“Yes, ma’am.”
“She didn’t say where she was going or what her plans were?”
“Well, no,” he said carefully. “She requested me to deliver the message to you and I said I would. But where she was going, she didn’t exactly say.”
“I see,” Martha said. “Won’t you come inside? It’s very cold out today.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I have to be getting on downtown.”
As he righted his bicycle, Martha said, “Did she take the children with her?”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Porterfield said. “Yes, she took the children.”
“Well, if you hear anything from her …”
“Be glad to. If I hear anything, I’ll certainly inform you of it.… Good day, ma’am, and remember me to Mr. King.”
He knows and he won’t tell me, Martha King thought as she watched him wheel his bicycle down the driveway. She started back into the house and then hesitated. Her eyes took in the icebox and the accumulation of things destined for the barn loft, as if somewhere—behind the mildewed print of the U.S.S. Maine, perhaps, or in the box of tarnished evening slippers—was hidden the disturbing reason for Rachel’s conduct, why she trusted Mr. Porterfield and not Martha King.
8
“Wait till I get there, Nora,” Alice Beach called out from her room, where she was getting dressed.
“We’re waiting,” Nora called back. “I haven’t told them a thing.”
Each evening when she came home from the office of Holby and King, she brought life and excitement not only into the Beaches’ gloomy house but also into the even gloomier sickroom. The atmosphere of illness had had to give way before it. The invalid’s eyes were bright with curiosity, and she had permitted Nora and Lucy, as a mark of special favour, to sit on her bed.
“Austin asked me if I’d come back this evening and help out. They’ve been searching all afternoon long for somebody’s will. Apparently Miss Ewing had her own system of filing and——”
“You are too, telling them,” Alice called out.
“No, I’m not,” Nora said. “Nobody can figure out what it is. The whole place is turned upside down, Mr. Holby is leaving for Chicago in the morning, and poor Cousin Austin——”
“Now,” Alice said coming into the room. From the colour in her cheeks, the eager expression on her face, she might have been expecting a gentleman caller.
“Miss Ewing’s mother used to sew for me,” Mrs. Beach said, forgetting that she had told Nora this vital fact several times already. “I had her for a week in the spring and a week in the fall. She was honest as the day is long, but slow—terribly slow.”
“Well,” Nora said, sitting back and with her arms crossed, looking from one interested face to another, “guess what.”
“Oh, don’t keep us in suspense any longer!” Alice cried.
“I won’t,” Nora said. “It was all in her imagination. The auditors have gone over the books with a fine-tooth comb, backwards and forwards, and every penny has been accounted for.”
“No!” Lucy exclaimed.
“Well, I’m glad, for her mother’s sake,” Mrs. Beach said.
“There isn’t a word of truth in Miss Ewing’s story,” Nora continued, “and I don’t know how many people she’s told it to. For instance, she hasn’t been near the doctor in two months.”
“It’s the strangest thing I ever heard of,” Alice said.
“Austin can’t convince her—he stopped in to see her this afternoon and I went with him. She still insists that she’s a thief and ought to be sent to the penitentiary. It’s very hard to know what to do with someone in that upset state. When you try to reason with them——”
“Was she in bed?” Lucy asked.
“No,” Nora said. “She was up and dressed. She has a cat, a big yellow tomcat and she didn’t want me to pick it up, but it came straight to me and sat in my lap as contented as you please, all the time we were there.”
“Austin shouldn’t have left everything in her hands,” Mrs. Beach said. “I’m surprised at him. I thought he was a better businessman than that.”
“But if you knew Miss Ewing——” Nora began.
“I had to watch her mother like a hawk,” Mrs. Beach said. “If I didn’t, every stitch had to be ripped out and done over again. Part of the trouble was that she was going blind and didn’t know it. Miss Ewing must have wanted to steal the money. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be so on her mind.… When Lucy was six years old, she took a dollar bill from my pocket-book to buy lemonade,” Mrs. Beach went on, as if Lucy no longer had any feeling about this crisis in her moral life. “I knew all about it. The neighbour boy who had the lemonade stand stopped me as I was coming home and gave me the change, but I wanted her to tell me and so I waited …”
Lucy flushed, and when the painful story came to an end, Nora tactfully led the conversation around to Miss Ewing again.
“They’ve arranged for her care in a nursing home in Peoria until she’s better. The thing is to get her to go there.”
“Who’s footing the bill?” Mrs. Beach asked.
“Cousin Austin offered to. Mr. Holby refused to have any part of it. But something has to be done with her. She’s threatened to kill herself. Tonight as we left each other, Cousin Austin asked if I’d mind going to see her again tomorrow, alone. He thinks maybe she might listen to me where she wouldn’t listen to a man, and of course I told him I’d be glad to. I feel that anything I can do to help her, I ought to do, especially when they’ve all been so kind to me.”
