Snapdragon and Ghosts

'VE brought you a Christmas present, Leslie—a ring which has the power of granting wishes."

The girl eyed the trinket as trustfully as a wild animal regards a trap. It was a half-hoop of diamonds, and much resembled an engagement ring.

The man smiled as she drew it on her index finger.

"I wish—I wish for an old-fashioned Christmas—snow, snapdragon, and ghosts!"

She crossed to the open window.

"Look! Nothing's happened!"

Below them stretched a dun, tideless sea, pricked with lamp-posts, above was a bagging ceiling-cloth of smoke-clogged vapour, and all around were the honey-combed cells of the block of flats.

Then from the invisible street arose a boy's thin treble. He kept the tune, also his accent, which was the canned twang of cities.

Leslie winced as she slammed down the window. She was a well-grown girl, with crystal-clear eyes and a youthful blur on her cheeks. With the same furious energy she wrenched off the ring.

"Take it back, George! It's very kind of you, but it's not pukka magic. Give it to someone who has the power to make it work."

"Very well. I will take it back—for the present. But you did not try the right finger for the spell."

He spoke with meaning, while he invited her scrutiny, with no fear of the stock-taking. He kept his goods in his hop window, with the approved labels: "Virility," "Pep," "Clean Living," "Open-Air Life," all achieved by Turkish baths, a smile which had paid him better than his education, and a stomach which was still taking its punishment.

But Leslie was not conscious of his presence. She was conscious only of the mass of humanity all around her, below and above her, of air thickened with voices, staled with breath, fouled with footsteps.

It was one of her bad days, which came when she was run down mentally and physically—days when she hungered for wide spaces and panted to climb to the chimney-pots of the world and hurl herself into the blue.

The high rental of the flats was justified solely by locality. Leslie believed that in the beginning an honest architect built an honest house, suitable to the good old Victorian days when families were twelve to a score of years and Providence looked after the future. That mischievous urchin, the architect's son, spoiled the original plan by ruling small squares all over it. When he achieved manhood, he chanced upon his childish drawing and found therein the essentials of good modern architecture.

So he partitioned each room into three, filched odd fragments therefrom, which were kitchen and bathroom, and gave each its own front door. And the rent of the house was the rent of each flat thereof.

Leslie took four wide strides which brought her up flush with the yellow wall.

"George," she said vehemently, "if anyone could look down—down, this city must seem like a black fly-paper, all buzzing with wretched little limed folks!"

He laughed as her voice broke in a croak.

"You've the grandfather of all the colds. Better not talk, old dear. You've got to be fit for Christmas."

"Christmas? There's no such word here. It's just a date on the calendar—December the twenty-fifth."

He whistled softly, for Leslie was usually too vital and tonic to be the victim of nerves. Then he gave a sigh of relief as the door of the bedroom was opened and his sister Beryl came in, armed with a couple of thermos flasks.

She was a beautiful blonde, with a permanent wave in her hair and a fish-bone in the throat of her natural impulses. She kept her emotions in cold storage and her money in the bank, for she lived by virtue of co-operative housekeeping with Leslie, who had no head for applied arithmetic.

She raised her brows imperceptibly. Her brother replied by wireless—

"Stuck!"

"I'm through with my packing, Leslie." Her voice held the clear diction of an occasional actress in straight drama. "What about yours, Leslie?"

"Plenty of time. I'm only taking a grip."

Beryl glanced at her sharply.

"Anything wrong?"

"Nothing. Just Christmas. It makes me think back, and then I get soggy and sentimental.… Christmas in the country, with red firelight and decorations, and the smell of cooking, and the family coming home for the holidays. That's inside. Outside is a white world, with the light streaming from the church window, where they are practising the carols. 'Peace on earth'"

Something more than a relaxed larynx choked Leslie's voice.

