“Naturally I’m sorry to learn that people have been talking about him and Miss Potter,” Martha said kindly. “But it’s something he is in no way responsible for. People have to gossip and if they can’t find something that’s true to gossip about, they’re likely to make something up. I’m sure you’ll do everything in your power to stop it. What a lovely umbrella! Is it new?”
“It was my mother’s,” Miss Ewing said, her attention shifting helplessly to the carved umbrella handle, in the likeness of a monkey’s head with the two paws covering the mouth. Though Martha King was lying in bed, she managed to convey that her guest had stayed as long as politeness would allow. Miss Ewing rose and, further dismayed by the glimpse of herself which she caught in the dressing-table mirror (she certainly had no intention of being a busybody and a meddler), took leave. Outside in the hall, she made a wrong turning and soon afterward found herself face to face with the backstairs. Rather than run the risk of having to stop and explain this social error if she retraced her steps, Miss Ewing went on, arrived in the pantry, and, trembling with agitation, eventually found her way out of the labyrinth.
“I don’t think anybody would believe her stories,” Martha said when she finished telling Austin about her visitor that evening, “except that she isn’t the only person who has been talking. You said it would cause a certain amount of talk and it has. Mrs. Jouette felt obliged to warn me of what people—mostly Mrs. Jouette, I have no doubt—are saying. I also heard it from Mrs. Ellis.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Austin asked.
“Because I didn’t want to worry you. I knew you’d take it seriously, even though it’s so preposterous, and a week from now they’ll be gossiping about somebody else. But Miss Ewing’s stories were really quite vicious. She’s let her imagination run away with her, and if she’s told anyone else what she told me this afternoon——”
“Let them talk,” Austin said.
“It can’t do us any harm,” Martha said slowly, “but what about Nora? If being in your office is going to give her a bad reputation——”
“But how can they talk that way about her?”
“They can and they will as long as Nora behaves as she does,” Martha said.
“What do you mean?”
“Apparently she tries very hard to pretend that she’s simply a friend of the family. But she mentions your name a good deal oftener than there is any need for, and the way she looks at you as you walk through the outer office is enough under the circumstances to convict you both. If she shouted her love from the housetops, people wouldn’t be any quicker to believe the worst.”
“Oh,” Austin said. And then, “I suppose if she gives up her plan of becoming a lawyer, and it’s understood that she isn’t to come to the office any more, or here, and if she manages to avoid speaking to me when we happen to meet somewhere, then they’d be satisfied?”
“It would help,” Martha said.
“They can’t hurt Nora,” Austin said.
12
“Come in, come in,” Austin called cheerfully, and to his surprise, Dave Purdy said, “Hello, Austin, how are you?” and walked into Mr. Holby’s office instead.
A few minutes later Miss Stiefel brought Austin some letters to sign. Unable to find a trained law secretary, he had taken a girl out of business college. Her typing was adequate, but not to be compared, of course, with the perfection of Miss Ewing’s spacing and paragraphing. Miss Stiefel was pale, with blue eyes, and hair and eyebrows and eyelashes so blonde that they seemed almost white. Her face, just now, indicated that she knew more than it was expedient to show.
“That was Dave Purdy, wasn’t it?” Austin asked.
Miss Stiefel nodded.
“Did you tell him I was busy?”
“No,” Miss Stiefel said. “He wanted to see Mr. Holby.”
“But I handle all his legal business,” Austin said. “Mr. Holby doesn’t know anything about it.”
“Shall I ask him to step in on his way out?”
“Never mind,” Austin said. And then, as she was leaving the room, “Will you let me know when Mr. Holby is free?”
Although he had not asked her to, she closed the door into the outer office, absentmindedly, perhaps. But it could also be, Austin realized suddenly, that she was following instructions from Mr. Holby—instructions based on the fact that the junior partner was socially no longer an asset to the firm.
When Miss Stiefel opened the door half an hour later, Austin was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, and she had to speak to him twice before he heard her.
