“Can’t catch her in this,” I cried again.
Hilary was leaning forward from behind, his chin by my shoulder. He whispered through the rushing air: “Afraid of her happiness in the end. You beat her, Maurice. You beat her, you and your mouldy old England. And your son wasn’t worthy of her love. Good God, he cared whether we respected her or not! She wasn’t enough for him as she was. Maurice, it’s on your head, all this. She’ll be in despair. You’ve got to catch her.”
We swept headlong round a corner. We were on the crown of the several small slopes that I remembered ascending from Harrod’s to Sutton Marle.
“There!” yelled Sir Maurice. And he laughed like an excited boy. “We’ll catch her yet.”
Far down the slope, winding, killing the darkness, rushed the lights of the Hispano. Sir Maurice kept his thumb on the button of the electric-horn, and we drove headlong down that slope with a wild cry of warning to Iris.
“She can’t hear!” I yelled.
“Go on, let her know we’re here!” yelled Hilary.
The General’s silver hair waved frantically in the wind. He was driving like a madman. He was smiling. The two great lights ahead lit the countryside. Then they seemed to shorten, and Harrod’s stood like a pillar of light against the darkness. The silver leaves, the giant trunk … in the lights of Iris’s car. The stork screamed hoarsely, once, twice, thrice. …
“Iris!” Hilary sobbed. “Stop her, man! Stop her! Not that—”
“Iris, not that!” Sir Maurice whispered. “Child, not that!”
I was blind, sick. There was a tearing crash, a tongue of fire among the leaves of Harrod’s. Our car had stopped. “Iris!” Sir Maurice whispered. “Iris!” Once again the great tree was lit by a shivering light, then from the darkness there came a grinding, moaning noise as of a great beast in pain. I stood beside Sir Maurice on the road. At the angle at which we had stopped our lights did not fall on the throbbing wreck. He was staring into the darkness.
“But that death!” Hilary stammered. “That death!”
My foot touched something on the grass beside the road, and I picked up the green hat.
Sir Maurice said hoarsely: “Chose the only way to make it look like an accident to those two children. …”
“Here’s her hat.” I muttered, and as Sir Maurice turned to it his face was puckered like a child’s.
Suddenly the moaning of the wrecked car ceased, and in the silence Hilary walked into the darkness about the great tree.
Colophon
The Green Hat
was published in 1924 by
Michael Arlen.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Sergio Tellez,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2023 by
Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Ruth St. Denis,
a painting completed in 1910 by
Alice Pike Barney.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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Uncopyright
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