by Otto Penzler
“Johnnie, Gerda knew her book, boy. She realised, as very few people of our profession realise, what an important study is your book of psychology. Women, as a rule, are better at that game than men. Criminologists trace crime to heredity, to suggestion, to physical phenomena, to environment. But women go one better than that. They use the emotions; they know the weight of an eyelash, the value of the turn of a head, of a word, and more, of an unsaid word. It was what she did not say in that letter that made me see red and shake with absolute bestial rage. I thought of the chap at the Opera—recalled his face—his tricks of gesture, his age, all about him. He was a nice-looking, young dark fellow, but I got a vision of Mephistopheles. I imagined him driving a bargain with her for the five hundred. I had plenty of money—the Cosmopolitans’ money—on me. I got notes for five hundred and put them into a letter, begging her to take them from the very mad Englishman, who would not even ask to see her in return, rather than from her ‘friend.’ But how I hoped for that meeting she’d promised! She sent an answer filled in between the lines—you know. I was to call and be thanked in person for ‘the loan.’ The next evening, at seven, I was to dine with her.”
“And?” Luck asked, after a longish pause had fallen.
Napoleon replied tersely.
“I went, blindfold as I had acted, and shaking with excitement, to her hotel at seven o’clock. I came out at seven ten, sane. She had left early in the morning with, presumably, several articles of jewellery missed by other visitors, and my—or rather the Cosmopolitans’—five hundred pounds. Police inquiry—from the other victims, not me, Johnnie—elicited the fact that she had left Florence with her ‘friend,’ but they could not be traced. I cursed solid for some while—imagining her laughter.”
Luck nodded.
“It must have been the softest thing she’d ever been on,” said Napoleon, “and yet she was dealing with the cleverest man she had, in all probability, ever met with.”
He made the assertion ruminatively, and with no conscious arrogance.
“Since then,” he resumed, “I have relied less on science in my profession, less on logical sequence, and have recognised that chance, emotion, and adventure are very potent contingencies to be reckoned with. Her eyes had melted me. My science, my logic, my ingrained suspicion of the world, went by the board. It was, as I say, a very soft thing. She could not have expected to draw the money before she had granted me an interview, at least. And how she must have laughed when she did it! She and her friend! It must be the joke of their lives. And when you come to think of it, Johnnie, it is excruciatingly humorous that I—I—I—should have tumbled into that!”
There was nothing in the little man’s pale face to betray that he had ever felt the excruciating humour of the situation, so John Luck did not laugh either.
“Logic is a fool to love,” said Napoleon.
“It is an interesting story,” Luck remarked.
“What reminded me of it,” said Napoleon, turning his head, and fixing his auditor with his brief bright glance, “was seeing her eyes in the fire just now, as you were seeing someone else’s, eh, Johnnie? I’ve never, these seven years, forgotten Gerda.”
“Nor forgiven her?”
He evaded that. “And what called up those eyes, Johnnie, was seeing another pair very like them as I came out of the building this morning. She was a pretty woman named Muswell, the lift-man told me.”
“My neighbour, I expect, in number twenty-four.”
“That so? Do you know her? She looked wistful, worried, down on her luck, though Mary tells me her frock must have cost exactly ten pounds nineteen and eleven pence halfpenny.”
“No, I don’t know her. Often met her going up or down, of course. I’ve noticed the worried air. Perhaps she’s just lonely. Seems a sin for a pretty woman like that to be living all by herself.”
“She has eyes just like Gerda’s,” said Napoleon softly. He looked into the fire again, his chin sunk a little, his face merely a pale mask. Then he asked:
“Have you ever credited me with weakness, Johnnie?”
Luck smiled so broadly at this question that a spoken negative was unnecessary.
