by Zenith Brown
6
SHE was struggling then in the narrow vestibule with her bags, trying to get them off the train, and he sprang forward to help her.
“Oh, thank you!” she said breathlessly. He lifted the suitcases off as the guard closed the door of the next carriage. She dropped her handbag and book, caught them up and stepped out onto the platform. “Thanks very much!”
“You—you aren’t going to Paris?”
He heard himself speak, his voice unnatural and curiously far away.
Mary Winship raised her head, her lips parted, an instant light springing into her eyes, blue-black under their extraordinary lashes, and dying as instantly as her cheeks flushed with sudden crimson.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I thought—for a minute you sounded like someone I—I knew a long time ago.”
She turned abruptly. “Porter! Will you take these for me, please?”
She remembers. She hasn’t forgotten.
“I’d like to leave this one in the parcel room.”
The porter picked up her bags. Dan stood as the train slipped quietly past him and the platform miraculously emptied, watching the two of them move toward the gate. Once Mary Winship glanced back, but only for an instant, before she hurried along again.
She remembers but she isn’t sure.
He went through the gate. He could see her going along to the parcel room. He waited till she turned away, took the smaller dressing case from the porter, tipped him, glanced quickly about her and hurried over to the telephone kiosk.
Why didn’t you carry her bags? Why didn’t you tell her then and there?
He knew the answer. In some way that he had no remote understanding of, he stood for danger. There was some connection, fantastic as it seemed, between the attempted murder of a harmless little man on that isolated balcony ledge, Mr. Sidney Copeland’s scarcely veiled threats, the taut pale face he had first seen, just now, through the soot-stained windows of the coach. Mary Winship was afraid. It was not the tenseness and pallor of her face that had struck the first sharp chord in his memory. It was her voice. “I’m not afraid, not really. It’s just the noise I mind.” He could hear her in the shelter, pretending that, and hear her again, speaking to her cousin before he had seen her face: “Do go along, Eric. I’ll be all right.” She was afraid now, of something. She was covering it up from Dalrymple-Hughes as she sent him away so she could slip off the train.
What was she getting into? All he knew was that it was somehow tied in with an attempt on the life of a frail and inoffensive little man who seemed to have done nothing more than repeat a simple question that he, Dan McGrath, had asked. “Has her father come home?” Dan thought of Mr. Sidney Copeland again. It was apparently not a simple question; it was loaded with dynamite. And if Mary Winship refused to be sent off to Paris, it was dynamite that so far as Dan McGrath knew could as easily go off under her as under the little grey man who could hardly be so intimately connected with it.
He went across the draughty hall. A hand truck loaded with parcels and left near the entrance was between him and the telephone kiosk. He went toward it casually, and came to a halt. The man standing at the end of it, apparently engrossed in his newspaper, was looking intently over the top of it at the door of the kiosk. On Eric Dalrymple-Hughes’s too handsome face was a look of such completely transparent triumphant malice that he suddenly seemed to become uncomfortably conscious of it himself. He glanced quickly at a small group of people standing near him and composed his features to their normal bored petulance. He fixed his eyes again over the top of his paper on the kiosk.
The door opened, Mary Winship came out and hurried to the entrance. Dalrymple-Hughes folded his paper, stuck it in the pocket of his trench coat and sauntered after her. Dan McGrath brought up a quiet rear guard, out into the foggy night.
She set off across Waterloo Bridge, walking rapidly without hesitation or a backward glance. Dalrymple-Hughes followed coolly. She turned left into the Strand. Abruptly, in front of the Savoy, Dalrymple-Hughes was no longer to be seen. He had turned off, and Dan, quickening his pace, saw him cross the court and go inside. He cut down the distance between himself and Mary. Was Cousin Eric not following the girl? Did he know he was being followed himself? A third possibility, more likely, came to Dan’s mind: he knew where she was going; there was no need to follow her further. After all, there must be a limited number of places she could confidently run to at that time of night, when nobody could call the Strand a crowded thoroughfare pulsing with life.
He quickened his step again. She had turned left, and as he reached the narrow entrance of Adam Street she was hurrying across it to the short block of houses on the opposite side. The street was an intimate cul de sac overlooking the Gardens on the Embankment, dimly lighted, and empty so that he could hear the quick echo of her heels on the cobblestones. He looked back to see if Eric had changed his mind, but there was no one in sight.
“Mary!” he called. “Mary Winship!”
It was a sudden impulse as she came into the mist-silvered light from the street lamp. In a moment she would be gone, thinking they didn’t know. Everything else aside, he had to warn her. Hearing her name, she would think it was someone she knew, stop under the light and turn and see him.
It seemed to him she gave a sudden start and hurried faster, not looking back. He called her name again. She broke forward wildly, running blindly. He saw her trip, stagger and catch herself.
“Mary! Wait a minute! It’s me—it’s Dan McGrath!”
His pounding feet echoed, drowning his voice, as she dropped her bag and book, caught hold of the iron step rail and flashed around, her face white with terror, her mouth open as if she was trying to scream and no sound would come. She was clutching wildly at the rail, her knees sagging. He put his hands out and gripped her arms.
