by Leslie Ford
“Mr. McClure is an unusually attractive man, isn’t he, my dear?”
I glanced at Mr. McClure. His blond rather wavy hair, his Bond Street dinner jacket, his blue Nordic eyes and little blond mustache, made Sandy, who was visible in the mirror beside him, look like nothing holy.
“Very, I should say.”
“Should you say he was interested in Karen?” Miss Isabel inquired. I don’t see how he could have helped hearing her.
I laughed.
“I do hope Roger isn’t jealous,” she said. “My dear, you wouldn’t believe it, but Roger has the most abominable temper. He’s not a bit like my dear brother—his father, you know.”
I nodded.
“I’m sure Karen will make him a perfect wife,” she went on. That was fortunately drowned in a burst of laughter from the group that surrounded Philander Doyle. Judge Candler and the Senator glanced over from the other end of the room.
“I was just saying, Senator, that it’s the Judge who ought to live in a glass house, not Karen. Inviolable integrity is wasted in a woman.”
It didn’t really sound funny enough for the peal of laughter it had brought forth. Somebody remarked that fortunately Judge Candler never threw stones, and Miss Isabel said, “You know, my dear brother has always been opposed to Roger’s passion for Karen. Isn’t it too marvellous he’s finally consented? I’ve been so afraid Roger would simply drift into a marriage with Jeremy.”
I looked at her, rather more savagely than I’d intended, I suppose.
“Oh, my dear, don’t misunderstand me. Jerry’s a lovely child, but I mean . . . really, they’re so like brother and sister.”
I glanced at the two of them, seated as far apart as the constricted actual space allowed. Jerry was very lovely, talking to the Senator’s wife, and Roger Doyle was being distressingly aloof, his eyes, like Geoffrey McClure’s, following his hostess from one small group to the other. When she came at last to Jerry and perched on the fragile arm of her chair, I saw Jerry stiffen for an instant. Then I heard her say, in her beautiful bell-clear voice, so that everyone in the room could hear:
“Karen, the bank is turning all your aircraft stock over to you in the morning, with all the back dividends.”
Karen’s voice pealed out joyously. “Darling! Aren’t you wonderful!”
“It’s Dad, not me. He couldn’t bear to think of your starving in this appalling squalor!”
If there was anything but the utmost and most engaging friendliness in any of that, it certainly wasn’t apparent to the naked ear. If it hadn’t been that Miss Isabel dropped her fork on the pale soft rug, the infinitesimal silence that met it would hardly have been noticeable at all. In the rush of male helpers I glanced in the mirror at Roger Doyle. His face had darkened alarmingly. Geoffrey McClure glanced very casually at Karen and away, and the moment was over. A kind of too gay tension had suddenly relaxed, and for the next hour a group, civilized and au courant in the affairs of the world, chatted pleasantly.
In my sudden jerk forward to catch the sweet potato ball that lodged in one of Miss Isabel’s purple bows I’d wrecked a shoulder strap. When the first guest rose to depart and there was the usual instant following of everybody who had to get back to town, I slipped upstairs to the shell-pink bathroom. But Karen’s house had nothing visible that held anything as utilitarian as a pin, and before I had the strap anchored it was too late. Outside the door I could hear the clipped Oxford speech of Geoffrey McClure.
“But it’s dishonorable, Karen, don’t you see? That sort of thing isn’t done.”
I could hear her soft voice, but not her words. And then his answer:
“Oh my dear, I love you too—madly, insanely—but we can’t, not that way. It would ruin everything—my family, our future. No, my dearest, I’d rather be dead—I’d rather see you dead.”
There was a pause then with the passionate undercurrent of Karen’s voice, and Geoffrey McClure’s again:
”No, you shan’t. It isn’t cricket, old girl—it just isn’t.”
I waited—and after a long, long time I peeked out. The gay little room was empty. From downstairs I could hear Karen’s voice, too high and too bright. I slipped down unnoticed—I hoped; certainly by Karen, who was saying goodbye at the door to Geoffrey McClure. Judge Candler and the Washingtonians had gone; only the Doyles and Jerry and Sandy were still there. Karen came back from the door.
