having insulted Mrs. Severance in public, but under the meaninglessness of his actual words it was wholly firm and controlled.

“I'm awfully sorry--I've got to go right away. You'll think me immensely rude but it's something that's practically life-and-death.” “Really?” said Mrs. Severance and Oliver could have clapped his hands at her accent. Now that the battle had ended bloodlessly, he supposed he might be permitted to applaud, internally at least. And “I'm sorry--but this is over,” said every note in Ted's voice and “Lost have I? Well then--” every note in hers.

It occurred to Oliver that things were badly arranged--all this--and he was the only audience.

Life seemed sudden lavish in giving him benefit performances of other people's love-affairs--he supposed it was all part of the old and deathless jest.

And then, like a prickling of cold, there passed over him once more that little sense of danger. Mrs. Severance and Ted were both standing looking at each other and neither was saying anything--and Ted looked by his face as if he were walking in his sleep.

“The car's down below, old boy,” said Oliver helpfully, and then, a little louder “Peter's car, you know,” and whatever cobwebs had been holding Ted for the last instant broke apart. He went over to Mrs. Severance. “Good-by.”

“Good-by,” and he started making apologies again while she merely looked and Oliver was suddenly fretting like a weary hostess whose callers have stayed hours too long, to have him down in the car and the car pointed again with its nose toward Southampton.

And then he heard, through Ted's last apologia, the whir of a mounting elevator.

The elevator couldn't stop at the fourth floor--it couldn't. But it did, and there was the noise of the gate slung back and “_What's that?_” said Mrs. Severance sharply, her politeness broken to bits for the first time.

They were all standing near the door, and, with a complete disbelief in all that he was hearing and seeing, Oliver heard Mrs. Severance's voice in his ear, “The kitchen--fire-escape--” saw her push Ted toward him as if she were shifting a piece of cumbrous furniture, and obeyed her orders implicitly because he was too surprised to think of doing anything else.

He hurried himself and the still half-somnambulistic Ted through the dining-room curtains, just in time to catch a last glimpse of Mrs. Severance softly pressing with all her weight and strength against her side of the door of the apartment as a man's quick short footsteps crossed the hall in two strides, and after a second's pause, a key clicked into the lock.

XXXVIII

Mrs. Severance, her whole weight against the door, felt it push at her fiercely without opening, and, even in the midst of her turmoil, smiled. Mr. Severance had never been exactly what one would call an athlete--

She slackened her pressure, little by anxious little. Her hand crept down to the knob, then she jerked it sharply and stood back and Mr. Piper came stumbling into the room, a little too fast for dignity. He had to catch to her to save himself from falling but as soon as he had recovered his balance he jerked his hands away from her as if they had taken hold of something that hurt him and when he stood up she saw that his face was grey all over and that his breath came in little hard sniffs through his nose.

“Sorry, Sargent,” she said easily. “I heard your key but that silly old door is sticking again. You didn't hurt yourself, did you?”

For an instant she thought that everything was going to be perfectly simple--his face had changed so, with an intensity of relief almost childish, at the sound of her accustomed voice. Then the greyness came back.

“Do you mind--introducing me--Rose--to the gentleman--you are dining with tonight?” he said with a difficulty of speech as if actual words were not things he was accustomed to using. “I merely--called--to be quite sure.”

She managed to look as puzzled as possible.

“The gentleman?”

“Oh yes, the gentleman.” He seemed neither to be particularly disgusted nor murderously angry--only so utterly tired in body and spirit that she thought oddly that it seemed almost as if any sudden gesture or movement might crumble him into pieces of fine grey paper at her feet.

“Oh, there isn't any use in pretending, Rose--any more. I have my information.”

“Yes? From whom?”

“What on earth does it matter? Elizabeth--since you choose to know.”

“Elizabeth,” said Mrs. Severance softly. She could not imagine how time, even when successfully played for and gained, could help the situation very much--but that was the only thing she could think of doing, and she did it, therefore, with every trick of deliberation she knew, as if any instant saved before he went into the dining-room might bring salvation.

