The Wheel Spins (15 page)

The faded yellow-rosebud cretonne curtains and bedspread were freshly washed and ironed; a cake of green soap was displayed on the washstand; and two green candles—never to be lit—were stuck into the glass candlesticks before the mirror of the toilet-table.

“We’ve made it look very nice,” said Mr. Froy.

“Yes, but it’s not finished yet.”

Mrs. Froy pointed to the narrow oak bed, where two lumps at the top and the bottom told of hot water bottles.

“It won’t be finished until there’s something inside that bed,” she said. “I can’t believe that in two nights’ time I shall be slipping in to kiss her ‘Good-night.’”

“Only the first night,” advised Mr. Froy. “Remember our daughter is the modern girl. Her generation avoids sentiment.”

“Yes, for all her heart, Winnie is modern,” agreed his wife. “That is why she gets on so well with every one—high and low. You may depend on it, that even on her journey, by now she has made some useful friends who may be helpful at a pinch. I expect she knows all the best people on the train. And by ‘best’ I mean it in every sense of the word. I wonder where she is at this moment.”

Well for Mrs. Froy that she did not know.

In the professor’s opinion, the Misses Flood-Porter were representative of the best people. At home he had the reputation of being unsociable and self-sufficient; but directly he travelled he developed a distrust of unfamiliar contacts, and a timidity which sought instinctively the security of his own class.

He wanted to hear his own accent reproduced by some one—however uncongenial—who had been to his college, or lunched at his club, or who knew a cousin of one of his acquaintances.

As he smoked in the corridor after his banishment, he glanced rather wistfully at the compartment where the sisters sat. Miss Rose—although his senior—was sufficiently near his age to be a potential danger. But her face dispelled any fears of dormant hysteria. It was slightly underhung and the firm outline of her protruding lip and chin was reassuring.

Although he recoiled automatically when the elder lady caught his eye and invited him to come in with a smiling gesture, he entered and sat down rather stiffly beside Miss Rose.

“Are you being kept out of your reserved carriage by that girl?” asked Miss Rose bluntly.

When the professor explained the situation both sisters were indignant.

“Fainted?” Miss Rose’s tone was incredulous. “She was laughing when she passed, arm in arm with that youth. It’s all too mysterious for me. Only I sincerely hope she won’t stir up a fuss and get us all hung up at Trieste, for nothing.”

“It’s her dog,” explained the elder sister in an aside.

Miss Rose caught her lower lip between her teeth.

“Yes, it’s Scottie,” she said defiantly. “I’ll own up I’m not quite normal over him. But he’s so devoted to me—and he pines. The only other person I can trust him to is the butler.”

“Strange,” remarked the professor. “My own dog has a marked aversion to butlers. Particularly, to my uncle’s.”

The social temperature rose several degrees, and Miss Rose grew confidential.

“It’s like this. Coles—our butler—is due to go on a cruise, directly I come back. It’s a new experience for him and he is thrilled. If I’m overdue he will probably stay at home with Scottie, and, of course, I don’t want him to lose his holiday. On the other hand, if he went, poor little Scottie would be frantic. He would feel he had lost every friend.”

“We have an excellent staff,” supplemented Miss Flood-Porter, “but, unfortunately, none of them likes animals.”

The professor’s long face wrinkled up in a smile which made him resemble a benevolent horse.

“I can enter into your feelings,” he told them. “I confess that my own dog makes me lose my sense of proportion. I rarely go abroad, because I cannot take her with me owing to quarantine regulations. But this year a complete change seemed indicated.”

The sisters exchanged glances.

“Isn’t that strange?” declared Miss Flood-Porter. “That is exactly our own position.”

Miss Rose flinched and changed the subject quickly.

“What’s your dog?” she asked.

“Sealyham. White.”

The professor was sitting bolt upright no longer. Introduced by butlers, and their friendship cemented by the common ownership of dogs, he felt he was in congenial company. So he relaxed to gossip.