“Yet all men are weak,” said Napoleon, answering the smile, “and my weakness, my soft spot, my tenderness, is for eyes like Gerda’s. I loved her—and she hurt me. She had never set eyes on me—I just worshipped from my distance. Never mind. I loved her, and love is love, and, as I say, above all the logic in the world. I had a charwoman in Paris once with eyes a little like hers, and I did what I could to help that charwoman because of Gerda. Gerda wouldn’t have done it, but never mind. Now I meet Mrs. Muswell here in these flats, and she has eyes that are the very duplicate of Gerda’s. She looks lonely, unhappy, unlucky. Convention forbids Mary to call on her, and offer her some palliation of her loneliness, because it seems that she arrived here first. Apparently she will not call on us. And I want to do some good turn for a girl with Gerda’s eyes. Arrange the matter for us, Johnnie.”
“How?”
“Make her acquaintance, as she’s next door. Make her talk. Make her tell you she’s lonely. Then beg her to call on those nice people, the Princes, whose acquaintance you have made since coming here. And so on.”
“How do I make her acquaintance, Nap?”
“Oh! run along, Johnnie!” said Napoleon, vastly tickled at this helplessness. “You are a very pretty young man—don’t blush! You have the ordinary social gifts, and a pair of eyes to appreciate the blessings the gods grant you in the way of alluring neighbours. You have a charming flat next her own, and you are both solitary young people. The conditions are so favourable as to allow of positively no interesting obstacles to surmount at all.”
Mary here returned from the Stores, and voted her shopping dull.
“Polly,” said her brother, “Luck, here, is going to bring his neighbour, Mrs. Muswell, to call on you tomorrow afternoon. It is an old love-story——”
Mary looked frostily from one to the other.
“Of mine, child, not Johnnie’s,” Napoleon continued, preparing to wheel from the room; “an old love-story of which her eyes remind me. So we are going to be exceedingly kind to Mrs. Muswell, child, please.”
—
A quite beautiful woman opened the door of her flat to Mr. John Luck the next morning. She was tall, dark, slight almost to leanness, and vivid; she looked any age from twenty-five to thirty, but it was most probably thirty. She wore an artful gown. Her eyes were very lovely—big, straight, innocent, appealing.
“I am sorry to trouble you,” said Mr. John Luck, with his engaging smile, “but I have lost my kitten, and I think she must have come in to you, with the milk, or something. May I look, please?”
The lovely apparition looked Mr. Luck over.
“Come in,” said she simply, and, closing the door behind him, led the way to a little drawing-room as artful as her frock. A very queer Eastern little drawing-room. She motioned him with frank kindness—her absence of all conventional mannerism was refreshing—to a seat, and inquired the name and description of the kitten.
“She answers to anything, but is generally called ‘Puss,’ ” replied Mr. Luck admiringly, “and she is about the most spiritual cat I have ever met.”
“What colour is your dear little kitten?”
“She is white,” said Luck. “All spirits are, you know. I am sure you would love her. Are you fond of cats?”
“Very,” she answered, smiling softly and doubtfully.
She stared at him much as a puzzled child might do. Then they rose and looked for the kitten all over the flat, but it could not be found. No answer came to any appeal of “Puss!” or any other name. The search proving futile, they returned to the drawing-room, and sat down again.
“I am your next-door neighbour, you know,” he said, when one or two topics had been exhausted, and she gave him no unkind hint to go.
“Oh!—yes?” she said doubtfully.
“They are jolly flats, ar
en’t they?”
“Yes.”
“But even a flat is very lonely for one person, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She added with great simplicity: “I am very lonely.”
“What a sin, Mrs.—Mrs.——”
“Muswell,” said she, hesitating over the name. He registered the hesitation. “I have no friends at all in London now.” And she sighed.
“Why not call on some of the people here? The newer comers, you know.”
“Oh, do you think they——”
“Would love it?” said Mr. Luck. “I do. There’s a charming pair, brother and sister, just below you, whose acquaintance I’ve made since coming here. They’d be delighted, I know they would. Their name is Prince.”
“Oh! Do you mean the poor little invalid gentleman, Mr.——?”
“My name is Luck. And I do mean the invalid and his sister. I say, are you very, very conventional?”
She shook her head, still smiling her doubtful, half timorous smile.
“No, I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with English conventions. I—I’ve been out of England so long.”
A faint sigh again, and the words seemed to call up to the dark wells of her eyes some best-forgotten thing from fathoms deep.
