Escape the Night

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  The receiver clicked as Serena said, “Good-bye.”

  Amanda’s voice had changed very little; it was still rich and full of vitality. It was rather odd, really, that the sisters had not managed to see each other in four years’ time.

  Certainly Leda Blagden couldn’t have had nearly as much reason for her hysterical outburst in the Plaza bar as she’d fancied. Serena was glad she hadn’t given it too much weight; if anything had been really wrong, Amanda wouldn’t have sounded so natural and so welcoming.

  She did wonder, but briefly, who was with Amanda when she’d talked and, but even more briefly, what whoever it was had been told to put down.

  And she wondered who would meet her at the little Del Monte station. Suppose—well, just suppose it were Jem.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ALL ALONG THE WAY south into the Monterey peninsula there were familiar things, well remembered. She went to the Third Street station, made her way to the train and found to her delight that Oliver, the porter who had presided over the lounge car for many years, was still there, greeting his passengers as if they were guests in the house of which he was major domo. Oliver was as pleased to see her, she thought with a warmth in her heart, as she was to see him. He escorted her to a chair as if she’d been visiting royalty. She remembered the long curve by which they left the city; the enchanting glimpses of bay and mountains; and an hour or so later the occasional sight of palm trees and the warmer air that somehow found its way gently into the lounge car.

  She looked out the windows eagerly, and, as the lines of the country began gradually to change and, to Serena’s welcoming eyes, to seem a little wilder and a little more rugged, she began to realize how desperately heartsick she had been for her own country.

  As the sun began to drop out of sight and the shadows of the land crept nearer around the little train, Oliver brought her tea.

  He brought her gossip, too; the war had made changes. Lots of the men had gone or were going. There was the balloon barrage over the bay; had she noticed it? And he had to pull the curtains soon; he always did it at sunset for they were so near the coast. Everybody there was strongly conscious of the war with Japan. There were always rumors, of course, but they were now strongly defended; everybody said so. There was a dimout at night; cars could use only parking lights and the little towns along the coast were blacked out almost completely. But it was only a question of time and the war would be over, said Oliver, and indicated that if she would like a second packet of sugar with her second cup of tea he had some of his own that she could have.

  The place was full of the army and navy, he went on; Fort Ord, of course, was near; and had she heard that the Del Monte hotel had been turned into a pre-flight school for the Navy aviation cadets?

  “No!” She thought of its gardens, its swimming pool, its luxuries, the dances in the long lovely Bali room with the moon shining down upon the gardens outside and the paths among them, and the orchestra playing always for the last dance “It happened in Monterey—a long time ago …”

  The lilting soft strain sung itself in her memory. “It’s a wonderful place for the boys,” she said aloud. “The best isn’t too good for them.”

  Oliver agreed. “The war can’t last forever,” he said again. “Your brother-in-law, Mr. Condit, he’s been trying to get in the service, but he say they found out he’s got a weak heart.”

  “Sutton?” Amanda hadn’t told her that; but then they wrote seldom and Amanda’s enormous vigorous handwriting really told very little. “I didn’t know that.”

  “I guess it ain’t very serious. Dr. Seabrooke’s going—into the army, I hear. Leaves soon. You remember him, Miss Sissy?”

  “Of course.”

  Dave Seabrooke was one of the tight little group of friends; Dave and Sutton, and Ashley Sayers, and Bill Davidson, and Bill Lanier. As boys they had spent their summers largely at the Condit ranch, working along with the other ranch hands; the Condit place was then in its heyday, running thousands of head of cattle; there were now, she knew from Amanda, only a farmer and his wife and two or three ranch hands. The boys who had grown up together were adults now, yet always friends. She asked about them by name and Oliver knew exactly what had happened to each; Mr. Sayers was in Naval Intelligence, somebody said in Egypt; Mr. Davidson was in an office in Washington. He hesitated over Bill Lanier and then said he’d heard Mr. Lanier had gone to war too, but he didn’t just know where or in what branch of the service and if Miss Sissy would excuse him he had to see about some bags for a passenger getting off at the next station. He went away rather quickly, leaving what must have been an entirely erroneous impression of embarrassment. There was nothing in an inquiry about Bill Lanier to embarrass anybody; well, probably she would soon see his wife, Alice Lanier, and hear all about him and about Alice and about everybody. She suddenly longed with almost a passion to fit into a place again in the small group, and into the beautiful, rich land she loved so much.