“Mr. Holby is free now.”
Mr. Holby didn’t as a rule stand upon his dignity. If he knew that Austin wanted to see him, he came to Austin’s office. In a dull flush of anger, with the words of his resignation all framed in his mind, ready to offer if the occasion required it of him, Austin got up and went through the outer office. Mr. Holby went right on reading for a moment and then, glancing up, said, “Did you want to see me, young fellow?” He had not called Austin “young fellow” since the early weeks of their partnership.
Austin sat down. Mr. Holby offered him a cigar but no explanation of Dave Purdy’s visit. Austin was sure that Mr. Holby would have preferred to ignore the incident. Mr. Holby didn’t like explanations when rhetoric would do just as well. When the occasion demanded—in cross-examination, for instance—he could get to the point with the speed and directness of aim of a rattlesnake.
“Dave Purdy came to see you instead of me,” Austin said.
Mr. Holby nodded. “He wanted to change his will. Nothing very complicated. I made a note of the change. Would you like to see it?”
“No,” Austin said, “if he came to see you about it, you’d better go ahead and handle it. What I want to know is if there have been any others?”
For almost half a minute Mr. Holby didn’t reply, and Austin saw that he was trying to make up his mind whether to take refuge in pompous vagueness or to speak frankly. In the end he took the cigar out of the corner of his mouth and spoke frankly.
“It’s the women. They’re out to get you.”
“Why? How do you know?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Holby said. “I only guess it; what usually happens when a man begins having trouble with his wife. They band together and take her side, and if they want to, they can do a good deal of damage in a business way.”
“But I’m not having trouble with my wife,” Austin said, with a rising sharpness in his voice.
“I didn’t say that you were,” Mr. Holby said blandly. “These stories start circulating, sometimes with no basis in fact, or at best a very slight one, and the first thing you know——”
“You’re sure that’s why Dave Purdy came to see you instead of me?”
“Positive.”
“Have there been others?”
Mr. Holby inhaled twice in succession on his cigar and then nodded slowly.
“Would you like to dissolve the partnership?” Austin asked.
“It may not be necessary,” Mr. Holby said. “It all depends on what happens. I mean between you and Martha.”
“But I tell you——”
“I know I can speak frankly to you,” Mr. Holby interrupted, “as one man of the world to another. Miss Ewing, I’m sorry to say, has done a good deal of talking. I’m no saint and I don’t know anybody who is, but you can’t expect to have an affair with another woman right under your wife’s nose and not get into trouble. I’m not blaming you for it. Miss Potter is a very attractive young woman and it was probably something that you couldn’t either of you help. What’s done is done, and there’s no use crying over spilt milk. We’ll——”
“If you’d just listen to me for a minute!” Austin exclaimed. “Miss Ewing is as mad as a March hare. She——”
“The time has come,” Mr. Holby said, “for you to listen to me. We’ll weather the storm, and I don’t mind telling you there has been a storm. It isn’t only a matter of people
coming to me instead of you. Bud Ellis has served notice on me that he is taking his business to Chappell and Warren from now on. Well, let him, I say. It’s going to cost him a pretty penny before he’s through. Meanwhile, anything you can do to patch things up between Martha and you, I advise you to do. Take some time off. Take a trip with her somewhere. It’ll be all right with me.”
“I’m afraid I can’t afford a trip just now,” Austin said. “And Martha is expecting a baby in January, so I doubt if she’d enjoy it.”
“Suit yourself,” Mr. Holby said, and got up from his desk and went toward the hatrack. Standing in the door, with his overcoat on and his silk muffler neatly arranged, he turned and said, “If Martha would care to talk to me, I’d be very happy to see her at any time,” and went out, leaving Austin alone, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his eyes staring, and his anger with no outlet.
