Lay On, Mac Duff!

by Charlotte Armstrong

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  Lay On, Mac Duff

  Charlotte Armstrong

  Chapter One

  My name is Bessie Gibbon. I am twenty years old now, and going to be married, but I was still only nineteen last February when all this happened. It began with me on the train for New York City, not knowing in the least what was going to become of me.

  My mother died three years ago. I had time to get used to getting along without her before my father, who was a Methodist minister in a little town up in New York state, died, too, a year ago this fall. For a few months I lived in the parsonage with the new minister and his wife, and everybody tried to help me support myself. But it wasn’t any use. I had no business training, and anyway there weren’t any business openings. The things I could do, nobody in our town could afford to hire done. I might have been a child’s nurse, but people in our town managed with a hired girl, if that, and I couldn’t be a hired girl, on account of the prestige of the Church, nor did I want to be one. I’d have made a fine companion, but companions were a frivolous impossibility to the old ladies of Baker’s Bridge, who were tough and got along all right alone. The only possible job for me was to become somebody’s wife, but after I turned down the butcher’s son, a catch, the new minister gave up and wrote to my Uncle Charles that I was coming.

  Uncle Charles Cathcart was my mother’s brother. He had offered to take me in as soon as Father died, but I hadn’t wanted to go. I still didn’t want to go, but I had to.

  Uncle Charles was a kind of myth to me. I had always known there was an Uncle Charles, but I had never seen him. He hadn’t even come to Mother’s funeral, or to Daddy’s. He’d sent lavish flowers. And lots of money, too, which came in handy, both times. I knew he was fabulously wealthy, by our standards. But although he lived in New York City, not far, he might as well have lived on Mars for all he’d ever meant to me.

  I had a notion that Daddy didn’t approve of Uncle Charles, or perhaps vice versa. Anyway, he was something rich and strange, far away from our strict and thrifty little world, mentioned infrequently by Mother with a kind of guilty awe, almost as if he were a disgrace to us in some way. Mother’s father had been a minister, too. I’d early caught the idea that Uncle Charles was a black sheep. And that it took special character to disapprove of him because the wages of sin, in his case, hadn’t been death but cash.

  He was married. My aunt’s name, I knew, was Lina. He was about fifty years old. He was rich. He’d offered me a home. And that was every bit I knew about my future, that Wednesday evening, as the train rumbled over the high tracks, between tenements and then plunged underground, so that I knew I was nearly there.

  I was scared. I felt helpless and at the same time a terrible urge not to be helpless. I didn’t like arriving in the role of a poor relation, yet that’s exactly what I was. I felt nervous and countrified and shabby, yet I was full of plans for getting a job and supporting myself, plans that I kept trying to make concrete, although they were necessarily dreamlike because I hadn’t the slightest idea what it would be like to try to get a job in New York. I hid my sweating palms in my cotton gloves and resolved to be every bit as dumb and awkward as I was bound to be, without flinching or pretending anything.

  All keyed up, with my chin in the air, I got off the train into a dim vault. A redcap asked for my two suitcases. I told him I expected to be met, whereupon he picked up the suitcases and raced off ahead of me, up the ramp, and I had to follow. Pretty soon I recognized the station proper and saw that people were waiting there, watching faces. The redcap stopped and looked at me, and I looked around helplessly, ready to bawl.

  A man’s voice said, “Aren’t you Miss Elizabeth Gibbon?”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, I am.” I was so grateful to him for having heard of me that I could scarcely see him, but I knew that, whoever he was, it couldn’t be my Uncle Charles. He was too young.

  “I’m Hugh Miller. Mr. Cathcart asked me to meet you. Shall we look for a cab?” He took my arm and steered me after the redcap, who dashed away in another direction.

