Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  The gardener suggested that Mrs. Rinehart try moving one of the pictures from the living room wall. Sure as shooting, he promised, she’d find it back in place the next morning. Mary preferred not to make the experiment, especially after she’d been wakened by a cold air blowing over her, a tremendous thud that rocked the bed she was lying in, and the sound of her dressing table rising up and crashing back to the floor. When she’d got up courage enough to turn on the light, she found the table where it belonged, with not so much as a tipped-over cologne bottle to prove she hadn’t been dreaming.

  Their scariest time came after a dog belonging to the estate was shot. Since ghosts do not usually carry revolvers, Mary wondered whether, after all, some human agent was behind these allegedly supernatural happenings. She arranged an ambush, stationing the boys in the living room with the shotgun, the gardener in the gunroom in the opposite wing of the house, and Mary and her secretary in the dining room with a window open. Here they had a clear view of the stairs and the hallway where a single candle burned. At one o’clock, with everyone keyed up to the shrieking point, a weird and shapeless figure crawled through the living room doorway.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot,” Mary quavered. The weird and shapeless figure leaped to his feet. It was Ted in his bathrobe, lamenting that his mother had scared off whoever was in the garden.

  No, she hadn’t. A round, white light was bobbing away from them across the lawn, as if somebody was walking backwards holding a flashlight. But why? They watched the light until it disappeared into the marshes about 200 feet away.

  Since the eldritch disturbances kept her from getting much sleep, Mary put in a good deal of time on her new novel. By late August, Dangerous Days was finished and she felt entitled to accept a few dinner engagements. One night at a neighbor’s, Mary entertained her fellow guests with a partial account of what had been happening in her rented house. The following day, she had a surprise visit from her hostess of the night before. Now that the Rinehart ménage would be moving out, the lady felt free to let Mary know that the house had been reputed for years to be haunted. There had even been a piece about it some years back in a New York paper.

  Perhaps this was cold comfort, but even things that go bump in the night have their uses. Six years later, Mary would make $40,000 out of a mystery novel laid in that house. Remembering those odd noises in her improvised office, she named her book The Red Lamp.

  CHAPTER 26

  An End to the War to End All Wars

  During that summer, Mary had kept in touch with the Theodore Roosevelts. On September 12 she was invited to lunch at Sagamore Hill. She was reluctant to go, she was too well aware that their youngest son, Quentin, had been killed in France less than two months before.

  But she went, of course, riding out from New York with the colonel and his wife in their car, trying to make light conversation while the former president sat up front with the chauffeur and didn’t say a word. Mrs. Roosevelt knitted. When at last she spoke of her dead son with loving resignation, it was Mary who cried. In her memoirs Mary paid due credit to the “shadowy partner” to whom much of the credit for the spotlighted half’s fame is so often owed. She saw this quiet strength in Mrs. Roosevelt, and she was everlastingly grateful for it in Stanley Marshall Rinehart.

  Back in New York and alone again, Mary took another poke at The Bat, but the perverse little creature refused to fly. Alan had found out at Harvard that he was now eligible to join the marines, and he informed his mother by phone that he’d already enlisted and was heading for boot camp. Ted, still too young for active service, signed up with the National Guard to protect bridges and railroad tracks from possible sabotage. Mary felt rather desperate about having all four of her men on active duty and herself fiddling around in a hotel suite.

  Then she got a long-distance telephone call. The secretary of war was on the line. Could Mrs. Rinehart sail for France in three days’ time? That same night, Mary was on the train to Washington to kiss her increasingly frustrated husband good-bye and get her passports in order. Again in New York to pack her bags, she squeezed in a luncheon with Avery Hopwood and asked him to finish The Bat for her. A special airplane flew up from Washington with her letters and credentials, she boarded a French ocean liner.

  This trip was a far cry from her maiden voyage on the Franconia. They had no convoy, but airplanes saw them safely down the bay. Boat drill was rigidly carried out; scads of women showed up for it along with the men, all in the uniforms of various welfare organizations, all claiming the war would soon be over. Mary didn’t believe them but didn’t argue the matter, she was too taken up with wondering how to locate Stanley Junior. She knew that her son had finished training school and been commissioned as a second lieutenant, but nothing more.

  At Bordeaux, she was heartened by meeting two French officers sent by André Tardieu, the new premier. They gave her to understand that the arms of France were flung wide to embrace Madame Rinehart, her slightest wish was their command. Having heard that Paris was mobbed, Mary asked the officers to phone ahead to the Ritz and reserve her a room. Alas for chivalry! When she got there late the following evening the Ritz had never heard of her, they couldn’t offer so much as a bathtub or a billiard table to sleep on. Furthermore, they didn’t even care. Tant pis, Madame. Allez-vous en, Madame.