Peace on earth? With Caruso on the gramophone at No. 11, a jazz on the pianola at No. 13, and at No. 15 a ladies' tea-party, with a little quiet conversation with ladies just across the way in Mars; a child crying at No. 12, a Pom yapping for the moon at No. 14, and at No. 16 a sick man making the best of it by trying to die.

Beryl, who was sound-proof, began to laugh.

"Snow and holly and tame robins buttoning up their little red waistcoats! Be honest, woman! You lived in the West. Wasn't it a warm wind, and muddy lanes, and charcoal in the turkey to keep it from going?"

"Mostly," admitted Leslie. "But once in a while we did have old-fashioned weather, with skating and frost flowers on your window. I keep thinking of that. Oh, dear heart! I do want it all back again! … Give me those flasks, and I'll heat up the coffee."

She felt that she must escape, if only for a few minutes, from those others. In half an hour the three would be penned in a railway carriage, on their way to the South Coast hydro. There they would follow the Spirit of Mirth through the trail of the programme of festivities, and howl "Auld Lang Syne" with a collection of overfed, sentimental strangers.

Leslie panted anew for the mountain-top. Meantime the Child would be reborn. And there was no manger at the hydro, only a feeding-trough.

The kitchen, like the rest of the flat, had yellow walls, black painted woodwork, and hangings of Chinese blue. It was a dishonest little crook of a room, and uncongenial to Leslie, who was a real homey person.

It had no qualities. No flames roared in the heart of its stove, which displayed the mysteries of its art of creation through a transparent panel. Behind plate-glass shelves were tins of sophisticated food, each with its artistic label, no jars of flour, spice, or plums, no smell of freshly-baked apple dumplings—nothing to regale the appetite, nothing to satisfy the Christmas spirit. It was a kitchen in name only.

At first Leslie had enjoyed the novelty of sharing the flat with Beryl Webb. Clad in wondrous cretonne overalls splashed with peacocks and parrots, and lighting rather more cigarettes than she smoked, she had designed her wallpapers with that youthful zest which made earning her living only another adventure. The flats then were to her only so many stories to the stars, for she was in love with the topmost tenant.

Douglas Burns had a flat among the chimney-pots, with an armchair, a flying-pan, and a varied assortment of pipes. Unlike George Webb, he offered no surface attractions, but presented a problem in raining to discover what went to his making.

A shortish, square-built man, with a rough-hewn face and a quiet voice, yet a fairy, for all that—one of the scientific genus who unite oceans and remove mountains. In other words, an engineer.

When Leslie had inherited her legacy, she had made no difference in her life. Presently, however, she found that life had altered in its attitude to her. Small incidents, trivial yet cumulative, had culminated in Christmas Eve, when she found herself bounded on the north, south, east, and west by George Webb, while Burns had withdrawn to the back of Godspeed.

Leslie shut the kitchen door with a sense of relief. This room contained two of her treasures—relics of the past. One was the dress-cupboard, which she had chosen from the wreck of her old home—a wondrous substantial ark of mahogany lined with cedar-wood. The other was her picture of the highwayman, masked and mounted, in caped coat and three-cornered hat, waiting for the stage coach.

He had waited for it for over a hundred years, there in the triangular patch of pines on the blasted heath, with the thin nail-paring of a moon, which would never swell to the full, riding in the amethyst sky.

The coffee got outside the pan as Leslie brooded over the picture. Within the limits of its frame were frosty space and romance and the spirit of the old-time Christmas, when lawlessness was adventure, and one tied up one's gifts with a true lover's knot.

"Holloa! Still stirring the Christmas pudding in the old home town in the West?"

As Beryl salvaged the coffee, her smile was acid as citron.

"I can see you, Leslie, the stock-coloured supplement of the Christmas number. You are the girl with the curls, in the full evening-dress of serviceable tulle, who's just finished her stunt of wreathing the church pillars with holly.… My grief! That broken-nosed highwayman has a look of Douglas Burns. By the way, he's just blown in."

