Several times while he worked over Laura, I found myself studying Donia. As usual, she was never still. She would watch her brother for a few moments, and then move restlessly about the room. Finally Gunnar, perhaps impatient with both of us, suggested that Donia and I unpack the lunch basket—and that gave us something to do.
Laura was behaving cheerfully, bravely—as of course she would. The first shock of weakness had passed, and if the fact of that intentionally damaged clamp was troubling her, she hid it well. She told Miles almost gaily that we were all going to the play at the teatret, the National Theater, on Wednesday night. Once the festival started, the theater would be preempted for musical performances, but in the meantime Arsenikk og Gamle Kniplinger was playing—the Norwegian version of Arsenic and Old Lace, and that would be fun. Miles was not notably enthusiastic.
“We’ll see if you can walk by then,” he said.
When Laura’s ankle had had ten or fifteen minutes of the ice pack, Miles bandaged it snugly with one of his own handkerchiefs, and insisted that she sit with the foot raised until we left for home.
Strangely enough, in spite of accidents and uneasy emotions, we were all hungry, and we ate the lunch Irene had packed, and enjoyed it. Nevertheless, a damper had been placed upon our further activities. If Miles had expected to walk about the mountaintop with Laura, that was now out of the question. And if I had hoped that Gunnar and I might do the same, that opportunity too was gone. The barrier between us was higher than ever, and I suspected that he would want no time alone with me. Now our one intent was to get Laura safely down the mountain with a minimum of discomfort to her.
Donia and I packed the remains of the lunch in the basket, while Miles put Laura’s boot on, fastening it loosely.
Just before we left the hut, I remembered something and began to look about for the note I had left upon the table. Miles saw me searching.
“I put it in the fire,” he told me sardonically.
No one seemed to notice the interchange. I should have taken better care of that sheet of paper. Certainly I shouldn’t have left it with Miles.
When we were ready we all set off across the snow toward the cable-car station. Donia led the way, leaving us behind in her nervous hurry, with Laura leaning heavily upon Miles as they followed in her wake. I waited with Gunnar while he checked the fire and locked up the hut. Then we started after the others, with Gunnar once more carrying the skis.
As we left the hut he stopped beside me for a moment and, unexpectedly, his look was not as cold and critical as it had been.
“You are having a bad time,” he said gently. “Sometimes there is a pain contained in growing.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and turned to follow the others.
“Yes, you know.” He came up beside me. “You are torn between two directions. You do not know which way you must go.”
This time I answered him hotly. “I know very well which way I must go.”
“I think you are not sure. But I think you will win out in the end.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll win out in the end.” But I did not mean what Gunnar Thoresen meant, and we did not speak to each other for the rest of the distance to the cable car. After that moment of gentleness, he had turned from me again, and I couldn’t help that. I had, indeed, grown. I wasn’t the same person who had come up in the cable car. Something in me had hardened against Laura. The very fact that I had come so close to giving myself over to her had stiffened all my resolve. Yet I felt somehow depressed, and very cold here on this mountaintop.
Our party was going down in the cable car alone, and several cement blocks were put into the car to add weight and keep it from swaying on the descent. This time Laura sat down on a bench in relief, and Miles sat beside her. She seemed grateful for his attention and help, and I wondered at the misplacing of this late affection on her part. Donia occupied her own window, and I mine. Gunnar stood apart, and I felt thoroughly alone, and not a little unhappy and rebellious.
The steep slope of the mountain slipped by beneath us. The up car went past on the opposite cable. The slanting red roof of the Ulriksbanen rose toward us from below. An afternoon sun touched the roofs of Bergen and made the Seven Mountains glow with light. This was one of the most beautiful towns in Europe, I’d heard Laura say, and I could believe it. But it was no place for me. I was no longer sure that I would be able to write a chapter about Laura Worth, let alone do a book. I was beginning to know her too well, and I could no longer separate actress from woman.