  Just before Oliver came to draw the shades, she had a rather curious experience, curious because she remembered it so long, and it stirred her so deeply. Yet it was nothing, merely a glimpse of a valley opening upon the sea and sky.

  She’d been watching for that valley, for it always had seemed to her that it was like a gate to the fabulous, Shangri-la world of the Monterey peninsula. When they reached it the sun was almost gone; they entered the deep darkness of the valley and twisted through it with still darker shadow below; and, after moments, while she watched, almost suddenly they reached the end of that passage. There was the open sky and beyond the ocean, and that night all at once it was incredibly beautiful—and, at the same time, queerly and unexpectedly threatening. The sun lay golden with promise deep in the west, but there were black drifts of clouds streaking heavily across that farther gold; the shadows of the canyon-like valley were, by contrast, unfathomable and deep around them and somehow menacing; the mountains on either side made black shapes which were too close; a few bent cypress trees on the cliff top were sharply, blackly outlined against the stormy sunset sky.

  It was a view from another world; yet it was her world that she loved; it was dark, it was threatening, it was subtly and strangely beautiful. And, above the black shadows, beyond these black cloud streaks opening from that enclosed valley, lay something that beckoned, that promised, that yet threatened—something that all at once she seemed to want and yet, obscurely, fear.

  It was an unusual and unexpected impression; it was strong and had something that was so touched with the atavistic (as if she recognized it with her feeling and instinct rather than with her reason) that it startled her. She stared and watched, a constriction in her throat, until suddenly they came from the dark valley and turned; and the threat and the distant glory changed and shifted and all at once the valley lay behind them; dark mountains rose to the east; the sun was merely a golden rosy light sinking out of sight behind a bank of clouds. And Oliver came apologetically to draw the shades so the lights of the moving train should not show possibly to any Japanese submarine out there in the darkening, vast Pacific.

  The view was gone; the memory, however, of a remarkable, a deeply moving and, again, oddly threatening experience remained.

  Then darkness dropped down upon everything; she couldn’t see it because of the drawn shades, but she knew it was there, reclaiming, as darkness does, its hold upon an ancient land. The train was a little tunnel of light plunging through that blackness.

  Eventually the little train began to make short stops. Monterey was so dimmed that it was scarcely visible from the train, for Serena pulled out the shade beside her a fraction of an inch and looked; there were small halos of street lights, very small and very faint, so the outlines of the old Spanish houses loomed up solidly. Then they went on, and Oliver, smiling, began to take her bags to the end of the car, and she put her short fur coat around her shoulders. She took out her compact and put some powder on her face and used her lipstick, and then looked at what she could see of he
r face in the tiny mirror, with a little tightening along her nerves. Suppose Jem Daly did come to the train.

  Well, she wasn’t bad looking. She had Amanda’s slender face with its slight shadows below the arched black eyebrows, which deepened her eyes; her hair, worn high and smooth, accentuated the March look of race in her face. Amanda, however, was all color and dash; her black eyes gave her fire and vivacity; Serena’s eyes were sometimes gray and sometimes blue. Like the sea, somebody had told her once and, although she took it merely as the compliment it was obviously intended to be, still she remembered it with a little feminine satisfaction; she looked now rather anxiously at the one eye she could see in the mirror, but it didn’t seem to have any color in particular, it was just bright and dark with excitement. Her mouth was all right though; she could always be sure of her mouth; so she added some more lipstick on the principle of making the most of a good point and then rubbed some of it off; she didn’t put on her hat but sleeked up the pompadour of her dark, soft hair. And the train was stopping at the tiny Del Monte station. Her heart gave a pitch of excitement. Home. The damp, sweet night air. Perhaps Jem.

