The talkers

A masked figure followed them noiselessly upstairs and slipped behind the portières to observe them.

Sutton, face to face with his first real adventure, was fascinated by the little Queen in Green—not prepared, perhaps, to encounter such youthful shyness at Derring’s. And now he attempted to discover her identity, rather roughly, but she evaded his curiosity and ardent advances, and coaxed him to show her Derring’s quarters.

The masked man watched them out of narrow eye-slits. They visited the further rooms; then, having satisfied her curiosity, the Queen in Green turned on her dainty heel.

As the two retraced their steps, she prettily avoided Sutton’s love-making. It was only after he unmasked, and they had stopped by the portières—so close that the man behind them could have stabbed them—that the girl turned impulsively to Sutton, put her arms around his neck, and took his kiss as passionately as he gave it.

It lasted but a second. She stepped back against the portières. Both seemed hotly embarrassed.

A second later the Queen in Green was readjusting her gilt crown and laughing at some light jest he had made—he could not recall what it was afterward.

Below, the orchestra had begun again. He looked at her; she nodded. They waited to catch the beat of the music. She was still laughing when she placed her smooth little hand in his. But as he encircled her waist she drew a swift, agonised breath and lurched forward against him.

He reeled under the sudden impact; her silk-clad body sagged, her masked head fell backward, and then, as he caught her, the Queen in Green collapsed in his arms.

He half dragged her to an armchair. One of her slippers dropped off.

For a moment he stood helpless, looking down at her; then, anxious, and having had no experience with people who faint, he hurried downstairs, perplexed, to find Sadoul, who had brought the girl to the party.

After-supper-dancing was beginning again in the studio, and the music seemed unusually noisy. He tried to discover Sadoul, shouted his name, but everybody was still masked and Sutton hunted for him in vain.

Finally he continued on through the studio into the supper room to get a glass of ice-water, and saw Harry Stayr still browsing there.

As Sutton left the table, carrying the water, he said to Stayr in a worried voice:

“That Queen in Green—the one Sadoul brought—has fainted in Derring’s quarters.”

“Is she soused?” inquired Stayr, busy with food.

“No.”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know. She wears a green mask. Casimir Sadoul brought her. If you see him tell him she’s ill upstairs.”

“Put some ice down her back,” advised Stayr, reaching for the salad.

Sutton hastened on upstairs, hoping to find the lady better.

The Queen in Green lay face upward on the floor—a crumpled heap of pale green silks. Her ruddy hair was dishevelled; her gilt crown had rolled across the rug.

There was a day-bed beside the rose-shaded lamp. Sutton carried her to it, laid her there and smoothed her clothing.

Under the mask her lips and skin were livid, but through the eye-slits she seemed to be watching him.

He flushed, spoke to her, waited, then stripped off the green silk mask. It shocked him to discover that her eyes were open.

“That’s a funny way to faint,” he thought. And he lifted the glass and tipped it, spilling ice-water over the upturned face.

The water washed off some cosmetic but produced no other effect.

Scared, Sutton tried to find her pulse, and failed; tried to locate her heart and couldn’t. There was nothing to loosen. He opened a window and came back to her. Then he went out to the gallery and shouted down through the clatter and music:

“Sadoul! Sadoul! Come up here!”

A masked figure in crown and crimson robes detached itself and came forward under the gallery, looking up.

“Is that you, Sadoul?”

“Yes. What’s the trouble?”

“Your girl—the girl you brought with you—has fainted. She’s up here. Bring Pockman, too.”

“What do you mean, my girl?” inquired Sadoul.

“The Queen in Green. You brought her, didn’t you?”

“Oh! That girl? What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t know. You’d better find Pockman and come up. I don’t know what ails her.”

Sutton went back to the day-bed and gazed nervously at the Queen in Green. Robes, stockings, slippers, jewels, all were green. Even her strangely open eyes seemed golden green as a cat’s.

Sadoul and Pockman, in gorgeous costumes but unmasked, entered together in a few moments.

“She doesn’t seem to be breathing, and I can’t find any pulse,” explained Sutton. “What on earth is the matter with her?”

Pockman bent over; Sadoul and Sutton watched him. She wore no stays—there was not much to her bodice, anyway—only a trifle more of her body visible when Pockman stripped off her waist than the waist had already revealed.

The two men watched him; the leisurely certainty of everything he was doing preoccupied Sutton.

“Why, she’s dead,” said Pockman coolly.

Sutton stared aghast.

Sadoul said: “Well, of all rotten luck!—What the devil was the matter with her?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You mean—mean to say that this girl is dead!” faltered Sutton.

“She’s been dead for more than twenty minutes.... I don’t know what killed her——”

Sadoul glanced up at Pockman, who was staring intently at him.

Sutton said miserably: “Is there anything possible to do—any other and surer test to be made?”

