Chapter XIV.
Margaret was trying the handle of the door. ‘He’s locked it,’ she cried, staring at Gladys.
‘I know he has.’ Gladys had sunk to her knees. She put the candlestick, with its feeble, spluttering flame on the floor beside her, and stretched out a hand to the door, leaning against it. ‘He’s shut us in because he thought we’d be safe in here.’ She spoke slowly, dully.
‘I don’t want to be safe, to be shut in like this.’ Margaret rattled the handle uselessly. ‘I want to know what’s happening. I want to be with Phil—my husband.’
‘Don’t you see?’ Gladys had roused herself and was looking up now, her eyes bright with resentment. ‘He’s out there, waiting for that lunatic to come down, and shoved us in here to be out of the way. You don’t seem to understand what he’s doing. You thought he was dodging it, didn’t you? My God!’
‘I did at first,’ Margaret said gently. ‘I’m sorry.’ And as she looked down at the girl’s pale face, working queerly in that jumpy little light, she felt sorry too, sorry for her, sorry for everybody.
‘As if he would!’ Then her tone changed from indignation to bitterness. ‘Well, I wish to God he had, wish we’d never come back. It would have to be him, of course it would be. It was just waiting for him. That’s silly, I suppose. I don’t care. I’m all to pieces now—and he’s out there, as lonely as hell, waiting for that—that thing.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ Margaret told her, trying to keep her voice quiet and confident. ‘The others will be back soon. Then there’ll be three of them.’
‘That woman locked the other door,’ Gladys muttered.
‘They’ll get the key from her when they’ve done with Morgan,’ Margaret went on. But she was thinking how all this crazy locking of doors made it seem like a bad dream. She glanced round in the dying light and shivered. ‘Where are we?’
‘I don’t know. What does it matter?’ Gladys raised herself up and tried to listen through the door.
Margaret took up the candlestick and moved forward a few paces. She saw nothing but the dimmest shapes of furniture, however, for the little spluttering flame gave a last jump, trembled, and then rapidly dwindled. Her spirits sank with it as the darkness closed round her. She trailed back to the door and, when the last flicker had gone, she let the candlestick fall to the ground. ‘What’s happening?’ She bent forward.
‘Oh, I can’t hear a thing,’ Gladys whispered.
Together they listened at the door, and it seemed to be hours before they heard anything but their own quick breathing and heart-beats. They were lost in a pulsating darkness.
‘We can’t do anything but wait,’ whispered Margaret at last. Somehow she daren’t raise her voice above a whisper.
‘I can hear him moving about now; can you?’ Gladys listened again. ‘Bill and your husband don’t seem to have come out yet. I believe he’s going upstairs.’
‘Yes, he is,’ Margaret told her, and could feel her trembling. There was a long pause, during which they listened again, then Margaret went on: ‘I can’t hear anything now. Perhaps he’s waiting at the top. That’s horrible, isn’t it? Why doesn’t Philip come back? It’s awful waiting here.’
‘It’s worse waiting there,’ cried Gladys, raising her voice now. ‘With that ghastly loony creeping down. Oh, my God!’ She cleared her throat. ‘I expect you know what’s the matter with me, or you must think I’m going mad too.’
‘I feel we’re all going mad to-night,’ Margaret broke in, hastily. ‘Everything’s turned crazy and horrible. That’s the awful thing, isn’t it?—that you can’t trust anything, like being in a nightmare. Haven’t you been feeling that?’
‘Yes, I have.’ Gladys was at once eager and piteous. ‘Didn’t I tell you before? I knew, I knew. Something told me all along, and I tried to tell him but I couldn’t make him understand. It was only a feeling—but you know what I mean?’
‘Who did you try to tell?’
‘Penderel, of course. When we were outside. That’s what I was going to tell you, I mean when I said you’d know what’s the matter with me—because, you see—Oh, you know—I love him. We can talk now, can’t we? Yes, we went outside and sat and talked, and then I found it out; came as quick as lightning, sudden but absolutely dead certain.’ Then she added, simply: ‘And you know what it means. You’re in love with your husband, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am.’ This was neither the time nor the place, Margaret felt, for all those delicate reservations that her truthful mind had so often brought out and examined. Then she realised, in a flash, that they no longer appeared to exist. She couldn’t remember what they were. And she didn’t want to remember. ‘I haven’t always thought so,’ she went on. ‘But I am.’