  The station was almost dark. The lounge car was at the end of the train; Oliver put her bags down and, as he did so, a station wagon lurched out of the gloom, its lights off, and stopped. A man’s voice called from it. “Sissy. Is that you?”

  Oliver, behind her, said relievedly: “It’s Dr. Seabrooke come to meet you. Good night, Miss Sissy,” and got back on the train again.

  So Amanda hadn’t sent Jem. Serena took a gulp of the warm, mist-laden air and went to meet the tall man in the light topcoat who swung open the door of the station wagon so a light revealed him and its interior. He got out, coming to meet her with his hands outstretched. “Sissy,” he said, and took her hand in his own fine nervous clasp.

  “Dave. How are you?” She put her face up to be kissed, but he didn’t observe the gesture and probably wouldn’t have kissed her anyway, she thought briefly and amusedly, remembering Dave’s disinterest in women. He put her bags in the back seat; she crawled in front, chattering excitedly and childishly all at once, telling of her trip, of seeing San Francisco again, of the delight of being back at home. Dave was one of the crowd who had grown up together; had shared dentists and dancing school and dates; had gone away to school and made trips home for vacations; had matured, gone into business or professions, married (although Dave had not) mainly among each other. Their parents, and in some cases their grandparents had been intimates as they were intimates; there’d been feuds and there’d been long-standing and loyal friendships but, friends or enemies, they were intimates, sharing each other’s lives as their grandparents had shared each other’s fortunes during those halcyon, fabulous days of California’s delirious bloom and development. Serena felt now really at home, and it unloosed her tongue.

  “It’s grand to have you back,” Dave said absently, leaning over the wheel to peer into the scarcely perceptible area of light ahead of the car. “Now, if I can just find my way through the dark. We’re dimmed out, you know, all along the coast. It’s hellish hard to see.”

  The car was dark now, but she could see dimly his sharp-featured, pleasant profile, the thin lock of black hair that always hung down over his forehead, and the fine-drawn, tired look around his mouth and deep-set spectacled eyes; Dave Seabrooke always worked too hard, as if time drove him. He was a doctor by profession, but so far as she knew he had never practiced, for he was of a research bent and spent most of his time in the laboratory he’d made of his small garage. She said: “How goes it, Dave?”

  He paused to negotiate a curve which was barely perceptible in the gloom ahead. When the stars were out they alone brightened the night, they seemed so near and clear; but it was cloudy that night with no stars and the trees on either side of the road further shadowed it. Then Dave turned another curve and they were in a village, sparsely lighted; he drove carefully, leaning forward. “Everything is fine,” he replied then. “I’ve been working, of course. Whoa, there …” Two young sailors, gobs, loomed out of the night into the small glow of the headlights, skipped nimbly out of the way of the car as Dave put on the brake and disappeared again; she could hear their laugh from the misty depths of the night beyond.

  “Don’t run over the navy,” she said lightly.

  “No, I won’t. Where’s the turn? Oh, here we are. Well, how are you, Sissy? How’s the job?”

  The job seemed three million miles away instead of three thousand. “All right,” she said. “Dave, Amanda’s having a party, she says, at the Lodge.”

  “Yes. We’re to stop there. She sent me for you. I had more gasoline than anybody else.”

  “Who’s to be there? Leda, I suppose, and Johnny. She must have got back from New York several days ago. Alice Lanier and Bill—oh, no, he’s gone to the Army. Or so Oliver told me. He told me Sutton was trying to get in the service, too. And that you were going.”

  “Yes.” Dave laughed shortly. “It’s all settled. That’s why Amanda’s giving the party. It’s a farewell party to me. Confound it! The gate should be here somewhere. If I’ve missed it—oh, no, here it is.”

