When Miss Ewing went to work for the firm of King and Holby she understood, without having to be told, that the big calf-bound books that lined the walls of the outer and inner offices were not to be taken down and read by her. She could copy deeds and abstracts to her heart’s content. She had the run of the filing cabinet. She could take dictation, and she could put in long-distance telephone calls and say (sometimes to Springfield, sometimes to Chicago), “Just a minute please, Mr. Holby calling …”
Miss Ewing knew as much about mortgages, wills, transfers, property rights, bills of sale, clearance papers, all the actual everyday functioning of a law office as the average attorney ever needs to know. With a little reading on the side, she might have been admitted to practice, along with Miss Lavinia Goodell, but instead she had chosen to dedicate her energies to the best interests of the firm of King and Holby, and later, the firm of Holby and King. She not only knew all their clients by name, but also where the income of these clients was derived from and among what relatives their property would be divided when the undertaker had made away with the mortal remains. She knew what Austin King thought of Mr. Holby and what Mr. Holby thought of Austin King. She knew who (in all probability) killed Elsie Schlesinger on the night of October 17th, 1894. The only thing Miss Ewing didn’t know was how to drive Nora Potter out of the office, how to send her weeping down the stairs.
She interrupted Nora’s reading whenever she had a free moment to do this in. She took delight in leaving the door into the hall open so that, although a cold draught blew around her own ankles, it also blew around Nora’s. She found a black velvet bow and, holding it between her thumb and forefinger as if it were unclean, deposited it in the wastebasket. She spoke one day with a Southern accent and instead of appreciating the true nature of this pleasantry, Nora smiled at her and said, “Why Miss Ewing, you’re beginning to talk like a Southerner just from being around me.” Nora offered to stamp and seal envelopes when Miss Ewing’s desk was inundated with outgoing correspondence. Nora said, “Can’t I do some typing for you, Miss Ewing? I can only use two fingers but that won’t matter, will it?” Nora said, “Can’t I help you with that old filing?” Nora said, “If you’d like me to, Miss Ewing, I’ll …” Day after day Nora was kind and thoughtful and cheerful and pleasant and friendly in a way that no one (if you exclude the cat that Miss Ewing could no longer bear to touch) had ever been. And perhaps it was this as much as anything that made Miss Ewing wake up so tired in the morning.
In her hurry to get as much work as possible done and out of the way before one-thirty, she made mistakes. She filed papers away in the wrong folders, she found sentences in her shorthand notebook that she could not decipher, she left a whole clause out of a contract that Austin King had given her to copy. When he pointed this out to her, she flushed, mumbled excuses, and retired to the outer office to copy the whole thing over. This time, she inserted the carbon paper the wrong way so that one of the carbon copies had the same words on the back, inverted, and the other was a clean white page. As it drew nearer and nearer to one-thirty, Miss Ewing’s eyes kept turning to the clock. Her hands were clammy and moist, and she had to wipe them continually. She was short with the wrong people and patient with people whose reasons for climbing the stairs were dubious. But when one-thirty came, and Nora walked in, there was an abrupt change. Composed, patronizing, ironical, Miss Ewing looked up from her typewriter and said, “Good afternoon, Miss Potter. What is it to be today—Blackstone or Sir James Maine?”
5
The bed creaked in the room across the hall and then a voice answered, “Yes, Alice, what is it?”
“Are you awake?”
“Well, I’m talking to you. I suppose I’m awake. What is it?”
“I thought I heard something.”
“In Mother’s room?”
“No, downstairs. It sounded like somebody walking around down there. Did you lock the back door?”
“Yes. Go to sleep.”
In the summer night such marauders as are about—the night insects, the rabbit nibbling clover on the lawn, the slug sucking the iris blade—all go about their work of destruction in a single-minded silence. Sleep is disturbed not by noises but by the moonlight on the bedroom floor. But in the late fall and early winter, especially before the snow comes, there is a time of terror when field mice, rats, and squirrels, driven indoors by the cold, make ratching-scratching sounds inside the walls; the stairs creak; some part of the house settles a thousandth of an inch (the effect of a dead man’s curse or a witch in the neighbourhood); and people whose dreams are too active wake and hear sounds that (so the pounding in their left side tells them) have been made by a prowler.
“If it is somebody,” Alice Beach said, “they probably won’t come upstairs where we are. They’ll probably just take the silver and leave. That’s what I’d do if I were a burglar.”
“Oh, Alice, you’re so silly. There isn’t anybody downstairs.” They both held their breath and listened, with their hearts constricted by fear, the pulse in their foreheads beating against the pillow.
“Sh—sh——”
“Very well,” Lucy said. “I’m going downstairs and find out what it is. Otherwise you’ll keep me awake all night.”
“Oh, Lucy, please! Please don’t! It isn’t safe!”
“Fiddlesticks!”
The light went on in the room across the hall and Alice got up out of bed also, put her dressing-gown on, and followed Lucy to the head of the stairs. The light at the foot of the stairs went on, then the light in the parlour, in the dining-room, the kitchen, the laundry. With every light in every room of the whole downstairs turned on, Lucy Beach opened the door to the basement and stood at the head of the cobwebbed stair, waiting. The cause of their disturbance was not there.
