Aliens. William McFee

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      "He must be a very interesting man, don't you think?"

      "Surely! Oh, I should give anything to see his home. You've described it to me, so I know all about it. Gainsborough landscape, and red tiles on the cottages!" She clasped her hands.

      "I mean the man my cousin met," said Bill, gently. "Carville."

      "Oh, him!" Miss Fraenkel looked at each of us for an instant to catch some inkling of our behaviour.

      "Same name as——" and Mac jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

      Miss Fraenkel's face did not clear.

      "We thought," I said heavily, "that this man in England, you know, might have——" I stopped, dismayed by her lack of appreciation. She seemed unable to grasp the simple links of our brilliant theory. We had omitted to calculate upon the indifference of the modern American temperament to names. A foul murder had been committed a short time back by a gambler named Fraenkel, yet she would have laughed at the suggestion that such a coincidence should cause her any annoyance.

      "I don't get it," she said, smiling, and we saw plainly enough that she did not get it. We were crushed. I explained in more detail the reason for which we had ventured to connect the two stories. We could see her trying to understand.

      "You mean—just as if it was a photo-play," she faltered.

      It does not matter now, and I admit that this put me out of humour. And yet it was true. We were really no nearer an actual and bona fide solution of Mrs. Carville's story than if we had simply tried to make, as Miss Fraenkel said, a photo-play. The others laughed at my downcast countenance.

      "Well," I said, "you said Miss Fraenkel had tried them and found them guilty, Mac."

      "What I meant was, Miss Fraenkel had formed her own opinion of the business."

      "Yes," she said, "I have."

      "Now we shall hear something," chirped Bill.

      "Listen," said Miss Fraenkel. "It's very likely an assumed name."

      It was our turn to look bewildered.

      "Yes?" said Bill. "What then?"

      "And——" went on Miss Fraenkel, making little motions with her hands as though she were trying to catch something that eluded her grasp. "And—oh! he's being held for some game in New York. She's got away with it, you see."

      Miss Fraenkel waited for this appalling development to sink into our minds. I don't think it was given to any of us at the moment to divine just what had happened to Miss Fraenkel. Even seven years in the country were not sufficient training in American psychology to realize it at once. We sat and looked at her, temporarily dazed by what we took to be a story built upon exclusive information. And she sat and looked at us, as pleased as a child at the success of her manœuvre.

      "Why," stammered Bill, blankly through her glasses, "how do you know?"

      "I don't know," replied Miss Fraenkel. "I just made it up, same's you." And she included us all in a brilliant flash of her hazel eyes.

      We changed the subject after that. In self-defence we changed the subject, for it was plain that when it came to making photo-plays we held a very poor hand. Moreover, we saw that Miss Fraenkel did not and could not take our ponderous interest in Mrs. Carville seriously. To argue that she ought to was no better logic than to say that since she was crazy about Chinese prints, she ought to be friendly with the Chinese laundryman in Chestnut Street. We regarded the nations of Europe as repositories of splendid traditions, magnificent even in their decay. Miss Fraenkel regarded them as rag-baskets from which the American Eagle was picking a heterogeneous mass of rubbish, rubbish that might possibly, after much screening, become worthy of civic privilege.

      The wisdom of our action was proved by Miss Fraenkel herself, for not only did she make no further mention of Mrs. Carville before she rose to go, but even when I remarked (I escorted her to her home) pointing to the great lantern in the Metropolitan Tower, twenty miles away, shining like a star above the horizon, "that light shines on many things that are hidden from us," she failed to apply the sententious reflection to her own story, merely looking at me with an appreciative smile. She had forgotten our discussion utterly, and I was quite sure that unless we mentioned it, she would not refer to it again.

CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

He Comes

       Table of Contents

      It was the evening of one of the most perfect days in an Indian summer of notable loveliness. In this refulgent weather, to quote Emerson, who knew well what he spoke of, "it was a luxury to draw the breath of life." Free equally from the enervating heat and insects of high summer, and the numbing rigour of the Eastern winter, the days passed in dignified procession, calm and temperate, roseate with the blazing foliage of autumn, and gay with geraniums and marigolds. On our modest pergola there still clung a few ruby-coloured grapes, though the leaves were scattered, and in the beds about our verandah blue cornflowers and yellow nasturtiums enamelled the untidy carpet of coarse grasses that were trying to choke them. Not far away, down by the Episcopal Church, men were playing tennis in flannels on the courts of yellow, hard-packed sand. The intense blue of an Italian sky lent a factitious transparency to the atmosphere, and the tiny irregular shadows that indicated the colossal architecture of New York seemed to float like bubbles in an azure bowl. Across the street, a vacant plot of land, neglected because of imperfect title, was cut diagonally by a footpath leading down to Broad Street, where, out of sight but not of hearing, trolley-cars between Newark and Paterson thundered at uncertain intervals.

      It was our custom, as we sat on our verandah during these afternoons, to watch the gradual appearance of familiar figures upon this path. We knew that a few moments after the whistle of the five-twenty had sounded at the grade-crossing down in the valley, certain neighbours who commuted to New York would infallibly rise into view on this path. There was Eckhardt, who lived at five hundred and nine, and spent the day on the fourteenth floor of the Flatiron Building. There was Williams, immaculate of costume, who designed automobile bodies and had an office on Broadway. There was Wederslen, the art-critic of the New York Daily News, a man whom all three of us held in peculiar abhorrence because he persisted in ignoring Mac's etchings. There was Arber, rather short of stature and rather long of lip, an Irishman who, miraculous to state, admired Burns. There was Confield, an Indianian from Logansport, who had been to Europe on a vacation tour (No. 67 Series C., Inclusive Fare $450) and invariably carried a grip plastered with hotel labels to prove it. We had met these men at tennis and at the Field Club, and in our English way esteemed them. They would come up, head-first, so to speak, out of the valley, revealing themselves step by step until they reached the street, when they would acknowledge our salutations by a lift of the hat and a wave of the evening paper, and pass on to their homes. They generally came, too, in the order in which I have given them. Eckhardt was always first, for he did not smoke, and the smoking-cars on the Erie Road were generally behind. And Confield, of course, was likely to be last, for he had his bag.

      It was so on the day of which I speak. The deep bay of the locomotive came up on the still autumn air, and a cloud СКАЧАТЬ