  They stopped at one of the three Lodge gates; a white arm, ghostly in the dimout, stretched across the road ahead and forbade their entrance. It was one of the customs of Pebble Beach; there were only three entrances and at each one a gateman, who checked cars in and out. A man advanced from the gloom, held a flashlight briefly upon Dave’s face, and said: “Evening, Dr. Seabrooke. Nice night. Go ahead, sir.”

  The arm moved slowly upward; so slowly it was like a warning, reluctant to retreat until its message had been understood. Dave let in the clutch and all at once they were driving along the winding, forest- and ravine-lined road Serena loved. And another mile and another mile, and then perhaps Jem.

  Suppose he wasn’t at all as she remembered him. Suppose she’d built a childish ideal and then cemented it with adult perception. Suppose Jem Daly as he existed in her mind didn’t actually exist at all in the flesh.

  She wished she’d had a chance to change clothes, to put on something more glamorous than a tweed suit. She wished she’d looked prettier than she’d looked in the piece of a face she’d seen in the small mirror of her compact. She wished her heart would get down out of her throat and she’d be more sensible about the whole thing. After all, Jem was only a man and—and they’d reached the last curve before the Lodge; they were turning; there was the Lodge, its entrance cautiously lighted; there was the graveled parking space and the row of shrubbery and cottages at the right. Dave turned in and parked.

  She wanted suddenly to escape, to put off her meeting with Jem, to have a little more time, and she couldn’t do anything about it, for Dave was out of the station wagon and opening the door for her. In a small moment of panic she hoped Jem wouldn’t be at the party. And the door to the Lodge was flung open by a smiling boy in uniform, whose face she remembered, and then they were entering the warm and friendly lobby, with its gray woods and crimson carpet.

  “They’re in the bar, Miss Sissy. I told Mrs. Condit the car had arrived. She’ll be here …”

  Amanda came in sight, tall and lovely, in a red, long, dinner gown, a cigarette in one hand. “Sissy!” she cried. “Sissy, my darling!”

  Serena hadn’t known how glad she was going to be to see Amanda. She felt a sudden surge of tenderness toward the beautiful woman coming to meet her and hugged her hard as Amanda put out her own arms.

  “Darling!” said Amanda again. “This is too marvelous. You’re just in time; come along to the bar; everybody’s there. Dave, you were sweet to bring her. Come along, both of you. How are you, Sissy?”

  There were confused impressions; the familiar face of the clerk behind the desk, smiling and saying, “How do you do, Miss March?” He’d been at the Del Monte Hotel, hadn’t he? Dave disappeared and came back without his topcoat; Amanda was taller than Serena remembered her and her figure fuller; her black hair was worn looser, to
o; she wore heavy earrings which looked exotic somehow and pearls at her long, white throat, and a beautiful wide bracelet of diamonds and emeralds which shone and glittered on her white wrist. Her perfume was in a cloud around them all. They were suddenly at the door of the small, red and white bar with its comfortable, red leather chairs, its low oak tables. The Monkeyshine Room, it was called; Serena remembered it and the face of the bartender, Rudy. And then she was wafted into the middle of the group lounging and drinking and talking around one of the tables.

  Leda, in a short black dress, blonde curls shining, kissed her. Her shallow light eyes were bright and knowing and, Serena thought swiftly, tried to exchange a look of mutual understanding with Serena. It was a look Serena refused to acknowledge or return. She turned instead to Johnny Blagden, Leda’s husband—jovial, round-faced, a little balder, smiling. He kissed her and patted her shoulder heartily. Alice Lanier, red-headed and very slim and elegant in gray, kissed her. Sutton Condit was at the bar and hurried toward them and embraced and kissed her, too; her brother-in-law hadn’t changed at all—he was thinnish, blond, with a small mustache, pale-blue eyes, no eyebrows, and a pleasant, slightly deprecating smile. There was time for only the briefest, confused impression of each. Sutton was putting her in a chair; Johnny Blagden was ordering a drink for her; Leda was sitting down again, directly opposite her, eyes steadily upon Serena’s, so fixed in their regard that all at once Serena remembered Leda’s saying as they parted a week ago in New York, “Don’t tell Amanda I asked you to come.”