CHAPTER II
A Cry for Help
FOR three days Thompson’s body lay enthroned on its couch at the morgue, but of the thousands of people who filed past it, not one could give a single clew to its identity. Godfrey’s emissaries went from end to end of the docks, loitered in sailors’ saloons and eating-places, provided innumerable drinks, but nowhere did they met anyone who recognized the rough, bearded face which the camera had reproduced. The officers of every ship that had arrived within a week were interviewed, but none of them knew Thompson. It would seem that he had dropped from the clouds and that no one had witnessed his descent. It was an altogether puzzling state of affairs, and made impossible any further real progress in the investigation of the crime.
The police worked in a desultory fashion along the usual lines. Various theories were built up and exploded; various clews were laboriously followed and found to lead nowhere; various suspects were arrested and afterward released; a close and utterly futile watch was kept on the movements of Jimmy the Dude. It was plainly apparent that the authorities were all at sea, and it seemed altogether likely that the affair would soon be written down with New York’s other unsolved mysteries.
Public interest waned and dwindled, and passed on to other things. Even with me, living at the very scene of the crime, it faded in an astonishing way; it no longer occupied my thoughts; over my evening pipe, it was not the details of the mystery I conjured up, but a vision of a dark face…
An inquiry of the janitor developed the fact that it was my neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Tremaine, whom I had met that evening as I left the elevator. They had the apartment just across the hall from mine, and I had thought, of course, that I must meet them frequently; but three days had passed and I had caught not a glimpse of them; their hours for coming and going seemed radically different from mine.
So it was with a sense of disappointment somewhat foolishly excessive that I sat in my room and watched the smoke circle up around the chandelier and wondered at the whim which had brought me to this apartment. Not but that it was comfortable enough; yet I was vaguely restless, uneasy; I had not that homelike sense of comfort and quiet which had marked my sojourn with Mrs. Fitch. There was nothing to be discovered here concerning the tragedy; the rooms had been stripped bare of evidence before my arrival; it was absurd to suppose…
I heard the sudden opening of a door; a scream, shrill, full of terror…
Rarely have I been so startled as I was by that voice. In an instant, I was in the hall. A red light streamed through the open door of the apartment opposite, silhouetting a woman’s figure, staring, with clasped hands…
I sprang past her, pulled down the burning curtains, and threw them into the hall, where Higgins, who had run up the stairs, stamped out the flames. The room was full of smoke, but it was evident that the fire had spread no farther. I opened the window, and the smoke was whirled away.
“That was lucky,” was Higgins’s comment, as he stood panting in the doorway. “By cricky! I’m all in a tremble. I thought it was another murder!”
I couldn’t help laughing as I looked at him gasping excitedly for breath.
“You’ve got murder on the brain,” I said. “I hope there won’t be any more at the Marathon.”
“So do I,” he agreed, and gathering up the fragments of the curtains, turned to go.
“Ah, bon dié!” cried Mrs. Tremaine, in a queerly broken but very charming mixture of French and English. “What a chance! What good fortune that you were in your room, missié!”
She had closed the window with a nervous shiver at the cold, and then stepped back into the full light. I fairly gasped as I looked at her. Charming she had been gowned according to the New York fashion; now she was radiant in a costume whose gorgeousness seemed just the setting her beauty needed. At the moment, it completely dazzled me, but I was able afterwards, in a calmer mood, to analyse it—the crimson petticoat, the embroidered chemise with its fold upon fold of lace, showing through the silken shoulder-scarf; the necklace of gold beads, and bracelets, studs, brooches—what not The sight of Higgins standing staring at this vision with open mouth brought me to my senses.
“I am very happy to have been there, madame,” I said, and started toward the door.
“But you will not go,” she protested. “Missié Tremaine will be here in a moment. He will desire to thank you.”
The words were accompanied by a smile there was no resisting. I faltered, stopped…
Higgins was still staring from the hall. Mrs. Tremaine stepped forward and calmly shut the door in his face.
In that instant a quick shiver ran through me, as though I had been suddenly imprisoned with a wild beast--a shiver that had in it something fearfully delightful. And let me add here that the emotion which Cecily, for so I came to know her, raised in me was not in the least admiration in the ordinary sense of the term, but rather an overpowering fascination, such as one sometimes feels in watching a magnificent tigress pacing back and forth in her cage; Such, I believe, was the feeling she inspired in most men; even in Tremaine himself.
She smiled at me again as she swept past me to a couch in one corner, and sank upon it.
“Sit, missié,” she said, and motioned me to a chair close at hand. “I was very lonesome; I was weary of talking to my own body.”
I cannot reproduce the soft dialect she spoke; any effort to do. so makes it appear grotesque, so I shall hot try. At first, it puzzled me occasionally, but I soon came to understand her perfectly.
“So was I,” I said, smiling at the quaint expression. “I was growing very sick of my own body. Have you been in New York long?”
“Less than a month, missié; and I do not like it—it is too cold—too grey.”
“Ah, you have come in a bad time,” I said, wondering at her almost childish expression of misery. “Wait until June—then you will see!”
“June! Ah, we shall not remain so long—I, at least! I have promised to stay one month longer, but more than that—impossible!”
She reached out and took up a cigarette from a pile which lay on a tabouret beside the couch.
“It was thus the curtains caught,” she laughed, and, after a whiff or two, flung the still-blazing taper over her shoulder. “Pouf!—and they were all in flame. A moment before, I was longing for excitement-any excitement whatever—but that sudden burst of fire frightened me—I rushed out—cried for help—and,” she finished with a charming little gesture, “spoiled your smoke. Try one of these.”
