Two-Face. Ernest Dudley

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      Two-Face

      DEDICATION

      For Mother with love.

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1951 by Ernest Dudley

      All rights reserved

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      CHAPTER 1

      Huddled in her seat in the Zurich-Paris plane, she remembered only all the most awful air disasters she had ever read about.

      Desperately she tried to fight down her panicky thoughts. Told herself again and again: “for every aeroplane that crashes, thousands don’t.” But she wasn’t comforted or reassured. The actual physical sensations she was experiencing were no more alarming than if she were floating in a boat down some placid stream. The other passengers, too, were either calmly indifferent or plainly thrilled at being hurtled through space.

      But try as hard as she might, it was no good. She was incapable of shaking off her blind, unreasonable terror.

      When she first received Henri Tallier’s letter, telling her he had made all arrangements for her to fly to Paris immediately, the prospect had merely filled her with vague apprehension.

      But as the time for her departure approached, that vague apprehension became intensified into something horrid at the pit of her stomach. Then, as the great air-liner bore her up, and she glimpsed the swiftly and sickeningly receding earth, fear engulfed her in overwhelming waves.

      Once, when the machine slipped suddenly in an air-pocket, she gave a scream. The man sitting in front of her turned round. His smile of amusement faded, however, when he saw the terror in her eyes.

      “Don’t worry! You’re as safe as houses!”

      He spoke in French, but his accent was obviously English. She tried to force a wan smile to her stiff lips. But it was a pitiful failure.

      The man explained to her in careful French what it was caused the plane to slip.

      “It’s nothing really,” he said. “No more than a bump on a road—and you know how that feels when you’re travelling fast in a car! Like a young mountain!”

      As she tried to gain courage from his casual tone, she wanted to tell him he needn’t speak French. That she herself was half-English, spoke his own language quite well. But the words remained a whisper somewhere at the back of her dry throat. When he returned to his newspaper terror paralysed her once more.

      For the remainder of the journey she sat as one awaiting inevitable doom, fingernails cutting into her moist palms, praying for the nightmare to end.

      And after an eternity the mighty steel bird was zooming away on its final stage of the journey. At last it was circling over Le Bourget, airport for Paris.

      She stumbled out of the cabin on to the wooden steps and cautiously descended to the tarmac. Her head ached abominably, her ears buzzed with the throb-throb of the engines, and she felt sick.

      But so enormous was her relief at feeling solid ground beneath her feet that these discomforts were forgotten. She had arrived. She was safe—safe! As the Englishman had said: “Safe as houses!”

      She tried to grasp that fact as she stood staring dazedly about her, tightly clutching a shabby handbag with both hands.

      She could not believe that the frightful adventure was over. That Paris was but half an hour’s car drive away.

      She really had flown all the way from Zurich, had come through the ordeal without either crashing to destruction or dying of fright. With this realization there came a hot, prickly sensation at the back of her eyes. She groped for a handkerchief in the depths of her bag.

      “I mustn’t, I mustn’t! I won’t cry!” she told herself and choked back the tears. She longed to cry. Not only now the strain of the journey was over—but because she knew it really wouldn’t have mattered much if she had died.

      All the time the thought of death had terrified her, a part of her would have welcomed it as a blessed release. Release from the grief which she felt would never leave her as long as she lived.

      Behind her was Zurich and her dreams.

      Zurich, where she had lived since childhood. Had known years of serene, rich happiness. Until… And now in a tiny churchyard atop a little hill, where the Springtime song of the birds was a gentle hymn, lay her mother, the earth fresh on her grave.

      That morning she had breathed the air of her beloved city for the last time. Henceforth it would be only a city of memories. Such memories which only the one, recent and cruelly bitter, could ever mar.

      Now Paris faced her, strange and frightening, and she was alone. With a future that held little for her to dream about. Conjecture about it, yes, and that but half-heartedly. Her dreams though, they would search backwards, she felt. Always.

      Here the job old Henri Tallier had offered her was waiting. Work that was to help her continue the job of living. Though she knew of no reason why she should go on doing so.

      That was all Paris could give her.

      “Remember Henri, cherie…” Those had been her mother’s last words. “He will see that all is well with you, for my memory’s sake.” And had smiled a tender little smile as she whispered half to herself, “Dear fat Henri, so kind and loving—and so dull he was…”

      Because there was no one else, she had turned for help to the man who had loved her mother long ago. His reply had been characteristically kind and understanding. He had not offered her charity. Come and work in my shop, he had said—his shop, the great multiple store in the centre of Paris.

      As she stood there indecisively amid the bustle of disembarking passengers, the babel of half a dozen foreign tongues, hearing but not understanding the crisp utterances of the stewards and airport officials, and the raucous voices of two cheeky newsboys, a steward touched her arm.

      “You are going by bus, Mademoiselle?”

      She saw that he had placed her luggage beside her.

      “Bus?”

      “Company’s bus takes all passengers on to the Place Lafayette, Paris,” he explained. “But—er—perhaps you are being met by car?” smiling as he glanced at her clothes as if to say: “Though I’d think that most unlikely.”

      His expression changed when she said:

      “Yes, I am expecting a car to meet me.” And he picked up her two dilapidated suitcases with a flourish.

      “If you will please follow me, Mademoiselle, we will find your car.”

      With a murmured word of thanks, she collected her thoughts, gave a furtive dab at her eyes with her handkerchief, made an effort to brace her slim shoulders, and followed.

      Her head still continued to whirl, however. The feeling of being completely and hopelessly lost enveloped her like a great cloak. She kept up with the steward blindly, without knowing which way she was going.

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