“Home,” he said, leaning first on the table, then on her shoulder, for support, “home, quickly.”
Downstairs they went together, he with dragging steps yet striving to hasten, she with horror and fright in her eyes. They went home as fast as a taxicab could take them. Mr. Marble’s fears had, of course, been baseless. Not a soul had been in the backyard. But he could not explain to Marguerite Collins about the silly fright he had given himself. Nor, on the other hand, could he convince himself that his fears were unjustified. The obsession was growing. Mr. Marble was experiencing more and more reluctance to spend his spare time anywhere whence he could not keep his eye on that backyard of his. And yet he lusted after Marguerite Collins of the warm hair as he lusted after little else. That was why he was so pleasantly excited to see his family drive off to Victoria on their way to the Grand Pavilion Hotel.
Marguerite was pleased, too. She was a woman of strong common sense, and rapidly recovered from the fright she had had.
For Marble began the happiest month he had known since James Medland’s visit. There was no bothering family to worry him at all. He cooked his own breakfast after a fashion, and his other meals he had out save for the occasions when he bought cooked food and consumed it at home. The evenings were very long and pleasant at first. He could sit and brood in the drawing-room with a book about crimes on his knee, drinking as he wished, without the worried eyes of his wife to cause him annoyance, and even though sometimes his thoughts began to stray towards detection and failure he was able at that period to change them, in consequence of the new interest he had. For sometimes as it grew dark, there would come a hurried little tap at the door, and he would go and open it to Marguerite Collins. She would come in superb, wonderful, ripe to rottenness, and then Marble would forget his troubles entirely for the time. He did not appreciate her taste in wine, but he saw that there was always wine for her. For himself he was content with whisky, and the time would fly by. At the end of the evening there would be a passing of a little bundle of money—trust Marble to deal in cheques as little as possible under these circumstances—and Marguerite would slip out as quietly as she came.
They were strange evenings, half dream, half nightmare. By a queer twist of thought, Marble found that the sharing of his house and of its view of the backyard was oddly comforting when Marguerite was with him. He could lose himself within the nest of her warm, white arms more completely than had ever been possible to him before. Her dark eyes were like velvet with passion, and her little gasps of love, only half simulated, led him on and on into all the mazy, misty byways of sodden animalism. From Marguerite at least he had value for his money.
Even the awakening next morning, blear-eyed and foul-mouthed, was not as wretched as might have been thought. For at least he had grateful solitude, and to Mr. Marble solitude was very grateful, unless he had Marguerite with him. There was no wife with the anxious look in her eyes to worry him; he could roam round the house and satisfy himself for the thousandth time that the garden was undisturbed; he could dress himself slowly and leave the house without all the fuss of saying goodbye. He was usually half an hour late, of course, but that did not matter. He knew that dismissal from the office was near and inevitable, but he did not mind. Every day he could see in the eyes of the junior partner who had been so diffident about offering him five hundred a year a growing annoyance at his sodden appearance and unpunctual habits. Of course, he had done nothing to earn the salary he received. He had assisted the firm to no grand coup like the one he had brought off for himself. That—he had known it all along—was most unlikely now that he no longer had the spur of imminent necessity. But the new firm could dismiss him when it liked. He had twelve hundred a year of his own, and he did not want to be bothered with business. So to the office he went, red-eyed, unshaven, with shaking hands. His scanty red hair was fast turning grey.
The rest of the Marble family was endeavouring to enjoy itself. Some of its members were successful in varying degrees. The trio itself had been the object of amusement to the loungers in the palm-shaded entrance hall. Mrs. Marble was so badly dressed, despite Winnie’s misguided efforts, and she was so obviously frightened of porters and waiters; Winnie herself had roused some interest in a few breasts. She was young, anyone could see that, but not one of them guessed how young she was. Her clothes simply called for comment, and her actions likewise. Her face was over-powdered, and she was developing a habit of looking sidelong at the men in the lounge as she walked past them. That mixture of youth and innocence and yet apparent readiness awoke strange longings in the hearts of some of the old men who viewed her.
The cunning ones approached the mother first. There were chance conversations arising out of nothing in the hotel lounge, and Mrs. Marble was agreeably surprised to have men with grey hair and the most perfect manners treating her with as much respect as if she were a duchess. She was flushed and flustered, but it was
