by Jerry eBooks
She did not come. He struck again, harder.
When she appeared it was by gradual stages. The cretonne drapes at the glass panel were spread wide enough so that he could see it all: the light bursting somewhere over to his left—behind wallpaper-bead curtains, it seemed—and passing through them to draw the shapes of the room toward him. Bonheur’s Horse Fair on the wall; a chair and sofa set that had forgotten it was plush; a table, a bookcase, a pot-bellied heater. And another picture he identified as a huge, frowning portrait of President Harding.
Miss Morrow followed the lamp so quietly he could not hear her progress. She was swathed to her ankles in a faded lavender bathrobe over what appeared to be many strata of sensible flannelette. Her feet were in carpet slippers lined with fleece.
She had her small, tranquil smile and the look of a Flemish doll that had never been new.
“You must be nearly frozen,” she said. “Do come in.”
If anything, it was colder inside. The temperature had congealed around the smells of plush and asafetida so that Miss Morrow’s slender lamp seemed to have brought the first warmth in years to this room. She set it carefully on the frosty top of the heater. He shivered.
“Isn’t it,” she said, “the most inclement weather you ever saw? I suppose there is illness in the family, and indeed I don’t wonder.”
“Miss Morrow,” he said.
“It will be a mercy if we don’t all take down with something before school opens. I know what some of my good neighbors say: An open winter makes a fat cemetery. Still, if you’ll excuse the quip, I’d much rather chance that than a summer as closed as this one.”
He hadn’t expected quite such fragility. Even back then, he remembered, the boys had called her Old Lady Morrow—though not without a certain fondness, as they referred to an agate taw with many moons in it. Now she was very old.
He said: “Miss Morrow.”
“Of course. I shouldn’t even try to cheer you up at such a time—I’ll hurry right into something more appropriate. I do know a little about nursing, fortunately.”
“No one is sick. Miss Morrow, don’t you remember me?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t met all the children’s—”
The change in her face was instant. The smile closed into primness. She said: “I know you. Indeed I do know you. You are the gentleman at the bank, and may I ask, sir, why you have come here disturbing the honest people of this neighborhood?”
There had been an inflection on the adjective. He was sure of it. He took a step toward her that did not bring him any nearer; she had taken a step away.
“At the bank,” he said jovially. “That’s right. I know I ought to be kicked for getting you up at this hour, but I was just passing by and—Frankly, Miss Morrow, I’m sometimes a little concerned about you.”
“Why?”
“We’ve been cashing a ninety-dollar check for you every month for years, and—”
“Oh, no. Not for years. Just this summer.”
He was too hearty. He knew that; it was the shallow, booming voice that sometimes made even his wife look at him strangely. But he could seem to do nothing about it.
“Still, you must have accumulated quite a bit over the yea—the summer. McNeff says you eat like a bird, and this is your own little house now isn’t it? Well we’re a local institution. We pride ourselves on that, and it is a matter of some moment to us that we haven’t had the honor of your account . . . I could take—I would be delighted to—”
She backed another step from him. He took a forward step. They were like figures in a parlor game, the old lady and the man.
“Do you really want to know why?” she said.
“Yes,” said the man.
“Because you are a scoundrel,” she said.
He stopped quite still.
“A scoundrel. A. scoundrel, Miss Morrow?”
“Of a very low order, I might add, and I do not believe I care to detain you any longer. I have never liked your face or manner, sir. I was saying to Mr. McNeff’s employee only this morning: ‘How could any man of such transparent mien have been placed in a position of trust?’ ”
He was appalled. He had heard of the intuition of the mad; but he would never have believed it could strike through a surface that for the most part convinced even himself. He said frantically: “How many oth—What did he say?”
The wallpaper-bead portieres swished faintly from the motion of her body. She was still backing.
“As usual, something quite irrelevant. ‘Oh, George Gholson is as honest as the day—he wouldn’t take a cent of anyone’s money.’ ”
He found that he could breathe again. “And then what did you say?”