With a lightning transposition of values, the little yellow mouse-trap was charged with a rich, full-flavoured Dickens atmosphere of roast goose and nut-brown ale, mistletoe and ice, snapdragon and ghosts. Leslie remembered that her highwayman was probably a pock-marked, unfragrant rascal, and that in another hundred years the block of flats and the South Coast hydro would be growing crusted and historic.

Her eyes were bright with anticipation as she followed Beryl into the sitting-room, where the two men were talking in jerks and not looking at each other.

Burns threw her a swift glance, tapped out his pipe, and rose.

"Well, I must be off. Just dropped in to wish you a good time and a merry Christmas, and all that sort of thing."

The glow faded from Leslie's face. It was always like this, the eager throb of welcome ending in the formal handshake of farewell.

"Are you going away for Christmas?" she asked.

"I shall probably pad the hoof. Moors."

"Moors! Fine. I'd love to do that. Just sun and wind and no one to see you but God."

"If you wish to test that theory, just try stealing a sheep. My word, you've a ripe, old-fashioned cold! Don't forget to take a flask of brandy."

"Thanks. That completes my collection of the hundred best remedies. I'm going to follow my granny and tie an old stocking round my throat."

"Well, don't talk, or your voice will go. Cheerio!"

"Time to pack, Leslie!"

They chased her out of the sitting-room as though she were an infectious germ.

She packed mechanically, her thoughts far from tissue-paper, face-foods, and boot-trees. In the same dream she put on her hat and coat and filled her flask with brandy. There was a little thrill of pleasure in following Burns's advice.

Hearing Beryl call, she hastened to fasten her grip. To her annoyance, she had packed too tightly, and the wedged sides refused to meet. Some bulky garment had to be discarded.

"Coming!"

Hurriedly dragging out a thick quilted silk dressing-gown, she rushed into the kitchen, where her summer things were stored away in the press. She stepped inside it, and as she was groping with frantic haste to find a muslin wrapper, she heard Beryl's voice the other side of the door.

"She's in the bedroom. Quick, George! Have you asked her?"

"Began to. Nothing doing—at present."

"George! She never turned you down?"

"She didn't have the chance to turn me down." The splendid George spoke with a certain irritation. "I saw she wasn't in the mood with that rotten cold."

"Well, I'd have snapped her up before she got to the hydro. There's plenty of competition for an heiress. I've had my work cut out keeping others off the grass."

Leslie shrank back into the unresponsive arms of the summer dressing-gown she had just located. In view of the extreme awkwardness of the situation, she had to remain an unwilling audience. She felt grateful that the cupboard door was closed, so that it was outlined by only a mere crack of light.

Beryl's last words had evidently given George food for reflection. He leaned suddenly against the cupboard and took out his pipe.

"Does the strong silent gorilla blow in often?"

"Burns? Not now. He was very keen at one time, but I rubbed it in that Leslie was very awake to fortune-hunters."

"Oh!" gasped the wrapper, thrilled to its very hem.

"That's a nasty knock for me, old dear!" George's laugh was half shamed, half cynical. "Burns doesn't seem a bad sort. A bit keen on him yourself, aren't you?"

"Am I?" Beryl's voice was careless. "He's—rather a lamb. We ought to be starting. Leslie! Leslie!"

Leslie, gasping among the summer finery, was not answering to her name. The circumstances put it out of the question. Moreover, her mind, was a jungle of rioting emotions through which one truth soared triumphant.

Douglas Burns had not changed towards her. Both had been pawns in Beryl's fingers, ambitious of a dowried wife for her brother, and for herself a lover caught on the rebound.

She heard Beryl's voice, now blurred as though by distance. Apparently they had left the kitchen, for the pencil of light had disappeared.

"I can't find Leslie anywhere in the flat. Do you think she has gone out to get a taxi?"

"Probably. Where's her grip?"

Leslie held her breath. She had left it under the kitchen table.