“Then,” he said, “do let me take you down to call this afternoon, Mrs. Muswell. Will you?”
After the necessary preliminary hesitations, she consented.
“Although,” she said, “I am afraid of making friends. I——”
“Why should you deprive people?”
“My story,” she said after a pause, “is rather an extraordinary one. I—I could hardly tell such a stranger, but——”
“Certainly not,” replied Mr. Luck, promptly rising to take his leave. They skook hands by a sort of mutual impulse, she looking at him very straightly, he looking back very reassuringly. So he returned to his own demesne, anticipating with pleasure the hearing of this pretty woman’s extraordinary story at a very near date, for he was but human. “In here after dinner,” said he, looking thoughtfully round his drawing-room, “over coffee, with a dim light. Almost any cushions would suit her as a background.”
He took her down that afternoon to call on the Princes, as prearranged.
The visit was a success. Afterwards Mary said, but kindly, that she looked like a woman with a story.
Luck assented grudgingly to the possibility.
Napoleon, with his mysterious smile, agreed with Mary. The young widow certainly had a story. He looked remotely into the fire. Probably he was seeing Gerda’s eyes.
The young widow’s extraordinary story was not long withheld from Johnnie Luck.
That same evening, having dined in his flat, he was seated at his piano, playing softly, and singing softly in a voice worth better things, some doggerel nigger melodies, when a lady was ushered in on him by the very discreet servitor whom Luck had engaged.
It was Mrs. Muswell.
She was in a simple black chiffon gown, and she looked appealing.
“You will think this very strange, I suppose,” she began, as he jumped up with every manifestation of pleasure to meet her. “At least, I suppose you will think it strange—I forget just exactly what one may or may not do in England. Can I sit down?”
“I am sure you may do that,” said he, smiling, and hastily dragging forward a chair which held cushions of the right colour for her complexion.
She dropped a soft black roll which she carried—it looked like a small hearthrug—and sank into the chair.
“You were so very kind to me this morning and this afternoon,” she said hesitatingly, “that I would like to—to tell you about myself, unconventional as I suppose it seems. But then, as I told you, I have forgotten how to be properly conventional like your nice English girls.”
She bit her lip, and her eyes looked as if they held tears.
“My dear Mrs. Muswell,” he said interestedly, sitting down near her, “conventions are always wrong, because they indicate a state of things that calls for unnatural restraint. Whereas things are not in the least in that most deplorable state. Why can’t we all be natural, and say what we like to each other? Why make acquaintance by the almanac?”
“Why, indeed?” she echoed innocently. “Can I, then, tell you everything, and ask your advice upon the situation, because I have no older friend than yourself here? Would a nice English girl do it?”
“She would love it,” replied Luck earnestly.
She was very charmingly full of doubts and indecisions, half smiling. “I was brought up in England,” she said; “my mother was English, but my father was Italian. You can see the Italian in me, can you not?”
The discreet servitor here brought in the coffee tray, to which he had discreetly added a second cup and saucer, and withdrew. Luck ministered to his guest; she tasted the coffee and gave a little exclamation.
“How good! I have not had it so good since I escaped from——”
She stopped. “We used to eat sweets with it there,” she said rather faintly. “Rich, delicious sugary things like chocolate, marrons glacés, almond paste, crystallised violets, and Turkish delight all rolled together.”
A box of chocolates, bought for Mary, was pushed away behind the furnishings of an occasional table. Luck found this, and, untying the ribbon, offered the sweets.
“It is the nearest thing I can do,” said he apologetically.
She helped herself. She had very white teeth, over which her red lips crinkled back prettily. “Not that I want to remember anything about it,” she sighed. “It is all too painful—too degrading—too——”
“I assure you that I will give you the best advice in my power.”
“I know it, and I am going to tell you my story.”
He sat before her, holding the open chocolate box; she began to talk, stopping now and again to help herself and nibble at the bonbons as a child may nibble sweets and tell a fairy tale.