9
The chairs in Dr. Seymour’s waiting room were straight-backed and hard, and time passed very slowly there. The dark varnished woodwork, the soiled lace doily on the centre table, the ancient Saturday Evening Posts, the brass lamp, and the leering, pink plaster billikin, all went with the atmosphere of antiseptic and worry, which remained intact, in spite of the continual substitution of one worried person for another. The waiting room was full: Austin and Martha King, an old man with his left hand wrapped in a dirty bandage, a woman with a little girl, a red-cheeked man who was the picture of health but who could not have been what he appeared to be or he wouldn’t have been here. They sat, sometimes looking at each other, sometimes staring at the two pictures that hung on the wall. One of these pictures was of a doctor in a long frock coat walking down a moonlit road with his medicine bag in one hand and his umbrella in the other. The umbrella was held in such a way that the doctor cast ahead of him the shadow of the stork. In the other picture, the doctor was at the bedside of a sick child, whose anxious father and mother were standing in the shadows.
After a time, an elderly woman being treated for the cataract on her right eye was led out by a woman who might have been her daughter. While she was inside, the elderly woman had been told something that she had not expected to be told; something good or something bad that it would take her a while to get used to. In the meantime, she had to be guided. Someone had to manage her purse for her, and show her the way to the door.
The man with the dirty bandage went inside, and Austin looked at Martha. She surprised him now by a patience that he (who was always so patient) did not have. He fidgeted, he was restless, he turned nervously and looked out of the window. His usual sense that everything would be all right, that he was not threatened by the disasters that overtook other people, had deserted him. These consultations had taken place before and they were always the same, always reassuring. He ought to have been at his office at this moment, but Martha couldn’t have managed the street-car, and he didn’t want her to come in one of Jim Mathein’s dirty old hacks, so he had harnessed Prince Edward and driven her down here himself.
The little girl was suffering from some skin disease. She looked at Martha and then away, looked again, and finally buried her head in her mother’s lap. The two women exchanged glances and smiled. Gradually the little girl overcame her shyness to the point where she could come and lean against Martha’s knee.
“How old are
you?” Martha asked.
“Five,” the mother said. “She doesn’t talk.”
“Oh,” Martha said. She leaned forward so that the child could finger her beads. It was all that Austin could do to keep from interfering, but Martha had no concern apparently about the skin disease and whether it might be contagious.
For a while nothing happened in the waiting room—nothing more interesting or dramatic than the sun’s coming out from behind a cloud, outlining the window on the linoleum floor and transferring the lace curtains there also, as if they were the kind of decalcomania pictures that schoolboys apply to their hands and forearms with spit. Of the illness that for forty years had passed through the waiting room, there was no trace. People with tuberculosis, people walking around with typhoid fever germs inside them, women with a lump on their breast that turned out to be malignant, men with an enlarged prostate, children who failed to gain weight. People with heart trouble, with elephantiasis, dropsy, boils, carbuncles, broken arms, gangrenous infections, measles, mumps, a deficiency of red corpuscles, a dislocated spine, meningitis, facial paralysis, palsy. Women with wrinkled stockings who would shortly be led away to the asylum, women who could not nurse their children, babies born to linger a short while, like a bud on a sickly plant. The little boy whose legs are in braces, the little girl who has breasts at three and begins to menstruate at four but is otherwise normal. The man whose breath is choked by asthma, whose heartbeat is irregular and tired. The woman with swollen joints. The woman whose husband has infected her with gonorrhœa. All saving their worry and fright for the inner office, all capable of being cured or incurable. The illness of the soul inextricably bound up with the illness of the body. The ones who ought to recover and won’t, the ones whose condition is hopeless and yet who live on. Like the pattern of the lace curtain on the linoleum, they came and went, leaving no trace.
The man who had gone into the inner office with a dirty bandage wrapped around his hand came out with a clean one. The office girl said, “The doctor will see you now, Mrs. King,” and Martha raising herself out of her chair, walked across the room with the curious, unnatural gait of a woman far gone in pregnancy.
Austin waited until the door closed behind her, and then his eyes dropped to the floor, searching for the outline of the window frame, which was so pale now that it was hardly visible, and soon went out altogether. He sat, crossing and uncrossing his legs. After a time he took out his watch and looked at it. The examination in the inner office was lasting longer than usual. He looked out of the window once more at the English cart and didn’t at once realize that the office girl had spoken to him.
“I beg your pardon?” he said, turning away from the window.
“Dr. Seymour would like to speak to you,” the office girl said.
10
“I don’t know what you must think of me,” Mary Caroline Link said. “I’ve been meaning to come ever since you got here, only there’s so much to do. This is my last year in high school. I’m graduating in June. And what with the glee club and the triangular debate and outside reading—Did you ever have to read The Heart of Midlothian? It’s a terribly sad book—I don’t know where the days go. But it isn’t right not to have time for your friends.”
Her conversational manner suitable to a woman of forty, Mary Caroline sat on the sofa in the Beaches’ parlour. She had come on a Sunday afternoon with an offering of Boston brown bread.
“I didn’t think anything about it,” Nora said.
“I hear you’re reading law in Mr. King’s office,” Mary Caroline said. “I’m sure you must find it interesting.”
“Yes,” Nora said. Her smile was both vague and lavish with some shining inner pleasure.
“How is your brother?” Mary Caroline asked.
“He’s fine,” Nora said. “I guess he’s fine. He never writes. Nothing in the world would make him write a letter.”