“You haven’t seen my house, have you, Mrs. Latham? Not the business end, anyway.”
She took my arm. “This is the kitchen.”
She pushed a crystal rosette, a glass panel slid smoothly to one side.
“I’m frightfully proud of it, it’s my own idea. Oilburner, hot water.” She waved at the small green oil heating unit and the gas hot water coil and storage tank compactly installed above it. The pilot light was a pencil point of blue flame at the bottom.
“Aren’t they wonderful? I’m one of those people they advertise about—you know, that buy their fittings at a junk shop and call in the plumber to put them in. Only I didn’t buy them, a friend who’s modernizing gave them to me instead of the junk man, and I got another friend to install them. He says they’re obsolete, but they work. Not the oil burner, it’s the latest. I mean the rest of them. You’d be surprised if you knew how little it cost.—Here are the cupboards.”
She displayed stacks of neatly arranged dishes, all washed and put away.
“Jerry loaned me William, and Miss Isabel sent her maid over,” she went on.
I looked at her. She was chattering like a magpie, but her heart was not in it.
“Oh, here’s my tonic,” she said. She picked up a glass of milk from a silver tray on the neat little metal sink and drank it, making a charming face, and put it down again, smiling brighty.
“It’s all marvellous,” I said.
We went back into the white room. The others had gone upstairs for their wraps; I could hear them talking and laughing. Then I heard another and quite different sound, closer by, a definite and very plaintive “Meow, meow!” I turned around. Karen broke into a peal of laughter.
“Come in, Mrs. Harris,” she called.
A small Siamese cat of a lovely café-au-lait shade stalked in from the kitchen, rubbing her back against the panel edge, purring heavily.
“I had to hide her tonight,” Karen said. “Miss Isabel hates cats. Come to Karen, beautiful.”
She picked the cat up just as everybody came down the narrow stairs of the old hay loft and pressed her face against its head. It struggled out of her arms, jumped down and made a dash for the kitchen, and just in time too. Miss Isabel said, “I thought I heard a cat.”
“No, indeed,” Karen laughed. She opened the front door.
Miss Isabel peered into the kitchen.
“Karen, it is a cat!”
I could hear her poking around among the pots and pans. Suddenly she gave a wild screech and flew back into the room, pulling at the glass panel. Mrs. Harris, even more terrified, made a leap for the narrow opening and streaked, hair on end, through the room, practically upsetting Philander Doyle, and out into the night. Miss Isabel Doyle leaned against the half-closed panel, her bloodstream pounding in the veins of her thin throat.
“You know, I’m terrified of cats,” she gasped, looking at her brother as if it were his fault, not Karen’s. “I do hope it won’t go over to our house.”
“It won’t,” Karen laughed. “Good night, everybody!”
She stood in the doorway for a while as we went out, calling “Kitty, kitty!” and finally closed the door.
“I’ll phone for a cab from your house, Jerry,” I said. Then I noticed that Roger Doyle was still with us. Jerry and Sandy—who’d been quieter all evening than I’d ever seen him—moved ahead. Roger walked with me.
At the steps Jerry turned.
“Good night, Roger,” she said quietly. “We won’t ask you in, it’s so awfully late.”
Roger Doyle stopped abruptly with one foot on t
he step.
“Oh, of course,” he said stiffly. “Good night. Good night, Sandy.”
I hoped my own too cheery good night covered Sandy’s silence. He opened the door. I heard Roger’s retreating steps crunch the dry snow.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said when we got inside.
Neither of them spoke for a minute. Then Jerry said, “Stay all night, Grace. It really is late. Lilac can bring you something in the morning.”
I hesitated, and then, perhaps because some primitive instinct stirred inside me, perhaps only because it was the easiest thing to do, I said, “All right, if it isn’t a lot of trouble.”
“Just be careful not to wake Dad when you go up, is all,” Jerry said. She glanced at her brother.
“I’m turning in,” he said. “Hurry up.”
He stood with his forefinger on the switch. I noticed then something I’d been vaguely unaware of all evening. He had at last taken the hand with the taped knuckles out of the pocket of his dinner jacket.
