It was a thought that would have found an echo in Piper's heart. Baby had changed. From being the deeply perceptive intelligent woman he had described in his diary she had become a quite extraordinarily urgent creature hell-bent on getting him out of the house in the middle of a most unsuitably stormy night. To make matters worse she seemed determined to come with him, a course of action calculated in Piper's opinion to put his already strained relations with Mr Hutchmeyer to a test which even flight was hardly likely to mitigate. He made the point to Baby as she led the way through the piazza lounge and into great hall.
'I mean we can't just walk out together in the middle of the night,' he protested standing on a mosaic vat of boiling wood pulp. Hutchmeyer glowered down from his portrait on the wall.
'Why not?' said Baby, whose sense of the melodramatic seemed to be heightened in these grandiose surroundings. Piper tried to think of a persuasive answer and could only come up with the rather obvious one that Hutchmeyer wouldn't like it. Baby laughed luridly.
'Let him lump it,' she said and before Piper could point out that Hutchmeyer's lumping it was going to be personally disadvantageous and that in any case he would prefer the dangers involved in pulling the wool over Hutchmeyer's eyes as to the authorship of Pause to the more terrible ones of running off with his wife, Baby had clutched his hand again and was leading him up the Renaissance staircase.
'Pack your things as quickly as you can,' she said in a whisper as they stood outside the door of the Boudoir bedroom.
'Yes but...' Piper began whispering involuntarily himself. But Baby had gone. Piper went into his room and switched on the light. His suitcase lay uninvitingly against the wall. Piper shut the door and wondered what on earth to do now. The woman must be demented to think that he was going to...Piper staggered across the room to the window trying to rid himself of the notion that all this was really happening to him. There was an awful hallucinatory quality about the experience which fitted in with everything that had taken place since he had stepped ashore in New York. Everyone was stark staring mad. What was more they acted out their madness without a moment's hesitation. 'Shoot you as soon as look at you' was the expression that sprang to mind. It certainly sprang to mind five minutes later when Piper, his case still unpacked, opened the door of the Boudoir bedroom and poked his head outside. Baby was coming down the corridor with a large revolver in her hand. Piper shrank back into his room.
'You'd better pack this,' she said.
'Pack it?' said Piper still glowering at the thing.
'Just in case,' said Baby. 'You never know.'
Piper did. He sidled round the bed and shook his head. 'You've got to understand...' he began but Baby had dived into the drawers of the dressing-table and was piling his underclothes on the bed.
'Don't waste time talking. Get the suitcase,' she said. 'The wind's dying down. They could be back at any moment now.'
Piper looked longingly at the window. If only they would come back now before it was too late. 'I really do think we ought to reconsider this,' he said. Baby stopped emptying the drawers and turned to him. Her taut face was alight with unventured dreams. She was every heroine she had ever read, every woman who had gone off happily to Siberia or followed her man across the Sherman-devastated South. She was more, at once the inspiration and protectress of this unhappy youth. This was her one chance of realization and she was not going to let it escape her. Behind was Hutchmeyer, the years of servitude to boredom and artifice, of surgical restoration and constructed enthusiasms; in front Piper, the knowledge that she was needed, a new life filled with meaning and significance in the service of this young genius. And now at this moment of supreme sacrifice, the culmination of so many years of expectation, he was hesitating. Baby's eyes filled with tears and she raised her arms in supplication.
'Don't you understand what this means?' she asked. Piper gaped at her. He understood only too