“A position of responsibility towards the extraordinary young lady seems to have been thrust upon me,” he said. “She appears bent on making things very awkward for every one. I understand she was staying at the same hotel as you. What opinion did you form of her?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Miss Rose bluntly. “I’m prejudiced. So, perhaps, I shouldn’t be fair.”

Her sister made the explanation.

“We know nothing about
her
, but she was with a party of near-nudists, who drank all day and night, and were a complete nuisance. The noise was worse than a pneumatic road-drill. And we came so far especially to get perfect rest and quiet.”

The professor clicked.

“I quite understand your feelings,” he said. “The point is—did she strike you as hysterical?”

“I only know there was a disgraceful scene on the lake yesterday. Two women screaming about a man. She was one.”

“I’m not surprised,” commented the professor. “At present she is either telling a pack of lies to get into the limelight, or she is suffering from slight delirium as a result of sunstroke. The latter is the charitable view. But it involves responsibility. After all, we are her compatriots.”

Miss Rose began to fidget. When she opened her case and drew out a cigarette, her fingers were not quite steady.

“Suppose—she
is
telling the truth?” she asked. “It’s
not
fair for us to leave the girl behind us at Trieste without any backing. I’m worried stiff not knowing
what
to do.”

Had Mrs. Froy been listening, she would have clapped her gouty old hands. At last Miss Rose’s attitude was coming into line with her expectations. The best people would be looking after Winnie. So no harm could possibly come to her. But all the same, “Keep her safe—and bring her home to us.”

Unfortunately the professor was proof against the power of prayer. He wrinkled up his face in a sceptical grimace.

“Her story is too unfounded for me to credit it,” he said. “But even if the vanished governess were not a myth, I cannot conceive any cause for anxiety on her behalf. Her disappearance must be voluntary, because if she had come to any harm, or met with an accident, it would have been notified at once by an eye-witness.”

“Exactly,” agreed Miss Flood-Porter. “The train is so crowded that if she knew the ropes, she could play ‘hide and seek’ indefinitely with the ticket-collector.”

“Therefore,” summed up the professor, “if she
is
hiding, she must have some strong personal reason for such a course. My own feeling is never to interfere with private issues. It would be extremely tactless and inconsiderate of us to start a general search for her.”

Miss Rose drew deeply at her cigarette.

“Then you don’t think me definitely feeble to put Scottie’s interests first?” she asked.

“I should consider that you were letting your dog down if you sacrificed him to such an absolutely preposterous issue,” replied the professor.

“That goes for me. Thank you, professor.” Miss Rose examined her firm pink hands. “I’m smutty. I’d better wash.”

When she had lurched out into the corridor, Miss Flood-Porter spoke to the professor confidentially.

“I couldn’t mention it before my sister—she is so sensitive on the subject—but we’ve just been through a nerve-shattering experience. And I don’t see that we did a pennorth of good. Am I boring you?”

“Not in the least.”

Miss Flood-Porter began her story of those events which played their part in shaping the conduct of the sisters, and so—indirectly—affected the destiny of a stranger.

“We live in a very quiet neighbourhood, close to the cathedral. It was ruined for every one when a terrible person came to live there. A War profiteer—at least, I call them all that. One day, when he was scorching in his car—drunk, as usual—he knocked down a woman. We saw the accident, and our evidence got him six months’ imprisonment, as it was a bad case.”

“I congratulate you on your public spirit.”

“I’m afraid we, too, were quite pleased with ourselves, until he came out. After that we were marked people. This man—aided by his two boys—persecuted us in every kind of way. Windows were smashed—flower beds raided—horrible things thrown over the garden walls—obscene messages chalked on the gates. We could never catch them in the act, although we appealed to the police and they had a special watch kept on the premises. After a time it got on our nerves. It did not matter where we were, or what we were doing, we were always listening for another crash. It affected my sister most, as she was terrified lest one of her pet animals might be the next victim. Luckily, before it came to that, the man left the town.”

Miss Flood-Porter stopped, overcome by the memories she had raised.

It began on the morning when she went out into the garden, to find that her unique white delphiniums had been uprooted during the night.