"I don't see it," replied Beryl.

"I should say she's gone on to make the train early and reserve seats. Sherlock's my middle name. We'd better thither, in any case."

Leslie waited until a distant slam told her that the flat was empty and locked for a week. She was trembling with varied emotions, but prudence told her that she must follow them as soon as possible to the station. Although she had to go through with the festivities at the hydro, she would be on guard. The holiday would give her time to think of how she should salve the wounds to Burns's self-respect. Already the future seemed powdered with star-dust.

She pushed the door, but, to her surprise, it did not swing open. She tried again with fingers which suddenly grew hot and ineffective. The door had a spring lock, but she had been careful not to fasten it.

The gramophone in the next flat broke into a band record of carols. The tea-party ladies grew more festive, for no tea was drunk at that party.

Leslie's heart dropped a beat. She put her shoulder against the door and pushed with all her strength. It did not yield.

At that moment the gramophone broke into a wailing chorus, as though heavy with the burden of old sorrows and old sins— The blood left Leslie's heart and rushed to her head. She remembered now how George had pressed against the door, also the dulled voices and the darkness. She was locked in the cupboard, like the little bride of over a century ago who had hidden in the oak chest on her wedding night, in the full tide of her youth and love and life.

And now, in tones of unutterable dolour, the gramophone was telling the end of the years-long search—a mouldered veil, a withered wreath, a handful of—bones.

A careless wish dropped into the dun, stagnant pool had found a fertile breeding-spot. Leslie heard a strange voice croaking—

"You fool! You asked for it—an old-fashioned Christmas!"

She felt her breath beginning to break in little panting half-sobs, like a distressed runner, and she knew that, at all costs, she must stem the rising tide of hysteria. She must feel no pity for that little human mouse caught in a trap baited with moon-cheese.

"I must think—think good and hard."

But every thread she followed led her back to a locked cupboard door.

To-night was Saturday. The hydro party would not be home until the following Tuesday week, for they had booked to stay for the New Year ball, which had to be held upon the Monday. Their daily servant was due back on the day before them, in order to air and clean the flat. All letters would be forwarded by the hall-porter. Consequently the flat would be hermetically sealed for nine days. And much could happen in those nine days.

She swiftly wrenched her thoughts back to George and Beryl. When they found that she was not on the train, they would institute an instant search.

Barely had she drawn her first breath of relief, when the cloud of doubt began to dim her clear picture of rescue. She saw the scene at the station—a chaos of luggage, and passengers fighting for fragments of porters and stray inches of cubic space on the last fast train to the south.

Beryl and George would naturally conclude that Leslie had already taken her seat in some other coach, if they thought of her at all, which was unlikely. George covered his responsibilities with his hat, while Beryl was a limpet who concentrated on finding a rock. Leslie had to rule out the first possibility. No one could miss her at the station.

She bit her lip fiercely as she felt anew the frightened flutter of her heart. She had but to wait for the arrival at the hydro. And then?

And then Leslie—who knew at least the upper strata of Beryl's mind—began to feel curiously cold. She was no spoon-fed babe, but an independent, vigorous young woman, with a temperamental tug, a tongue between her teeth, and money in her purse.

Let that same young woman loose, turn her round three times, take off her blinkers, and it's Lombard Street to a china orange that she will swerve off in a bee-line to anywhere but her appointed destination.

Beryl would conclude that Leslie had yielded to impulse and cut out the hydro to follow her nose.

But, apart from Beryl, there remained George. Leslie, drowning in deep waters, was clutching at straws and feathers. If George wanted her money, he could only possess it through a personal medium. Less than an hour ago he had offered her a ring.

Yet if they plucked the City apart in sections, to discover its secret hiding-places, it could not help her, for the one place which they would not search would be the flat, knowing it empty as a shelled pod.

