Puslapio vaizdai
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"He stopped dead. The woman moved nearer, and for the first time he saw her face clearly"

With a

his outstretched fingers struck a friendly curb, and he saw a glimmering patch of diffused radiance overhead. great, quick effort he stood upright, and an instant later his stick rattled along an area railing. He leaned against it, breathless, panting, his heart beating painfully, while the street-lamp gave him the further comfort of its feeble gleam, the actual flame, however, being invisible. He looked this way and that; the pavement was deserted. He was engulfed in the dark silence of the fog.

But Morley Place, he knew, must be very close by now. He thought of the

friendly little V. A. D. he had known in France, of a warm, bright fire, a cup of tea, and a cigarette. One more effort, he reflected, and all these would be his. He pluckily groped his way forward again, crawling slowly by the area railings. If things got really bad again, he would ring a bell and ask for help, much as he shrank from the idea. Provided he had no more open spaces to cross, provided he saw no more figures emerging and vanishing like creatures born of the fog and dwelling within it as within their native element,-it was the figures he now dreaded more than anything else,

more even than the loneliness,-provided the panic sense

A faint darkening of the fog beneath the next lamp caught his eye and made him start. He stopped. It was not a figure this time; it was the shadow of the pole grotesquely magnified. No, it moved; it moved toward him. A flame of fire followed by ice flowed through him. It was a figure close against his face. It was a woman.

The doctor's advice came suddenly back to him, the counsel that had cured him of a hundred phantoms:

"Do not ignore them. Treat them as real. Speak and go with them. You will soon prove their unreality then. And they will leave you."

He made a brave, tremendous effort. He was shaking. One hand clutched the damp and icy area railing.

"Lost your way like myself, have n't you, ma'am?" he said in a voice that trembled. "Do you know where we are at all? Morley Place I'm looking for "

bright eyes, their distress, however, no whit lessened. She gazed at him as though aware suddenly of his presence.

He told her briefly. "And I'm going to tea with a V. A. D. friend in Morley Place. What 's your address? Do you know the name of the street?"

She appeared not to hear him or not to understand exactly; it was as if she was not listening again.

"I came out so suddenly, so unexpectedly," he heard the low voice with pain in every syllable; "I can't find my home again. Just when I was expecting him, too." She looked about her with a distraught expression that made O'Reilly long to carry her in his arms to safety then and there. "He may be there now, waiting for me at this very moment, and I can't get back." And so sad was her voice that only by an effort did O'Reilly prevent himself putting out his hand to touch her. More and more he forgot himself in his desire to help her. Her beauty, the wonder of her strange, bright eyes in the pallid face, made an immense appeal. He became calmer. This woman was real enough. He asked again the address, the street and number, the distance she thought it

He stopped dead. The woman moved nearer, and for the first time he saw her face clearly. Its ghastly pallor, the bright, frightened eyes that stared with a kind of dazed bewilderment into his own, the beauty, above all, arrested his speech midway. The woman was "Have you any idea of the direction, young, her tall figure, wrapped in a dark ma'am, any idea at all? We'll go tofur coat.

"Can I help you?" he asked impulsively, forgetting his own terror for the moment. He was more than startled. Her air of distress and pain stirred a peculiar anguish in him. For a moment she made no answer, thrusting her white face closer, as if examining him; so close, indeed, that he controlled with difficulty his instinct to shrink back a little.

"Where am I?" she asked at length, searching his eyes intently. "I'm lost; I've lost myself. I can't find my way back." Her voice was low, a curious wailing in it that touched his pity oddly. He felt his own distress merging in one that was greater.

"Same here," he replied more confidently. "I'm terrified of being alone, too. I've had shell-shock, you know. Let's go together. We'll find a way together."

"Who are you?" the woman murmured, still staring at him with her big

was.

gether and-"

She suddenly cut him short. She turned her head as if to listen, so that he saw her profile a moment, the outline of the slender neck, a glimpse of jewels just below the fur.

"Hark! I hear him calling! I remember!" And she was gone from his side into the swirling fog.

Without an instant's hesitation O'Reilly followed her not only because he wished to help, but because he dared not be left alone. The presence of this strange, lost woman comforted him; he must not lose sight of her, whatever happened. He had to run, she went so rapidly, ever just in front, moving with confidence and certainty, turning right and left, crossing the street, but never stopping, never hesitating, her companion always at her heels in breathless haste, and with a growing terror that he might lose her at any minute. The way she found her direction through the

dense fog was marvelous enough, but O'Reilly's only thought was to keep her in sight, lest his own panic redescend upon him with its inevitable collapse in the dark and lonely street. It was a wild and panting pursuit, and he kept her in view with difficulty, a dim fleeting outline always a few yards ahead of him. She did not once turn her head, she uttered no sound, no cry; she hurried forward with unfaltering instinct. Nor did the chase occur to him as singular; she was his safety, and that was all he realized.

One thing, however, he remembered afterward, though at the actual time he no more than registered the detail, paying no attention to it-a definite perfume she left upon the atmosphere, one, moreover, that he knew, although he could not find its name as he ran. For him it was associated vaguely with something unpleasant, something disagreeable. He connected it with misery and pain. It gave him a feeling of uneasiness. More than that he did not notice at the moment, nor could he remember he certainly did not trywhere he had known this particular scent before.

Then suddenly the woman stopped, opened a gate, and passed into a small private garden so suddenly that O'Reilly, close upon her heels, only just avoided tumbling into her.

