# The Man Who Hated His Wife

Extracted from Cosmopolitan, May 1924, pp. 56–59, 108, 110.
$^{TheManWho}$ H$^{ATEDHIS}$ WIFE
$^{By}$ Robert Hichens
Illustrations by John Richard Flanagan
“What a life companion—that package—my wife for a man blazing with ideas!” exclaimed the Potentate.
IN a red hotel which used to stand on the sea-front at Naples I encountered Madame. She was traveling with a remarkable looking man who drew my attention before I took any notice of her. Indeed he practically effaced her by his strong personality, as a mighty rock effaces a small plant meekly sprouting in its shadow.
This man was enormous, much over six feet high, with great shoulders, a tremendously deep chest, a vast, jutting out stomach, big, sturdy legs, broad capacious feet. His startling bulk of body was finished off with a head and face which simply demanded your attention; the head covered with dense black hair brushed back from a mighty forehead and worn long over the nape of a thick bull-like neck; the face bronzed, with large handsome features quivering with expression, and hot, staring black eyes.
The mouth and chin were adorned with elaborate mustaches and an ample square-cut Assyrian beard.
The voice and manner of this personage were just what they should have been to accord with the rest of him. The former was a sonorous and commanding bass, the sort that would sound just the thing in the finale of Verdi's “Aida.” The latter—but that's more difficult to describe.
Sometimes it suggested to me an earthquake, at other times a storm at sea. It embraced voluminously, or rejected and dashed down with violence. It was gesticulatory. Hands, arms, head seemed always in movement. Often, too, the great body seemed to quake. The large hot eyes rolled. The Assyrian beard was thrust out this way and that, as if to the four points of the compass.
As I watched, imaginations of what Alexandre Dumas père must surely have been came to me. Did some obscure black blood, flowing in those canal-like veins, cause all this restless, yet not happy, exuberance? Was there a nigger hiding deep down somewhere in that gesticulating mass?
I sat not far from him in the restaurant and noticed that he was a great eater and that he drank like a Russian. Also he was an epicure and was never satisfied with the cooking. There were perpetual summonses to the maître d'hôtel, perpetual arguments, scoldings and commands. And these upheavals ended invariably in a a distribution of largesse. Tipping I cannot call it.
After dinner, when I came into the semi-Oriental hall which occupied the middle of the hotel, I would find the Potentate—as I had secretly named him—protuding from a large armchair, a mighty cigar in his mouth, a magnum of champagne in an ice pail beside him. Madame had vanished to some distant corner and was occupied with some foreign newspaper, as often as not held upside down. But one didn't miss her because one hadn't noticed her. The Potentate had a strange power of making those near him seem so unimportant that they became practically invisible. They were there, but one didn't genuinely see them. I didn't genuinely see Madame till some time after I had minutely observed every detail of her phenomenal companion.
He soon spoke to me. He soon spoke to everyone. Solitude was as abhorrent to him as tranquillity. Despite his evident herculean strength he was, I'm convinced, a martyr to neurasthenia. He had the mania of motion. He couldn't be quiet. He couldn't sit really still. Some malady of the mind or the nerves was forever whipping him. And he was forever responding to the lash. During the day he was heaven knows where; up Vesuvius, one volcano going to another, at Ana Capri, at Sorrento, coasting among the caves beyond Posilipo, visiting the prisons of Nisida, diving into the lowest quarters of Naples, here, there, everywhere.
But at eight-thirty he was usually to be found in the restaurant and generally after dinner he managed to stay in the hall for some time, companioned by the champagne and the ice pail and by anyone he could capture to serve as the victim of his avalanche of talk. Later, in a vast overcoat, with an immense black hat spreading wings about him, cigar in mouth, he would pass out by the revolving door and disappear into the night.
When he caught me coming out of the restaurant he poured iced champagne down my throat and smothered me with intimate information. He was a Brazilian, a doctor, a publicist, journalist, politician, millionaire. He owned great tracts of land, large segments of cities in South America, plantations, mines, ranches. He had built himself palaces. He showed me photographs of one, apparently all of white marble, with columns, terraces, fountains, bath-houses, lakes, tennis-courts, a racing track, exotic gardens. And he was there in the gardens, striking a tremendous attitude, his head exposed to a tropical sun.