“Scram, pals,” he said.
Then at last, when Jerry had said good night, I lay slowly overcoming the frigid linen sheets. Neither of us had mentioned Karen or her party, absorbed, it would seem, in the mechanics of my staying all night—as if I’d never borrowed a pair of outing flannel pajamas before or Jerry hadn’t spent half her life coping with unexpected guests. There was no visible sign of what the pale enigmatic mask of her face concealed. No one else would have guessed that the subdued fire in her dark gold-flecked eyes was dying ember, on her heart’s altar, of a sacrifice that made the suet and raisins she’d offered up to the birds on the snow so pitifully inadequate.
7
If Capitol Hill were being demolished in an air raid, I’d still get my sleep. Unless, of course, the neighbors had left a cat out; and this night one of them had. I woke up gradually in the pitch dark, a faint “Meow, meow, meow” seeping through into my conscious mind. I turned over and resolutely closed my eyes. It still went on. Mrs. Harris didn’t yowl, she merely moaned.
I muttered savagely, for all the world like Lilac, “Why doesn’t that blasted Karen take her cat in?” I don’t know what it is about a low pitiful noise that makes it so unbearable. At last I sat up in Stygian darkness, thinking that of course the animal must be half frozen, and turned on the light. Then I thought it must be entirely frozen. It was after five; o’clock. Mrs. Harris still mewed, so close as to sound almost under my window.
I thought, “Why doesn’t it go home and wake its mistress?” but I got up, put on Sandy’s bathrobe and woolly slippers and went to the window. The sound must at last have waked Karen too, I thought; there was a light in her house, both upstairs and down. I waited a moment, expecting to see her open the door and call her cat, but she didn’t. Mrs. Harris’s cry rose again. She’d seen my lights go on, I supposed. Then I saw two little balls of fire raised from the Candlers’ garden doorstep.
“If I liked cats, Mrs. Harris,” I said, “I’d come down and get you”; and then I added, “—with more pleasure,” knowing very well that I couldn’t let a rat lie there and freeze to death. I opened the door and stepped out into the hall. The house was as silent as the grave. I crept down the wide old staircase, and stopped abruptly. Someone else was awake too. I could hear quiet footsteps behind me. I turned around. In the faint light from the window I could see no one.
“I must have imagined it,” I thought, and started on down. The soft footsteps behind me started too. I whispered, “Who’s that?” There was no answer, nothing but the utter silence, and Mrs. Harris’s faint wail still sounding outside. My heart, never too brave, crawled up to my mouth. My fingers were like icicles on the old pine stair rail as I realized that I couldn’t go back, I had to go on. “If I can reach the switch,” I thought, and started quickly. The soft thump-thump-thump sounded again, closer now. I dashed across the hall, fumbled with shaky fingers at the switch, clicked it on and whirled around . . . and saw the long heavy tassel of Sandy’s bathrobe flying around after me.
I said “Fool!” and tied it up, but I stood there for a moment, my heart still pounding. Then I made my way back through the door beside the stairs and into the garden entry. I felt around for the light there, found it at last, and started to reach for the big old-fashioned key in the polished brass lock. Then I stopped abruptly, staring down at the worn old drugget on the pine floor in front of the door.
A piece of caked snow lay in the middle of it. It was dry and perfectly firm. Someone had come in that way, and not very long before.
My lips were so parched that I moistened them without relief. Mrs. Harris’s low wail on the other side of the door was the only sound in the world except my own heart pounding dully. I turned the key in the lock and drew the door open. Mrs. Harris slithered inside instantly and rubbed against me with a grateful “Meow!”, her icy fur electric against my bare ankle.
I looked down at her, and I looked down, through the bare branches of the crape myrtles, icy black above the snow-white garden, at that little gem of a house. I don’t know what it was that made me just stand there, for a moment, staring down at it with some kind of a nameless dread catching at my heart. I’d certainly never pretend I’m psychic . . . and yet there was something about that gay lighted little building that wasn’t gay at all—like a brilliant ballroom quite empty of dancers. Maybe it wasn’t that; maybe it was just my bloodhound’s sense of smell communicating something strangely unfamiliar in the clean night to my subconscious. Or perhaps it was some curious foreboding that had been plucking at the muted strings of fear in my mind all that evening. I don’t know. I only know that as I stood there the tiny house seemed unreal and frightening to me, like brilliant rouge on cheeks drained of life.