“Do you know, I was always a little doubtful about Elizabeth. She was a little too beautifully incurious about everything to be quite real--and a little too well satisfied with her place, even on what we paid her. But of course is she has been supplementing her salary with private-detective work for you--”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I suppose you were foolish enough to give her one of your private numbers,” she said a trifle acidly. “Which will mean that you will be paying her a modest blackmail all the rest of your life, and you'll probably have to provide for her in your will. Oh, I know Elizabeth! She'll be perfectly secret--if she's paid for it--she'll never make you willing to risk the scandal by asking for more than just enough. But if this is the way you carry on all your confidential investigations, Sargent--well, it's fortunate you have large means--”

“She doesn't know who I am.”

“Oh Sargent, Sargent! When all she has to do is to subscribe to 'Town and Country.' Or call up the number you gave her, some time, and ask where it is.”

“There are the strictest orders about nobody but myself ever answering the telephones in my private office.”

“And servants are always perfectly obedient--and there are no stupid ones--and accidents never happen. Sargent, really--”

“That doesn't matter. I didn't come here to talk about Elizabeth.” “Really? I should think you might have. I could have given you all the information you required a good deal less expensively--and now, I suppose, I'll have to think up some way of getting rid of Elizabeth as well. I can't pay her off with one of my new dresses this time--”

“_Who is he?_”

“Suppose we start talking about it from the beginning, Sargent--?”

“_Where_ is he?”

“In the dining-room, I imagine. It wouldn't be very well bred of anyone, would it, to come out and be introduced in the middle of this very loud, very vulgar quarrel that you are making with me--”

“I'm going to see.”

“No, Sargent.”

“Let me pass, Rose!”

“I will not. Sargent, I will not let you make an absolute fool of yourself before my friends before you give me a chance to explain--”

“I will, I tell you! I will! _Let me go!_”

They were struggling undignifiedly in the center of the room, her firm strong hands tight over his wrists as he pawed at her, trying to wrench himself away. Mr. Piper was a gentleman no longer--nor a business man--nor a figure of nation-wide importance--he was only a small furious figure with a face as grey and distorted as a fighting ape's who was clutching at the woman in front of him as if he would like to tear her with his hands. A red swimming had fallen over his eyes--all he knew was that the woman-person in front of him had fooled him more bitterly and commonly than anyone had been fooled since Adam--and that if he could not get loose in some way or other from the hateful strength that was holding him, he would burst into the disgusting tears of a vicious small boy who is being firmly held down and spanked by an older girl. Grammar, manners and sense had gone from him as completely as if he had never possessed them.

“Lemme go! oh damn you, damn you--you _woman_--you _devil--lemme_ go!”

“Be _quiet,_ Sargent! Oh shut up, you _fool, shut up!”_

A noise came from the kitchen--a noise like the sound of a man falling over boxes. Mr. Piper struggled furiously--Paris was crawling out of the window--Paris, the sleek, sly chamberer, the gay hateful cuckoo of his private nest was getting away! Mrs. Severance turned her head toward the noise a second. Mr. Piper fought like a crippled wrestler.

“Grr-ah! Ah, would you, would you?”

He had wrenched one hand free for an instant--it went to his pocket and came out of it with something that shone and was hard like a new metal toy.

_“Now_ will you lemme go?” But Mrs. Severance tried to grab for the hand with the revolver in it instead, and succeeded only in striking the barrel a little aside. There was a noise that sounded like a cannon-cracker bursting in Mr. Piper's face--it was so near--and then he was standing up, shaking all over, but free and a man ready to explain a number of very painful things to Paris as soon as he caught him. He took one step toward the dining-room, sheer rage tugging at his body as high wind tugs at a bough. Now that woman was out of the way----

And then he saw that she was out of the way indeed. She could not have fallen without his hearing her fall--how could she?--but she was lying on the floor in a crumple of clothes and one of her arms was thrown queerly out from her side as if it did not belong to her body any longer. He stood looking at her for what seemed one long endless wave of uncounted time and that firecracker noise he had heard kept echoing and echoing through his head like the sound of loud steps along a long and empty corridor. Then he suddenly dropped the pistol and knelt clumsily beside her.

