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Page 4
Still the din of horns and whistles and sirens, still the shouting.
Would they never move on? She was hungry. She wanted to get back to
the hotel, to learn what had happened to her mother. Militant
suffragettes, indeed! A pack of mad witches, who left their brooms
behind kitchen doors when they ought to be wielding them about dusty
corners. Woman never won anything by using brickbats and torches:
which proved on the face of it that these militants were inefficient,
irresponsible, and unlearned in history. Poor simpletons! Had not
theirs always been the power behind the throne? What more did they
want?
Her cogitations were peculiarly interrupted. The door opened, and a
man plumped down beside her.
"Enid, it looks as if we'd never get out of this hole. Have you got
your collar up?"
Numb and terrified, Kitty felt the man's hands fumbling about her neck.
"Where's your sable stole? You women beat the very devil for
thoughtlessness. A quid to a farthing, you've left it in the box, and
I'll have to go back for it, providing they'll let me in. And it's
midnight, if a minute."
Pressing herself tightly into her corner, Kitty managed to gasp: "My
name is not Enid, sir. You have mistaken your carriage."
"What? Good heavens!" Almost instantly a match sparkled and flared.
His eyes, screened behind his hand, palm outward (a perfectly natural
action, yet nicely calculated), beheld a pretty, charming face, large
Irish blue eyes (a bit startled at this moment), and a head of hair as
shiny-black as polished Chinese blackwood. The match, still burning,
curved like a falling star through the window. "A thousand pardons,
madam! Very stupid of me. Quite evident that I am lost. I beg your
pardon again, and hope I have not annoyed you."
He was gone before she could form any retort. Where had she heard that
voice before? With a little shudder--due to the thought of those cold
strange fingers feeling about her throat--her hands went up. Instantly
she cried aloud in dismay. Her sapphires! They had vanished!
CHAPTER II
Daniel Killigrew, of Killigrew and Company (sugar, coffee and spices),
was in a towering rage; at least, he towered one inch above his normal
height, which was five feet six. Like an animal recently taken in
captivity he trotted back and forth through the corridors, in and out
of the office, to and from the several entrances, blowing the while
like a grampus. All he could get out of these infernally stupid beings
was "Really, sir!" He couldn't get a cab, he couldn't get a motor, he
couldn't get anything. Manager, head-clerk, porter, doorman and page,
he told them, one and all, what a dotty old spoof of a country they
lived in; that they were all dead-alive persons, fit to be neither
under nor above earth; that they wouldn't be one-two in a race with
January molasses--"Treacle, I believe you call it here!" And what did
they say to this scathing arraignment? Yes, what did they say?
"Really, sir!" He knew and hoped it would happen: if ever Germany
started war, it would be over before these Britishers made up their
minds that there was a war. A hundred years ago they had beaten
Napoleon (with the assistance of Spain, Austria, Germany and Russia),
and were now resting.
Quarter to one, and neither wife nor daughter; outside there, somewhere
in the fog; and he could not go to them. It was maddening. Molly
might be arrested and Kitty lost. Served him right; he should have put
his foot down. The idea of Molly being allowed to go with those
rattle-pated women! Suffragettes! A "Bah!" exploded with a loud
report. Hereafter he would show who voted in the Killigrew family.
Poor man! He was made of that unhappy mental timber which agrees
thoughtlessly to a proposition for the sake of peace and then regrets
it in the name of war. His wife and daughter twisted him round their
little fingers and then hunted cover when he found out what they had
done.
He went out again to the main entrance and smoked himself headachy. He
hated London. He had always hated it in theory, now he hated it in
fact. He hated tea, buttered muffins, marmalade, jam, toast, cricket,
box hedges three hundred years old, ruins, and the checkless baggage
system, the wet blankets called newspapers. All the racial hatred of
his forebears (Tipperary born) surged hot and wrathful in his veins.
At the drop of a hat he would have gone to war, individually, with all
England. "Really, sir!" Nothing but that, when he was dying of
anxiety!
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