‘I knew you were,’ Gladys whispered. ‘I could tell, always can. But I suppose it doesn’t make you ache any more, does it?’
‘I think,’ said Margaret, slowly, ‘it’s beginning to, again.’
‘It’s funny it’s so different——’ Gladys began, but then broke off. There was a crash outside. ‘My God! Did you hear that? And we can’t do a thing! Has that lunatic come down, do you think? Are they fighting?’
‘I think they must be. It’s horrible, horrible.’
‘And he’s there by himself. The other two haven’t come back. Why don’t they come?’ Gladys pressed her hands together in the darkness.
‘I don’t know,’ Margaret stammered. ‘Something may have happened to them. That beast—Morgan—and Miss Femm.’ Then something seemed to snap inside her. ‘Oh, I can’t bear it, can’t bear it any longer.’ Her legs crumpled like paper and she slipped down the door, sobbing.
Gladys was kneeling by her side now, with an arm about her. ‘Never mind, never mind, Mrs. Waverton. It’s awful, isn’t it, but it’ll all come right for you, you’ll see. Nothing’ll have happened to him. Your man can look after himself.’ They clung together, while through the dark, from behind the door, came tiny vague sounds, a mysterious thud-thudding. But neither of them wanted to listen any longer. They could only wait, comforting one another, until the door was opened again, to reveal their fate. Until that moment arrived, this was all their world, and they could only cling together in the darkness and cry to one another their hope and their despair.
‘It’s worn me down,’ said Margaret, brokenly. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s been like, for me, here. One thing after another. First, Miss Femm—telling me about her sister—then touching me—and that horrible room of hers. Then Morgan—he came after me—like a beast. And Philip had to fight him, upstairs. And then that strange old man—lying so still in his bed—whispering terrible things. And now this. All going on and on. Everything strange and dark and getting queerer and darker. No end to it. Until at last you begin to feel that all the safe and clean and sane things have gone for ever. You can’t hold on for ever. It’s been different for you perhaps; but don’t you see what I mean?’
Gladys murmured that she did and tightened her clasp. She didn’t understand it all, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now except keeping close until that door opened.
‘I hated it at first,’ Margaret went on. ‘But then when we were talking round the table I liked it. And I thought Philip and I could easily find one another after that, because it seemed so easy to know and understand people, even strangers, so easy to be happy with someone you once loved.’
‘I felt that too, or something like it.’ Gladys was crying very quietly. ‘Oh, what am I crying for! It doesn’t matter though. But—it was better than that with me. It was really beginning, see? First, listening to all of you, then talking about myself. Then talking to him out there. And being able to laugh about everything together, and knowing as well that I could do a lot for him. He was absolutely fed up, didn’t care a damn about anything. And I was like that really. And then I thought, if it lasted, I wouldn’t be lonely any more, wouldn’t be going in at night sometimes wishing I was dead. And even if it didn’t last, I’d had something, you see, something different....’
Margaret had been mechanically telling herself that it was all very sudden and strange, this love affair of her companion’s. But when Gladys’s voice trailed away, there came, flowing up through the silence, the thought that it was not strange at all, that it was as simple and natural as the breath in their bodies. Now it seemed strange that people whose hearts were empty could meet on such a night and talk through this darkness without loving. ‘I see,’ she said, after a long pause. Then she added: ‘You know, I didn’t like you at first, but I do now.’
‘I hated you,’ said Gladys, very close and warm. ‘But that’s gone completely.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think I hated you really. I was frightened.’
‘Frightened?’ As soon as the word was out, however, Margaret realised what Gladys had meant. She too had been frightened of Penderel, alarmed by something unharnessed, mocking, anarchic in him that had called to its brother, usually safely hidden away, in Philip; and so she had decided that she detested him. And so people crept about, absurdly frightened of one another, pretending to hate, keeping it up even when they had to take shelter together in such a place as this.
‘Yes, I was frightened really,’ Gladys was whispering, ‘of the way you walked and talked and were dressed. I felt you despised me. But now it’s all right, isn’t it? Aren’t we women silly with one another? As if there wasn’t enough——!’
There was a little silence between them, and Margaret’s mind returned to the world outside. ‘I can hear little noises all the time,’ she said, at last. ‘I feel sure something’s happening there. What’s that?’
