"Don't you think you'd better lie down?" he suggested in more masterful accents. And added: "And I'll go? ... You ought to lie down. It's the only thing." He was now speaking to her like a wise uncle.

"Oh, no!" she said, without conviction. "Besides, you can't go till I 've paid you."

It was on the tip of his tongue to say: "Oh! don't bother about that, now!" But he restrained himself. There was a notable core of common-sense in Denry. He had been puzzling how he might neatly mention the rent while departing in a hurry so that she might lie down. And now she had solved the difficulty for him.

She stretched out her arm, and picked up a bunch of keys from a basket on a little table.

"You might just unlock that desk for me, will you?" she said. And further, as she went through the keys one by one to select the right key: "Each quarter I 've put your precious Mr. Herbert Calvert's rent in a drawer in that desk.... Here 's the key." She held up the whole ring by the chosen key, and he accepted it. And she lay back once more in her chair, exhausted by her exertions.

"You must turn the key sharply in the lock," she said weakly, as he fumbled at the locked part of the desk.

So he turned the key sharply.

"You 'll see a bag in the little drawer on the right," she murmured.

The key turned round and round. It had begun by resisting but now it yielded too easily.

"It does n't seem to open," he said, feeling clumsy.

The key clicked and slid, and the other keys rattled together.

"Oh, yes," she replied. "I opened it quite easily this morning. It _is_ a bit catchy."

The key kept going round and round.

"Here! I 'll do it," she said wearily.

"Oh, no!" he urged.

But she rose courageously, and tottered to the desk, and took the bunch off him.

"I 'm afraid you 've broken something in the lock," she announced, which gentle resignation, after she had tried to open the desk and failed.

"Have I?" he mumbled. He knew that he was not shining.

"Would you mind calling in at Allman's," she said, resuming her chair, "and tell them to send a man down at once to pick the lock? There 's nothing else for it. Or perhaps you 'd better say first thing to-morrow morning. And then as soon as he 's done it, I 'll call and pay you the money, myself. And you might tell your precious Mr. Herbert Calvert that next quarter I shall give notice to leave."

"Don't you trouble to call, please!" said he. "I can easily pop in here."

She sped him away in an enigmatic tone. He could not be sure whether he had succeeded or failed, in her estimation, as a man of the world and a partaker of delicate teas.

"Don't _forget_ Allman's!" she enjoined him as he left the room. He was to let himself out.

"Oh, no!" he said.

III

He was coming home late that night from the Sports Club, from a delectable evening which had lasted till one o'clock in the morning, when just as he put the large door-key into his mother's cottage, he grew aware of peculiar phenomena at the top end of Brougham Street, where it runs into St. Luke's Square. And then, in the gas-lit gloom of the dark summer night he perceived a vast and vague rectangular form in slow movement towards the slope of Brougham Street.

It was a pantechnicon van.

But the extraordinary thing was, not that it should be a pantechnicon van, but that it should be moving of its own accord and power. For there were no horses in front of it, and Denry saw that the double shafts had been pushed up perpendicularly, after the manner of carmen when they outspan. The pantechnicon was running away. It had perceived the wrath to come and was fleeing. Its guardians had evidently left it imperfectly scotched or braked and it had got loose.

It proceeded down the first bit of Brougham Street with a dignity worthy of its dimensions, and at the same time with apparently a certain sense of the humour of the situation. Then it seemed to be saying to itself: "Pantechnicons will be pantechnicons." Then it took on the absurd gravity of a man who is perfectly sure that he is not drunk.

Nevertheless it kept fairly well to the middle of the road, but as though the road were a tight rope.

The rumble of it increased as it approached Denry. He withdrew the key from his mother's cottage and put it in his pocket. He was always at his finest in a crisis. And the onrush of the pantechnicon const.i.tuted a clear crisis. Lower down the gradient of Brougham Street was more dangerous, and it was within the possibilities that people inhabiting the depths of the street might find themselves pitched out of bed by the sharp corner of a pantechnicon that was determined to be a pantechnicon.