The friend of presidents, it seemed that he had made revolutions and been instrumental in overthrowing governments and placing his nominees in positions of autocratic power. He had traveled all over the world, and was traveling still. He was in fact always traveling. He spoke of going from Naples to Japan, Tibet, New Zealand, Central Asia, the islands of the Southern Pacific. The round world shrank to the size of a pea as I listened to his uproar of conversation.
One night, when he caught me, Madame was as usual in the offing, but this time well in sight and well within hearing distance of us. She was sitting on a pseudo-divan, holding the “Berliner Tageblatt” upside down in front of her. The Potentate pointed at her with a big brown forefinger.
“That package is the curse of my life,” he said in his loud bass.
He spoke usually in French, with a tremendously strong accent, but often introduced Italian, Spanish and English words into the conversation.
I begged his pardon.
“That woman—my wife—she's a package!” He turned on me. The beard swept about me. “Look at her! Isn't she a package?” he bayed.
I said I really couldn't agree with him. I begged him to remember that the lady could hear everything that me said.
“Hear! She's a fool! She's an ignoramus! She understands no language but Portuguese. Think of being married to a package who understands not one word of any language but Portuguese!”
I did so.
“And isn't she ugly?” he exclaimed, with a violent gesture towards her. “Tell me—isn't she frightful? And I didn't marry her till I was forty and she was forty-three. So she wasn't even young. Look at her!”
Madame, at whom I then was obliged to look, was certainly not a beauty. She was very thin, with an indefinite flat face, powdered here and there in patches, a retreating chin and coarse, dusty looking dark hair, so badly arranged that it suggested that hens had been scratching about in it.
“Well?”
What could I say? I said nothing.
“Goon! I tell you she understands nothing but Portuguese!”
“But really——”
“You can shout. She won't understand you.”
But politeness prevented me from shouting that I thought Madame a very unfortunate looking female. Her timid, anxious eyes were upon me, peeping over the upside down newspaper. And they surely understand a language other than Portuguese.
“Just think!” the Potentate went on. “I have to drag that package there with me all over the world. She's been round the world with me three times already. And she sees nothing, comprehends nothing, enjoys nothing. What does she do? Sits in hotels all over the globe reading papers written in languages she can't understand upside down! What a life companion for a man blazing with ideas! But I'll pack her back to Brazil.” He spoke at her across the room. “One day when she least expects it down to the Port with her boxes, and”—he actually got up and extending his right leg brought it back, then shot it forward in a violent kick—“and off to Brazil with you, you package!”
He followed up the kick with a movement of his hands doubled up into fists.
“Boum—pouf—and off with you!”
I seemed to see the fists catching her in the small of the back and elsewhere, I seemed to see her shot over the gangplank head foremost into the ship that was bound for Brazil. Then I looked across the hall and met those small furtive eyes peeping over the “Berliner Tageblatt” upside down, and I believe I reddened.
“Really,” I said, turning to the Potentate, “really, I think we ought to be more—more careful.”
It wasn't a very adequate sentence, I know. He swept it away with a blast of withering scorn that seemed to run like fire through pampas grass.
“Haven't I told you again and again that she understands nothing but Portuguese?”
It was, I think, two days after this rather unfortunate introduction—if it can be properly called an introduction—to the Potentate's helpmate that between ten and eleven o'clock in the evening I was in the outer hall of the hotel, in front of the cage that served as the home of the electric lift. The Potentate, after a stormy hour with me by the ice pail, had just barged out alone into the night, having failed to persuade me to accompany him in a search for the horrors of Naples. Ever since dinner Madame had been sitting by a pseudo-hubble-bubble on the usual pseudo-divan, reading “Echo de Paris” upside down, while her spouse had been entertaining me with copious iced champagne and a torrent of abuse of her.
