Juggernaut Part 52

One more chance gone, she thought in a panic of dread, five minutes more wasted. Oh! to think a simple matter like finding a telephone should present so many difficulties!

Diagonally across the street loomed a large, modern apartment house of familiar design. Without doubt there would be a telephone there, in the loge of the concierge. Precipitately she darted across the street, narrowly escaping a motor-cycle, and plunged into the court. She could see the loge at the far end, up a flight of three shallow steps. Light streamed out of the wide gla.s.s double doors so frequently seen in this type of building; she aimed her faltering steps towards it as to a beacon. Within the doors she saw a brightly lit, stuffy room overcrowded with machine-carved furniture, the central table covered with a red chenille cloth, on which lay a string-bag bursting with vegetables and parcels. No soul was visible, but she spied the telephone against the back wall. She opened the doors and went in, a bell tinkling as she did so. From an inner room issued the sound of voices laughing and gossiping. The door was shut, and no one troubled at all to answer the summons.

She crossed hurriedly to the other door and opened it, disclosing a domestic group, fit subject for one of the Dutch school paintings.

There was a neat, compact, black-clad woman with s.h.i.+ning, immaculate coiffure, an old, florid, bald-headed man sluggishly fat, and a youth, long-limbed and pale, with the face of an apache and a dank lock of black hair dipping into his eyes. The woman was peeling potatoes and recounting a history, the old man smoked, and fondled a cat, the apache lounged against the chimney with a cigarette dangling from his thin lips. A dog slept on the hearth; there were two love-birds in a green cage upon the wall.

"_S'il vous plait, madame----_"

The three turned instantly and regarded her, all merriment gone, their eyes shrewd, alien, inquisitorial. She began to feel like a criminal, and struggled stammering in the effort to make her desire known, urgent though it was.

"_Bien, mademoiselle, qu'est-ce que vous desirez?_" the woman rapped out in staccato accents.

"_Madame, s'il vous plait, je veux bien telephoner. Je regrette de vous deranger, mais c'est tellement important._"

She saw the woman's gaze, hard and curious, take in the details of her appearance, from her muddy shoes up to her blood-stained cheek.

"I've had an accident--_je viens d'avoir un pet.i.t accident,_" she explained hurriedly. "_Il faut que je telephone immediatement._"

The concierge's face cleared slightly.

"_Pour chercher un medecin, sans doute?_" she suggested. "_Bien--voici le telephone._"

Gratefully Esther thanked her and took down the receiver in her trembling hand. The operator failed to understand her accent; she repeated the number three or four times without success, and was on the point of bursting into tears when the concierge possessed herself of the receiver and delivered the number for her, crisply and precisely.

"_Voila, mademoiselle,_" she announced in triumph, and returned to her potatoes.

There followed a long wait. From the other room Esther could hear the family group discussing her in subdued voices, her strange aspect, her evident weakness. They hazarded guesses as to how she had received her injuries. The old man was positive that the lady's lover had been chasing her with a knife; the wound on her face was a proof of it, in his opinion.

A series of buzzings, tappings and clinkings came over the wire, with hints of far-distant unintelligible conversation. This continued while with agonised eyes Esther watched the hands of the big clock on the wall creep from five minutes past seven to eleven past. Still no connection. At last the operator, remote and chill as the top of the Tour Eiffel, informed her that there was no reply. With French born of desperation Esther cried, "_Sonnez encore! Sonnez toujours! Je suis sure qu'il y a quelqu'un la!_" Then recommenced the mysterious commotion on the line, which, before, led to nothing.

"Oh, G.o.d! oh, G.o.d!" she breathed hysterically. "It will be too late, it may already be too late! Oh, G.o.d, help me, make them answer!"

She was dimly aware that the apache was lounging in the doorway, using a toothpick and examining her with interest. The voices from the inner room had ceased; everyone was listening, but she did not care. All at once a click louder than those preceding told her she had been put through at last. Hope leapt within her. Alas! It suffered an immediate extinction, when she found herself _au courant_ of a conversation between two people of opposite s.e.xes, a dalliance flirtatious in character, interspersed with laughter and s.n.a.t.c.hes of song. Three times she lowered the hook, three times she raised it to find herself still listening to the idiotic babble--"_Tu ne m'aimes pas? Hein? Pourquoi pas?_"--laughter--"_Quand j'ai regarde le couleur de ton nes l'autre soir, j'etais completement bouleverse, j'

t'a.s.sure!_"--"_Ah, formidable!_" then another shrill cackle. It was beyond endurance.

There was no use trying further. The clock hands touched twenty minutes past, she had thrown away over a quarter of an hour here while at the villa death was closing in surely upon its unsuspecting victim.

She dropped the receiver with a groan, turning to the woman, who had just come out.

"_Madame, c'est inutile. Je vous remercie._"

The woman looked her over again with a softened glance, touched, perhaps, by the tremor that shook her visitor's voice.

