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‘Well, damn it all, Deirdre, it hurt! It isn’t that I blame you. I don’t. But it hurt.’
They were both silent. Then Tim raised her face to his and kissed it with a new tenderness.
‘But that’s all over now, sweetheart. The only thing to decide is how we’re going to break it to Crozier.’
‘Oh!’ She drew herself away abruptly. ‘I hadn’t thought –’ She broke off as Crozier and the manager appeared round the angle of the path. With a swift turn of the head she whispered:
‘Do nothing now. Leave it to me. I must prepare him. Where could I meet you tomorrow?’
Nugent reflected.
‘I could come in to Bulawayo. How about the Café near the Standard Bank? At three o’clock it would be pretty empty.’
Deirdre gave a brief nod of assent before turning her back on him and joining the other two men. Tim Nugent looked after her with a faint frown. Something in her manner puzzled him.
Deirdre was very silent during the drive home. Sheltering behind the fiction of a ‘touch of the sun’, she deliberated on her course of action. How should she tell him? How would he take it? A strange lassitude seemed to possess her, and a growing desire to postpone the revelation as long as might be. Tomorrow would be soon enough. There would be plenty of time before three o’clock.
The hotel was uncomfortable. Their room was on the ground floor, looking out on to an inner court. Deirdre stood that evening sniffing the stale air and glancing distastefully at the tawdry furniture. Her mind flew to the easy luxury of Monkton Court amidst the Surrey pinewoods. When her maid left her at last, she went slowly to her jewel case. In the palm of her hand the golden diamond returned her stare.
With an almost violent gesture she returned it to the case and slammed down the lid. Tomorrow morning she would tell George.
She slept badly. It was stifling beneath the heavy folds of the mosquito netting. The throbbing darkness was punctuated by the ubiquitous ping she had learnt to dread. She awoke white and listless. Impossible to start a scene so early in the day!
She lay in the small, close room all the morning, resting. Lunchtime came upon her with a sense of shock. As they sat drinking coffee, George Crozier proposed a drive to the Matopos.
‘Plenty of time if we start at once.’
Deirdre shook her head, pleading a headache, and she thought to herself: ‘That settles it. I can’t rush the thing. After all, what does a day more or less matter? I’ll explain to Tim.’
She waved goodbye to Crozier as he rattled off in the battered Ford. Then, glancing at her watch, she walked slowly to the meeting place.
The Café was deserted at this hour. They sat down at a little table and ordered the inevitable tea that South Africa drinks at all hours of the day and night. Neither of them said a word till the waitress brought it and withdrew to her fastness behind some pink curtains. Then Deirdre looked up and started as she met the intense watchfulness in his eyes.
‘Deirdre, have you told him?’
She shook her head, moistening her lips, seeking for words that would not come.
‘Why not?’
‘I haven’t had a chance; there hasn’t been time.’
Even to herself the words sounded halting and unconvincing.
‘It’s not that. There’s something else. I suspected it yesterday. I’m sure of it today. Deirdre, what is it?’
She shook her head dumbly.
‘There’s some reason why you don’t want to leave George Crozier, why you don’t want to come back to me. What is it?’
It was true. As he said it she knew it, knew it with sudden scorching shame, but knew it beyond any possibility of doubt. And still his eyes searched her.
‘It isn’t that you love him! You don’t. But there’s something.’
She thought: ‘In another moment he’ll see! Oh, God, don’t let him!’
Suddenly his face whitened.
‘Deirdre – is it – is it that there’s going to be a – child?’
In a flash she saw the chance he offered her. A wonderful way! Slowly, almost without her own volition, she bowed her head.
She heard his quick breathing, then his voice, rather high and hard.
‘That – alters things. I didn’t know. We’ve got to find a different way out.’ He leant across the table and caught both her hands in his. ‘Deirdre, my darling, never think – never dream that you were in any way to blame. Whatever happens, remember that. I should have claimed you when I came back to England. I funked it, so it’s up to me to do what I can to put things straight now. You see? Whatever happens, don’t fret, darling. Nothing has been your fault.’
