Run! (4 page)

He turned to another column and cocked an eyebrow at a highly decorative picture of Ambrose Sylvester. The famous novelist's famous profile was displayed. James, who had stuck in the middle of
Links in the Chain,
wondered why some novelists were famous and some were not. Everyone raved about Ambrose Sylvester—that is to say, all the women did. Daphne, Kitty, Chloe, Linda, and Susan all declared that his profile was simply divine. He supposed they also read his books. He didn't seem to have written very much—three novels—nothing for the last five years or so. The legend under the photograph said, “When are we to have another link in the Chain?”

He left Ambrose Sylvester, and read without interest the odds that were being offered at Hollywood on a popular film-star's matrimonial chances. He was just going to turn over the page, when his eye was caught by a small paragraph tucked away in the right-hand corner. It was headed
Windfall for our Dumb Friends.
But that wasn't what had caught his eye, it was the name immediately below it—Lady Clementa Tolhache.

James stared at it as he might have stared at a fiery disc, or a blue dragon, or a luminous snake, or any other product of a disordered imagination. Not much more than an hour ago he had decided that there was no such name as Clementa. He did not find it at all easy to reverse this decision. He preferred to disbelieve the evidence of his senses. After all, if you see fiery spots floating in the air, you don't believe they are really there—not unless you are very far gone.

He looked away from the paragraph and gazed fixedly at one of Gertrude's pictures which hung on the farther wall. It depicted a greyish female with an enormous body and a very small head in the act of eating a bright green apple with red spots on it. There was a huge lobster in the foreground, and a thing like a bright blue tadpole in the right-hand top corner. This work was called Eve, and James thought it was the most frightful thing he had ever seen. The fact that he now remained looking at it for some moments showed how much he had been thrown off his balance. As a matter of fact, he was not seeing it at all, he was seeing that ridiculous name, and when after blinking rapidly several times he looked back at the paragraph he saw it still—Clementa—Lady Clementa Tolhache. There it was, in print. He read it three times, and then finished the paragraph: “Lady Clementa Tolhache has made a generous bequest to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. There are a number of other legacies, but the bulk of her estate passes to her great-nephew Mr. John Jernyngham West, at present with his regiment in India.”

James felt exasperated to the last degree. Without the slightest warning life had become completely mad. He had had an unbelievable adventure with an impossibly named girl who pitched him an incredible tale about her Aunt Clementa, and here was a paragraph featuring Aunt Clementa's will. And as if that wasn't enough, it also featured Jack West—old J.J. It couldn't be anyone else. There weren't two John Jernyngham Wests in the Army, he'd take his oath on that. No, it was J.J. who had fagged for him at Wellington, and he was Lady Clementa Tolhache's great-nephew and heir. The paragraph said so. He was surprised at its moderation in the matter of the diamond necklace. It might have insisted on his believing in that too.

He went down to his bath obstinately determined to go on regarding the necklace as a myth.

V

It was next day that his cousin Daphne rang up. He heard the telephone as he put his key in the lock. It herded with the sink, and the gas-cooker, and the bath in a manner which everyone except Gertrude Lushington found extremely inconvenient. Gertrude herself merely observed vaguely that it was so nice not to have to get out of your bath when people rang you up.

James said, “Be quiet, you brute!” switched on the light, tripped over a hot-water can, and unhooked the receiver. The voice of his cousin Daphne came fluting sweetly to his ear. She had not married any of the three men to whom she had become engaged at her first ball, and was now the wife of Bonzo Strickland, the oil magnate.

“Darling, I've been trying to get you for hours. Where
have
you been?”

“Working,” said James. “Some of us have to, you know.”

Daphne managed to transmit a shudder.

“Too horrid! My poor angel!”

“Cut it out!” said James austerely. “What do you want, Daph?”

“Darling—how unkind! Couldn't I just want to hear your voice?”

“You could, I suppose, but you don't. What is it?”

“Darling, I really do think you've got the most foully suspicious mind.”