“Rose! Rose!” he started calling huskily, his hands feeling with frantic awkwardness for her pulse and her heart, as Oliver Crowe ran into the room through the curtains.

XXXIX

Oliver thought that he had never been quite so sure of anything as he was that he must be insane. He was insane. Very shortly some heavy person in uniform would walk into the tidy kitchen where he and Ted were crouching like moving-picture husbands and remark with a kind smile that the Ahkoond of Whilom was giving a tea-party in the Mountains of the Moon that afternoon and that unless Oliver (or, as he was probable better known) St. Oliver, came back at once in the nice private car with the wire netting over its windows, everybody from God the Father Almighty to Carrie Chapman Catt would be highly displeased. For a moment Oliver thought of lunatic asylums almost lovingly--they had such fine high walls and smooth green lawns and you were so perfectly safe there from anything ever happening that was real. Then he jumped--that must be Mrs. Severance opening the door.

“What are we going to _do_?” he said to Ted in a fierce whisper.

Ted looked at him stupidly. “Do? When I don't know whether I'm on my feet or my head?” he said. His drugged passiveness showed Oliver with desolating clarity that anything that could be done would have to be done by himself. He crept over toward the window with a wild wish that black magic were included in a Yale curriculum--the only really sensible thing he could think of doing would be for both of them to vanish through the wall.

“Look! Fire-escape!”

“What?”

“_Fire-escape_!”

“All right. You take it.”

Oliver had been sliding the window up all the while, cursing softly and horribly at each damnatory creak. Yes--there it was--and people thought fire-escapes ugly. Personally, Oliver had seldom seen anything in his life which combined concrete utility with abstract beauty so ideally as that little flight of iron steps leading down the entry outside the window into blackness.

“You first, Ted.”

“Can't.” The word seemed to come despairingly out of the bottom of his stomach.

“Came here. Own accord. Got to see it through. Take my medicine.”

“You fool, she doesn't want you here! Think of Elinor!” For a moment Oliver thought Ted was going to blaze into more blind rage. Then he checked himself.

“I am. But listen to that.”

The voices that came to them from the living-room were certainly both high and excited--and the second that Oliver heard one of them he knew that all his most preposterous suppositions on the drive down from Southampton had come preposterously and rather ghastly true.

“Well, _listen_ to it! Do you know who the man is now? And will you get out on the fire-escape, you _fool_?”

Ted listened intently for the space of a dozen seconds. Then “Oh my God!” he said and his head went into his hands. Oliver crept over to him.

“Ted, listen--oh listen, damn you! What's the use of acting the chivalrous fool, _now_? Don't you see? Don't you understand? Don't you get it that if you leave she can explain it some way or other--that all you're doing by staying is ruining yourself and Elinor for a point of honor that hasn't any honor _to_ it?”

“Oh sure. Sure. But listen to him--why great God, Ollie, if he has a gun he might kill her--probably will--Don't you see it's just because I hate the whole business now--and her--and myself--th'at I've got to stick it out? You go, Ollie, it's none of your business--”

“You go. You blessed idiot, there's no use of both of us smashing. If anybody's got to stay--I can bluff it out a good deal better than you can--trust me--”

“Oh rats. Not that it isn't very decent of you, Ollie, it is--and you'd do it--but I wouldn't even be a _person_ to let you--”

They were both on their feet, talking in jerks, ears strained for every sound from that other room.

“It's _perfectly_ simple--nobody's going to pull any gunplay--good Lord, imagine poor old Mr. Piper--” said Oliver uncertainly, and then as noises came to them that meant more than just talking, “_Get down that fire-escape_!”

