Sally, fancying that he had not heard at all, cried at him again, repeating the question.
Welden, holding his hat on with one hand and pointing back at the house with the other, shouted: “I shall have friends of mine call there.”
That was very satisfactory. Sally, her head bent, considered it gleefully. It was what she had hoped, an additional arrow for her quiver, in which already was divorce. Presently she spoke again, but what she said Welden did not hear, did not care.
The sea, pounding on the shore, was creating a thunder deafening and confused. It was as though a gigantic machine were hastening terribly to some enormous task.
Sally, in despair of making Welden hear otherwise, caught at his arm and motioned him to lower his head.
When he had she shrieked in his ear: “I want you to do me a great favour, a very great favour, will you?”
“Will I what?”
He had heard but half of what she said, not because of the roar but because of his thoughts which she, with her questions, entangled.
Now, however, again she was shrieking: “I want you to kill him.”
But though she shrieked, she smiled and, in spite of the tossing gale, in spite too of her ballooning dress, she looked sweet and simple.
Welden nodded. For the first time since they had known each other, what she wanted he wanted also.
Sally nodded too. Clutching at her dress she shouted: “Don’t let anyone know why; promise that you will not.”
They had reached the gate of a little park in which the Cawtree villa stood. In the shelter of the wall there was a respite from the gale. The sea too sounded less thunderous.
“Promise you won’t,” she repeated more normally.
Welden cried at her: “That reminds me, will you do something for me?”
“Anything,” Sally cried back. “I will do anything in the world for you.”
The fervour of the protestation Welden let pass unnoticed.
“Is Prince Saraguine in there?”
“He is leading the cotillon.”
Welden got at his card case and from it took a cheque already made out.
“Give him this with my thanks.” He turned. “Good night,” he added.
“Good night,” she replied and, as he moved into the gale, she made a trumpet of her hands and screamed through them: “Good luck.”
Welden, holding his hat to his head, passed on to the village. The wind that blew through his flannels, bent the trees, swept the narrow streets, dispersed their germs, refreshing whatever it touched, leaving the quivering air pure and delicious.
The hall of the Roches Grises, saturated with tobacco and electricity, full of people, of hurrying waiters, of parties returning from the Casino at Trouville and of tourists eyeing one another hostilely or with indifference, resounded with calls of the telephone, with slamming doors and the noise of lifts that ceaselessly rose and descended.
At the bureau, Welden secured a room, sent a chasseur for his things to the villa and, these recovered, at last was alone.
The room, though quiet, was as peopled as the hall. There were visions in it, very many, that gradually, without effort, fused into a picture of a girl’s pillowed head.
The girl herself was a stranger. It was not she he had loved, it was another, totally different, one whom his imagination had created, a girl who had never lived and who now was dead. The past alone was real. It surged phantasmagorically, like a great deceit, a lie enormous and cruel, inexplicable from sheer monstrosity. The crime he had witnessed permeated that past, smearing it with the odiousness of a coarse vulgarity.
In the chair in which he sat, he moved. From the wall at which he stared, he turned. Wherever he looked the picture appeared. To escape it he hid his face in his hands. He saw it there the clearer. At that, an agony made of a thousand wounds, each distinct, each more lancinant than the other, caught and enveloped him. The torture of it thrust into being memories long ablated. Fragments of recollections multiplied in his mind. There came to him the day he had first seen her, the hour he had first loved her, the moment he had first thought she might care for him, and, traversing these memories were tempests of others; shaded interiors, chairs under the trees, the ballrooms of Newport, Long Island lawns; sudden tableaux of wherever a new delight had been experienced, of wherever a fresh sensation had been born, of wherever she had exhaled her invincible charm.
Within him the sea of these things mounted, adding their bitterness to the sear of his wounds. There was no myrrh for them. There is none for a death rattle, and as the obsessing vision returned, it brought with it a lassitude so large, so empty and desolate, that it resembled extinction itself.
VII
The Door
On the morrow the gale had gone, flown afar, to die perhaps on some shore of the Mediterranean. In Welden too a tempest had subsided. In the eager sunshine that filled the room he stood, contemplating a note, a hurried scrawl from Sally informing him she had learned from Perkins that Malakoff was leaving for Paris.
The letter fell from him. A telegram different from the one he had meditated must, he saw, be sent, and he wrote one asking Le Hillel to meet him at the Escrime. But there were other things to be done and done quickly. He gave orders; tubbed, dressed, drank some coffee, for even in the great crises of life one must do these things, and in the same spirit perhaps that, at the reveille for battle, men shave and see to it that their gloves are spotless, Welden adjusted his neckcloth and considered the sheen of his shoes.
But Malakoff’s move perplexed. He could not understand why the man should be leaving. Toward the man himself he was