“Oh, come off it!” said James. He spoke loudly and fiercely in the telephone. “What—do—you—want?”

“Well, Bonzo's gone to see his mother. He does, you know—too filial. And I'm throwing a party here—just a few bright spirits. I thought we'd dance. You'll come, won't you?”

“I don't dance,” said James.

“Darling—what a
lie
! Why, you proposed to me in the middle of a waltz.”

James grinned at his end of the telephone.

“That's why—too dangerous—I mightn't get off the next time.”

“Darling, you must come. I won't let anyone propose to you—I really won't. And I'm a man short. You wouldn't like to spoil my party—would you? And I've really got a secret, particular reason why I want you to come. I can't tell you about it, because I promised.”

“And you've never been known to break a promise—have you?” said James in a nasty sarcastic voice.

“Darling, what a bad temper you're in. How's chauffing?”

“Not too bad. I sold a Rolls yesterday.”

“Well, I don't say for certain, but I think you might sell another, perhaps day after tomorrow. Bonzo hasn't exactly promised, but he always comes back very fond of me, so I should think there's quite a decent chance of our blowing in one day this week.
Now
will you come to my party?”

“That's bribery and corruption.”

Daphne cooed back at him.

“I know. Shocking, isn't it? You will come, won't you, darling?”

“I suppose so,” said James.

The Stricklands had an immense house, in which their opposite tastes contended without mingling. The hall contained portraits of Bonzo's grandparents, marble busts of his father and mother, a tessellated floor, and the heads and horns which he had collected on his various shooting expeditions. James counted eight tigers mounted on red cloth, two rhinoceri, and a quantity of antlers and horns. The dining-room was also pure Bonzo. It had the bright red walls of the Victorian period. His mother had had a bright red wallpaper in her dining-room when he was a little boy, and at forty he was still unable to think of a dining-room except in terms of Pompeian red. Daphne knew when she was beaten, and having to give way, she did so with the greatest charm. Bonzo was permitted, even encouraged, to go the whole hog. There was a blue and crimson carpet, red velvet curtains, and a massive mahogany suite.

But the drawing-room was Daphne's, floor, walls, and lighting all modern, daring, and bright. The room was cleared now ready for dancing. A trio occupied an alcove, and a twostep was in progress. James stood at the doorway and waited for the music to stop. Daphne's idea of a few bright spirits amused him. The floor was packed. He caught a glimpse of her and lost it again. She was looking insufferably pretty. He did not see anyone else he knew, and he thought that he had been a fool to come. He had probably still got oil on his hands. You soaped them and you scrubbed them, and they looked all right, and then next time you looked at them the oil seemed to have worked out again. He didn't mind dances when he knew the people, but he wasn't going to know a solitary soul in this crowd.

The dance ended, and Daphne emerged. She slipped her arm through his, addressed him as “Angel,” and began to edge him along to the end of the room.

“I've got a partner for you. You can thank me afterwards—I hope she will. You usen't to tread on people's toes, but that was when I was taking a lot of trouble over you. Hi, Rabbit, let us through! Just one more good shove, James. That's done it! I told her to stay just here, so if she's gone—”

They came into a sort of backwater beside the fireplace. There was actually a bare square yard of space. A sheet of glass ran from ceiling to floor, moulded curiously into fantastic pillars on either side and arched above a flickering electric fire. The pillars followed and distorted the human form, but the distortion had a rhythm of its own. Against the nearer pillar a girl stood waiting for them, and the first thing that James noticed about her was that she had green eyes. And that was nonsense, because people didn't have green eyes.

“Here he is, Sally,” said Daphne in her high sweet voice—“James Elliot. He sells cars. I can't swear he won't step on your feet.” And with that she was gone.

James had another look at the eyes. Of course they weren't really green. They just looked green because she had on a green dress. They had very soft black lashes, as black as soot. But her hair wasn't quite black, though it was very dark. It was done up in rows of little curls across the back of her head. Frightful waste of time doing up those curls every day—he supposed they had to be done every day. He remembered his cousin Kitty having her hair brushed round and round her nurse's finger to make it curl.