It is never easy to live under the same roof with someone in love. Even when the secret is known to all and can be openly joked about, there is something in the atmosphere that promotes restlessness. If the family is divided into those who know and those who don’t know and mustn’t under any circumstances find out, then instead of restlessness there is a continual strain, the lamps do not give off their usual amount of light, the drinking water tastes queer, the cream turns sour with no provocation. The conspirators avoid each other’s eyes, take exhausting precautions against one another, and read double meanings into remarks that under normal circumstances they would not even hear. The person they are doing their best to protect keeps giving the secret away. Now on one pretext, now on another the cat is continually let out of the bag and it is then up to those who know about this animal to rush immediately and corner it before the fatal damage is done.
“You see?” Lucy said, and closed and locked the cellar door. Turning out lights as they went, they found themselves, at last, in the front hall. Lucy opened the door of the coat closet, where a man could have been hiding among the raincoats and umbrellas. “Now if you’re satisfied,” she said, “we can go back to bed.”
6
“I know you’re busy, Mr. King,” Miss Ewing said, “but Mr. Holby has someone in his office and I thought—if you could give me a minute, that is. I—if you don’t mind, I’ll close the door.”
Austin had given her a great many minutes without her feeling any need to ask apologetically for them, and her manner now was so hesitant, so deeply troubled that he motioned her to a chair. Miss Ewing sat and twisted her handkerchief and at last said, “I haven’t been feeling well lately. The doctor tells me I ought to take a rest.”
“The office is very busy just now,” Austin said, “but I guess we can manage somehow. We don’t want you to get down sick. How much time do you plan to take off? A week? Two weeks?”
“I’m afraid it would have to be longer,” Miss Ewing said. “I know this is a hard time for you, and I don’t like to do it, Mr. King, but Dr. Seymour thinks I ought to give up my job entirely.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Austin said, neither his voice nor his expression con
veying an adequate amount of regret. It takes time to accept a catastrophe, and in the face of the first intimation that the golden age of Miss Ewing had come to an end he was almost cheerful.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you,” she said. “I thought maybe I could keep on a while longer anyway, but I haven’t been sleeping at all well and——”
“It’s not a question of money, is it? Because if it’s a question of money, I’d be glad to speak to Mr. Holby about a raise for you. I’m sure it could be arranged.”
“No,” Miss Ewing said. “It isn’t that. You and Mr. Holby have always been generous with me. More than generous. It’s just that I’m getting along in years and I don’t seem to be able to stand the work I used to. My mind is tired, and it makes me so nervous when things don’t go just right—when I make mistakes.”
Austin searched his conscience for some mild reprimand, some abrupt or impatient gesture that might have hurt Miss Ewing’s feelings.
“I’ll never forget how good your father was to me when I first came to work here. I was just a girl and I didn’t know anything about law or office work. He used to get impatient and lose his temper and shout at other people, but with me he was always so considerate. He was more like a friend than an employer.”
Austin nodded sympathetically. What she said was not strictly true and Miss Ewing must know that it was not true. His father had often lost his temper at Miss Ewing. Her high-handed manner with people that she considered unimportant and her old-maid ways had annoyed Judge King so that he had, a number of times, been on the point of firing her. He couldn’t fire her because she was indispensable to the firm, and what they had between them was more like marriage than like friendship. But there is always a kind of truth in those fictions which people create in order to describe something too complicated and too subtle to fit into any conventional pattern.
“He was a wonderful man,” Miss Ewing said. “There’ll never be anybody like him.”
Austin’s glance strayed to the papers on his desk, and then returned to Miss Ewing. “When would you want to leave?” he asked.
“As soon as possible.”
“I’m afraid there are a good many things that Mr. Holby and I don’t know about. We’ve leaned so heavily upon your experience and knowledge of the firm. If you could stay on a few weeks, say until the new girl is broken in.”
“Oh I expect to do that,” she said eagerly. “The way things are now, I’m the only one who——”
She stopped talking and looked at him with such a strange pleading in her eyes that, half in fright, he started to get up out of his chair.
“Mr. King, I’m not the person you think I am. You shouldn’t have trusted me. I’ve done things I never thought I’d do. Something so …”
What was left of her ordinary self-composure gave way entirely and she began to cry and to tell him that she had done terrible things, so terrible that he’d have to put her in jail for it. From her hysterical confession he could make only one incredible fact—Miss Ewing had stolen money from the firm. How much he couldn’t discover, but apparently it had been going on for over a year. First, small sums from the cash box. Then she had forged his and Mr. Holby’s signatures and in that way withdrawn considerable sums from the bank, which her knowledge of book-keeping had enabled her to conceal.
“If you had come to me and told me that you needed money,” Austin said.
