“Benson!” She was speaking to the man behind the bar. “Close this now. Most of the guests have gone.” She slipped a hand into the crook of Otto’s arm—and he found himself walking beside her from the room and along a corridor which he had not been in before. She said:
“There’s something about that man Etter I don’t like. . . . You were a nice boy to wait such a long time.” She laughed softly. “But it was bad of you to try and run away. Suppose I hadn’t caught you!”
They stopped walking and she was opening a door and they were entering a small, pretty room which seemed half-study, half-library. She said:
“If I were a man, I suppose they’d call this my ‘den.’ But it’s nice, don’t you think? Now you just sit down and be comfortable. There are drinks there. . . . Mix yourself one . . . and smoke . . . and wait for me just five minutes while I speed the left-overs.”
She was gone, and Otto was left staring at the door. After a moment he crossed to the side-table where the tray was and poured himself a small drink. He carried the glass around the room, looking at pictures without seeing them; noting without conscious thought the several inner doors—three in all—which led from this room to others; thinking, very deliberately, about nothing at all except that in no circumstances should his reactions be other than those of Nils Jorgensen.
She was back in less than ten minutes—and with her was a man-servant who carried a tray and champagne glasses and a silver-bound oaken bucket from which, beneath the napkin which covered the ice, protruded the neck of a gold-foiled bottle.
“Down there, Charles.” She pointed. “And the glasses here. No, don’t open it.”
The man obeyed with silent deftness and was gone, the door closing softly behind him. Otto crushed out the cigarette he had just lighted—and then took another one. He became aware that his hostess had crossed behind him and was now sitting at the strange-shaped little writing-table. He lighted the new cigarette and smiled at her—even Nils Jorgensen could do that!
She said: “We’ll have a drink in a minute, Nils.” She had opened the centre drawer of the desk and was searching in it. The strange hair gleamed and the soft light caressed the smoothness of her shoulders.
She said: “I want to write an address down for you—now, while I remember it. I’ll tell you why later.” She took a pad of paper from the drawer and began to scribble fast upon it in a large dashing script.
A sound came from Otto’s lips; a strange sound, instantly repressed, which was half grunt, half gasp. He had come nearer to the table as she took out the paper—and now he was staring at the pencil with which she was writing: it was a small, slim thing of gold and silver, but in place of its cap was a tiny, neatly whittled plug of cedar-wood!
The point broke, and she threw the thing down with a gesture of annoyance. She said, without looking up:
“Lend me a pencil, will you? This has broken.”
Automatically, Otto’s hand went to his breast-pocket and came away with his own pencil. He laid it on the table, near her hand. His mind felt numb.
She picked it up and sat back in her chair and looked at him. Her face was different somehow: the eyes seemed to have changed colour. It was difficult for Otto to meet their scrutiny.
He was waiting for her to speak; but she did not and he remembered. He said:
“It . . . must be very late. Do you please know the time?”
“It’s seventy-one minutes past the hour—or earlier.” Her voice, whetted to a sharp edge of impersonality, was as changed as her face.
“The thirtieth of February is the day,” she said then—and Otto’s cup of somehow humiliating astonishment was filled to overflowing, for this was the phrase which meant that its user was no mere cog in the Machine but a master part.
He stood stiffly to attention now, though it is doubtful that he knew he was doing so. The eyes which had seemed to change colour studied him through a long silence. His mouth felt dry, and he moistened his lips with the point of his tongue. He tried to keep all sign of feeling from his face. She said:
“You seem . . . astounded, Captain.”
“I . . . I confess I am . . . surprised.” Otto fumbled over his words. Again he tried to moisten his lips.
The eyes still studied him. “You should not show it—in your new line of duty.” She took a cigarette from a silver box and put it between her lips. “A match,” she said. “In front of you there.”
Otto had to force himself to move. He took a match from the glass bowl and broke it in striking and had to use another. He succeeded this time and bent over the desk, shielding the flame in hands which refused to obey his command to be completely steady.
She lit the cigarette and leaned back in her chair and looked at him again.
“You’ve been wondering when your orders would come.” She made the words statement rather than question. “And in what manner.”
Otto stood stiffly before the desk and was silent.