  Two men whom Mary had met on the ship, a clergyman and a polo player, got the same cold shoulder as she had. The man of the cloth remembered a small but good hotel nearby at which he and his wife had spent their honeymoon. There the manager gave Mary an extremely fishy stare and wouldn’t let the three in until he had rooted through an old register and verified the minister’s honeymoon visit. At last he confessed that he did have a suite with two bedrooms and bath on the top floor. He failed to add that the bath could only be reached through the bedrooms.

  Here was a contretemps most serious. Should Mrs. Rinehart have the outer room and be required to pass through the men’s sleeping quarters, or should the one next to the bathroom be hers? They settled on the latter. Mary sustained the proprieties by ducking under the covers and pretending she wasn’t there. The following morning, to the relief of the manager, she set out to find less iffy quarters.

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of November 11, 1918, Mary happened to be standing on a curbstone on the Rue de la Paix when she looked up and saw a German airplane doing loops and barrel rolls in the sky. Then she heard the booming of the signal guns, and knew. This was the Armistice. The war to end all wars was itself ended.

  All traffic stopped. All Paris grew silent. Then a young poilu in uniform rushed into the center of the avenue, shouting out the news of victory. A man in civvies joined him, then a girl, then a whole procession, all smiling, all quiet.

  But then the excitement began to build. Having no bands left to play for them, the Parisians brought out toy drums, cooking pots, spoons to beat them with, anything and everything that could make a joyful noise. A file of American doughboys goose-stepped down the Avenue de l’Opéra, led by a corporal with a tin trumpet and a sergeant with a big cigar. They broke ranks and snake-danced through the crowd chanting, “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here! What the hell do we care now?”

  An Algerian soldier straight from the battlefield, ragged and filthy, kissed a British admiral. A French soldier reeking with vin ordinaire kissed Mary. Then, along toward twilight, came the parade of the mutilés, the halt leading the blind, Red Cross nurses pushing the wheelchairs of the legless. Mary cried.

  She still hadn’t found her son, and she was hearing tales of certain officers who’d kept up the fight to the very end, of soldiers killed within moments of the armistice. How could she celebrate until she knew? Fortunately she was soon able to locate Stanley through the American service paper, the Stars and Stripes. They sat down together to the biggest, most expensive meal they could find in Paris; that was when Mary Roberts Rinehart signed her own armistice.

  But the wounds were yet to be healed. November 14 found Mary
off to Chaumont on a jam-packed train that poked along at the speed of a tortoise. At last they arrived; Mary’s escort, a young officer who’d lost an eye to an exploding hand grenade, took her straight to General Pershing. Black Jack looked thin and tired but greeted Mrs. Rinehart warmly and described the strategy of the Allies’ final all-out attack. On the fifteenth, she began a tour of battlefields still littered with the debris of that last grand assault: broken-down tanks and transport, dud shells, barbed wire, discarded equipment, even personal letters. In an abandoned observation post Mary found a notebook with meticulous records of that last, fateful morning: German reconnaissance flights, an observation balloon, and finally, on the stroke of 11 A.M., guns ceased firing. Mary took the book and kept it.

  This was a sad journey and far from a comfortable one. Things were much the same everywhere Mary went. The weather was cold and gloomy, shelter hard to find, food neither good nor plentiful. A meal might be no more than a piece of dry bread and a cup of water. Sometimes Mary spied a column of marching men, more often she saw nothing worth recording. The German line of retreat was total desolation, the vanquished Wehrmacht had cut down telephone poles, lifted railroad tracks, set fire to ammunition dumps, wrecked guns, tanks, vehicles, destroyed absolutely everything, except the former headquarters of the German crown prince in the Argonne. This was an amazing mix of concrete dugouts with stairways that led down to heavily protected subterranean chambers and, above ground, a cozy beer garden set out with tables, chairs, and rustic arbors. But the plants were all dead.

  Back in Paris after a harrowing visit to Verdun, with its thousands of graveyard crosses set out in tidy rows, Mary found a mood of gaiety that verged on abandon. Drunkenness was rife, prostitutes lined the sidewalks. Montmartre was thronged with rowdy celebrants. One night at the Folies Bergère, Mary watched a gang of soldiers form a flying wedge and surge through the audience, knocking down chairs and patrons like candlepins. When they began throwing things, she wisely decided it was time to leave. There were taxis, but hailing one was impossible unless the would-be passenger knew the magic signal. Mary was well schooled; she simply stood at the curb and held up a pack of American cigarettes.

  The big news now was President Wilson. For the first time in America’s history, an incumbent president was going out of the country. But not out of touch with his office. Here was another historic first, a transatlantic hotline made up of telegraphic relays stretching all the way from Washington, D.C., to Sydney, Nova Scotia, the North American terminus of the Atlantic Cable, and thence to Europe. One day in early December, Mary stood behind an honor guard of soldiers and watched Mr. and Mrs. Wilson drive by in an open car. Whatever might later befall his hopes for a just and lasting peace, on this day Woodrow Wilson was the hope of the world.

