The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 36

He took one step toward the woman in the rose-colored dressing-gown.

She was, I could see, much the taller of the two. And she was standing, now, with her back flat against the wall. She made no attempt to escape. She was still staring at him out of wide and bewildered eyes when he fired.

I saw the spit of the plaster and the little shower of mortar that rained on her bare shoulder from the bullet-hole in the wall.

Then I did a very ordinary and commonplace thing. I stooped quickly forward to the end of the table and caught up the nickeled coffee-pot by its ebony handle. The lunatic with the smoking revolver saw my sudden movement, for as I swung the metal instrument upward he turned on me and fired for the second time.

I could feel the sting of the powder smoke on my up-thrust wrist. I knew then that it was useless to try to reach him. I simply brought my arm forward and let the metal pot fly from my hand. I let it fly forward, targeting on his white and distorted face.

Where or how it struck I could not tell. All I knew was that he went down under a scattering geyser of black coffee. He did not fire again.

He did not even move. But as he fell the woman in the cap and ap.r.o.n dropped on her knees beside him. She knelt there with an inarticulate cry like that of an animal over its fallen mate, a ludicrous, mouse-like sound that was almost a squeak. Then she suddenly edged about and reached out for the fallen revolver.

I saw her through the smoke, but she had the gun in her hand before I could stop her. She fought over it like a wildcat. The peril of that combat made me desperate. Her arm was quite thin, and not overly strong. I first twisted it so the gun-barrel pointed outward. The pain, as I continued to twist, must have been intense. But I knew it was no time for half-measures. Just how intense that pain was came home to me a moment later, when the woman fell forward on her face, in a dead faint.

The other woman had calmly thrown open the windows. She watched me, almost apathetically, as I got to my feet and stooped in alarm over the unconscious man in his ridiculous welter of black coffee. Then she stepped closer to me.

"Have you killed him?" she asked, with more a touch of childlike wonder than any actual fear.

"No; he's only stunned."

"But how?"

"It caught him here on the forehead. He'll be around in a minute or two."

Once more I could hear the mult.i.tudinous rustle as she crossed the room.

"Put him here on my bed," she called from an open door. And as I carried him in and dropped him in a sodden heap on the white coverlet, I saw the woman unsheathe her writhing body of its rose-colored wrapping. From that flurry of warmth her twisting body emerged almost sepulchrally white. Then she came to a pause, bare-shouldered and thoughtful before me.

"Wait!" she said as she crossed the room. "I must telephone McCausland."

"Who's McCausland?" I asked as she stepped out into the dining-room.

"He's a man I know at Headquarters," was her impersonal-noted reply.

For the second time, as she stepped hurriedly back into the room with me, I was conscious of the satin-like smoothness of her skin, the baby-like whiteness of her rounded bare arms. Then wholly unabashed by my presence, she flung open a closet door and tossed a cascade of perfumed apparel out beside the bed where I stood.

"What are you going to do?" I demanded, as I saw her white-clad figure writhe itself into a street dress. There was something primordial and Adamitic in the very calmness with which she swept through the flimsy reservations of s.e.x. She was as unconscious of my predicament as a cave woman might have been. And the next moment she was crus.h.i.+ng lingerie and narrow-toed shoes and toilet articles and undecipherable garments of folded silk into an English club-bag. Then she turned to glance at her watch on the dresser.

"I'm going!" she said at last, as she caught up a second hand-bag of alligator skin and crammed into it jewel boxes of dark plush and cases of different colored kid, and still more clothing and lingerie. "I'm going to catch the _Nieuw Amsterdam_."

"For where?"

"For Europe!"

Her quick and dextrous hands had pinned on a hat and veil as I stood in wonder watching her.

"Call a taxi, please," she said, as she struggled into her coat. "And a boy for my bags."

I was still at the receiver when she came into the room and looked down for a moment at the woman moaning and whimpering on the coffee-stained floor. Then she began resolutely and calmly drawing on her gloves.

"Couldn't we do something for them?" I said as I stepped back into the bedroom for her hand-bag.

"What?" she demanded, as she leaned over the bed where Whelan's reviving body twitched and moved.

"There must be something."

"There's nothing. Oh, believe me, you can't help him. I can't help him. He's got his own way to go. And it's a terribly short way!"

She flung open a bureau drawer and crammed a further article or two down in her still open chatelaine bag.

Then she opened the outer door for the boy who had come for the bags.

Then she looked at her watch again.

"You must not come back," she said to me. "They may be here any time."

"Who may?" I asked.

"The police," she answered as she closed the door.

She did not speak again until we were at the side of the taxicab.

"To the Holland American Wharf," she said.

Nor did she speak all the while we purred and hummed and dodged our way across the city. She did not move until we jolted aboard the ferry-boat, and the clanging of the landing-float's pawl-and-rachet told us we were no longer on that shrill and narrow island where the fever of life burns to the edge of its three laving rivers. It was then and only then that I noticed the convulsive shaking of her shoulders.

"What is it?" I asked, helplessly, oppressed by the worlds that seemed to stand between us.

"It's nothing," she said, with her teeth against her lip. But the next minute she was crying as forlornly and openly as a child.

"What is it?" I repeated, as inadequately as before, knowing the uselessness of any debilitating touch of sympathy.

"It's so hard," she said, struggling to control her voice.

"What is?"

"It's so hard to begin over."

"But they say you're the cleverest woman in the world!" was the only consolation I could offer her.

CHAPTER IX

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM

I lifted my face to the sudden pelt of the rain-shower, feeling very much like a second edition of King Lear as I did so. Not that I had lost a kingdom, or that I'd ever been turned out of an ungrateful home circle! But something quite as disturbing, in its own small way, had overtaken me.

I had been snubbed by Mary Lockwood. While I stood watching that sudden shower empty upper Broadway as quickly as a fusillade of bullets might have emptied it, I encountered something which quite as promptly emptied my own heart. It was the cut direct. For as I crouched back under my dripping portico, like a toad under a rhubarb-leaf, I caught sight of the only too familiar wine-colored landaulet as it swung about into Longacre Square. I must have started forward a little, without being quite conscious of the movement. And through the sheltering plate-gla.s.s of the dripping hood I caught sight of Mary Lockwood herself.