I think the same sense of depression lay upon us all as Gunnar drove us back to Kalfaret, for we did not talk, and our thanks to Gunnar for the outing were on the restrained side, even though Laura tried to rally a little enthusiasm.
Irene met us at the door and noted Laura’s injury at once. She almost shouldered Laura’s husband aside to help her up the stairs. Miles followed and Donia ran after them. Gunnar and I stood alone in the dark inner hallway, and he held out his hand to me.
“We will go another time up Ulriken,” he said. “It will be better then. In the meantime, watch over her.”
Everything had changed and I could give him my hand in no such bargain. I shook my head. “She’s not my responsibility. I’ll be going home as soon as I’m able.”
“So you are running away?”
I started to answer, but a sound came from upstairs that chilled my very blood. Laura was screaming as I had never heard her scream before. Gunnar raced up the stairs and I went after him.
In her bedroom Miles stood holding Laura tightly in his arms, trying to still her shuddering sobs. Irene hovered nearby, adding her pleas for calm as she too tried to quiet Laura. Donia stood apart and one quick look in her direction told me that her expression was one of elaborate innocence.
“What happened?” Gunnar asked of Irene.
She shook her head. “Miss Worth came through the door into this room and began to scream.” Irene glanced about helplessly. “I don’t see anything which might so upset her.”
I looked for myself—not at eye level, as the rest of them were doing, but around the floor. At once I saw the china cat. It sat as a doorstop before Laura’s open bedroom door—a large, heavy cat of frivolous pink china, with a nose of deep rose, and blue, heavily lashed eyes. It was not made of iron, as that other had been—the cat supposedly used to murder Cass Alroy—but it was a doorstop in the shape of a cat.
“There you are,” I said to the others, and touched it with my foot. “I think this is what must have frightened her. I haven’t seen it here before.”
The others stared and I tried swiftly to read their faces. All except Donia looked shocked and upset. She looked sly.
“Get it out of here,” Miles ordered. And then to Laura, “It’s all right. There’s nothing to be disturbed about. This is undoubtedly some prank of Donia’s.” He looked angrily over Laura’s head at his sister.
She had begun to sidle toward the door, but Gunnar stepped into the opening, quietly blocking her way.
“It will be best if you tell us,” he said.
Her slyness fell away, and she looked a little frightened, and as though she might burst into tears. “It was only a surprise for Laura that I bought in a store on Torgalmenning,” she wailed in a protest of innocence. “It was such a funny pink cat, and I thought it might please her. She’s been annoyed with me lately, and I—I wanted to make it up to her for the trunk and—”
Laura raised her head from Miles’s shoulder, released herself from the restraint of his arms. “I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “I’m still far too nervous. Donia probably never thought—”
“She thought,” Miles broke in, but he was studying his wife rather coolly and objectively—as any doctor might look appraisingly at a patient.
Gunnar had stepped aside in the doorway, and Donia gave a curious little squeal—like a small animal fleeing the hunter—and hurled herself out of the room.
Laura limped across to the chais
e longue and sat down, raising her booted foot to its cushions. “Please go away,” she said. “Please go away—all of you except Leigh. She can help me now, if she will. I don’t want anyone else.”
Miles started to object, but she turned her face away from him. I think Irene, too, wanted to stay, but Laura would have none of anyone but me. And I didn’t want to stay at all.
Gunnar spoke to me quietly before he went out. “I would like to know how she does. Will you call me tomorrow at home, please? And on Monday, so if Laura is able I will come to bring you both to visit my mother.”
I merely nodded at him, and they all went away. When Irene had carried off the pink china cat and closed the door, I went to stand beside the chaise longue, looking down at Laura.
“Why did you want me to stay? There’s been enough playacting between us.”
She took off her visored white cap and dropped it on the floor. Her brown hair waved softly back from her forehead and her eyes were wide and a little staring. I suspected that she was still suffering from the unnerving shock of coming upon that china doorstop.