It seemed that matters matrimonial were moving rapidly towards a crisis in the Brazilian ménage. Monsieur was about to depart for Java—he had suddenly thrown over Tibet—and he had affirmed to me that evening that if he saw Madame sitting about in Java, reading Javanese papers upside down, he would assuredly strangle her “with his own hands.” He had indulged in a violent and marvelously expressive pantomime of strangling a reluctant consort, during which Madame's small eyes had peeped at us both over the bottom of the “Echo de Paris.” And then, foaming more or less over my refusal to bear him company, he had flung away into the night. Now, feeling really rather unnerved by it all, I was on my way to bed.
I must tell you that in our hotel we sometimes operated the lift ourselves by shutting the gate and pressing a button. I was now bringing the lift down from an upper story. It arrived empty, and not seeing any attendant at the moment I stepped in, shut the cage gate and was about to press the button which would take me up to the third floor when I saw peeping at me through the bars of the gate the small furtive eyes of the Potentate's wife.
Knowing she understood no language but Portuguese I felt it was useless to address her in English, French or Italian, the only languages I can speak, and I therefore asked her by gesture if she wanted to go up. She nodded vaguely, whereupon ] opened the gate, let her in and then by facial expression and hand pantomime inquired which floor she wished to go to. She pointed to my button, the third floor button. I pressed it and the lift immediately began to ascend. We had glided upwards past two floors when the electric light went out, the lift stopped between floors two and three, and the Potentate's wife and I were imprisoned in total darkness. Evidently a short-circuit had occurred.
Now while the lift had been in movement Madame had been sitting on a narrow seat with which it was provided and I had remained standing ready to open the gate when we arrived at the third floor. Neither of us of course had uttered a word to the other. I could not speak Portuguese, and besides we had never been formally introduced to one another. Certainly I had been asked in her presence whether she wasn't frightful and had been told I could shout my acquiescence. I had also been told, when she was there, that she was a package, a fool, an ignoramus, that she had been forty-three when she married, that she read newspapers in languages she didn't understand upside down all over the world, that she saw nothing, comprehended nothing, enjoyed nothing, that if she went to Java she was going to be strangled, but that in all probability she would be kicked almost immediately on board a vessel bound for South America and exported to Brazil. All this might perhaps be said to have forged a sort of link between us. Still I must repeat that in my opinion it scarcely constituted a strictly formal introduction. And now we were closeted together in the pitch dark and might be there, isolated from the outer world, for a considerable time.
I felt, I confess, rather awkward as I remained standing perfectly still.
There was at first not a sound from the Potentate's wife. She mightn't have been there, so mute was she. I remember absurdly thinking, “Suppose she's dead!” (Such ridiculous thoughts come to you in the dark.) She might be dead. Some people did die suddenly. She might be one of them. If it were so, if she were dead, should I be compromised? I found myself asking that question of myself. A comparatively young man is discovered shut up alone in a pitch dark lift between two floors with a dead lady from Brazil, whom he had been seen to let into the lift a few minutes before in apparently perfect health!
It hadn't at all a nice sound about it! I had to admit that to myself. It didn't suggest a nice character at all. And how would the Potentate take it? I knew of course that he was anxious to strangle the lady, but I knew also that his intention was, if the strangling were to be done, to do it with his own hands. He had expressly said so, and more than once. If he thought he had reason to suppose that I had stepped in and taken the matter into my own competence, he mightn't like it. He mightn't like it at all. He might consider that I had played false with him, had as it were stolen his idea and used it before he had had leisure to. He might turn nasty, and if he did I should probably have an exceedingly unpleasant time.
I was beginning to feel extremely apprehensive when out of the darkness came a thin soprano murmur of words which I didn't understand. Madame was not dead and was saying something to me, doubtless in Portuguese. “I'm so sorry I don't understand Portuguese,” I replied politely.
The murmur came again. “Je le regrette beaucoup mais je ne comprends pas la langue portugaise,” I said.
For the third time the voice spoke.
“Mi rincresce tanto tanto, ma veramente non capisco la bella lingua del Portogallo,” I exclaimed in desperation.
To my intense surprise the voice said: “'Elp me! I spik little Inglis, French, Italian, little German, too. 'Elp me! Aidez moi! Sauvez moi!” There was a second of deep silence. Then came a sort of thin cry out of the darkness. “Aiutatemi, Signorino!”
