Miss Silver Deals With Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

torpedoed and I’ve lost my memory. I didn’t know anything could make one feel such a fool.”
    Meade slipped away from him into the corner of the seat. Giles didn’t remember her. A frozen feeling gathered about her heart. She said,
    “I won’t faint.”
    It hurt too much for that. He was Giles come back from the dead, and he was a stranger. He was looking at her just as he had looked the first time they met, at Kitty Van Loo’s. And all of a sudden the frozen feeling went and her heart was warm again, because he had fallen in love with her then, at first sight, and if he had done it once, why shouldn’t he do it again? What did it matter that he had forgotten? He was Giles, and she was Meade, and he was alive. “Oh, God, thank you, thank you, for letting Giles be alive!”
    He saw the light and colour come back. It gave him the strangest feeling, as if he had created something. He said in a different voice,
    “Who are you?”
    “Meade Underwood.”
    He repeated it, “Meade—Underwood—It’s a pretty name. Did I call you Meade?”
    Something flickered and went again, like the flash of light off a bird’s wing. He couldn’t catch it. She said,
    “Yes.”
    “Have I known you long?”
    “Not very long. We met in New York, on the first of May, at Kitty Van Loo’s. Do you remember her?”
    He shook his head.
    She looked at the bright blue eyes, at the crisp fair hair above the ruddy brown skin, and thought, “He’s well—he’s alive. What does anything else matter?” But she was glad that he didn’t remember Kitty Van Loo.
    “I don’t remember a thing, except about the job I went over there to do. I don’t remember going out there, or anything after Christmas ’39. Everything since then has just run into a fog as far as my personal recollection goes. Why”—his voice changed—“I didn’t even remember about my brother Jack being killed. He was with me at Dunkirk, and somehow I knew he was dead, but I couldn’t remember a thing about it—not a thing. I can’t now. I’ve had to get it all from a chap who was there with me. I can remember being in France, and getting away from Dunkirk, and the job I had at the War Office, but none of the personal things. I could tell them all about my job in the States—all the technical part. Funny, isn’t it, but I can remember a fellow in my first regiment, an extraordinarily fine bridge player. He used to get canned every night, but it never affected his game. I’ve seen him so that he couldn’t take in a word you said outside the play, but he knew every card that was out— never made a mistake. I suppose it’s something like that. Well, we met at Kitty Van Loo’s—and where did we go from there?”
    He saw Meade sparkle. It went to his head a little. The whole thing was going to his head—this blend of the strange and the familiar. She said,
    “Oh, we went places.”
    “Nice places?”
    “Yes, nice places.”
    “Lots of them?”
    “Lots of them.”
    “And when did you come back?”
    She was watching him. She said,
    “In June.”
    She saw the blood run up under his skin.
    “But so did I—at least that’s what they tell me. That is to say, I started to come, and we were torpedoed.” He laughed. “I was picked up by a tramp a couple of days later. I’d got hold of a grating, and I believe they couldn’t get me to let go—had to more or less prise me off it. I don’t remember anything about it myself. I’d been hit on the head, and the next thing I knew I was in a hospital ward in New York, and nobody knew who I was. Well, that’s me. But you said June. I suppose the Atlantic wasn’t by any chance one of the places we went together… Oh, it was? Well, I hope I saved your life.”
    Meade nodded. For a moment she couldn’t speak. It was all too horribly, too vividly present again—the darkness, the noise, and those rending crashes—the rush of the water, coming in, sucking them down—Giles lifting her, heaving her into the boat.