The green eyes were lifted to his, and a very soft voice said,

“Have I got a smut on my nose?”

James blushed a little. It didn't really show, but he could feel himself doing it.

“I'm afraid I was staring.”

She nodded.

“You're quite sure I haven't got a smut?”

“Oh, yes, quite.”

She looked modestly down. Her lashes were really very black indeed. James wondered whether the colour was natural, or whether she put stuff on them. They looked natural, but then so did Kitty's, and Kitty's eyelashes had been as near as a toucher white till she came out, so you could never be sure.

He said rather suddenly, “They're just going to start again. Would you like to dance?” And she said, “No, I don't think so.”

“I don't really step on people's feet.”

She said without looking up,

“I love dancing, but I've hurt my foot. Do you think we could find somewhere to sit?”

This appeared to be a rhetorical question, because she was able immediately to lead the way to two very comfortable chairs on a half-way landing. She sat down, heaved a sigh of relief, and enquired,

“Why did you stare at me like that? Did you think you'd seen me before?”

James shook his head.

“I'm quite sure I haven't.” And then in the most disturbing way his certainty wavered. “At least—”

“There—you're not sure!”

“Yes, I am—I'm positive.”

“Why?”

“I should remember your eyes.”

“Oh, my eyes?”

“I didn't think anyone had green eyes really.”

She shook her head.

“Mine aren't—not really—only when I wear green. Really green-eyed people are supposed to have red hair, but I once saw a child who had pale gold hair and eyes the exact colour of jade. It wasn't pretty, you know. It gave you a sort of squirl.”

James didn't want to talk about children with jade eyes. Something was bobbing up and down in his mind, and he wanted to catch hold of it. He said,

“How did you hurt your foot?”

And she said,

“That blighted bicycle, I shouldn't wonder.”

VI

There was a silence. James grabbed at the thing that had been bobbing up and down in his mind and caught it. This girl was the girl who had clutched him in the dark and said “Run!” And someone had started taking pot-shots at them, and they had run like the dickens. And she had borrowed his handkerchief to tie up a cut on her foot, and when he asked her how she had hurt it, she had said, “That blighted bicycle, I shouldn't wonder.” She was that girl.

Nonsense! She couldn't be.

What do you mean by she couldn't be? How couldn't she be?

It's a coincidence.

James ran a hand violently through his hair, a thing Daphne had always been very strict with him about—she said it made him look exactly like Strewelpeter—but in moments of emotion he still did it. He didn't know that he had done it now. He stared at the girl with the green eyes and said in an explosive voice,

“What bicycle?”

The girl looked down at her toes, which were encased in pale green slippers of the rather sketchy sort which consist chiefly of a heel, and a strap, and a diamond buckle. “Encased” is perhaps the wrong word, because a good deal of the toes showed through. They were pleasantly shaped and extremely flexible. She appeared to be twiddling them. James tried to imagine them tied up in his large and very oily handkerchief. He failed. He repeated his question rather more moderately, because if this wasn't the girl, she was probably beginning to think that he was a dangerous lunatic.

“What bicycle?”

She said without looking up,

“It was the housemaid's really, but I borrowed it. She'd have been frightfully sick if I hadn't brought it back, because she saved up for it for two whole years. She put all her tips in a savings-box. Her name is Gladys White, and she's got a young man in the motor trade. He's a mechanic—horribly oily except on Sundays, but most attached and steady. Gladys says they're all very steady in the motor trade. She ought to know. She says she tried six other trades before she settled down with Albert Wilson for her regular boy. They're thinking of getting engaged in the spring.”

This was all with a gentle deliberation, a bit at a time, with some toe-twiddling in between.

James felt a just anger. If she thought she was going to put him off in that way—He gave an unwilling glance at his hands. Had she meant anything by that “horribly oily,” or hadn't she? The hands were all right. He hoped she hadn't seen him look at them. He said firmly and plainly,