There was no resisting her—it was like playing with fire. I took a cigarette and lighted it.
“At Fond-Corré there was much to do,” she continued, with a little sigh. “Here there is nothing but to smoke, smoke!”
“Fond-Corré?” I queried.
“Just beyond St. Pierre,” she explained, closing her eyes with delight at the memory. “There was our home—I can see it again, in its grove of cocoa trees running down to the grey sand, with the waves lapping gently over it. Tambou! how I sigh for it!” and she stretched her arms above her head with a gesture of infinite longing.
Looking at her, I began to believe that I was dreaming all this; that I had fallen asleep in my chair and been transported to the land of Haroun-el-Raschid. I had never seen a woman like her—so full of colour, of passion, of…
A key rattled in the lock, the door opened and a man came in. It was quite in keeping with the dream—the enraged husband with naked cimeter—even here in New York it was hardly the proper thing to be discovered thus, though not till that instant had I thought of it.
“Ah, now,” I said to myself, “stilettos and pistols! you’re in a ticklish place, my friend.”
But before I could rise, Cecily had sprung from the couch and thrown her arms about his neck.
“Oh, coument ou yé, doudoux?” she asked, in a voice like—well, I have never heard anything to compare with it.
“Toutt douce, ché—et ou?” he answered, and kissed her; then he perceived me, seemingly for the first time, though this I somehow doubted. “Good-evening, sir,” he said, standing with his arm still about his wife and gazing at me with a look so sharp that I found myself for an instant unable to meet it, as though I had really been guilty of some fault.
His wife uttered in his ear a sentence so rapid that I was utterly unable to catch the words, but I suppose it explained the reason of my presence, for he turned to me instantly with outstretched hand.
“Cecily tells me that your presence of mind prevented a general conflagration, Mr.”
“Lester,” I said. “I am your neighbour across the hall.”
“My name is Tremaine, and I’m exceedingly glad to meet you,” he continued, with a courtesy which charmed me from the first moment. “We must pour a libation to honour the escape.”
Cecily, who had been hanging on his lips, flew to the next room and was back in a moment with decanter and glasses—three of them—and she joined us with an imperturbable matter-of-course air which somewhat surprised me. Only I noticed she left a little wine in her glass, and with it she approached a square cage of fine gilt mesh hanging over the radiator in the warmest corner of the room.
I happened to look at Tremaine and was astonished at the intensity of the glance he sent after her. So absorbed was he that for the first time I had the opportunity to examine him closely. It was impossible to tell his age, there was about him such an air of exhaustless youth—he might have been anywhere from thirty to forty-five. He was a handsome man, with a dark, fascinating face which somehow matched his wife’s. The power of his eye I had already experienced, and the square jaw and clear-cut lips bespoke an extraordinary power of will to match. He perhaps felt my scrutiny, for he turned to me, shaking off with an effort the spell that held him.
“She’s a most extraordinary woman,” he said, with a smile that seemed a little forced. “She’s about to do what no other woman in the world would dare do, and she thinks nothing of it. Come and see.”
Cecily had already reached the cage, and was bending over it, humming a weird little refrain that rose and fell and turned upon itself, reminding me faintly of the negro spirituals I had once heard at a camp-meeting in the Jersey woods. After a moment, I saw a movement within the cage, and a head erected itself, a broad, triangular head, deep orange barred with black, with eyes like coals of fire. It swayed to and fro, to and fro, as Cecily fitted words to the refrain—queer, chopped-off Creole words.
“Oh, ou jojolli, oui! Oh, thou art pretty, pretty, Fé-Fé! Pa ka fai moin pé! I do not fear her, not at all! Fé-Fé is the work of the good God. Travaill Bon-Dié joli? Is she not pretty?”
Gradually we had drawn nearer, Tremaine and I, and I felt myself yielding to the fascination of the song, even as the serpent did. It was not very large, nor seemingly very formidable, so I did not even think of fear when Cecily opened the little door of the cage and drew it forth. She held it between thumb and finger just behind the head, and by a slight pressure she forced its jaws apart. Then she poured the wine down its throat, drop by drop. Finally she returned it to its cage and shut the door.
When it was over and she was lying again on the couch, panting with a kind of fearful exhaustion, I turned to Tremaine, who was mopping his forehead feverishly.
“I’ve got a kind of superstitious horror of that snake,” he said apologetically, as he met my eyes. “I’ve seen a lot of them, but none ever affected me just as this one does.”
“What is it?” I asked, astonished by his pallor, by the trembling of his hand as he put away his handkerchief and reached for a cigarette. He lighted it before he answered, inviting me by a gesture to help myself.
“It’s a fer-de-lance,” he said, at last; “One of the deadliest serpents in the world—and this particular variety is said to be especially deadly—a sort of crème de la crème, as it were. Its bite kills a man in three minutes, if it happens to strike an artery—it does more than that—it turns him to a swollen, rotten piece of carrion—I’ve seen it,” and he leaned back to blow a ring toward the ceiling.
I sat, petrified, with my cigarette half-way to my mouth.
“A fer-de-lance!” I faltered, at last, with a horrified glance at the figure on the couch.
“Oh, it’s safe enough, I guess,” he added. “She’s had it for years and it has never attempted to harm her. Perhaps it has lost its poison.”
“Still,” I said, “it’s a risk. I shouldn’t think you’d permit it.”
“Permit it?” he repeated. “Oh!” and he shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of impotence impossible to describe.