“You detest me thoroughly, don’t you?” she said.
“Let’s say I find very little to like about you,” I agreed. “Except as an actress.”
She nodded as if in satisfaction. “You despise and detest me, but you would never injure me. Not deliberately. I can trust you.”
This was astonishing and it was not what I wanted. “If you mean that I’d never physically assault you, that’s right. But you’d better not trust me on any other score.”
“That’s a bargain, Leigh Hollins.” She held out her hand to me in an open, boyish gesture.
I wanted to repudiate that open hand. I wanted to repudiate any trust she might place in me. Instead, I gave her my hand reluctantly, and felt the warm clasp of her fingers about my own in the sealing of some bargain I did not want to make, and did not understand.
“Now, if you’ll help me off with my boots and bring my slippers,” she said.
How accustomed she was to being waited on! I helped her out of her jacket and brought the slippers from the adjacent dressing room, between Miles’s room and her own, and loosened the boot from about her swollen ankle.
“Irene should be doing these things for you,” I said curtly.
“Irene is against my going to Hollywood. She’ll lecture me, and I don’t want to listen to her. You want me to go. You believe I’ll follow my new dream to complete disaster—as Miles and Gunnar do. But you’ll encourage me to go for that very reason.”
I was rougher with the other boot. I pulled it off and dropped it on the floor with a clatter. She was always ten steps ahead of me in whatever direction I moved.
Miles tapped on the door and came in. She looked up at him guardedly. I think she had begun to distrust everyone.
“We’re going to bandage that ankle properly,” he told her, and went to work coolly and expertly.
I slipped out of the warm jacket she had loaned me to go up the mountain, and went into the dressing room to get her caftan robe. I pretended to be busy at the dress rack, but through the door I watched Miles while he was working. If he had any affection for his wife, he was not showing it now. When the elastic bandage was snugly in place, he stood up beside her.
“Stay off that foot,” he ordered. “Keep it elevated all the time.”
“Of course,” she said meekly. “Thank you for your concern, darling.”
He gave me his usual look of distaste and went out of the room without answering her. When he’d gone, she sat up, swung her feet to the floor, and stood up lithely.
“Ah, that’s better! The bandaging helps. There’s nothing terribly wrong with my ankle. But we’ll let them worry a bit.”
She moved to the center of the room with scarcely a limp and stripped her white sweater off over her head. Then she got out of the black ski pants, entirely casual about her undressing, and slipped into the caftan I held for her. Its sand-colored folds engulfed her body gracefully.
“Now then,” she said, “we will begin.”
“Begin?”
She paid no attention to my echoing of the word, but crossed the room to a bookcase, picked out two volumes and brought them back to the chaise longue, where she sat down. When she had riffled through the pages of one, she handed me the open book.
“There you are—Hedda Gabler. I’ve always wanted to play her in a film. Not that they’d ever let me. Ibsen’s not considered popular these days, except in the theater. But he stands for Norway, and it’s always good for me to start with Hedda when I want to get the feeling of playing a part again. I adore her. A marvelous role. A thoroughly unscrupulous woman.”
I stared, holding the pages blankly in my hands, while she opened the second volume to the same play.
“We’ll read the scene in Act IV, where Hedda tells Tessman that she has burned Lövborg’s manuscript. Then on through the end where she realizes that history is going to repeat itself and there’s nothing left for her.”
“But I can’t—” I began, “—I can’t possibly—”
“Of course you can. We’ll read together. It doesn’t matter that you’re no professional. All I want is to be cued. I can still remember most of the lines. Ibsen wrote for actors. He’s never as effective when read to oneself. He knew what an actor can do with a pause, with the silence between speeches. There’s more to acting than the reading of words. Let me show you. Begin. Take Tessman’s line—”
I slammed the book shut. “I’ll do nothing of the sort. I won’t play audience for you. What sort of woman are you? A few moments ago you were screaming with the utmost realism because you’d found that china cat against your door. And now—”
“I was good, wasn’t I? I brought you all running.”