He lifted first one hand, then the other to his lips. Then she was alone, staring at the untasted tea. And, strangely enough, it was only one thing that she saw – a gaudily illuminated text hanging on a whitewashed wall. The words seemed to spring out from it and hurl themselves at her. ‘What shall it profit a man –’ She got up, paid for her tea and went out.
On his return George Crozier was met by a request that his wife might not be disturbed. Her headache, the maid said, was very bad.
It was nine o’clock the next morning when he entered her bedroom, his face rather grave. Deirdre was sitting up in bed. She looked white and haggard, but her eyes shone.
‘George, I’ve got something to tell you, something rather terrible –’
He interrupted her brusquely.
‘So you’ve heard. I was afraid it might upset you.’
‘Upset me?’
‘Yes. You talked to the poor young fellow that day.’
He saw her hand steal to her heart, her eyelids flicker, then she said in a low, quick voice that somehow frightened him:
‘I’ve heard nothing. Tell me quickly.’
‘I thought –’
‘Tell me!’
‘Out at that tobacco estate. Chap shot himself. Badly broken up in the War, nerves all to pieces, I suppose. There’s no other reason to account for it.’
‘He shot himself – in that dark shed where the tobacco was hanging.’ She spoke with certainty, her eyes like a sleep-walker’s as she saw before her in the odorous darkness a figure lying there, revolver in hand.
‘Why, to be sure; that’s where you were taken queer yesterday. Odd thing, that!’
Deirdre did not answer. She saw another picture – a table with tea things on it, and a woman bowing her head in acceptance of a lie.
‘Well, well, the War has a lot to answer for,’ said Crozier, and stretched out his hand for a match, lighting his pipe with careful puffs.
His wife’s cry startled him.
‘Ah! don’t, don’t! I can’t bear the smell!’
He stared at her in kindly astonishment.
‘My dear girl, you mustn’t be nervy. After all, you can’t escape from the smell of tobacco. You’ll meet it everywhere.’
‘Yes, everywhere!’ She smiled a slow, twisted smile, and murmured some words that he did not catch, words that she had chosen for the original obituary notice of Tim Nugent’s death. ‘While the light lasts I shall remember, and in the darkness I shall not forget.’
Her eyes widened as they followed the ascending spiral of smoke, and she repeated in a low, monotonous voice: ‘Everywhere, everywhere.’
4 The Red Signal (#ulink_f1b83e14-cb14-523e-8695-6e94d91805cb)
‘The Red Signal’ was first published in Grand Magazine, June 1924.
‘No, but how too thrilling,’ said pretty Mrs Eversleigh, opening her lovely, but slightly vacant eyes very wide. ‘They always say women have a sixth sense; do you think it’s true, Sir Alington?’
The famous alienist smiled sardonically. He had an unbounded contempt for the foolish pretty type, such as his fellow guest. Alington West was the supreme authority on mental disease, and he was fully alive to his own position and importance. A slightly pompous man of full figure.
‘A great deal of nonsense is talked, I know that, Mrs Eversleigh. What does the term mean – a sixth sense?’
‘You scientific men are always so severe. And it really is extraordinary the way one seems to positively know things sometimes – just know them, feel them, I mean – quite uncanny – it really is. Claire knows what I mean, don’t you, Claire?’
She appealed to her hostess with a slight pout, and a tilted shoulder.
Claire Trent did not reply at once. It was a small dinner party, she and her husband, Violet Eversleigh, Sir Alington West, and his nephew, Dermot West, who was an old friend of Jack Trent’s. Jack Trent himself, a somewhat heavy florid man, with a good-humoured smile, and a pleasant lazy laugh, took up the thread.
‘Bunkum, Violet! Your best friend is killed in a railway accident. Straight away you remember that you dreamt of a black cat last Tuesday – marvellous, you felt all along that something was going to happen!’
‘Oh, no, Jack, you’re mixing up premonitions with intuition now. Come, now, Sir Alington, you must admit that premonitions are real?’