"_Mademoiselle est souffrante?_"

"_Non, madame, pas trop, ce n'est pas ca--mais il y a quelqu'un qui est en danger--quelqu'un qu'il faut prevenir. Si je peux trouver un taxi----_"

"_Gaston! Vite! Cherche un taxi pour mademoiselle. Va!_"

With a warmed feeling that these were kindly people after all, Esther watched the young man's long figure slink out of the door like an otter around the bend of a stream.

"_a.s.seyez-vous, mademoiselle,_" the woman bade her, and pushed forward a chair.

But she could not sit down. She was in a fever of excitement, quivering all over. With one section of her mind she thanked the woman again, with another she looked for the young man's return, with still another she said to herself, "How long will it take me to get to La Californie from here? Has Roger come back? Is the doctor getting the bandage ready for his hand? Oh, if it should already be too late!"

A torturing interval ensued. She left the loge and wandered out to the entrance. Rain had begun to fall, that would make it harder to find a taxi. It would happen, now of all times! Ten minutes pa.s.sed, then up the street chug-chugged a somewhat battered motor-vehicle with the apache hanging on the step. Yes, it was a taxi, an antediluvian one, but she must not be critical. If a chariot offered one a lift out of h.e.l.l, one would not stop to inquire its horse-power. The apache helped her in and closed the door. She turned grateful eyes on him through the open window and with an expressive gesture showed him she had no purse.

"_Pas de quoi, mademoiselle,_" he responded gruffly, and her opinion of the French rose several points.

The chauffeur, a septuagenarian who smelled of wine, had a bulbous nose and was so deaf that it took her several seconds to make him understand where she wanted to go. When finally he grasped the address, he tapped his most conspicuous feature with a h.o.r.n.y finger, and, his engine having by this time stopped, descended with creaks and groans to crank it up. He was so long over the operation that she began to be alarmed.

However, he was not drunk, only senile. Of the two, his taxi was far worse--rickety, spavined, with every evidence of decrepitude. It started with a jerk which threw its occupant off her seat.

"At any rate I'm moving," she told herself with real relief. "I'm getting there at last. That's something."

Any sort of motion might be better than none, yet when she realised the pace at which she must crawl she suffered strong misgivings. To jog along like this when speed was a prime essential! Moreover they did not always jog, frequently they stopped dead still, while the ancient driver fumbled with the gear and eventually hit upon something which sent them forward again with a fresh spasm. It was so completely maddening that after the fifth attack she could bear it no longer.

Thrusting her head out of the window she shouted shrilly:

"_Vite! Vite! Je suis tres presse! Vite!_"

She regretted her lack of expletives, but she need not have done so.

The sole result, amid mumblings and grumblings, was an abortive spurt which ended in a breakdown more disastrous than any preceding. Minutes were lost while the septuagenarian got down for another cranking up, and then in the old fas.h.i.+on they chugged on again. At this rate it would take them more than half an hour to reach the villa, during which time anything might happen--would happen, in all probability. Still, she resolved not to risk another exhortation to speed, but to trust to luck to send another taxi in her way. She had no money to pay for this one if she abandoned it, but she reflected that she could give the old man her wrist-watch. It was a problem which need not have concerned her. Many taxis whizzed by, but not one was disengaged.

When they mounted the steeper part of the incline the unhappy engine so laboured that each revolution of the wheels threatened to be the last.

Still they moved onward with a sort of grim persistence, and it occurred to Esther that if she did not go altogether mad in the interval there might just possibly be a glimmer of hope. They had pa.s.sed many familiar landmarks; in a sort of fas.h.i.+on they were getting there. She sat on the edge of the lumpy seat, alternately praying and gibbering, her hands clenched, her head throbbing with the sharp pain born of fear.

"Oh, G.o.d," she murmured for the twentieth time, "don't let it happen, make him wait till I get there! Oh, G.o.d----"

The taxi slowed down with an ominous finality. Again the driver climbed down, fiddled about for several seconds, then with immense deliberation approached and opened the door. "What's the matter?

Can't you get on? _Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?_" she cried, ready to shake him.

He shrugged his shoulders and blew his red nose on a huge filthy handkerchief. Then with an air of great philosophy he replied:

"_ca marche plus._"

"_Comment?_" she screamed at him, although she had heard only too well.

"_Plus d'essence,_" he explained briefly, spitting into a puddle.

"_C'est fini._"

There it was concisely; she could take it or leave it. No more petrol, and still at least a mile away from the Villa Firenze. As well write "finis" to her whole desperate attempt. How she had got this far without fainting was almost a miracle; if she tried to walk the remaining distance she was quite certain to fall by the wayside. At the moment the one thing that would have brought her some slight relief would have been to slay this old man--and she had no weapon.

Slowly she got out of the mouldy cab and began automatically to unfasten the strap of her watch. At least she must pay her debts....

"_Plus dessence... C'est fini...._"

The words rang in her brain like a knell.