“My mother, as I told you, was English, my father Italian. I was brought up during my childhood in England, but when I was eighteen I went with my parents to Paris. There my mother died, and I was left entirely to my father’s care. It was not good care. Heaven forgive me for speaking ill of him, but it was very bad care. So bad for a girl of only eighteen, straight out of a convent school in England.”
“A convent school?”
“Yes. I spent my holidays there as well as the terms. It was very peaceful and sweet; I loved it. One lived asleep. When I came out of that dear place the awakening was very sudden, crude, bewildering. But then I realised the world outside, and that I was alive in it. I simply threw myself into all the excitement my parents provided. When my mother died, my father went on providing excitements. I played, like a child still, with everything and everybody, till at last, seeing that I could not or would not understand that I was grown up, and what were his aims for me, my father spoke. ‘Julie,’ he said—in Paris it was, after a ball— ‘when are you going to marry?’
“The question was a horrid shock. I had not thought of marrying. I was happy. My world was Arcadia—not a dull one, of course, in Paris—but mentally Arcadia. ‘I shall always stay with you, papa,’ I said to him lightly. ‘I have other plans for you, ma chérie,’ said he to me heavily. And the next day he introduced me to Prince Mustapha. The prince had just come from Constantinople on a diplomatic mission, I understood. He was quite young, charming, and polished like our own men. I went about with him a great deal, my father dropping chaperonage when possible. I let the prince, as it were, into my Arcadia among all my other friends. I had very few women friends; but that, of course, was my father’s fault. You believe me that it was Arcadia?”
She looked like a child afraid of the construction which may be put by an irreverent elder upon the truth which it is telling.
“I see you believe me,” she resumed. “You are good, kind. Then came a horrible day; my father storming and telling me that I was talked about in every club and café in Paris; and Mus
tapha proposing marriage. I was so afraid of my father, so anxious to escape from such a blustering parent, that I accepted the prince. We were married in Paris—I, like an ignorant girl, not questioning the validity of the rite between one of his religion and one of mine, and we—my husband and I—travelled back together to Constantinople.”
A long pause.
“I do not really think that I can go on,” she said very faintly. But when she had dried her eyes and eaten a few more chocolates she insisted bravely on doing so.
“The prince had a harem——”
“Good heavens!” cried Luck.
“A harem. And I was one of his—called by courtesy—wives. I had been in his house twenty-four hours before I knew. I reproached him passionately. I said: ‘If my father knew of this——’ He replied: ‘Your father knew well. I paid him twenty-five thousand francs to help him with his debts.’ So I understood that it was a question of buying and selling. I, a free girl with English blood in my veins, had been sold! I saw what a broken reed I had to lean on in my father—my only reed, too! What could I do? I had been with Mustapha for a week. I—I stayed. I became one of the harem. One of the sleepy, fattening, decorated pets and slaves. I was that for eight years, and suddenly I revolted strongly enough to devise, with all the odds against me, my escape. I planned it for seven months, watching every sign and listening to every sound of life I could catch from outside to help me build a scheme. One thing I was resolved on: I would not go penniless.
“Just at that time there was a craze among us in the harem for making mats of black silk and wool an inch and a half thick. I had been for eight years Mustapha’s favourite, and he had lavished jewels on me. As soon as I began to plan my escape, I commenced to hide these chains and necklaces in the weaving of my mat. One by one, very cunningly, I put my ornaments away, always keeping up to the last something to wear when Mustapha sent for me. I quarrelled with the other women, who had hated me from the beginning, and for seven months we hardly spoke, so I could sit away from them, and they never came to look at and handle my work, and chatter about it, as they did with one another’s. By the time the mat was nearly finished my plans were ripe, and occasion came. We always walked at will on the roof garden. I went up alone with my mat one evening, and dropped myself right down from the roof into the top of a big fruit tree underneath. It seemed a sickening distance. I lay there and looked over the wall into the street. It was a comparatively quiet spot, away from the market place and principal squares. At last I dared to climb down and over the wall by the aid of the fruit trees that were trained along it. So I walked out free into a street for the first time in eight years. As free as I could be, that is. Of course, I went veiled. I got my passage money and an escort privately from the British Consul, and so I came back at last to England and to London.”