“I don't understand German,” I said hastily, fearing that Madame would break into that language and then go on possibly to Spanish, Russian, Greek, Roumanian, Dutch and other European languages. “But don't be afraid. It's only a short-circuit. I'm convinced of that. Probably in a few minutes it will be all right. Meanwhile there's no danger.”
“'Elp me!” the voice replied. “Sauvez moi!”
“I assure you, Madame, I gladly would if I could do anything. But we are between two floors and there's no possible means of getting out. You see, the lift——”
“'E is mad!”
“It wasn't my fault! I swear on my sacred honor, it wasn't my——”
“No, no! What I mean is that the lift——”
“I not understand!”
“L'ascenseur! L'ascenseur! L'ascensore!”
“'Elp me! 'E is mad! Il est fou. E pazzo!”
“But it isn't the lift's fault, really, Madame. What has happened is this. There has been a short-circuit and——”
“I say 'e is mad.”
“But it's the electricity which has—”
“You t'ink not. 'E give you champagne. Vous en buvez. Vous pensez qu'il—you t'ink 'im good man. But 'e is mad.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon! You are speaking about your husband. I thought you were upset about the lift.”
“'Elp me! Bitte helfen Sie mir! helfen Sie mir!”
“Madame, I'm very sorry but I don't understand Ger——
“'E is mad. Er ist verrückt! 'Elp me, sair!”
Now that I understood the exact meaning of this oft-repeated exclamation I began to feel extremely uncomfortable. I was very sorry for the poor lady. Her situation awoke all my chivalrous feelings. The prospect before her if, as was at least possible, she did ever reach Java with the Potentate was certainly very far from reassuring. No one likes to be strangled, and she was probably as averse as anybody else to such an end. Nevertheless I really didn't quite see what I could do.
“Per-raps you—peut-étre vous comprenez Spaneesh, sair?” the voice broke in on my anxious self-communing.
“I don't, Madame, not one word! I must ask you to stick to English, French or Italian.”
“'Elp me! 'E is mad!”
This reiteration of a very unpleasant, even sinister, statement began to get on my nerves. Things always seem worse in the dark. Hideous visions of the Potentate mad rose before my imagination. Such a large man—mad! It scarcely bore thinking.of. A moderate-sized man gone crazy is all very well, but dementia on such a scale as the Potentate's would be altogether too much, a thoroughly inartistic piece of exaggeration.
“'Elp ...”
“Madame!” I exclaimed, “I only wish I could, but you must realize how very difficult my position is in this matter. I know your husband so very little. And besides”—suddenly the ice pail rose before me in the darkness—“besides, I have received nothing but hospitality at his hands. I have drunk his champagne. How can I interfere? How can I take any steps which might end in his incarceration in a lunatic asylum?”
“When you spik I understand no t'ing.”
I realized that in my excitement I had been talking with voluble rapidity. Now I bent forward in the direction in which I believed Madame to be located—I was beginning to get confused, to lose my bearings, as one easily may in the dark—and said very slowly:
“Your husband has given me champagne, iced champagne. That makes my position very delicate. Champagne! you understand? Cham-pagne!”
That word, pronounced first English, then French fashion, evidently got home to what Madame no doubt thought of as her brain. For she replied with unexpected lucidity:
“Il donne toujours du champagne. 'E give champagne to all. In France 'e give champagne, in Italie, in Japon, dans les Indes. When I say ''Elp! everyone 'e say 'Champagne!'”
This was a veritable heart cry and it did not leave me unmoved.
There was something genuinely pathetic and terrible in the thought of this poor and ineffective lady being whirled about the habitable globe by the extraordinary being she had somehow—how I could not conceive—had somehow married, being whirled about the globe, and when she appealed in all the languages of the nations for help in her doubtless very grave dilemma, being met always by the same very brief remark, “Champagne!” Something terrible in it, but something irresistibly comic, too! And in the dark I saw men of all nations, in all quarters of the world, being caught by the Potentate as they emerged from the restaurant of hotels de luxe, and held captive by the ice pail, while Madame sat in the offing, peeping at them over her upside down newspaper and realizing that yet another possible rescuer was being rendered impotent by the cruel generosity of the Brazilian phenomenon. And the farcical comedy of it struck away the tragedy out of my mind, and I began to laugh.