“I can't. Let go of me, Ollie. I mustn't Listen--something's up--something bad! Get out of the way there, Ollie, I've got to go in! It _isn't_ your funeral!”

“Well, it isn't going to be yours!” said Oliver through shut teeth--Ted's last remark had, somehow been a little too irritating. He thought savagely that there was only one way of dealing with completely honorable fools--Ted shouldn't, by the Lord!---Oliver had gone to just a little too much trouble in the last dozen hours to build Ted a happy home to let any of Ted's personal wishes in the matter interrupt him now. He stepped back with a gesture of defeat but his feet gripped at the floor like a boxer's and his eyes fixed burningly on the point of Ted's jaw. Wait a split-second--he wasn't near enough--now--_there_!

His fist landed exactly where he had meant it to and for an instant he felt as if he had broken all the bones in his hand. Ted was back against the wall, his mouth dropping open, his whole face frozen like a face caught in a snapshot unawares to a sudden glare of immense and ludicrous astonishment. Then he began to give at the knees like a man who has been smitten with pie in a custard-comedy and Oliver recovered from his surprise at both of them sufficiently to step in and catch him as he slumped, face forward.

He laid him carefully down on the floor, trying feverishly to remember how long a knockout lasted. Not nearly long enough, anyway. Ropes. A gag. His eyes roved frantically about the kitchen. _Towels_!

He was filling Ted's mouth with clean dish-rag and thinking dully that it was just like handling a man in the last stages of alcohol--the body had the same limp refractory heaviness all over--when he heard something that sounded like the bursting of a large blown-up paper bag from the other room. He accepted the fact with neither surprise nor curiosity. Mr. Piper had shot Mrs. Severance. Or Mrs. Severance had shot Mr. Piper. That was all.

As soon as he had safely disposed of Ted--for an eery moment he had actually considered stowing him away in a drawer of the kitchen-cabinet--it might be well to go in and investigate the murder.

And then either Mrs. Severance or Mr. Piper--whichever it was of the two that remained alive--might very well shoot him unless he or she had shot himself or herself first. It seemed to Oliver that the latter event would save everyone a great deal of trouble.

He did not relish the idea of being left alone in a perfectly strange apartment with two corpses and one gagged, bound and unconscious best friend--but he liked the picture of himself trying to make explanations to either his hostess or Mr. Piper when, in either case, the other party to the argument would be in possession of a loaded revolver, still less. He hoped that if Mrs. Severance were the survivor she had had a sufficiently Western upbringing at least to know how to shoot. He had no

## particular wish to die--but anything was better than being mangled--and

a reminiscence of Hedda Gabler's poet's technique with firearms caused his stomach to contract quite painfully as he tightened the knots around Ted's ankles. Ted was the devil and all to get out on the fire-escape--and then you had to tie him so that he wouldn't roll off.

He crawled back through the window, dusted his trousers, and settled his necktie as carefully as if he were going to be married. Married. And he had hoped, he thought rather pitiably, that even though Nancy had so firmly decided to blight him forever she might have a few pleasant memories of their engagement at least. Instead--well, he could see the headlines now. “Big Financier, Youth and Mystery Woman Die in Triple Slaying.” “_Dead_--Oliver Crowe, Yale 1917, of Melgrove, L. I.”

It hadn't been his job, damn it, it hadn't been his job at all. It was now, though, with Ted perfectly helpless on the fire-escape where any crazy person could take pot-shots at him as if he were a plaster pipe in a shooting gallery. The idea of escape had somehow never seriously occurred to him--what had happened in the evening already had impressed him so with a sense of inane fatality that he could not even conceive of the possibility of any-thing's coming right. In any event, Ted, tied up the way he was, was too heavy and clumsy to carry down even the most ordinary flight of stairs--and if he were going to be shot, he somehow preferred to gasp his last breaths out on a comfortably carpeted floor rather than clinging like a disreputable spider to the iron web of a fire-escape.