Leslie went under. It was no use cheating herself. She was doomed to die, like a poisoned rat in a drain, of hunger, thirst, or suffocation. She was a sacrifice to appease the old-fashioned Christmas spirit, which checks the feasting and joust by the lights burning blue to herald the ghost.

Her self-control snapped suddenly. She ran amok like a rogue elephant in a jungle. Pressed as she was within a few inches of space, she rained pitifully futile blows upon the door and sides of the cupboard, as effective as pennies dropping on snowdrifts.

She tried to scream at the top of her voice, but all she could achieve was a broken wheeze, like the dying effort of a cut windpipe. Her hands, fighting the air, got entangled with the sheaves of hanging dresses, flimsy scented summer things, and she tore them down and stamped them under her feet like an infuriated animal, not knowing what she fought.

It was a severe, but brief struggle. Choked and exhausted, she stopped battering, and slid to her knees. Perhaps it was her own attitude which reminded her of those wondrous winged guests who, not so long ago, stood at each corner of her crib. They had faded as she grew older and had flirted with a score of Johns, an occasional Mark and Matthew, and once a unique Luke, all of whom, later on, had stood between her and a Hun bullet.

Although she had grown hazy about her bodyguard, and was generally too tired for more than a prayer done into shorthand, she still felt the protection of something strong and pure. And now her whole soul rushed from her body in appeal to those four guardian angels.

It may be that their memories were longer than hers, for certain it was that at that moment, while the taxi was honking its way through the traffic, George turned to Beryl.

"We've got to buzz back, old child! I must have left my note-case on the mantelpiece when I took out my pipe."

Leslie could hardly credit her ears when the click of the opening door aroused her from her stupor. She heard a familiar voice—

"Strike a match, Berry. I don't know where you keep your switch."

A George to the rescue—George with the noble torso and the virile clean-cut face tanned with the great out-of-doors, George, worthy namesake of a saint who spiked dragons!

Leslie sprang to her feet and hammered with all her force, which was little enough, for her elbows were jammed tightly against the back of the cupboard and allowed no purchase for her blows. Her fists fell dead upon the solid barrier of the two woods. Yet, to her joy, she heard George question—

"What's that? A sort of noise, like—like pecking."

"Someone chopping suet in the next kitchen, of course. Oh, do hurry!"

"Coming!"

Leslie drew an agonised breath. It was her very last chance. She must make them hear.

"Beryl! George! Help!"

To her horror, her lips gaped soundlessly, like those of a goldfish in a bowl. Only the thread of a whisper spluttered out in her throat. In her paroxysm of screaming her voice had petered out completely.

Then she heard her own name mentioned. But this time she did not crouch among the dresses, spilling her laughter down their empty sleeves.

"Berry, suppose Leslie doesn't show up at the station? She's a rum kid. What's the plan?"

"Wash her out and carry on as arranged." Beryl's voice was ruthlessly decisive as she reverted to the special pleading of the oldest criminal in the world: "I'm not responsible for Leslie."

As the door banged to in the adjoining kitchen, someone chopped suet with almost passionate energy.

Leslie only desisted when her hands were sore from bruises. By this time she supposed that George and Beryl would be far away. She did not know how long she had been beating at the door.

All around her people were laughing, in training for the great festival of joy. The gramophone was being very funny over a gorgonzola cheese. The tea-party ladies had reached the top note of hilarity in the compass of their tonic.

Leslie began to laugh, too, noiselessly.

"I asked for it. No, no! Stop!"

She began to grope in the darkness, exploring every inch of the closet for some hidden spring which she knew perfectly well was not there. Presently her finger sank nearly to its tip into a hole bored with a red-hot poker through the two woods. Leslie remembered even now the time it had taken to penetrate the thick mahogany, and the slippering she had received over a paternal knee.

When she crouched, the hole was on a level with her eyes. Although she could see nothing, it brought her some vague comfort, as a link with the outside world of living people.

The gramophone was working overtime, in honour of Christmas Eve. The carols proved a popular record, for once again Leslie heard the sorrowful story of the Mistletoe Bough.