She was almost beyond the circle of the lamp, but her face flowered suddenly in its own light.
“Why, naturally I told him I was speaking about the banker. Heavens, I know George is honest—the fifty-cent piece must have rolled into a crack somewhere. Principal Dunlevy was quite, quite wrong to give him such a dressing-down last semester.”
What had become of old Dunlevy, anyhow? he wondered. And the little chinaeared Pritchard girl on whom he had spent the coin? He said huskily: “I’m George Gholson, Miss Morrow.”
She laughed a ringing laugh.
“I was your favorite student, remember?—everybody said so. Rhetorical Day. Five dollars. Five—You gave me a five-dollar prize for reciting a poem by Tennyson.”
Miss Morrow still laughed.
“Considering that there was an item in the Democrat about it last fall, you have a very poor memory indeed. George chose a sonnet by Wordsworth, and very nicely declaimed it was, too. With feeling. I believe I had to prompt him in the middle of the fourth line, but—”
He could not reach her. She was proof against moth, rust or thief. But his voice still quavered in his ears. He still pursued.
“. . . And you wouldn’t really want me to go to the pen. Not me. I haven’t deserved anything like that . . . It was a good investment—quick turnover, safe. Should have made me rich . . . I am George Gholson, Miss Morrow. You were—Miss Morrow, you were sick.” She smiled ironically. “You have changed greatly in the last few months, George. Suppose you tell me, then, sir, how the sonnet went?”
And the pity of it was: he could not remember. His mind rushed blindly into the past and returned only with a smutty limerick he had memorized not long ago for stag sessions.
“I think I do feel a little sorry for you, sir. Like Brutus the betrayer, you are obviously an ambitious man. But if you have taken something not your own, why can’t you be at least honest enough to pay a thief’s price for it?” His fingers were gathering around the derringer. “Three thousand dollars, that’s all,” he said, “and you’ve got enough to cover. Somewhere. And what the hell does it mean to you?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s not that much. I’ve only been saving over the summer. But when I’m drawing my hundred a—It means a great deal.”
“What? Tell me that, will you? What?” The dry portieres were whispering against her shoulders. She said wearily: “I couldn’t make you understand. Suppose you leave me now, sir. I sometimes feel a little more tired than a woman in her prime should feel.”
“I’ll make you understand,” he said.
His shadow crossed President Harding’s face and the shadow of the derringer with it. He had cleared the gap at a single bound so that now they stood quite close together, the little gun raised between them. It was as if he were offering her a forfeit at the end of the parlor game.
She was more frightened than he had expected her to be. The pallor coursed down from the roots of her white hair for all the world like a blush. It reached the hollow of her throat, where a vein fluttered softly.
He could press an advantage. “You see? You see now what will happen, don’t you? No scream, though. Quiet.”
“I never scream,” she whispered. “The gun. Just don’t make me look at it—don’t touch me with it! Please. I can’t stand any of
them now. Not since last year.”
He said: “Last year? What—”
The hunting accident at the Ridge, he remembered. The middle-aged Swede with the huge, awkward hands—Miss Morrow’s young man, the town called him good-naturedly—who had tangled himself and his Winchester in a barbed-wire fence and made a mess of himself.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve tried to be gentle with you. Where is it, then? The money.” Her lips drew severely into the pallor. “I won’t give it up, sir. Not ever.”
He touched her wrist with the muzzle of the derringer. Her throat contracted but she did not move. “I’ll have to kill you, then,” he said.
Miss Morrow’s small laugh rippled again. “George Gholson, indeed! I don’t believe you will kill me until you’ve found the money, and then you would do so anyway, would you not?”
“I’ll find it,” he said. “One way or another.” He brought his clasp-knife out into the lamplight, holding the derringer fixed on her while his free hand sprang the blade. Miss Morrow neither spoke nor moved. He struck suddenly at the wallpaper beads behind her.
