第92章 CHAPTER THE FIFTH(23)

It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down before him and clung to his knees.He struggled ridiculously to get himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate on the floor with her dishevelled hair about her.

She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet without.He had come back.The door reopened.There was a slight pause, and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the second housemaid.There are moments, suspended fragments of time rather than links in its succession, when the human eye is more intelligible than any words.

The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a click of the door.

"DAMN!" said Amanda.

Then slowly she rose to her knees.

She meditated through vast moments.

"It's a cursed thing to be a woman," said Amanda.She stood up.

She put her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot about it.After another long interval of thought she spoke.

"Cheetah!" she said, "Old Cheetah!...

"I didn't THINK it of you...."

Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who packs a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.

30

The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in Danebury Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham's private processes the morning after this affair.

Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London.

She had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way.

On the morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor waiter that the occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar in the night, and almost immediately she was summoned to see Benham.

He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little obscure the condition of the room behind him.He was carefully dressed, and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever.But one of his hands was tied up in a white bandage.

"I am going this morning," he said, "I am going down now to breakfast.I have had a few little accidents with some of the things in the room and I have cut my hand.I want you to tell the manager and see that they are properly charged for on the bill....Thank you.''

The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.

Benham's things were all packed up and the room had an air of having been straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive cataclysm.One or two items that the chambermaid might possibly have overlooked in the normal course of things were carefully exhibited.For example, the sheet had been torn into half a dozen strips and they were lying side by side on the bed.The clock on the mantelpiece had been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded to pieces.All the looking-glasses in the room were smashed, apparently the electric lamp that stood on the night table by the bedside had been wrenched off and flung or hammered about amidst the other breakables.And there was a considerable amount of blood splashed about the room.The head chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the spectacle and summoned her most convenient friend, the head chambermaid on the third floor, to her aid.The first-floor waiter joined their deliberations and several housemaids displayed a respectful interest in the maful to Martindale House and the thing was rankling almost unendurably.It seemed to be a relief to him to show his son very fully the essentially illogical position of his assailant.He was entirely inattentive to Benham's carefully made conversational opportunities.

He would be silent at times while Benham talked and then he would break out suddenly with: "What seems to me so unreasonable, so ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second argument--if one can call it an argument--....A man who reasons as he does is bound to get laughed at.If people will only see it...."