"You 've found it?" he cried. "May "May I come in a moment with you? Perhaps you'll let me telephone to the doctor."

She turned instantly. Her face, close against his own, was livid.

"Doctor!" she repeated in an awful whisper. The word meant terror to her. O'Reilly stood amazed. For a second or two neither of them moved. The woman seemed petrified.

"Dr. Henry, you know," he stammered, finding his tongue again. "I'm in his care. He's in Harley Street."

Her face cleared as suddenly as it had darkened, though the original expression of bewilderment and pain still hung in her great eyes. But the terror left them as though she suddenly forgot some association that had revived it.

"My home," she murmured-"my home is somewhere here. I'm near it.

I

I must get back-in time for him. must. He's coming to me." And with these extraordinary words she turned, walked up the narrow path, and stood upon the porch of a two-story house before her companion had recovered from his astonishment sufficiently to move or utter a syllable in reply. The front door, he saw, was ajar. It had been left open.

For five seconds, perhaps for ten, he hesitated; it was the fear that the door would close and shut him out that brought the decision to his will and muscles. He ran up the steps and followed the woman into a dark hall, where she had already preceded him, and amid whose blackness she now had finally vanished. He closed the door, not knowing exactly why he did so, and knew at once by an instinctive feeling that the house he now found himself in with this unknown woman was empty and unoccupied. In a house, however, he felt safe. It was the open streets that were his danger. He stood waiting, listening a moment before he spoke; and he heard the woman moving down the passage from door to door, repeating to herself in her low voice of unhappy wailing some words he could not understand:

"Where is it? Oh, where is it? I must get back!"

O'Reilly then found himself abruptly stricken with dumbness, as though, with these strange words, a haunting terror came up and breathed against him in the darkness.

"Is she, after all, a figure?" ran in letters of fire across his numbed brain. "Is she unreal-or real?"

Seeking relief in action of some kind, he put out a hand automatically, feeling along the wall for an electric switch; and though he found it by some miraculous chance, no answering glow responded to the click.

And the woman's voice rose from the darkness:

"Ah! ah! At last I 've found it! I'm home again-at last!" He heard a door open and close up-stairs. He was, alone on the ground floor now, alone. Complete silence followed.

In the conflict of various emotions, fear for himself lest his panic should re

turn, fear for the woman who had led him into this empty house and now deserted him upon some mysterious errand of her own that made him think of madness, in this conflict that held him a moment spellbound, there was a yet bigger ingredient demanding instant explanation, but an explanation that he could not find. Was the woman real or was she unreal? Was she a human being or a "figure"? The horror of doubt obsessed him with an acute uneasiness that betrayed itself in a return of that unwelcome inner trembling he knew was dangerous.

What saved him from a crise that must have had most dangerous results for his mind and nervous system generally seems to have been the outstanding fact that he felt more for the woman than for himself. His sympathy and pity had been deeply moved; her voice, her beauty, her anguish and bewilderment, all uncommon, inexplicable, mysterious, formed together a claim that drove self into the background. Added to this was the detail that she had left him, gone to another floor without a word, and now, behind a closed door in a room up-stairs, found herself face to face at last with the unknown object of her frantic search-with "it," whatever "it", might be. Real or unreal, figure or human being, the overmastering impulse of his being was that he must go to her.

It was this clear impulse that gave him decision and energy to do what he then did. He struck a match, he found a stump of candle, he made his way by means of this flickering light along the passage and up the carpetless stairs. He moved cautiously, stealthily, though not knowing why he did so. The house, he now saw, was indeed untenanted; dust-sheets covered the piled-up furniture he glimpsed through doors ajar, pictures were screened upon the walls, brackets draped to look like hooded heads. He went on slowly, steadily, moving on tiptoe as though aware of being watched, noting the well of darkness in the hall below, the grotesque shadows that his movements cast on walls and ceiling. The silence was unpleasant, yet, remembering that the woman was "expecting" some one, he did not wish it broken. He reached the

landing and stood still. Closed doors on both sides of a corridor met his sight as he shaded the candle to examine the scene. Behind which of these doors, he asked himself, was the woman, figure or human being, now alone with "it”?

There was nothing to guide him, but an instinct that he must not delay sent him forward again upon his search. He tried a door on the right, an empty room, with the furniture hidden by dustsheets, and the mattress rolled up on the bed. He tried a second door, leaving

the first one open behind him, and it was similarly an empty bedroom. Coming out into the corridor again, he stood a moment waiting, then called aloud in a low voice that yet woke echoes unpleasantly in the hall below:

"Where are you? I want to help. Which room are you in?"

There was no answer; he was almost glad he heard no sound, for he knew quite well that he was waiting really for another sound-the steps of him who was "expected." And the idea of meeting with this unknown third sent a shudder through him, as though related to an interview he dreaded with his whole heart, and must at all costs avoid. Waiting another moment or two, he noted that his candle-stump was burning low, then crossed the landing with a feeling at once of hesitation and determination toward a door opposite to him. He opened it; he did not halt on the threshold. Holding the candle at arm'slength, he went boldly in.

And instantly his nostrils told him he was right at last, for a whiff of the strange perfume, though this time much stronger than before, greeted him, sending a new quiver along his nerves. He knew now

why it was associated with unpleasantness, with pain, with misery, for he recognized it-the odor of a hospital. In this room a powerful anesthetic had been used, and recently.

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