That was dreadful, but I couldn't help it any more than a man with a keen sense of humor can help laughing in church when anything ridiculous happens there. I laughed. I shook with laughter. My whole body quivered and was convulsed with laughter. And tears of laughter ran out of my eyes and down my laughing face. But through it all I was intent on not making a noise. Some, I hope gentlemanly, instinct prompted the avoidance of the roar. And I believe this praiseworthy endeavor would have been crowned with success if just at the crisis of my convulsion the thin voice out of the darkness had not exclaimed:
“'Elp me, sair! Aidez moi! Aiutatemi, Signorino!” And then, though she knew surely by this time I didn't understand German: “Helfen Sie mir! Er ist verrückt.”
I think it was the German that finished me off. Anyhow, when she said the last words I saw all the nations, represented by their male populations, round the Potentate's ice pail, and I let out one of the biggest bursts of laughter that probably ever broke from the frame of a man.
Long ago in a French farce called “Les surprises du divorce” I saw Coquelin ainé in a laughing scene. He began to laugh and he couldn't stop. His laughter escaped entirely from control, like Frankenstein's monster. It dominated him, it devastated him, it ransacked him from top to toe, it reduced him finally to a sort of human jelly, but still he went on laughing. The mind had long since ceased from laughing, but the body couldn't stop laughing. It was doubled up with laughing while the mind looked on shocked.
So I laughed that night in the lift with Madame. I thought of her marriage to the Potentate at the mature age of forty-three, and laughed. I thought of her traveling three times round the globe with him, doing nothing except read foreign newspapers upside down, and laughed. I thought of the Potentate's gradually going mad under the stress of her impotent companionship, and laughed. I thought of the Potentate's rendering all the knights-errant who might have succored the poor lady innocuous by means of iced champagne, and laughed. I thought of her being picked on board a ship bound for Brazil, and laughed. I thought of her being strangled by the Potentate in Java, and shrieked with laughter. Yes, I grieve to say it, that final vision of tragedy made me throw back my head in the by then almost suffocating darkness and laugh till my knees gave way.
How long I laughed I shall never know. But at length human nature seemed to go on strike from sheer exhaustion. My mind had long since stopped laughing, or even smiling. Now the last drops of laughter oozed—so I felt it—out of the squeezed sponge of my body. The tears of laughter began to dry on my cheeks, and in another moment I should have returned to my normal self-possession when just at the psychological moment I heard the thin voice say in the darkness, “Why you laugh, sair?”
And that set me off again.
When at last I did finally and permanently stop, stop “for good and all,” I felt physically exhausted and mentally very much ashamed of myself. I realized that I must have made a quite tremendous row and wondered whether my terrible outburst of merriment had been carried by the lift shaft, as by a sound conductor, into the farthest corners of the hotel. If so, what would people think? When a man shouts with laughter in a dark lift stuck between two floors the most natural supposition would surely be that he is singularly devoid of proper feeling. And when it is known—as I realized that it must by this time be known in the hotel—that his companion in misfortune is an elderly Brazilian lady, of permanently lugubrious temperament and entirely devoid of all sense of humor, and moreover that this lady is a total stranger to him, how must his conduct appear to all decent and right-thinking people?
My own laughter had rendered me deaf to any outside happenings, though not to the still, small Brazilian voice enclosed with me in the lift, but now I found myself listening intently for noises from the hotel. Madame, after the question which had renewed my convulsions. had subsided into the death-like silence which had alarmed me at the beginning of our adventure. I conceived of her as finally stricken dumb by my shameless hilarity. But I was now concerned not with her but with the hotel. Our imprisonment could not be permanent. We should presently be enabled to emerge once more into the outer world. How should I be received there after what had just taken place? I listened as I don't think I have ever listened either before or since.
Presently I seemed to become aware of great confusion at a distance, of a confusion manifesting itself in multitudinous noises which were all blended together into an indeterminate something that was neither sound nor silence. And I was obscurely conscious that the hotel must be in an uproar.
Now what could be the cause of an uproar in the hotel? I asked myself the question and I immediately thought of the Potentate.
