There was no hurry. She sipped at, and snuffled over, the first drink. I gave her time to get on top of things, twiddling the stem of my glass and listening to the phonograph in the other pub churning out the currently popular, if rather lugubrious, ditty:
“My love’s locked up in a frigidaire,
And my heart’s in a deep-freeze pack.
She’s gone with a guy, I’d not know where,
But she wrote that she’d never come back.
Now she don’t care for me no more,
i’m just a one-man frozen store, And it ain’t nice
To be on ice
With my love locked up in a frigidaire,
And my heart in a deep-freeze pack.”
While I sat I stole an occasional covert look at the girl. Her clothes, or the remnants of them, were good quality. Her voice was good too-probably not stage or movie acquired, for it had not deteriorated under stress. She was blond, but quite a number of shades sub-platinum. It seemed likely that
beneath the smudges and smears she was good-looking. Her height was three or four inches less than mine, her build slim but not thin. She looked as if she had strength if is were necessary, but strength which, in her approximately twenty-four years, had most likely nor been applied to anything more important than hitting balls. dancing. and, probably, restraining horses. Her well-shaped hands were smooth, and the fingernails that were still unbroken showed a length more decorative than practical.
The drink gradually did good work. By the end of it she was sufficiently recovered for habit of mind to assert itself.
“God, I must look awful,” she remarked.
It did not seem that anyone but me was likely to be in a position to notice that, but I left it.
She got up and walked over to a mirror.
“I certainly do,” she confirmed. “Where-”
“You might try through there,” I suggested.
Twenty minutes or so passed before she came hack. Considering the limited facilities there must have been, she’d made a good job; morale was much restored. She approximated now the film director’s idea of the heroine after a roughhouse, rather than the genuine thing.
‘Cigarette?” I inquired as I slid another fortifying glass
across.
While the pulling-round process was completing itself we swapped stories. To give her rime, I let her have mine first.
Then she said:
“I’m damned ashamed of myself. I’m not a bit like that
really-like you found me, I mean. In fact, I’m reasonably self-reliant, though you might not think it. But somehow the whole thing had got too big for me. What has happened is bad enough, but the awful prospect ahead suddenly seemed too much to bear, and I panicked. I had got to thinking that perhaps I was the only person left in the whole world who could see. It got inc down, and all at once I was frightened and silly; I cracked, and howled like a girl in a Victorian melodrama. I’d never, never have believed it of me.”
Don’t let it worry you,” I said. “We’ll probably be learn-kg a whole lot of surprising things about ourselves soon.”
But it does worry me. If I start off by slipping my gears like that-” She left the sentence unfinished.
“I was near enough to panic in that hospital,” I said. “We’re human beings, not calculating machines.”
Her name was Josella Playton. There seemed to be something familiar about that, but I could not place it. Her home was in Dene Road, St. John’s Wood. The district fitted in more or less with my surmises. I remembered Dene Road. Detached, comfortable houses, mostly ugly, but all expensive. Her escape from the general affliction had been no less a matter of luck than mine-well, perhaps more. She had been at a party on that Monday night-a pretty considerable party, it seemed.
“I reckon somebody who thinks that kind of thing funny must have been tooling with the drinks,” she said. “I’ve never felt so ill as I did at the end of it-and I didn’t take a lot.”
Tuesday she recollected as a day of blurred misery and record hangover. About four in the afternoon she had had more than enough of it. She rang the bell and gave instructions that come comets, earthquakes, or the day of judgment itself, she was not to be disturbed. Upon that ultimatum she had taken a strong dose of sleeping draught, which on an empty stomach had worked with the efficiency of a knockout drop.
From then on she had known nothing until this morning, when she had been awakened by her father stumbling into her room.
“Josella,” he was saying, “for God’s sake get Dr. Mayle. Tell him I’ve gone blind-stone blind.”
She had been amazed to see that it was already almost nine o’clock. She got up and dressed hurriedly. The servants had answered neither her father’s bell nor her own. When she went to rouse them she had found to her horror that they, too, were blind.
With the telephone out of order, the only course seemed to be for her to take the car and fetch the doctor herself. The quiet streets and absence of traffic had seemed queer, but she had already driven almost a mile before it came to her what had happened. When she realized, she had all but turned back in panic-but that wasn’t going to do anyone any good. There was still the chance that the doctor might have escaped the malady, whatever it was, just as she herself had. So, with a desperate but waning hope, she had driven on.
Halfway down Regent Street the engine started to miss and sputter; finally it stopped. In her hurried start she had not looked at the gauge: the tank had run dry.
She sat there for a moment, dismayed. Every face in sight was now turned toward her, but she had realized by this time that not one of those she saw could see or help her. She got out of the car, hoping to find a garage somewhere near by, or, if there was none, prepared to walk the rest of the way. As
she slammed the door behind her, a voice called:
“Hey! Just a minute, mate!”
She turned and saw a man groping toward her.
“What is it?” she asked. She was by no means taken with the look of him.
His manner changed on hearing her voice.
“I’m lost. Dunno where I am,” he said.
“This is Regent Street. The New Gallery cinema’s just behind you,” she told him, and turned to go.
“Just show me where the curb is, miss, will you?’ he said. She hesitated, and in that moment he came close. The outstretched hand sought and touched her sleeve. He lunged forward and caught both her arms in a painful grip.
“So you can see, can you!” he said. “Why the hell should you be able to see when I can’t-nor anyone else?”
Before she realized what was happening he had turned her and tripped her, and she was lying in the road with his knee in her back. He caught both her wrists in the grasp of one large hand and proceeded to tie them together with a piece of string from his pocket. Then he stood up and pulled her onto her feet again.
“All right,” he said. “From now on you can do your seeing for me. I’m hungry. Take me where there’s a bit of good grub. Get on with it.”
“I think, Bill,” she said, “that though you wouldn’t have guessed it to look at him, he wasn’t perhaps too bad a man really. Only he was frightened. Deep down inside him he was much more frightened than I was. He gave me some food and something to drink. He only started beating me like that because he was drunk and I wouldn’t go into his house with him. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t come along.” She paused. Then she added: “But I am pretty ashamed of myself. Shows you what a modern young woman can come to after all, doesn’t it? Screaming, and collapsing with the vapors Hell!”
She was looking, and obviously feeling, rather better, though she winced as she reached for her glass.
“I think,” I said, “that I’ve been fairly dense over this business-and pretty lucky. I ought to have made more of the implications when I saw that woman with the child in Piccadilly. It’s only been chance that’s stopped me from falling into the same kind of mess that you did.”
“Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence,” she said reflectively.
“I’ll go on bearing that in mind henceforth,” I told her.
“It’s already very well impressed on mine,” she remarked. We sat listening to the uproar from the other pub for a few minutes.
“And what,” I said at last, “just what, do we propose to do now?”