“I think you’re lying,” I said. “Your screaming was real. What I don’t understand is how you could forget it so quickly.”
Her veined hands smoothed the pages of the book she held on her knees. “It was real, yes. But don’t you see that I must try to forget. I must try somehow to get through the next few days, perhaps weeks, without being destroyed. Help me with Hedda Gabler.”
“Tell me first why the doorstop made you scream.”
“You’re making me remember.” Her tone was almost petulant. “It was the shock, of course. You know that an iron doorstop in the shape of a cat was the weapon which killed Cass Alroy?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve seen that iron doorstop.”
Her eyes widened. “You’ve seen it—what do you mean?”
“It’s there forever in the film of The Whisperer. There in the early scenes. But not at the end.”
“No, not at the end.” Her hands were clasped tightly upon the pages of the book and she did not look at me. I could sense the tension mounting in her, rising once more toward explosion. By this time I knew the signs.
“Why did you scream?” I said.
She sprang up and the book of plays went flying. “Because I killed him! Because I killed Cass with that iron doorstop, and it will be on my conscience forever!”
Hysteria was mounting, the moment coming when she would hurl something wildly, or begin to scream again. I put my hands on her shoulders and shook her hard.
“Stop it! Stop it at once. You’re talking nonsense. You couldn’t possibly have killed him. That doorstop was too heavy for a woman to have used as a weapon. I’ve read the reports.”
Beneath my hands she quieted, shuddering, fighting for control. “I killed him,” she repeated. “For twenty years I’ve wondered if I could ever say those words aloud. And now I have. To you—to the one person who will never betray me.”
“But you couldn’t have!” I repeated. “It wasn’t possible—” and then I thought of the candlestick, the sudden sight of which had made her faint only yesterday. “Was it the candlestick, then? You could have lifted that? Did you strike him with the candlestick?”
She shook her head violently. “No! No, I didn’t use th
e candlestick. I only carried it away so it wouldn’t be found there. That and the gun. I hid that too and no one ever looked for it. I still have it here in this room.”
“Gun?” I was echoing her again.
“Yes. He meant to kill me, I think. I hated him before that picture was over. We were never lovers, as the papers said. I—I made fun of him, taunted him. He was close to being psychopathic, though I didn’t realize that at the time. He’d already been through one scandal a few years before when he’d been sued in a divorce case. He didn’t care about much of anything, and he had the idea that I—that I was interested in Miles Fletcher. When I saw the gun, I knew what he’d meant to do.”
“So if you did—kill him,” I said, still disbelievng, “it was in self-defense.”
“No!” She was shaking her head again. “If I killed him it was in calculated cold blood. For twenty years I’ve tried to make myself believe that wasn’t true. I’ve run away endlessly. I couldn’t face films any more, or acting. I knew I’d go to pieces. It was better to let my successes stand. But now I’ve admitted the truth. Now I can rest.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” I protested. “Why do you say if you killed him—as if you weren’t sure?”
“That’s of no importance. You’re my confessor. There’s relief for me in speaking out. But we’ll do nothing more about it. Neither of us. You have to understand that. We can’t.”
“Because you’re afraid of what the law might still do to you?”
“There’d be a penalty to pay. I’d really be finished then. But it’s not only that.”
“Does Miles know?” I asked her.
Her expression told me that I’d touched a sensitive nerve.
“He can’t know, but perhaps he suspects. He loved me once, and he saved me when I was desperately in need. But what he suspects comes between us, and there’s a growing malice in him that frightens me. Sometimes I think he believes I have spoiled his life. There’s an even worse malice in his sister. Undoubtedly he’s talked all this over with her in the past. That’s why she brought that doorstop and left it in my bedroom. She knew how much it would shock me.”
Listen for the Whisperer Page 20