“I didn’t need it. I don’t know why I took it. At first I just wanted to see if I could, as a kind of game, I guess. And when I found out how easy it was to deceive you and Mr. Holby, I went on doing it. If Judge King had been alive I wouldn’t have dared. He’d have guessed somehow, and he’d have done something terrible to me. But you kept coming in, day after day, always the same, always trusting me, and I couldn’t stand it any more. I just had to tell you and get it over with before I went crazy. You don’t know what it’s like, Mr. King, to have something gnawing at your conscience day and night. No peace of mind, no rest, until finally you think everybody knows and is just waiting to catch you at it. Anything, even going to jail, is better than the worry you go through in your own mind. I hope you never know. But that’s what you have to do with someone like me—call the police and have them take me away.…”
She broke into a fresh storm of weeping, and Austin got up from his chair and went around the desk and put his hands on her thin shoulders to comfort her.
“Please don’t!” she exclaimed, shaking herself free. “I don’t deserve kindness, and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand anything more.”
Austin left her weeping in the chair that was reserved for people who came to inquire into their rights under the Law, and went out into the outer office and called a cab. When it came, Miss Ewing put her hat and coat on, and took one last wild hopeless look at her cluttered desk. Austin helped her down the stairs and told the Mathein boy who was driving his father’s hack to take her home. Then he went back into his office, closed the door, and called Dr. Seymour.
In his excitement, while he was talking over the telephone, there was a certain hardness—the hardness of triumph. All these years Miss Ewing had rubbed his nose in the fact that he was not the man his father was. And how the mighty were fallen! But he said “She’s put in many years of faithful service, and if she’s sick—she’d never have behaved this way otherwise—naturally we’ll take care of her”; and so preserved that inner image, the icon that no one, kind or unkind, is ever willing to change.
7
“Why my darling!” Martha King exclaimed as she lifted Ab onto her lap. “My precious angel! Nobody can ever take your place, not even for one solitary second!”
Ab’s tears were stopped by the quick comfort of softness and her mother’s “There, there …” When she sat up she was smiling.
“Where will the baby sleep? Will the baby sleep in my room?”
“If you’d like it to,” Martha said. With her hand she brushed Ab’s bangs back from her high forehead, and then bending down, kissed the soft place where the bones had long since grown together.
When Ab left her to go and play, Martha got up from her chair and went over to the window seat and the pile of mending. Rachel had failed to show up, that morning, and Martha King was weighed down by a premonition. The tangle of socks, the shirt collar that needed turning, remained untouched. For over an hour she sat with her forehead against the window, looking out on the driveway and the house next door, on the kitchen pump and the mulberry tree now stripped of both leaves and fruit.
What she thought of, sitting there all that time, she could not have told later. She saw a leaf dropping, people passing on the sidewalk, the grey overcast Saturday. But all this was out of any time sequence and often part of a long chain of ideas and images that seemed to have no connection with each other and that led nowhere. There is a country where women go when they are pregnant, a country with no king and no parliament. The inhabitants do nothing but wait, and the present does not exist on any calendar; only the future, which may or may not come. Yet something is accomplished there, even so, and that inescapable tax which in the outside world is collected once every lunar cycle, in blood, is forgiven and remains in the hands of the taxpayer.
The castle in which all are confined is surrounded by a moat fed by underground springs. There are no incoming and outgoing heralds, no splendour falls on the castle walls. The windows are narrow slits looking out through stone upon a landscape of the palest colours. The view from the highest turret is always the same, except that sometimes there is no view at all.
The inhabitants of the castle are often seized with cramps and vomiting. They are extravagantly hungry one moment and without appetite the next. Consistency is not required of them. Eccentric wool-gatherers, in summer they huddle each one beside an ornamental stove that is always lit and there for her alone. In winter they put their arms through the slits in the stone walls and feel the warm rain. Emotions are drowsy, remembered, and vague. Bitterness, hatred, and fear are watere
d and tended and turned so that they can grow evenly, and then are forgotten before they have a chance to flower. Intending becomes pretending. The children’s voices that are heard occasionally are not the voices of children who will grow up and marry and beget more children, but those of Cain and Abel quarrelling over the possession of a tricycle or a rubber ball.
Now and then someone tries to escape from the country but this is difficult. There is bound to be trouble at the frontier. The roads, although policed, are not safe after dark. People are robbed of the calcium in their bones, and of their life’s savings in dreams. The featureless landscape turns out to be littered with dirty things, maggots crawling, disgusting amoeba that move and have hairy appendages, or the bloated body of a dead deer.
A sound outside made Martha King turn in time to see Mr. Porterfield wheeling his bicycle up the brick driveway. As she opened the kitchen door, her eyes travelled to the note in his right hand.
The Reverend Mr. Porterfield was a slight, neatly dressed Negro of uncertain age. His hands and face were grave, his manner (neither obsequious nor race-proud nor quick to see insult where no insult is intended) a model for white people to follow in dealing with black. Every Sunday evening from the platform of the African Methodist Episcopal Church he justified the ways of God to his congregation, and when they were in trouble, they came to him for help.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without her,” Martha said, after she had finished reading Rachel’s note. “Is she all right?”