After that there was the ever-increasing tension—the constant annoyance—the cumulative pecuniary loss—the futility of repairs, when panes of glass were replaced, only to be smashed again. It was like standing at a cross-roads in windy weather and being buffeted by an invisible weather-cock, which whirled round again after it had struck its blow. There were flutters of apprehension whenever the fiendish boys scorched by them on their bicycles, grinning with impudent triumph. And the time came when their nerve was worn down, so that their imaginations raced away with them and they grew fearful of worse evils in store.

It ended on the evening when Miss Flood-Porter found her sister Rose in tears. If the Rock of Gibraltar had suddenly shaken like a jelly, she could not have been more aghast.

She looked up to meet the professor’s sympathetic eye.

“Can you blame us,” she asked, “when I tell you that, after that, we made a vow never to interfere in anything again—unless it was a case of cruelty to animals or children?”

As Iris passed the window, in token that he was free to return to his own compartment, the professor rose.

“Tell your sister,” he advised, “not to worry any more, but to get back to her dog as quickly as possible. No one is going to suffer in any way. In case of any further complications, you can trust me to take charge.”

A few minutes later, when Miss Flood-Porter repeated the message, Miss Rose was greatly relieved.

“Now I can go home to Scottie with a
clear
conscience,” she said. “Any one must have complete confidence in the professor.”

She forgot one important point. The professor was working on the basis that Miss Froy was a fiction of hysteria—while both the sisters had seen her in the flesh.

After Miss Froy had shrivelled to a never-never, Iris was thrown back on herself again. When her first relief at shelving the riddle had passed, she grew worried by her own sensations. Her knees were shaky, while her head felt light and empty as a blown egg-shell.

Miss Froy would have known that, in addition to the aftereffects of sunstroke, the girl was exhausted for lack of light nourishment. At this juncture she was a dead loss to Iris, for Hare—with the best intentions—could only offer stimulants.

As she clung to the shaking rail, fighting off recurrent spells of giddiness, Iris told herself that she must forcibly hang out until she reached Basle.

“It would be fatal if I collapsed,” she thought fearfully. “Max is too young to be any good. Some busybody would push me out at the first station, and pack me off to the local hospital.”

And anything might happen to her there, as in Miss Froy’s terrible story. Or did Miss Kummer tell it to her?

It was an ordeal to stand, but although she had insisted on leaving Hare—when she found that both talking and listening had become a strain—she shrank from the thought of return to her own compartment. It was too near the doctor and too remote from her compatriots. At the far end of the corridor she felt bottled up in enemy territory.

Besides—it was haunted by the ghost of a little tweed spinster, of whom it was not wise to think too long.

The high-pitched conversation of the Misses Flood-Porter—audible through the open door—was a distraction.

“I’ve written to Captain Parker, to meet us with his car at Victoria, to push us through the customs,” said Miss Flood-Porter.

“Hope he’ll be there,” fussed Miss Rose. “If he fails us, we may lose our connection. And I’ve written to cook that dinner is to be ready at seven-thirty to the dot.”

“What did you order?”

“
Not
chicken. Definitely. It will be some time before I can endure one again. I said a nice cutlet of salmon and a small leg of lamb. Peas, if possible. If it is too late for them, French beans and marrow. I left the sweet to cook.”

“That sounds very good. I’m longing to eat a plain English dinner again.”

“So am I.”

There was a short pause before Miss Rose began to worry anew.

“I do hope there’ll be no muddle over our wagon-lits at Trieste.”

“Oh, my dear,” cried her sister, “don’t suggest such a thing. I couldn’t face the idea of sitting bolt upright all night. Didn’t you hear the manager telephone for them?”

“I stood by him while he was doing it. Of course, I could not understand anything. But he assured me positively that they were being reserved for us.”

“Well, we must hope for the best. I’ve been looking through my engagement-book. It’s the bishop’s last garden party, the day after we get back.”

“Oh, we
couldn’t
miss that.”

Iris’ half-smile was bitter as she listened to the characteristic chatter of two inexperienced women-travellers, who felt very far from their beaten track.

“And I expected
them
to risk losing their reservations and spoiling their dinner,” she thought. “What a hope.”