It was a kind of cracking sound, and they heard it repeated several times. Then it stopped and they could only catch the noises they had heard before. At last there came another crack, louder this time, and it seemed to them, as they listened, trembling in the dark, as if something were breaking.
‘What is it? What’s happening?’ Gladys cried. ‘My God, I can’t stand much more of this!’ Then her voice rose to a shriek. ‘Oh, what’s that?’
The crash and splintering and heavy thud-thud still rang in their ears. They clung to one another in agony of apprehension. The moments passed, but there came no other sound. The silence, as if heavy with doom, weighed down upon them.
‘What was it?’ The words came from Margaret in a hollow whisper, like ghost talking to ghost.
Gladys gave a choking little cry and Margaret felt the girl’s whole body relax and droop. For a few moments she remained passive, but then suddenly she sprang up and fell on the door in a fury, battering at it with her fists and even kicking it. The next minute her strength had left her and she was in Margaret’s arms, quietly sobbing. Holding her tight and murmuring over her as if she were a child, Margaret was now the comforter and immediately felt better. We’re being child and grown-up in turn, she was thinking; and if we always worked like that, we could all comfort one another through anything.
Gladys was quiet now. At last she spoke, but it was only as if an odd thought here and there were slipping into words. ‘We said we’d have a little flat, somewhere high up, very little and cheap.... You wouldn’t think that much fun, I suppose?’
‘We had one once,’ Margaret told her, gently, ‘when we first began, and we thought it fun.’
‘I shouldn’t have been able to do much at first, but I’d have managed. I’d have liked that. I told him so. Even the little rows would have been a kind of fun. You understand, don’t you?’
Margaret found that she couldn’t reply.
‘There’s a lot of fun in life, isn’t there?’ Gladys went on, very slowly, as if she were talking in her sleep. ‘I’ve had some. But not lately. Somehow if you start missing it, you go on missing it. And it’s so easy to get right off the track of it, just lose the way. We’d missed it, but we’d have found it together. I would anyhow....’
‘Oh, why are you talking like that?’ Margaret cried. ‘I can’t bear it. You sound—I don’t know—as if something’s broken—in you, I mean.’
‘I felt as if it had,’ said Gladys, ‘when something broke out there. You heard it.’
‘No, no.’ Margaret was desperate. ‘That’s all nonsense. Rouse yourself. We don’t really know what’s happened. It’s only waiting here, in the dark, not knowing anything, that’s wearing us down. If we give in, I don’t know what will happen. We can’t let these things drive us out of our senses, beat us down. That’s what they’re trying to do. We won’t have it, will we? Let’s do something. Bang on the door again.’
‘I did that,’ said Gladys, dully. ‘There’s nobody to let us out.’
‘Oh, don’t say that! It sounds so horrible.’ And Margaret began pounding on the door. Then she stopped herself. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t, though,’ she faltered. She thought of that vague, gibbering figure on the stairs. Suppose he was at the other side of the door, alone, heard them knocking—and opened it. Her hands fell helplessly to her side, and once more she saw life trembling on the edge of a pit, with unreason darkening the sky above it. If Philip didn’t come, it wouldn’t be long before she would be absolutely beaten down and everything would be lost.
Gladys stirred. ‘I thought I heard something then. Yes, there you are. Voices.’
‘I can hear Philip,’ Margaret broke in, jubilantly. ‘I’m sure I can.’ Without thinking now, she rapped on the door. Then she stopped to listen again. ‘Yes, it is Philip. It’s all right now. I’m sure it is.’ She called out and rapped again.
‘Hello!’ Philip was very close now, just at the other side of the door. ‘Is that you, Margaret?’
‘Yes, here we are,’ she called back. ‘Let us out, Philip. Isn’t the key there?’
‘Yes it is. You’re all right, aren’t you?’ His voice sounded queer. ‘Well, wait a few minutes.’
‘We can’t wait. What’s the matter?’ But he had gone, and they were left to listen and wonder and whisper together a little longer in the darkness.
‘I’m frightened, I’m frightened,’ said Gladys at last, putting out a hand and coming close again.
‘So am I,’ replied Margaret. ‘But it’s really all right now, Gladys, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know.’
Then they waited in silence for the door to open.