  I got my chin up somehow and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know who you are, Mr. Miller.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” He seemed confused. “I’m … I work … I mean I’m an assistant to one of your uncle’s friends. I just … well, I was there, and they pressed me into service.” He smiled at me, and, since my vision was clear by this time, I saw that he was a tall serious-looking man of perhaps thirty, perhaps more, with eyeglasses and a pale but rather nice face. He had a long nose, slightly concave and thickened at the bridge. His mouth was sharply cut, and he had good teeth. His hair was light but not quite blond, and very fine, lying close to his head. I knew, immediately, without knowing how I knew, that he was scraping along in the world without much money, that he was as much out of my uncle’s world as I was, and that I needn’t be afraid of him because his interest in me was just about zero.

  We came to a place where there were taxicabs and got into one, he tipping the redcap.

  “Let me,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” he said quickly, and I wondered if it was Uncle’s money, but I let it go. The cab roared around underground and suddenly climbed into the middle of the city. The noise and the strangeness got me for a moment.

  “You’re been to New York before?” asked my companion politely.

  “When I was too little to remember it. Is my … uncle busy or something?”

  “He is entertaining.”

  “Oh. And I suppose Aunt Lina—” He turned his head to look at me so suddenly that I stopped. “I … I’ve never seen them, you know,” I said; “either of them. Didn’t I pronounce it right?”

  “Your Aunt Lina,” he said, rhyming it with Carolina and using a very queer tone, “is out.”

  “Oh,” I said. It all seemed very odd to me. After all, it isn’t every day that a strange niece comes to live in one’s house. This wasn’t the way things were done at the Methodist parsonage.

  “You mustn’t be hurt,” said Hugh Miller suddenly.

  “Oh, I’m not.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve said the wrong thing,” he went on quickly. “You see, every six weeks or so, your uncle and his friends have a meeting. It’s a tradition, a regular thing. They get together for auld lang syne, I guess.” He had a light, rather pleasant voice. It seemed to trail off with vagueness or even irony. I felt he knew things I didn’t know and that until I knew them I couldn’t understand some subtle emphasis.

  “Do you mean these meetings, or whatever they are, are important?” I said.

  “Well, you see, these three men and your uncle are old cronies. They used to be in business together, one way or another, or so I understand it.” He looked around at me and hesitated. “They play a game,” he said.

  “They play a game? What kind of game?”

  “They play parcheesi.”

  “P-parcheesi!” He seemed to be trying to explain, but the more he said the more bewildered I was.

  “Yes. It’s a good cutthroat game,” he said, smiling, “and very exciting, the way they play it.”

  “I know,” I gasped. “It’s a swell game, but my uncle …! Oh. You mean they gamble?”

  “Not for money. They play for blood.”<
br />
  He said this very quietly in his light, rather high voice and kept on looking out of the window. I struggled to make some sense out of what he had been saying. “So Aunt Lina goes out to leave the men alone,” I said aloud.

  “It’s rather a large house,” he said apologetically, and I flushed. “She often goes out.”

  “Where does she go?” I demanded.

  “Why, to the theater and to dinner with friends and … uh … concerts you know, or to the ballet. Just … uh … out.”

  “Alone!” I gasped.

  “Uh … no,” he said. He dropped that cool little syllable between us and left it there.

  “While my uncle stays home and plays parcheesi?”

  He laughed. “You’ll see how it is,” he said more warmly. “The four of them … well, I call them ‘Pirates of Industry.’” He looked at me anxiously. “You’ve heard of Captains of Industry?” I nodded. “Well, they rather like to … uh … do each other in the eye, you know?”

  “For fun?” I said.

  “Oh, yes.” Then in a hurry, “I come along sometimes with Mr. Winberry just because I haven’t anything else to do, but I am not in the game, you see, so when your uncle said that your train was nearly due, why, Mr. Winberry suggested … I mean, I offered … Anyhow, here we are, I guess.”

  The cab stopped and I looked out. We were on a rather quiet street, where the cars all pointed one way, and the house before us was one of several in a tight row, tall, narrow, cold, with stone steps going up to a massive double door, past a sunken areaway where I could see iron-barred windows. It looked closed and blank except for a glow in the fanlight over the high doors and behind blinds in the three tall windows on the second floor.