It must have been sharper and more compelling, too, than I was aware of, or I’d never have ventured down the icy path in Sandy’s sheepskin slippers, hugging his bathrobe around my frozen limbs, until I came almost to the end of the path. And then I knew—for the foul acrid smell of gas was unmistakable.
I ran those last few steps, and banged frantically on the door.
“Karen!” I called. “Karen!”
The lights from the little windows shone brightly still, but no longer gaily . . . like wide staring grimaces, utterly horrible. I dashed to the nearest one. Through the chinks in the Venetian blind I could see into the living room. Karen Lunt, still in her black velvet evening dress, the bright corn-colored curls still piled on top of her head, was sitting motionless in the cherry-red love seat.
I banged at the window, and cried out desperately. She didn’t move. Then, almost beside myself, I searched frantically around on the snow-covered walk until I found a loose brick, pried it out, dashed back to the window, and then—I shall never forget that crash as long as I live—hurled it through the pane. A flood of gas poured out, choking me as I tried to get closer to tear down the blind.
I vaguely realized that the lights were going on in the Doyle house across the street, and behind me in the Candlers’, as I scooped up a handful of snow, held it over my nose, reached through the broken glass and seized Karen by her black velvet shoulder. She swayed there for just an instant, toppled over and lay, quite inert in a huddle on the eggshell rug.
My head reeled then, and I had just enough consciousness left to bury my face in the snow as I fell, and to hear voices all around me then and the crashing of window glass. The next thing I knew I was in Judge Candler’s study. And then for a brief instant I was alone, the smell of gas making a roller coaster of my stomach. I pulled myself together with a dreadful effort, reached for the telephone on Judge Candler’s desk, and whispered to the operator:
“Get Colonel Primrose at District 0091 and tell him to come to Alexandria, to Judge Candler’s house, at once! Tell him Mrs. Latham wants him.”
8
Nothing, of course, not even battle, murder or sudden death, will ever keep me from acting on the impulse of the moment . . . or from sitting afterwards just stewing in the
consequences. That was what I did now, the instant the telephone was back in place and the operator was going efficiently about the intricate simple business of transmitting my message.
“Why on earth did I do that?” I thought, staring blankly at the pool of brilliant light on the leather-topped desk in front of me. It occurred to me then that I must really be losing my mind. For what if Karen was dead? It simply meant that infinite trouble and heartache for the girl whose outing flannel pajamas I had on and the boy whose bathrobe was all that was keeping me from freezing to death was at an end. What right had I to jump to perfectly preposterous conclusions just because I’d found a bit of caked snow in the garden entry? Thinking that, and because so many people would be happier with her dead, and there was really nothing you could do about it anyway, I reached out and picked up the phone again.
It tinkled lightly at just the same moment. The operator’s voice, cool and businesslike, said, “I’ve delivered your message, madam. Colonel Primrose said to tell you he’d be down immediately.”
In any other country I’d have had time to change my mind a dozen times.
I said, “Thank you.” If I called him then and said not to come, I knew he’d come anyway. He’s always had more confidence in my intuitions than in my reasoned processes. I had, to the best of my ability, tossed the fat into the fire, and all I could do now was think, wretchedly, “If I’d only learn to mind my own business!”
Outside I could hear the clanging of the fire department and excited voices, and one muffled shout: “Put that cigarette out! Do you want to blow us all to hell?” I sat there, wrapped in icy misery. My head ached, my arm where the window glass had scratched it hurt like poison. Suddenly I just couldn’t sit there any longer. I ran upstairs, got my white caracul evening coat, slipped it on and came back downstairs. In the garden entry I stopped and looked down at the drugget. A dozen people had tracked snow and ice across it since I’d let Mrs. Harris in. My head didn’t seem to pound so badly then.