“Don’t be afraid, Mary. It’s Dan McGrath. In the shelter, Mary—you remember—during the raid! I took you home, to Godolphin Square!”
It was not the way he had planned it, not the way in all his day dreams he had ever thought he was some day going to tell her.
“I love you, Mary. That’s why I’m here. I came back to find you.”
He had thought he might say that, but he was saying it more violently, with none of the vague nostalgia he’d pictured in his own mind but with an intense and present reality. Nor had he ever dared hope she might do what she did then. She raised her white face to his, her lips parted, her eyes searching his. Then her head drooped forward on his shoulder and she clung to him tightly.
“It was you,” she whispered. “Oh, I hoped you’d come. I hoped you’d come some day.”
Her trembling body was suddenly quiet. He could feel her pounding heart slow down.
“I love you, Mary.” He murmured the words, holding her closer, and straightened abruptly as she raised her head, her eyes suddenly sparkling with laughter.
“But isn’t this a hell of a way to meet a girl.” She shook her hair back from her face and moved away a little. “Do you remember? That’s what you said. And you were the first boy that ever kissed me.”
“That makes it simple. I’m going to be the next, and the last.”
He kissed her, then he said, “I wish we’d both gone to Paris.”
As she drew back quickly, dropping her arms to her side, he reached down and picked up her book and bag.
“And I don’t know what you thought you were going to do, but what I mean is, I don’t know what this is all about—but unless it makes an awful lot of sense you’re not going to do it. Your cousin knows you didn’t go. He saw you get off the train, and followed you as far as the Savoy.”
“Oh, no! He couldn’t—”
She looked at him, her eyes widening, not understanding for an instant. She broke off and turned away quickly. “Then I’ve got to get home. I was—I was going to stay here tonight. In a friend’s flat. He’s away, and—”
“Why?” Dan said. He added gently, “I mean, what�
��s it all about, Mary? Why were you going to stay here? Why didn’t you go on to Paris ? ”
When she didn’t answer he said, “Maybe you think it isn’t any of my business, but it is.” He thought of Mr. Pinkerton and his spectacles caught in the inside folds of the red and green wool shawl. “For a couple of reasons. You’re one of them.” He managed a grin to make it all sound less abysmal. “After all, Mary, when a guy comes three thousand miles to find a gal and take her back home with him, he’s got a right to know why she ditches her cousin, ducks off trains and goes zooming down back alleys. Hasn’t he?”
“You’d not want to take me back home, probably, if you did know,” Mary Winship said slowly. Then alarm sprang up quickly in her eyes. “I’ve got to get back home. Eric’s probably on the phone now, telling my aunt—”
“But—you were on the phone yourself. Not ringing an empty flat—”
“No, I wasn’t ringing an empty flat. I was ringing my uncle —my father’s brother.”
“All right, Mary. But what’s it all about?” He tilted her firm pointed chin up and looked down at her. “I can help you if you’ll tell me.”
The sound of a car coming into a side street made him release her chin and take hold of her arm. “But not here. You’re coming home with me.”
She shook her head quickly. “My own home. I’m terribly late already.”
They started across the road back into the Strand.
“It just happens it’s the same place,” Dan said. “Number four Godolphin—”
Her arm resting lightly in his was suddenly rigid. She stopped dead in the center of the road, staring at him, her lips parted. “You—you’re not the American Miss Grim—”
She caught her breath, still staring at him, without finishing as much as Miss Grimstead’s name.
“Sure,” Dan said. “That’s me.” He was as startled as she was. “Or at least it was me. She may have put me out by now. And why not, Mary? I told you I came over to find you.”
Her arm, still rigid in his, came to sudden life. She jerked it away and moved quickly a step from him.
“Dan,” she said. It was not spoken to him but as if she was speaking to someone else. She looked at him again. “What— what did you say your last name was? I—I’m afraid I was too upset to hear it.”
“McGrath,” Dan said calmly. After all, he had not known hers either until Mr. Pinkerton had told him.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh!”
She stood rigidly where she was a moment, then turned and started forward. He had the fantastic impression that she was about to break into a run. He took a step after her and caught her arm.
“Mary! For heaven’s sake, what’s the matter?”
He turned her sharply about to face him. “What’s happened? Why shouldn’t I be the American Miss Grimstead told you about? What in hell did she say? You can at least tell me that, can’t you?”
Mary Winship’s chin shot up, her blue-black eyes were hot as burning pitch in the blank white of her face.
“Nothing at all,” she said curtly. “She didn’t even tell me your name. All she said was it was too bad I was leaving just when a handsome American had arrived.”
The intonation of her voice gave it the quality of devastating scorn. She released her arm from his grasp and moved quickly forward into the Strand.
“I’m sorry I forgot my bag. Give it to me, please.”
She held out her hand. “I can get a bus at the next corner.”
“Look, Mary!”
“Taxi!” She spotted a cab and held up her hand. As it pulled into the kerb, she reached out and snatched her bag. She stepped quickly forward to the cab and turned.