13
On the morning of the day before Christmas, Martha King did not come downstairs and the door of her bedroom remained closed. Austin stayed home that day and Ab followed him wherever he went, except that she was not allowed to use the basement stairs, which had no railing, and so, while he was searching for some boards to make a stand for the Christmas tree, she stood at the top and asked questions of the dark and dusty rooms below. With the wreath of holly on the front door, the red candles on the mantelpiece in the living-room and the study, and the tree lying on its side beside the icebox on the back porch, her mind was crawling with questions, the answers to which bred new questions that occasionally had to be repeated because Austin’s mind was taken up with matters that had nothing to do with Santa Claus. Put her to bed and keep her in bed, Dr. Seymour had said. The slight hemorrhaging had lasted only that one day, but the fear that it might begin again at any time kept Austin from sleeping, made him irritable and unlike himself. If she’s only all right, he said to himself as he came up the stairs with the boards for the stand; if she just gets through this last month without any more trouble, that’s all I ask.
With Ab after him, he went to the pantry and began searching through the drawer where the hammer should have been and wasn’t. I should have realized, he said to himself, that something was the matter, that it was different this time from the way it was before Ab was born. I should have gone and talked to Dr. Seymour myself. Instead of which, I was so immersed in my own affairs that I——“Frieda, have you seen the hammer? It should be here in this drawer.”
“No, Mr. King,” Frieda said from the kitchen. “You were the last person that used it. If it isn’t there, I don’t know where it could be.”
The Kings’ new cook was a middle-aged widow who had raised a family of five sons and then, just as she, was ready to sit back and be taken care of by them, they had one after another married. She was very religious, with thin tight lips and a streak of grey running through her hair. They ate early on Wednesday evening so she could get to prayer meeting on time, but that wasn’t of course the same thing as contributing to the support of foreign missionaries in far-off places like India and China, who would have been grateful (she managed to convey as she cleared the table) for the piece of gristle, the remainder of a slice of bread that Austin or Ab left on their plates.
The hammer turned out to be in the larder, a room that Austin King hadn’t been in for over a month.
“How does Santa Claus bring presents to children who live in a house where there isn’t any fireplace?” Ab asked at his elbow.
Austin answered this question to the best of his ability and then said, “Now if somebody hasn’t made off with the nails.”
“With his bag and all the presents?” Ab asked.
“Certainly.”
With the boards, the hammer, and nails, Austin went out to the back porch and saw a grey sky and soft rain descending. The ground, which should have been covered with snow, was soggy after a week of rain.
“How does Santa Claus get here in his sleigh if there’s no snow?”
“There’s plenty of snow at the North Pole,” Austin said, sawing at one of the boards he had brought up from the basement. When he had finished making the stand, he nailed it to the bottom of the tree and carried it through the kitchen, the pantry, and the dining-room, leaving a trail of pine needles behind him, and discovered that the tree was too tall to stand upright in the bay window of the living-room.
He decided that, for the sake of the shape of the tree, he would have to rip the stand apart and saw another foot off the trunk. He dragged the tree through the house once more, and out on the back porch.
If she takes good care of herself, Austin said to himself, as he pried the stand apart, and if she gets plenty of rest. And if I see to it that nothing happens that could in any way upset her …
But suppose she does take care of herself and something happens to her anyway? said the rain, the same slow steady rain that was falling on the graves in the cemetery. Suppose you are left in this house? Suppose you have to go on living without her, the way other men have had to do who lost their wives?
She’s just got to be all right, Austin said to himself.
The stand, which had been all right the first time, now gave him trouble. The tree leaned to one side, and so he tried more nails, explaining meanwhile to Ab about Mrs. Santa Claus and her remarkable geese.
“And whenever she plucks one of her geese, it snows.”
“Then why doesn’t she pluck one of them now so Santa Claus’s sleigh will have something to run on?” Ab asked.
“Because nothing is ever that simple.”
“Why isn’t it that simple?”
The tree, when he stepped away from it, teetered and in a spasm of exasperation he threw down the hammer and cried. “Oh, Abbey, I don’t know!”