As she listened, she lost all sense of time and place. In a light-headed half-dream she saw pictures which ran parallel to her own plight, just as though she looked in a mirror which flashed back an unfamiliar reflection. She blended into the little bride of the romantic past, in snowy brocade and floating veil, even while she was vividly conscious of herself—Leslie Mason—wearing the smartest of travelling suits under her fur coat.

She chuckled involuntarily as the radiant girl shook back her powdered curls and leaped lightly inside the old oaken chest. An unuttered scream stabbed her throat like a sword as the heavy lid crashed down. She stretched out her arms in a panic of fear. And it was only Leslie Mason, walled up among the summer gowns of the twentieth century, many of them bearing the tag of Rue de la Paix.

The thrill of terror awoke her to wide-eyed despair. She began to wonder how long it would be before Beryl recognised the truth that her disappearance was no impulsive freak. Sooner or later they must grapple with the fact that, within a few ticks of the clock, nine-and-a-half stone of beautiful girlhood, plus some very expensive clothes and a considerable sum of money, had been snuffed out like a blown candle.

There would be paragraphs in the newspapers—Beryl being interviewed, in her best frock, and with a stationary drop on her lashes. Inquiry agents would circulate those descriptions which fit every blonde woman who wears the orthodox clothes. No one would look in the cupboard. It held only Leslie's gowns—last summer's drift of stranded chiffon and lace.

But one day inevitably someone would make the gruesome discovery.

Even while Leslie wondered how long it took to die of starvation, she knew that she would not go out that way. Her breath was growing shallow, and every expansion of her lungs was an effort. She could feel large drops of sweat starting out on her forehead, while her heart leaped like a wounded bird.

She could not tell how long she had been using up the atmosphere, but it was plain that it was nearly exhausted. It seemed semi-solid, weighing down upon her like a sodden clout.

As she struggled to free herself from her fur coat, her hand pressed something in her pocket. It was the flask of brandy.

"Not much good now. But—it was sweet—of him—to think of me."

She caressed the flask foolishly, childishly. Douglas Burns had passed from her mind in the stress of her anguish. She wondered where he was—whether he had started on his journey; she wondered, too, whether she would still be somewhere in the universe, a vagrant whisper in the wind, free to fan his brow and tell him her love.

Her thoughts, which were growing misty again, suddenly cleared. A spot of light was glowing through the hole in the closet. Someone had entered the room unnoticed.

Automatically she thought of burglars, and, forgetful of her plight, her first feeling was fright. A great throb of surprise and joy shook her when she saw that the intruder was Burns. She remembered that he had once told her that he had a key which fitted their lock.

He was ready dressed for his journey in tweeds and nailed boots. But she did not question what brought him to the flat. A sense of peace and security had fallen like balm upon her tortured spirit. She knew that everything would be well.

Her angels had not cheated her. Since George had failed them, they had sent a worthier champion, who would hear her dumb voice and see through locked doors.

Burns marched directly to the mantel-shelf which held the sole photograph of Leslie—a snap with the sun full upon her nose, making a white blob of it, yet joyous with her own attractive grin and breeze-ruffled hair.

He looked both sheepish and sentimental as he put it inside his breast-pocket. "Going to borrow you for the week-end, little girl. Walk will do you good."

A wave of faintness swept over Leslie. She strove desperately to unscrew the top of her flask, but before she could raise it to her lips, her head fell forward on her breast, and the flask slipped noiselessly down on to the litter of gowns.

But, even as her eyes closed, she knew that it was all right. Burns was there. And the Providence which ordains a safety-door when the proper channel is blocked, and permits eyes to speak and fingers to see, flashed the message through the last receptive faculty. His hand upon the door-knob, Burns stiffened, threw up his head, and sniffed the air.

"Brandy?"

Casting around to locate the odour, he walked to the cupboard and unlocked the door.