I had now lost all count of time and really had not the remotest idea how long we had been shut up in the lift. Had we been there for a quarter of an hour, for an hour, for two hours? The Potentate had flung out into the night sometime after ten o'clock, and I had thought to retire to bed almost immediately after his departure. If Madame and I had been in the lift for half an hour or so it must be about eleven o'clock. But it might well be later. Possibly it was near midnight. I began to wonder at what hour the Potentate usually returned from his nocturnal excursions. Beneath us, it seemed to me now, the muffled uproar in the hotel was growing in volume. What could be the cause of such mysterious confusion in a hitherto well-ordered establishment? Had the Potentate——
But I put the ugly thought from me.
I realized that I had no definite idea what happened in a first-class hotel when a lift containing an elderly lady from Brazil and a comparatively young Englishman stuck fast in the dark between two floors. The matter was outside my experience of life. I could only guess and imagine. But guess and imagine as I might, the ugly conviction remained with me: “The Potentate has returned and has found out about the lift.”
What he was doing in consequence of having found out, of course I couldn't know. But having observed his demonstrations in the restaurant when an omelet was lacking in truffles or when a bottle of Burgundy wasn't warmed to a nicety, I could deduce from them what he might well be capable of if he imagined that his honor was in question. And he wouldn't be reasonable. At all times he was like a thoroughly unreasonable volcano. It would, I knew, be quite useless for me to tell him that I hadn't deliberately arranged for a short-circuit in order that I might secure an undisturbed tête-à-tête with Madame. He wouldn't believe me. I remembered my reiterated refusal to go out with him that night. By Jove, that would look bad too if he suspected anything! He would certainly bring that up against me.
I found myself sweating profusely with heat and apprehension.
“Why you laugh, sair?” said the thin voice.
I began to understand in some degree why the Potentate had at any rate thought of strangling my companion. Why will women go back upon the past? Why will they rake up memories which are far best forgotten? It seemed to me now incredible that I had ever laughed, and I was intensely irritated by this cross-examination upon a matter which was, as I recognized, very little to my credit, and which it was quite impossible for me to explain to anyone, least of all to Madame. For how could I possibly tell her the simple truth, which was that I had nearly died of laughing because I had been visualizing her assassination at the hands of the Potentate in Java?
“I can't explain, Madame,” I said. “Please don't ask me. Please forget all about it. And now I beg you to tell me something. At what time does your husband usually come back?”
“Sair?”
“At what hour does your husband generally come in to go to bed?”
“Sair?”
I clenched my hands. “A quelle heure votre mari—votre mari! Comprenez vous?—à quelle heure se couche-t-il généralement?”
“Sair?”
I raised my fists, as the Potentate had raised his in the pantomime of the exportation to Brazil. “Vostro marito—capisce Lei? Vostro marito—a che ora va a letto?”
“Sair?”
“At what o'clock—a quelle heure—a che ora——”
“I understand no t'ing!”
“But you told me that you spoke Inglis—I mean English—French, Italian and even German. But you assured me—mais vous m'avez assuré que—ma Lei mi ha detto che Lei parlava quattro lingue, guattro lingue——”
“When you spik I understand no t'ing.”
The perspiration was dropping from me. I was bathed in it, partly on account of the intense heat generated in the lift shaft, but partly also, I am certain, on account of my mental exasperation, my fear of the immediate future and my inability to induce my extraordinary companion to comprehend any mortal thing I said. That was it, then! She was one of those intolerable women who can't comprehend one word of any language spoken to them. And I remembered that the Potentate had told me that Portuguese was the only language she understood, not that Portuguese was the only language she spoke. For all I knew she might be able to speak badly in all the living languages extant. But it was quite certain that she was totally incapable of grasping the meaning of the simplest sentence in any one of them, however carefully spoken to her.
Suddenly desperation rose in me. I resolved that somehow I would make this extraordinary being understand me. And I recollected having been told that the best way to force a very stupid or very ignorant or very obstinate person into comprehension of your meaning is to speak of something which vitally affects his, or her, comfort, safety or happiness—of money owed, for instance, or of food long overdue, or of personal insecurity—such as danger to life or limb.