  I got out of the cab, stepping without any warning into an icy wind that bit through my coat. I shivered and looked up. Whatever this house was like inside, I knew darned well it wasn’t going to be anything like the Methodist parsonage.

  Chapter Two

  The first butler I ever saw in my life was my uncle’s butler, Effans. For a long time I thought his name must be Evans and that everyone pronounced it wrong because of some joke I didn’t know. But his name was really Effans, and he opened the door for us that night.

  He was an oldish man, quite short, with a small pinched face on top of a very long neck, which was always bright red as if it were chafed. I thought for a moment he was my Uncle Charles when he smiled, but he said, “How do you do, Miss Elizabeth. Mr. Cathcart is expecting you.”

  Hugh Miller began to take off his coat. I didn’t know what to do, but I had a strong feeling that I mustn’t take off my coat yet, so I clutched my handbag and stood still, looking around. For the first time, I saw the shape of the staircase in my uncle’s house. It was a dizzy spiral, going up and around, not only once, but many times, endlessly, it seemed to me that night, around the well at whose base we stood. We were at the bottom of the silent core of the tall house.

  This entrance hall was carpeted, softly lit, keyed low in color, luxurious. There was a beautiful cabinet against the wall. To my left were white double doors, closed. Straight ahead, under the upward swoop of the staircase, there was a small humble door. To my right a big mirror reflected my anxious face. There was no life on this floor … none at all.

  “This way, please,” Effans said, picking up my suitcases and starting softly up. I followed and Hugh Miller followed me.

  “Game still going on, Effans?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We padded softly (because of the carpet) upward, past a niche in the curve of the wall where stood a precious-looking vase, as big as I am, filled with flowering branches. On the next floor there was another set of double doors, wide open, and as we came opposite I saw a big comfortable room, all books and leather and amber light. A man came around a corner somewhere within.

  He was tall, as tall as Hugh Miller, with a great chest and a big head. He was not fat. His face was, rather, lean and dark, with long flat-curving lines along the cheeks. It was hard. The skin and the flesh seemed hard. His mouth, above a long chin, was full and yet hard. There was a dent in the side of his chin, not quite a scar. He had black and white hair, was bald in the middle. His eyebrows were dark and thin, and one of them was crooked. His eyes were blue, cold, and, at the same time, amused. He didn’t look old, and he certainly was not young. He knew too much to be young. He looked as if he knew an awful lot and it was making him laugh. I thought of Sin, out of an old-fashioned allegory, because he was ugly and fascinating and frightening and exciting and a shock to me. He had no business being anybody’s uncle, yet he was mine.

  I knew because Mother had a crooked eyebrow and so have I. And I said to myself “no wonder” because I understood, now, why he had never been to Baker’s Bridge, why he hadn’t met me at the train. He just wasn’t the kind of man who visits relatives and sleeps in the guest room where the sewing machine is or stands in a railroad station meeting shabby nieces at trains. Nothing had prepared me for the power and the impact of his personality, but, somehow or other, it explained him.

  He said, “How are you, Elizabeth?” His voice was rich and deep and softly on a leash, as if there were volumes more of it, as if he could, if he wished, fill the whole stairwell with sound and as if it would be no effort at all for him to do so.

  “I’m fine,” I said, “Unc … Uncle Charles.”

  “You found her, Hugh. Thanks.” That took me out of Hugh’s hands and signed the receipt for the package. “Did you have a pleasant trip?” said my Uncle Charles.

  “Oh, yes.” All I could think of were the set phrases I had composed on the train. “I’m very grateful to you for having me here,” I said, “and I hope not to bother you too much.” Then I blushed furiously. It sounded so prim and silly.