They went pattering away into the shadows with a sound like tears. “See what I mean? You treasure these old things, don’t you?”
“I shall,” she said, “when they are old.” The plush armchair yielded riffles of pinkish cotton batting, surprisingly clean for its age. He gutted the plush sofa down to its springs and considered the soft buckskin cushion that had once said: St. Louis World’s Fair, 1906. Miss Morrow made a stifled sound when the blade sank into it.
“I’ve got to look everywhere, you know,” he said conversationally.
“I wonder if you will have time. I doubt very much, sir, that you are the kind of murderer who can work by daylight.”
The upper shelves of the bookcase bulged with tier on tier of Ridpath’s History of the World. Below were the literary accumulations of a lifetime: Plato in scuffed vellum, Samantha at Saratoga, the complete works of Mary J. Holmes. Stacks of textbooks he could not remember; A Boy’s Life of Roosevelt he remembered well. She had read aloud from it.
He sliced deliberately into the open books, tearing when he did not slice. Miss Morrow said: “Is that necessary, sir? You know the money could not be in—”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“No.”
A brown-backed grammar book fell apart at the leaf mark. He bent with an unaccountable curiosity to stare at the diagramed sentence under the lamp. The North Wind is full of courage, it said, and puts the stamina of life into a man.
He gathered handfuls of the yellowed pages, feeling them dissolve in their own age. Afterwards Miss Morrow said: “I treasured that book, yes. The publishers wrote me last year that the plates have been destroyed, and I think in twenty years or so it would have been worth thousands.”
A nerve twisted in the corner of his mouth. He said, “Thousands?”
“Though I would never have sold it, of course. Heavens, money can’t be that important. But I think you understand now, do you not, that there is nothing to be gained from this malicious nonsense?”
“Yes,” said Gholson.
He swung the lamp up from the floor and set it down on the gateleg table. The shadows jarred away to leave them standing together in the circle of light. His fingers dropped to her wrist.
“I had an idea,” she said, “that this would come next.”
“Do you think I want to do it? It’s the last thing in the world I want.”
“Except prison,” she reminded him.
“All right! Except that!” The repressed nerve fluttered into his voice. “It can’t mean anything to you. You’ve got enough to live on—plenty to live on! And you’ll have to tell me sooner or later. Why not—Miss Morrow, I’ll pay you back! Just in the nature of a loan, that’s all. I—”
“You are going to kill me,” she said. “We both know that.”
His hand hardened around her wrist. He pressed her fingers slowly toward the open chimney of the lamp.
“In a way,” she whispered moments later, “I can be almost glad . . . I thought—there was once when I thought your eyes were a great deal like George’s.”
The nerve caught at his mouth again. “Be so easy! Just a word or two and—Will you tell? Will you tell?”
Her answer came to him across another interval of moments.
“I suppose I must,” she said faintly. “I could never bear to see a man in such distress.”
His fingers loosened. “Where?”
“The kitchen,” said Miss Morrow.
It was a small room hung with a frieze of old willow-ware and warmed faintly by the last embers of the cookstove. Above their heads a graying canary drowsed in a ruff of feathers. “You see,” Miss Morrow explained cheerfully, “I do most of my living in this room. It’s only proper, don’t you think, that I should do my dying here, too?”
He set down the lamp. “The money,” he said.
“I keep it under the old sacks in the flour bin. Shall I—”
“Oh, no, you don’t! I’ll get it.”
He moved the derringer to his left hand and pressed down with the heel of his right one on the bin, topheavy from the weight of the two full sacks inside. He bent one knee into the aperture underneath and scuffed his fingertips along the dark crevice where the empty sacks had accumulated. Something small and terrible sprang out of it to take his fingers in its teeth.
Gholson’s knee lost its purchase in the slot and the ponderous bin went backward with him, pinning his right arm immovably to the cabinet frame.