I therefore crouched forward in the darkness towards where I supposed Madame to be and said in a penetrating voice: “If you value your life on no account go to Java!”
“Sair?” came, to my great surprise, from immediately behind me.
I spun round. “N'allez pas à Java, je vous en prie, Madame! N'allez jamais à Java!”
“'Elp me, sair!”
“I'm trying to help you. Lei non deve andare a Java! Ha capito?”
“When you spik I understand no t'ing.”
“Don't go to Java!” I roared.
“'Elp me, sair!”
“I'm telling you——” My voice failed me.
“Aiutatemi, Signorino! Helfen Sie mir!”
“I don't understand Ger——”
“Er ist verrückt! 'E 'ave give you champagne but 'e is mad. È pazzo. È pazzissimo! Monsieur, c'est un grand fou! Ich fürchte mich vor ihm. Aber was soll ich thun? Niemand hilft mir, weil Sie alle zusammen von seinem Champagner getrunken haben. Ich bitte Sie——”
“Madame, how many times must I tell you that I don't under——”
“Wenn mir niemand helfen will weiss ich wirklich nicht was ich thun soll. Er ist mein Mann aber er hat mich nicht lieb. Wenn Sie nur——”
But at this point in our conversation a diversion occurred. The electric light gleamed out once more, and I found that I was standing up in the lift with my back to Madame and my face to the folding doors. I was about to turn round when the lift moved upwards and stopped with a jerk. Concluding that at last we reached floor number three I pulled the door inwards and was confronted by a wall. We had stuck again.
But something—it seemed fatally—drew my glance upwards and I saw above the wall, through the bottom of a grille, a pair of enormous feet and the beginnings of two mighty legs. They were immovable, like things put outside a bedroom door at night to be cleaned, Despite the bars which partially concealed them, I knew them for what they were—the Potentate's feet and ankles—and I looked round at Madame.
“For mercy's sake,” I whispered, “don't——”
The lift moved with a jerk and stuck again, I was now confronted by a mountainous protuberance decorated with a cable chain of gold and a whole family of seals of various shapes and sizes: Again I turned my head.
“For heaven's sake!” I whispered urgently, “mind you don't——”
“Sair?”
“Dites lui que—spiegate che quando voi siete venuto——”
The lift glided smoothly upward, stop gently, blandly almost, and I was face to face with the Potentate. His enormous black eyes were staring into mine. His Assyrian beard was thrust out towards me. He still wore the vast overcoat and enormous hat in which he had passed out into the night.
“It isn't my fault!” I began through the bars. “I assure you solemnly that——”
He flung open the lift gate. I thought of course that he was going to assault me, but his eyes traveled fiercely beyond me to Madame, who was still seated in the corner and who now peeped out into the regained world exactly as she peeped over her newspapers.
The Potentate looked at her and then at me in deadly silence.
“I positively assure you,” I began again, “I solemnly swear on my honor that——”
He swept aside my excuses with a gesture. I stepped meekly out onto the landing. Exactly what happened then I don't know. But I suppose Madame must have summoned courage to get out of the lift of her own accord, for the next thing I remember was seeing her thin back and scratchy head of hair disappearing in the distance of the corridor. She seemed to creep round the corner and was gone. I was alone with the Potentate.
He took out an immense gold watch and looked at it. “The electric light and power failed all over Naples at twenty minutes to eleven,” he said in the “Aida” bass. “It's twelve o'clock now. You've been shut in there alone with her for an hour and twenty minutes.”
“It wasn't my fault! I positively assure you, I swear on my sacred honor, that it wasn't my——”
“For an hour and twenty minutes—and you haven't strangled her!”
He stared into my eyes like one who regards a phenomenon, something which he sees but in which he finds it almost impossible to believe.
Then without another word he turned and walking as it seemed to me with majestic contempt, disappeared round the corner of the corridor.
I kept my room all next day. On the following morning when I ventured out I learn from the polite young man at the bureau that the Potentate and Madame had just set sail for Java.
We speak of love at first sight. Will love die just as suddenly if, for instance, the loved one commits some despicable act? That is the question answered in Robert Hichens's next dramatic story, in an early Cosmopolitan
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1950, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 73 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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