She backed away from him in surprise. He had never before spoken sharply to her and now, just when everything else was so confusing, it turned out that with him, too, there was a line that she must not cross. She looked at him as if, before her eyes, he had suddenly turned into a stranger. He picked her up in his arms and carried her into the house.
“You stay inside with Frieda,” he said. “You’re getting cold.”
He was once more her kind, patient father, but that did not in any way alter what had just happened.
She sat watching him from a remote sofa while he set the tree up in the alcove of the living-room. Her face was long and thin with reproach. When he sat down beside her and lifted her onto his lap, her expression changed gradually. He saw that she had forgiven him and that she had another question which she was afraid to ask. He was tired to death of questions, hers and his own and everybody else’s, and he sat holding her and looking at the bare Christmas tree. At last, feeling her so quiet against him, he said, “Well, Abbey, what is it?”
14
At quarter after eleven, on Christmas morning, the Kings’ living-room was strewn, from the ebony pier glass to the dining-room doors, with tissue paper. The candles on the Christmas tree had burned low and been put out, for fear of fire. Their red and white and green and blue wax had dripped on the pine needles, the artificial snow, the gold tinsel, and the coloured balls that managed to reflect the whole disorderly, uninhabited room in their curved sides.
The square flat package on the hall table was for Nora. It was wrapped in red tissue paper tied with white ribbon and contained a handkerchief. On the sofa in the living-room, the presents that Austin had received were arranged in a neat pile that contained nothing more interesting or exciting than a belt with a silver monogrammed buckle (he already had a pearl-handled pocketknife) and a game that required the throwing of dice. The person or persons who had sent Ab the box of dominoes, the box of tiddlywinks, and the dancing mechanical minstrel would never be properly thanked, because Martha King was not in the living-room when these presents were opened, and the cards that came with them were now somewhere in the mass of tissue paper.
When the doorbell rang, there were footsteps in the upper hall, and Austin came down the stairs
, with Ab following, one step at a time.
“Merry Christmas!” Nora cried, as he opened the front door.
“Merry Christmas,” Austin said, and took the pile of Christmas packages that she held out to him so she could close her umbrella.
“When I went to bed last night,” Nora said, disposing of her coat and the umbrella in the hall, “I was so sure it was going to snow by morning. How is Cousin Martha?”
“Just the same,” Austin said.
Nora did not hear him. She had caught sight of the Christmas tree, and was exclaiming over it.
“This room looks as if a cyclone had struck it,” Austin said apologetically.
“We just have a small one,” Nora said, “on the dining-room table. At home every year—Oh, Austin, I’ve left you standing there holding all those packages! I’m so sorry.” She took them from him and put them on a table. “Cousin Abbey, this is for you,” Nora said, handing Ab the largest and most impressive-looking of the presents she had brought over.
Ab, jaded by the continual opening of packages, ripped the big rosette of red ribbon and the tissue paper off and discovered a Noah’s ark. It was large, it was painted in bright colours, and it was undoubtedly the most expensive toy that had found its way into Mr. Gossett’s shop in time for Christmas.
Nora glanced around the room and said, “Oh, isn’t that a sweet doll’s house! I had one when I was little—with real andirons in the fireplace that I just loved.”
Ab found the catch that released the hinged roof, and dumped Noah and his wife and the wooden animals matter-of-factly on the floor.
“I’m afraid you’ve been much too generous,” Austin said. “We’ll put it away until she’s older and can appreciate what a beautiful thing it is.”
“No, let her play with it.… Cousin Abbey, show me what else Santa Claus brought you.” In the midst of this tour of inspection, Nora suddenly turned to the pile of packages once more. “This is for Cousin Martha—it’s a quilted bed-jacket. And this is for Cousin Martha, too. I couldn’t remember what kind of cologne she likes, so I got her violet. And this is for Cousin Martha from Mama. It’s the crocheted centre-piece that she started when she was here. She said to tell Cousin Martha that it was her masterpiece.… And this is for you, Cousin Austin.”