‘To a certain extent, perhaps,’ admitted the physician cautiously. ‘But coincidence accounts for a good deal, and then there is the invariable tendency to make the most of a story afterwards – you’ve always got to take that into account.’
‘I don’t think there is any such thing as premonition,’ said Claire Trent, rather abruptly. ‘Or intuition, or a sixth sense, or any of the things we talk about so glibly. We go through life like a train rushing through the darkness to an unknown destination.’
‘That’s hardly a good simile, Mrs Trent,’ said Dermot West, lifting his head for the first time and taking part in the discussion. There was a curious glitter in the clear grey eyes that shone out rather oddly from the deeply tanned face. ‘You’ve forgotten the signals, you see.’
‘The signals?’
‘Yes, green if its all right, and red – for danger!’
‘Red – for danger – how thrilling!’ breathed Violet Eversleigh.
Dermot turned from her rather impatiently.
‘That’s just a way of describing it, of course. Danger ahead! The red signal! Look out!’
Trent stared at him curiously.
‘You speak as though it were an actual experience, Dermot, old boy.’
‘So it is – has been, I mean.’
‘Give us the yarn.’
‘I can give you one instance. Out in Mesopotamia – just after the Armistice, I came into my tent one evening with the feeling strong upon me. Danger! Look out! Hadn’t the ghost of a notion what it was all about. I made a round of the camp, fussed unnecessarily, took all precautions against an attack by hostile Arabs. Then I went back to my tent. As soon as I got inside, the feeling popped up again stronger than ever. Danger! In the end, I took a blanket outside, rolled myself up in it and slept there.’
‘Well?’
‘The next morning, when I went inside the tent, first thing I saw was a great knife arrangement – about half a yard long – struck down through my bunk, just where I would have lain. I soon found out about it – one of the Arab servants. His son had been shot as a spy. What have you got to say to that, Uncle Alington, as an example of what I call the red signal?’
The specialist smiled non-committally.
‘A very interesting story, my dear Dermot.’
‘But not one that you would accept unreservedly?’
‘Yes, yes, I have no doubt that you had the premonition of danger, just as you state. But it is the origin of the premonition I dispute. According to you, it came from without, impressed by some outside source upon your mentality. But nowadays we find that nearly everything comes from within – from our subconscious self.’
‘Good old subconscious,’ cried Jack Trent. ‘It’s the jack-of-all-trades nowadays.’
Sir Alington continued without heeding the interruption.
‘I suggest that by some glance or look this Arab had betrayed himself. Your conscious self did not notice or remember, but with your subconscious self it was otherwise. The subconscious never forgets. We believe, too, that it can reason and deduce quite independently of the higher or conscious will. Your subconscious self, then, believed that an attempt might be made to assassinate you, and succeeded in forcing its fear upon your conscious realization.’
‘That sounds very convincing, I admit,’ said Dermot smiling.
‘But not nearly so exciting,’ pouted Mrs Eversleigh.
‘It is also possible that you may have been subconsciously aware of the hate felt by the man towards you. What in the old days used to be called telepathy certainly exists, though the conditions governing it are very little understood.’
‘Have there been any other instances?’ asked Claire of Dermot.
‘Oh! yes, but nothing very pictorial – and I suppose they could all be explained under the heading of coincidence. I refused an invitation to a country house once, for no other reason than the hoisting of the “red signal”. The place was burnt out during the week. By the way, Uncle Alington, where does the subconscious come in there?’
‘I’m afraid it doesn’t,’ said Alington, smiling.
‘But you’ve got an equally good explanation. Come, now. No need to be tactful with near relatives.’
‘Well, then, nephew, I venture to suggest that you refused the invitation for the ordinary reason that you didn’t much want to go, and that after the fire, you suggested to yourself that you had had a warning of danger, which explanation you now believe implicitly.’
‘It’s hopeless,’ laughed Dermot. ‘It’s heads you win, tails I lose.’
‘Never mind, Mr West,’ cried Violet Eversleigh. ‘I believe in your Red Signal implicitly. Is the time in Mesopotamia the last time you had it?’
‘Yes – until –’
‘I beg your pardon?’