  “My dear,” said my uncle, “you’ll be no bother.” I didn’t know whether he meant to be kind and welcoming or whether he was matching me, sentiment for sentiment, as if it were a game he played with secret laughter, or whether he was warning me that I darned well better not be a bother or out I’d go. I felt hot and uncomfortable and about ten years old.

  “Effans will take you up to your room,” he said. “You’ll stay, Hugh?”

  “Yes, surely,” Hugh said.

  I turned, stupidly surprised, to follow Effans. Then I pulled up my chin and stopped and asked him. “Am I to come down again?” I demanded of my Uncle Charles.

  “By all means, please do.” I thought, he’s laughing. Not a muscle in his face moved, but I hated him for laughing.

  “If you’re busy,” I said stiffly, “and if Aunt Lina isn’t here …”

  “Are you tired?” he asked, with his eyebrows higher.

  “No, oh no.”

  “Aunt Lina,” said my uncle, rolling the words over his tongue twice, “Aunt Lina will surely want to see you when she comes in.” He shot a glance at Hugh, and the corner of his mouth quirked as if he couldn’t help it. Then he turned and went swiftly back into the big library, leaving me on the stairs and Hugh Miller standing in the doorway. He was frowning.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” I said to him. “I guess I’ll … I’ll be down.” He smiled, and I trudged up after Effans, as flustered as I have ever been in my life.

  The bedroom Effans bowed me into didn’t help either. It was magnificent and enormous, all gray and gold and blue, lit softly, and there were two pale wooden beds, side by side in satin coverlets. A middle-aged woman in a maid’s uniform said, “I’m Ellen, Miss Elizabeth,” and waited for my coat.

  “I can’t stay here,” I said a little hysterically. “Look, there are too many beds.”

  Ellen looked at me sharply. She had a plain, sensible face that might have come from Baker’s Bridge. “Miss Lina said to put you in the best guest room,” she said briskly, “and this is it. Shall I unpack for you, dear?”

  I told her the truth, almost belligerently. “Nobody ever unpacked for me,” I said, “or packed for me either. And you wouldn’t understand my sy
stem, with beads in my stockings and underwear stuffed in my shoes.…”

  “I bet I would,” Ellen said.

  That made me laugh. I pulled off my hat and threw it on an elegant chaise longue. “Gee whiz!” I said, and sighed. I decided that Ellen looked very much like Mrs. Dillon, the milliner, up home. “Must I change my dress to go down?” I asked her.

  “No, you needn’t,” she answered me directly, and I knew she liked me for being ignorant and saying so. “Just wash your face, and let me brush your head for you. Take a clean handkerchief and a drop of scent, and go down.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Good,” she said surprisingly. She showed me my bathroom, apologizing because it opened from the hall. It served two rooms, she told me, mine and a tiny one behind the stairwell. “But nobody’s ever put in there.”

  “I wish I could have it.”

  “It’s no bigger than the master’s bathroom,” she told me with shame, “and only one window with the fire escape past it! Miss Lina’d never hear of it.”

  Miss Lina sounded kind, if from a distance, but I resolved that she’d hear of it from me. I felt better by then. I began to understand that these people were giving me everything, and more, than I could possibly need and that I shouldn’t feel hurt because they didn’t seem to be putting themselves out to do it. They were rich and had everything to give me. We, who were poor, had always given “of ourselves” as Daddy used to say in sermons, but perhaps we thought it important and necessary only because it was all we had to give. My spirits were up now, and when I started down the staircase with my clean handkerchief and my bit of scent, I was full of just plain curiosity.

  The library on the second floor of my uncle’s house looked upon the street with three tall windows. It was an enormous rectangle, with an alcove, which ran between the stairwell and the front of the house and must have been over the entrance doors, downstairs. In this alcove, around a beautifully made table with a parcheesi board inlaid in its surface, sat my uncle and his guests. When I came in, Hugh Miller rose and came to meet me, and my uncle rose and introduced his friends. Then they went right on playing parcheesi.