The derringer had fallen somewhere under the skirts of his overcoat. His free fingers found it, and lost it again in the shadow that was taking shape on the worn linoleum—so clearly defined he had begun to scream before his head turned.
Miss Morrow stood quite close to him with a small Boy Scout hand-axe poised above his skull. Her eyes were wide and intent.
He cried out again. “Oh, no!”
The axe fell solidly.
He opened his unbelieving eyes and watched it revolve to a dead stop in the corner where Miss Morrow had flung it.
She was gone. He could hear the whisk of her flannelettes in the room beyond.
He brought up one heel and put his full weight to the bin, freeing the numbed arm an inch at a time. His overcoat sleeve had deadened the blow so that the muscles in it would still flex. He shook the little rat-trap from his fingers and caught up the derringer and the lamp.
The scattered pages of Miss Morrow’s books were rattling in a draught from outside. Gholson put the lamp down hard and went through the open door.
She was midway of the icy street when he overtook her. She stopped among the dying echoes and faced him defiantly.
“You are an even worse rogue than I would have believed, sir.”
He was panting with relief and fury. “Come on. We’re going back.”
“No.”
“The gun,” he reminded her.
She padded ahead of the derringer, her small shoulders squared with indignation. “Don’t touch me with it! . . . Believe me, sir, you have had every chance. I could have killed you, you know—I fully intended to do so when we went out to the kitchen.”
“Well, why didn’t you, then?”
“You screamed,” Miss Morrow said simply. “Death is a majestic thing, and it occurred to me then that you may not be an important enough man to die.”
Gholson put his shoulders to the door and crossed over to the lamp. He gave the wick a full turn so that the barb of light rose high in the chimney. “I still want the money. I’ve still got to have it, can’t you understand that?”
“The lamp again?”
“Until you tell.”
She was crying so inaudibly that he did not know it until he stood over her and saw the tears. They fell like a faint mist, without convulsing her face.
“I would have to tell you sooner or later. I know that now—there would come a time when it seemed unimportant to me . . . But no o
ne could blame me, surely. Sometimes I don’t even want it to be as much money as it sometimes seems.”
Gholson boomed genially, “Just a few dollars. That’s all it can be, you know.”
“But I thought you would go away. I had a right to expect that much when I let you live.” He set his teeth again and took her wrist. “The stove,” she mourned. “The heater.”
“Another lie! No one would be crazy enough to—”
But the room was very cold.
Miss Morrow said: “I never light a fire there in the summer, you see. I wouldn’t want to be prodigal of fuel, no matter how inclement it grows.” She smiled through the slow tears. “But as to its being an absurd hiding place, you would never have thought to look there, you know.”
He was shaking so that the rusty catch resisted him on the first try. He put down the derringer. The isinglass-paneled door swung outward on infinitely weary hinges.
The nerve puckered his mouth again. “Kindlings in here!” he accused. “Newspapers. It’s all laid for the morning fire.”
“From last spring, I think,” Miss Morrow said vaguely. “I haven’t heated the sitting-room once this summer, sir.”
“And I think you’re lying to me! If—”
He would have turned, except that some quality in the texture of the newsprint held his eye. He crackled a page of it out between his fingers.
The headline said:
MISS MORROW SEES TYPHOID BOGIE AT TOWN CONFERENCE
School Kids Endangered by Slough, Scolds Kindly but Mistaken Pedant
It was laid for a fire of long ago. It had been an interminable summer.
The money was underneath.
Even so, it was hard for him to believe that she could have accumulated so much of it. Wherever his fingers groped they found it, in bills of all ages and denominations—at least a small fortune bedded away in the space between kindlings and grate. He could not imagine an existence so frugal. At the most generous estimate, he had expected to find only enough.
“But it isn’t yours, you know,” Miss Morrow said. “You must not take it.”
He watched the mound of currency grow. “Nature of a loan,” he said over his shoulder. “Just like having it in the—”