“This girl is dead,” repeated Pockman, still looking significantly at Sadoul. Then he shrugged his bony shoulders, went over to the telephone and called his laboratory. While waiting, he said to Sadoul: “Here’s my chance, by God! It will take about three hours,” he added, “—and half an hour more——” His connection interrupted; he asked for somebody named Stent, got him immediately, talked to him unhurriedly.

When he came back he asked Sutton to go into Derring’s bedroom and get a sheet from the bed.

Sutton brought it; Pockman covered the recumbent figure decently, concealing the face also.

He said to Sutton: “Sadoul and I realise that this is a good opportunity for me to try something I am interested in.... It can’t harm her, anyway——”

“Do you mean that there is any chance of reviving her?” asked Sutton, his voice still hoarse from shock.

“Well—she’s dead.... Figure it out for yourself, Sutton.” And to Sadoul: “This is a damned unpleasant episode for old Derring and his party——”

... “Who was that girl?” interrupted Sutton, harshly.

“Her name was Gilda Greenway,” replied Sadoul, with composure; but his long fingers were working at the gilt fringe on his robe.

“Has she any family?” inquired Pockman.

“No, I believe not——”

“Well—what the devil!—She had a home somewhere, I suppose!”

Sadoul shook his head: “Possibly. I don’t know where she lived.”

Sutton opened the telephone directory. There were only two Greenways in the book. He called them up. Neither knew anything of Gilda Greenway.

Pockman turned to Sutton: “What were you doing with her up here?” he enquired with one of his pallid smirks.

“We were dancing—or going to. She wanted to look down at the floor from the gallery when they began throwing confetti.”

“Oh, sure,” said Pockman, but his pasty, flat features bore no trace of the sneer in his voice.

“We came up to the gallery,” continued Sutton, “and watched the battle of confetti and flowers. Then she peeped into Derring’s quarters and desired to inspect them.

“It was harmless curiosity—no matter what you’re thinking, Pockman. She looked the place over; we were standing over there by the portières. She was laughing; and then the music began downstairs—and we were starting to dance up here.... And then—good God!——”

“Just like that,” nodded Pockman, softly.

There was something subtly horrible about the vernacular as he used it in the dim room where death was. But death had become an old story to Pockman, and there were for him neither thrills nor shocks in the spectacle of human dissolution—nothing to awe or subdue or arouse emotion—only a fact of routine interest to a student preoccupied by original research.

He had a pale, flat, fat face, smoothly shaven; washed-out eyes; a tall, ill-made figure with very wide, square shoulders, and scanty, untidy hair of a faded hue.

He looked almost stealthily at Sutton, now, who, quite overcome by the tragedy, sat staring at the sheeted figure of the girl he had been laughing with half an hour ago.

“If you don’t feel like dancing,” said Pockman pleasantly, “stay here until my man Stent arrives. Sadoul and I are going down.”

“You don’t mean you are going to dance?”

“Sure,” replied Pockman, adjusting his mask. “Why not?”

Sadoul said nothing. After a moment he slowly put on his mask.

“Aren’t you going to tell Derring?” demanded Sutton.

“I’m no crape-hanger,” replied Pockman. “Why spoil Derring’s party? If you insist on staying here until Stent comes, you’d better lock the door or some of those fair young things downstairs will get the shock of their variegated lives.”

He started downstairs in his crown and fluttering yellow robes. Sadoul, in flamboyant crimson, followed him. After a moment Sutton got up and locked the door behind them, stood by it, looking back over his shoulder at the form on the day-bed, then he slowly returned to his chair.

The decency that kept him beside a dead stranger was purely emotional.

He gazed miserably at the shrouded figure. After a long while he rose, picked up her gilded crown and the little green slipper. The silken crescent which had masked her still lay beside her bed. This also he recovered, and then reseated himself, holding her toys in his lap, his boyish eyes full of tears.

It was all very well for a graduate physician like Pockman to exhibit callousness—and for the saturnine Sadoul—he of the long, horse face and black eyes and Vandyke—he of the murderous, mocking pen—the literary vivisectionist and jester at all lovable human frailties—it was well enough for him to remain obtuse.

But a plain young man, like Sutton, continues to be emotional, whatever garments of experience still clothe him.

He was horribly, profoundly upset.

Several times an unseen clock in a farther room struck a treble note in the stillness.

Faintly, too, came music and tumult from the gaiety below. Even the odour of roses penetrated the locked room.

Sutton, staring at the covered form, was thinking it rotten hard luck to be dead so young. He wondered who she could have been; who were her people, her friends; what hearts were going to break for such an ending as this.

He wondered whether she had been respectable—was fiercely inclined to believe so—wondered why she had consented to come to Derring’s party with Sadoul.

When again the silvery treble of the unseen clock sounded twice, Sutton glanced at his own timepiece. It lacked a few minutes of two o’clock. Gilda Greenway had been dead three hours and a half.

He rose and lifted a corner of the sheet. Her lower jaw had dropped. Horrified, he covered the dead face and went back to his chair, trembling.