A pantechnicon whose ardour is fairly aroused may be capable of surpa.s.sing deeds. Whole thoroughfares might crumble before it.

As the pantechnicon pa.s.sed Denry, at the rate of about three and a half miles an hour, he leaped, or rather he scrambled, on to it, losing nothing in the process except his straw hat, which remained a witness at his mother's door that her boy had been that way and departed under unusual circ.u.mstances.

Denry had the bright idea of dropping the shafts down, to act as a brake. But, unaccustomed to the manipulation of shafts, he was rather slow in accomplishing the deed, and ere the first pair of shafts had fallen the pantechnicon was doing quite eight miles an hour and the steepest declivity was yet to come. Further the dropping of the left-hand shafts jerked the van to the left, and Denry dropped the other pair only just in time to avoid the sudden uprooting of a lamp-post.

The four points of the shafts digging and prodding into the surface of the road gave the pantechnicon something to think about for a few seconds. But unfortunately the precipitousness of the street encouraged its headstrong caprices, and a few seconds later all four shafts were broken; and the pantechnicon seemed to scent the open prairie. (What it really did scent was the ca.n.a.l.) Then Denry discovered the brake, and furiously struggled with the iron handle. He turned it and turned it, some forty revolutions. It seemed to have no effect. The miracle was that the pantechnicon maintained its course in the middle of the street.

Presently Denry could vaguely distinguish the wall and double wooden gates of the ca.n.a.l wharf. He could not jump off; the pantechnicon was now an express; and I doubt whether he would have jumped off even if jumping off had not been madness. His was the kind of perseverance that, for the fun of it, will perish in an attempt. The final fifty or sixty yards of Brougham Street were level, and the pantechnicon slightly abated its haste. Denry could now plainly see, in the radiance of a gas-lamp, the gates of the wharf, and on them the painted letters: "Shropshire Union Ca.n.a.l Coy. Ltd. General Carriers. No admittance except on business." He was heading straight for those gates, and the pantechnicon evidently had business within. It jolted over the iron guard of the weighing machine, and this jolt deflected it, so that instead of aiming at the gates it aimed for part of a gate and part of a brick pillar. Denry ground his teeth together and clung to his seat.

The gate might have been paper and the brick pillar a cardboard pillar.

The pantechnicon went through them as a sword will go through a ghost, and Denry was still alive. The remainder of the journey was brief and violent, owing partly to a number of bags of cement and partly to the propinquity of the ca.n.a.l basin. The pantechnicon jumped into the ca.n.a.l like a mastodon, and drank.

Denry, clinging to the woodwork, was submerged for a moment, but by standing on the narrow platform from which sprouted the splintered ends of the shafts, he could get his waist clear of the water. He was not a swimmer.

All was still; and dark, save for the faint stream of starlight on the broad bosom of the ca.n.a.l basin. The pantechnicon had encountered n.o.body whatever en route. Of its strange escapade Denry had been the sole witness.

"Well, I 'm dashed!" he murmured aloud.

And a voice replied from the belly of the pantechnicon: "Who is there?"

All Denry's body shook.

"It's me!" said he.

"Not Mr. Machin?" said the voice.

"Yes," said he. "I jumped on as it came down the street-and here we are!"

"Oh!" cried the voice. "I do wish you could get round to me!"

Ruth Earp's voice!

He saw the truth in a moment of piercing insight. Ruth had been playing with him! She had performed a comedy for him in two acts. She had meant to do what is called in the Five Towns "a moonlight flit." The pantechnicon (doubtless from Birmingham, where her father was) had been brought to her door late in the evening, and was to have been filled and taken away during the night. The horses had been stabled, probably in Ruth's own yard, and while the carmen were reposing the pantechnicon had got off, Ruth in it. She had no money locked in her unlockable desk.

Her reason for not having paid the precious Mr. Herbert Calvert was not the reason which she had advanced.

His first staggered thought was:

"She 's got a nerve! No mistake!"

Her duplicity, her wickedness, did not shock him. He admired her tremendous and audacious enterprise; it appealed strongly to every cell in his brain. He felt that she and he were kindred spirits.