The Grinding of the Brakes 189
“‘ But it’s you, my dear girl, that I see in my wizard’s
spy-glass, on a lee shore with your masts all gone by
the board, and the Union Jack upside down flying
from a stump, and your wireless hero tapping out
S.0.8.”
He dropped my hair and lighted his pipe. Then he
began to play with it again.
“And some on boards, and some on broken pieces
of the ship, they all came safe to land.”
One’s familiarity with the New Testament makes a
quotation somehow significant, however little one may
believe in the truth of the book.
I felt that his voice was the voice of a prophet. I
felt myself already saved.
“You take some of this,”’ he went on, bringing a
white tablet from a little cedar cabinet, and a big glass
of cold water. ‘“‘ Throw your head back, and get it
well down, and drink all this right off. Here is another
to take home to your husband, and don’t forget the
water. It will calm you down; your nerves have all
gone west. I’ve got some people coming here in a
few minutes. But this will help you through the
night, and I’m coming round in the morning to see you.
What’s the address ? ”
I told him. My face blazed with the disgrace. A
house where the top social note was a fifth-rate musician
in a jazz-band, and the bottom where we don’t give it
a name.
He jotted it down as if it had been the Ritz. But I
could feel in my over-sensitive state the disgust in
his mind. It was as if he had soiled his pencil.
The tablet made me feel better; but I think that
the atmosphere of the man did more than its share of
the work. I felt nearly normal when I got up to go.
I didn’t want his friends to see me. I knew too well
what I was looking like.
He stopped me at the door.
“You haven't any of that stuff, I take it?” he
said.