“You needn’t have pretended, Mr. McGrath,” she said. Her voice was low and quivering with passionate intensity. “It wouldn’t have helped you. My father is not a thief. There’s no use your trying to find him. You shan’t, not ever—not if I can help it.”
She got in the cab, pulled the door sharply to behind her and reached out for the lever to draw up the open window. “So now you know why I didn’t go to France.”
She leaned forward to the waiting driver. “Fifty-three Saint—”
The window snapped shut, cutting off the rest of it. Dan McGrath had not heard enough to tell him where she was going. It was enough to tell him it was not Godolphin Square. The cab pulled away. He stood blankly where he was, blinded for an instant by the after-image of her small vivid face, eyes fixed ahead, chin up.
He pushed his hat up and scratched the back of his head, as completely bewildered as he had ever been in all his life. He looked down at the hand she’d snatched the bag away from. The whole thing was screwy as hell. He reached in his pocket to get a cigarette. It was an automatic gesture he was not aware he was making until he touched her book he had put in his pocket when he picked it up from the street where she’d dropped it.
He took it out and looked at it blindly, as if automatically searching for any kind of clue that might explain what was a fantastic and completely incoherent muddle. Then in spite of himself, he blinked. His own name was on the book. He saw that before he saw the title. “McGrath,” it said there. The author was somebody named McGrath. He moved over to the lighted shop window behind him and opened the book.
“Masterpieces They’ve Never Found,” was the title. The author’s name under it was Arnold D. McGrath, Former Inspector Metropolitan Police, Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
Dan McGrath looked down at it a long time. Then he turned the pages to see if it had an index. There was none, and a jeweller’s show window in the Strand was not a particularly adequate reading room. He closed the book and put it slowly back in his pocket, wondering if perhaps a first dim flicker of light was creeping into his bewildered mind.
He headed for home, trying to figure it out. As he became conscious of the hollow echo of his footsteps in the dreary empty side streets leading from Piccadilly back into Godolphin Square, he was ironically aware that it was the way he felt himself. It reminded him of background music in a movie. It had the same lonely hollow feeling he had, in the form of a curiously empty ache somewhere in the bottom of his stomach. He couldn’t quite get rid of it no matter how detached he tried to make himself, even though he could view it with a certain amount of quietly sardonic humor. After all, it was something to come to London to find a girl, and find her, and find he really was in love with her, and lose her, all in less time than he had expected would take him to get settled and start looking for her. It was a record of some sort.
In fact, he thought, the brief period he had been there had seen a series of records new in his experience. He had become the self-appointed guardian of a rabbitty little Welshman obviously touched in the head (that he had got conked on it too was beside the point for the moment, although that was hardly normal in his experience either). He had been accused of being the confederate and finger man of a guy he’d merely inquired about in the most innocent way. He had gotten what could be called a room to stay in and had been asked to get the hell out of it. And finally, he had been mistaken for a Boston-Irish cop who had written a book, and had been left holding the book, as it were, because his girl thought he thought her father was a thief.
As he reviewed it, he could only conclude it was not the sort of thing to happen to a McGrath—at least not to Daniel J. McGrath. McGrath, he reflected, should have stood in bed. His big mouth twisted in a wry grin as he turned into Godolphin Square. Maybe the Savoy would be better, he thought. It was lighter, anyway—lighter and noisier. Godolphin Square was dark. The few street lamps seemed frail discouraged candles, their wispy yellow beams chewed off by the hungry shadows of the plane trees in the central garden. The fanlights over the uniform doorways were a shabby phalanx of sleepy single-eyed robots standing at attention around the Square’s dark perimeter, broken only when they came to the rude gap where the bombs had fallen.
He looked across. He could see the black empty spaces on either side of Number 22, and the gaunt r
uins that were all that was left of it. That was where his trouble had started. He thought of that, still trying to convince himself the whole business was a comedy of errors, easily explained as soon as he could get anybody to stop long enough to listen. But his own mood had changed. There was something curiously fascinating, and at the same time moving, about a house that had been bombed. He had found himself at other places in London stopping to look down into the empty holes at the broken masonry and then going on quickly, a little ashamed, as if he had been caught staring curiously at the open wounds of someone who was poor and naked and without defence. It was all in his own mind, he knew. No one passing in the street cared whether he looked or not. Still, he had found himself turning away, as if somehow the burden of guilt was also partly his. And at this house, he thought now, Mary Winship’s mother and her aunt had been there the night it was destroyed.
He thought of the story the little Welshman had told him, as he went across to that side of the Square. It was a vivid picture in his mind—the two terror-stricken women huddled at the top of the fantastic stairway, the whole front of the house torn away, collapsed in a mass of powdered brick and mortar, the two women imprisoned behind it, half-crazed, clinging hysterically to the ornamental rail, refusing rescue when it came. It was his fear that Mary might have been there too, and his relief learning she had not been, that had made it so much more vivid than the little man’s telling, he thought as he approached the void that had been the house next door to it. What had happened to the people here ? Had they got out, or had they been buried in the debris?
