Nothing Can Rescue Me by Elizabeth Daly Page A

you can to help him get to the bottom of it.”
    She walked around the table, and out of the room by the side door. The two griffons, gambolling after her, tumbled on and off her train. She paid no attention to them, and sent no backward glance to her stupefied family and guests.
    When the door had closed—pretty sharply—behind her, Sylvanus muttered: “She’s all upset,” and led the way into the drawing-room. The others trooped silently in his wake, and Thomas, with the coffee tray, got them over the first moments of shock. There seemed at first to be some question whether or not Mason would plunge out of the room after his wife; he stood irresolute, looking out into the hall, until Thomas approached him. Then, however, he seized a cup from the tray and gulped hot coffee down. But he remained standing beside the doorway.
    Miss Burt, after a long look in his direction, went and sat at the end of the sofa not occupied by Mrs. Deedes. Miss Wing took a low chair at some distance from that lady, and Percy resumed his earlier position at one end of the hearth; he placed his cup on the ledge of the mantel. Sylvanus wandered up and down, muttering.
    â€œHad no idea she felt so strongly,” he said; and then, confronting Gamadge, “You must have worked her up.”
    â€œI hope so; I meant to.” Gamadge walked to the other end of the hearth, got out Chapter Nine, and faced the room.
    â€œMrs. Mason’s speech,” he began, “seems to me to need no apology. A wretched trick has been played on her, a trick which appals me far more than it appals her. It demands the most serious consideration. It wasn’t a joke, you know, although the perpetrator certainly wished to amuse him- or herself as well as to frighten the victim.”
    Percy took a sip of coffee, and got out a cigarette. “Are you sure, Mr. Gamadge,” he asked with detachment, “if you know how insensitive the practical joker can be?”
    â€œThe effect is brutal,” said Gamadge, looking at him, “but it is not humorous. Please note that the additions to the text are not parodies, they are not even comments on it; they are merely echoes. The first and last don’t do more than achieve a certain verbal continuity; they don’t fit into the sense of the text at all.”
    â€œTo have fitted them into the sense of the text,” said Percy; “would have taken some doing.”
    â€œYou put your finger on an important point.” Gamadge continued to look at the young man. “A most important point. What was done took some doing; for our friend had to do it all—choose the quotations, you know, before writing them in—after Miss Wing herself had finished work for the evening; for who, except Miss Wing herself, could have known where she would leave off?”
    Sylvanus came up to the back of the sofa and gripped it with both hands. He gazed fixedly at Gamadge, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown.
    â€œOpportunity,” Gamadge went on, “was therefore not so free as it seems. None of the work could be prepared in advance. Our friend had to wait until everybody was upstairs and presumably asleep; too well settled, in fact, to wander forth again and be surprised at the activities of a midnight reader—no typing would I think be heard through those doors. Our friend had first to consult the typescript, and then go into the library and hunt up a quotation that could be used first with arresting, then with terrifying effect; for each is more threatening than the last.
    â€œSo much for the literary part of the job. But what about the technical part? Don’t underrate the skill that went into this piece of work—these five pieces of work. The page was replaced in the typewriter, and the quotation inserted; with no erasures, with no faults, and with professional spacing and alignment; each interpolation is put in exactly as the others are. I’m a mere