Simon the Jester Part 30

"Lady summoned by Papadopoulos on private affairs. Avoid lunacy save for electioneering purposes.--SIMON."

Then I joined Lola and Colonel Bunnion. She was lying back in her laziest and most pantherine att.i.tude, and she looked up at me as I approached with eyes full of velvet softness. For the life of me I could not help feeling glad that they were turned on me and not on Dale Kynnersley.

Almost immediately the elder Miss Bostock came up to claim the Colonel for bridge. He rose reluctantly.

"I suppose it's no use asking you to make a fourth, Mr. de Gex?" she asked, after the subacid manner of her kind.

"I'm afraid not," I replied sweetly. Whereupon she rescued the Colonel from the syren and left me alone with her. I lit a cigarette and sat by her side. As she did not stir or speak I asked whether she was tired.

"Not very. I'm thinking. Do you know you've taught me an awful lot?"

"I? What can I have taught you?"

"The way people like yourself look at things. I'm treating Dale abominably. I didn't realise it before."

Now why on earth did she bring Dale in just at that moment.

"Indeed?" said I.

She nodded her head and said in her languorous voice:

"He's over head and ears in love with me and thinks I care for him. I don't. I don't care a bra.s.s b.u.t.ton for him. I'm a bad influence in his life, and the sooner I take myself out of it the better. Don't you think so?"

"You know my opinions," I said.

"If I had followed your advice at first," she continued, "we needn't have had all this commotion. And yet I'm not sorry."

"What do you propose to do?" I asked.

"Before deciding, I shall see my husband."

"You shall do no such thing."

She smiled. "I shall."

I protested. Captain Vauvenarde had put himself outside the pale. He was not fit to a.s.sociate with decent women. What object could she have in meeting him?

"I want to judge for myself," she replied.

"Judge what? Surely not whether he is eligible as a husband!"

"Yes," she said.

"But, my dear Lola," I cried, "the notion is as crazy as any of Anastasius Papadopoulos's. Of course, as soon as he learns that you're a rich woman, he'll want to live with you, and use your money for his gaming-h.e.l.l."

"I am going to meet him," she said quietly.

"I forbid it."

"You're too late, dear friend. I wrote him a letter before dinner and sent it to the Cercle Africain by special messenger. I also wrote to Anastasius. I asked them both to see me to-morrow morning. That's why I've been so gay this evening."

At the sight of my blank face she laughed, and with one of her movements rose from her chair. I rose too.

"Are you angry with me?"

"I thought I had walked out of a nightmare," I said. "I find I'm still in it."

"But don't be angry with me. It was the only way."

"The only way to, or out of, what?" I asked, bewildered.

"Never mind."

She looked at me with a singular expression in her slumbrous eyes. It was sad, wistful, soothing, and gave me the idea of a n.o.ble woman making a senseless sacrifice.

"There is no earthly reason to do this on account of Dale," I protested.

"Dale has nothing to do with it."

"Then who has?"

"Anastasius Papadopoulos," she said with undisguised irony.

"I beg your pardon," I said rather stiffly, "for appearing to force your confidence. But as I first put the idea of joining your husband into your head and have enjoyed your confidence in the matter hitherto, I thought I might claim certain privileges."

As she had done before, she laid her hands on my shoulders--we were alone in the alcove--and looked me in the eyes.

"Don't make me cry. I'm very near it. And I'm tired to-night, and I'm going to have a h.e.l.lish time to-morrow. And I want you to do me a favour."

"What is that?"

"When I'm seeing my husband, I'd like to know that you were within call--in case I wanted you. One never knows what may happen. You will come won't you, if I send for you?"

"I'm always at your service," I said.

She released my shoulders and grasped my hand.

"Good-night," she said, abruptly, and rushed swiftly out of the room, leaving me wondering more than I had ever wondered in my life at the inscrutable ways of women.

CHAPTER XIV

I am glad I devoted last night and the past hour this morning to bringing up to date this trivial record, for I have a premonition that the time is rapidly approaching when I shall no longer have the strength of will or body to continue it. The little pain has increased in intensity and frequency the last few days, and though I try to delude myself into the belief that otherwise I am as strong as ever, I know in my heart that I am daily growing weaker, daily losing vitality. I shall soon have to call in a doctor to give me some temporary relief, and doubtless he will put me to bed, feed me on slops, cut off alcohol, forbid noise and excitement, and keep me in a drugged, stupefied condition until I fall asleep, to wake up in the Garden of Prosperpine.

Death is nothing; it is the dying that is such a nuisance. It is going through so much for so little. It is as bad as the campaign before a parliamentary election. It offends one's sense of proportion. In a well-regulated universe there would be no tedious process of decay, either before or after death. You would go about your daily avocation unconcerned and unwarned, and then at the moment appointed by an inscrutable Providence for your dissolution--phew!--and your clothes would remain standing for a surprised second, and then fall down in a heap without a particle of you inside them. If we have to die, why doesn't Providence employ this simple and sensible method? It would save such a lot of trouble. It would be so clean, so painless, so picturesque. It would add to the interest of our walks abroad. Fancy a stout, important policeman vanishing from his uniform--the helmet falling over the collar, the tunic doubling in at the belt, the knees giving way, and the unheard, merry laughter of the disenuniformed spirit winging its way truncheonless into the Empyrean.

But if you think you are going to get any fun out of dying in the present inconvenient manner, you are mistaken. Believe one who is trying.