When Nora smiled, Mary Caroline noticed that there was something about the shape of her eyes and the curve of her mouth that was like Randolph. Nora was nice looking, she looked like someone it would be exciting to know, but her face didn’t, of course, make all other faces look flat and commonplace the way his did. There was only this fleeting similarity of expression. Mary Caroline was surprised that she had never seen it before, when it was quite noticeable.
“Do you like the girl he’s engaged to?”
“Engaged?”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked about it. He told me in confidence, but I thought of course that you knew.”
“No,” Nora said kindly. “I’m afraid I don’t even know what girl you’re talking about.”
“There must be some mistake,” Mary Caroline said, colouring. “I must have misunderstood him. But he told me——at least I thought he said he was engaged. It seems to me—I could be mistaken—that he said she was a beautiful girl from New Orleans, whose father was a millionaire.”
“Oh, that one,” Nora said. “No, he’s not engaged to her, and never has been, so far as I know. Did he really tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what makes him tell such terrible lies,” Nora said. “Except that he can’t bear things the way they really are. Do you have any brothers?”
Mary Caroline shook her head.
“I’ve often wished that I had another brother besides Randolph,” Nora said. “Because as it is, there’s no basis of comparison. I don’t know whether the way Randolph acts is usual with boys or not.”
Nora could have told Mary Caroline how to get even with Randolph, and have led her to the holly tree from which the arrow would have to be fashioned that slew the darling of the gods. What Randolph could not endure was indifference. All Mary Caroline would have had to do was not to be touched by him, not to care in the least whether he lived or died, and he would have moved heaven and earth to make her care.
“I know lots of boys at school,” Mary Caroline said, “and I assure you that Randolph isn’t at all like them.”
“Probably not,” Nora said, patting a pillow into shape. “But sometimes I wish he weren’t so vain.”
“Is he vain?” Mary Caroline asked, sitting forward in her chair.
“Terribly.”
“Well, I’ve never seen that side of him,” Mary Caroline said. “But I suppose it’s hard not to be vain if you look like Randolph. I’m glad you told me. I feel I understand him better. And it’s nice, don’t you think, when people who seem so perfect in every way turn out to have some small fault? It makes you like them all the more.”
As a result, apparently, of this remark, the vague and yet shining smile was once more interposed between them.
From where Mary Caroline was sitting, through the parlour window, she saw a rig drive up and stop in front of the Kings’ house. She leaned closer to the lace curtain and then said, “It’s Dr. Seymour. Is somebody sick at the Kings’?”
“Mrs. King,” Nora said gravely.
“Oh dear,” Mary Caroline said. “Nobody told me.”
“She has to stay in bed all the time, from now until the baby comes.”
“What a shame!” Mary Caroline said. “I must go and see her.”
Feeling that she had already said more than she should about Randolph to his sister, Mary Caroline began to talk about the glee club cantata. She stayed until it began to get dark outside, and Nora went with her to the door. She had heard very little of what Mary Caroline said during the last half hour, and she had no idea that part of an undying devotion had been transferred from Randolph to her.
“I’ll call you in a day or so and perhaps we can do something together,” Mary Caroline said.
Watching Mary Caroline go off into the twilight and the rain, Nora said You must not think I don’t appreciate all you have done for me. If I don’t speak of it, it’s because …
Deeply committed to a conversation with Austin King that never ended, Nora did not forget that he had a wife, but she found no room in her heart for jealousy. Co
usin Martha was married to him and that was all. She had no interest in his work, no curiosity about what went on in his mind. For that he turned to Nora, who gave him her complete and rapt attention, no matter where she was or what claims the outside world made on her. I realize perfectly that there are things which I cannot possibly say to you, which you do not wish to hear, she said as she shepherded the children past the dangerous inter-urban crossing. I think I have discovered something important, she said as she put the pots and pans away in the cupboard. No, I didn’t actually discover it. You directed my thinking and there it was.… You may have friends who are nearer and dearer to you, she said to the image in the mirror while she brushed and braided her hair, but I doubt if there is anyone who cares more deeply about your happiness than I do.… I hear everything you say, everything, she said, and let the coffee boil over on the stove.
11
“I appreciate your thoughtfulness in coming to tell me,” Martha King said. “But you and I know, Miss Ewing, that Mr. King isn’t that kind of a man.”
This statement, which didn’t follow logically what Miss Ewing had just been saying, confused and dismayed her. She was not in the habit of paying social calls on Mrs. King, and the long wait downstairs had given her ample time to consider whether it wouldn’t have been better not to come. If she had known that Mrs. King was not well, that she would be received in Mrs. King’s bedroom, her courage would have failed her. It was sustained now by the belief that what she was doing was for the best interests of the firm of King and Holby. Leaning forward anxiously, she said, “Of course, there’s no one like Mr. King. That’s why I was so surprised when he called her into his office and——”
What other strange visions Miss Ewing’s eyes had seen lately—the synagogue of Satan, the four beasts full of eyes before and behind and within, hail and fire mingled with blood and all green grass burnt up, the star that is called Wormwood falling from heaven, and the air darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit—their unnatural glitter attested to.