  Mary would not be covering the treaty negotiations at Versailles. She went back into Germany, was ignored by stolid peasants trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, had her car stoned by yelling boys, visited hospitals both good and bad. She spent a tragic night helping to make cocoa for a crowd of ragged, skeletal former prisoners of war who’d been let out from German prisons with nothing to eat, no money to buy anything, hardly boots to their feet. They were a polyglot crew, some Russians among them. Would they ever get back to their homeland? Did they still have a homeland? Did they know about the Bolshevik Revolution, the assassination of the czar and his family? Mary never found out what happened to the ex-prisoners; perhaps it was just as well.

  Mary had authorization to stay longer, but her son was being demobbed and home ties were tugging. She had already wheedled a berth on Stanley’s troop transport when she got a cablegram asking her to succeed Edward Bok as editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. The offer was tempting. For a freelance writer, nothing comes in unless the work goes out; a steady job with a regular salary and paid vacation was a temptation.

  However, the money wouldn’t be so good. Lord Northcliffe had told Mary Roberts Rinehart that she was now earning more than any other living writer except possibly J. M. Barrie. Mary did want a big lump of cash in a hurry, because George Doran had offered her eldest son a junior partnership and she wanted to buy Stanley Junior a percentage of the publishing company’s stock. She was still weighing the pros and cons when the troopship put out from Brest.

  It was a ghastly voyage. The seas were enormous, the weather was terrible, so was the food served to the passengers. Anticipating this, Mary had brought aboard a big hamper crammed with edibles: bread, butter, fruit, baked ham, cooked chicken, lots of tinned goodies. Her cabin, obtained by evacuating the assistant engineer, poor man, became the most popular spot on the ship. It was also Stanley’s sleeping quarters. He hadn’t fancied his berth in the hold next to the engine room, but the pitching and rolling in a sleeping bag on his mother’s cabin floor presented its own problems. Mary offered to nail her son to the floor, but he demurred and kept on rolling.

  Once in the States, the two made a beeline for Washington. Dr. Rinehart was still with the surgeon general’s office, still a major. He had been up for a colonelcy, which he’d wanted very much, but an across-the-board cancellation of promotions after the Armistice had dashed his hopes. Mary was somewhat dazed to see her husband living frugally on his army pay in a small bachelor apartment, making his own coffee in an electric percolator. Ted and Alan had spent Christmas with their father, bought presents, decorated his two rooms. This was all they’d had by way of a home; it was clearly time for their mother to turn down the Journal’s offer and go home and air the mattresses.

  The Bluff had not taken kindly to neglect. It took Mary and the servants three months to get rid of the accumulated grime. Cornelia was with her now, Major Stanley and the boys would be coming home. Mary knew she ought to begin another book but all she could think of was the war, and readers were sick of the war. To deepen the gloom, Congress had passed a new Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. America had gone dry.

  The timing was stupid, and a total ban on the sale of liquor was far too stringent. People were still burdened with wartime taxes, they’d had enough of privation and sacrifice. Young men and women who had served in the military or as civilians had learned all too well how brief and tragic a life could be. They wanted to snatch at any pleasure, however evanescent. So the less well heeled made home brew or distilled something horrible that they called bathtub gin. As for the rich … well, even Bab would soon be prattling quite matter-of-factly about Daddy’s bootlegger.

  Running battles between T-men and rumrunners were not in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s line, but these were not the only villainies afoot. She recalled a furtive conversation she’d had with a very frightened man in Los Angeles at the end of her Mexican trip. During her own service with the War Department, Mary had learned plenty about agents provocateurs, incendiary propaganda, and sabotage. Like a great many other Americans, she blamed it all on Bolshevik Communist infiltrators. She cited one pamphlet she’d seen that suggested arson, pillage, and rape as acceptable working tools for establishing a true government by the people, which is to say by those who were gullible enough to adopt the Party line and thenceforth pay mindless allegiance to their self-appointed leaders. The phenomenon is not unfamiliar.

  The Seattle shipyard had been targeted as a logical starting point for the Revolution. Mary’s confidant had been a shipyard worker there, and he’d walked out with the rest when the strike was called. Organizers had taken it for granted that the police and militia would at once join out of sympathy for their oppressed brothers, take over city hall, shut down power plants to halt the streetcars, and cut off the water supply until everybody capitulated; as of course they would, it being axiomatic that a few armed men could easily bring an unarmed populace to its knees. From then on it would be a piece of cake to spread the Revolution across the entire country to the glory of the Communist party and its dauntless leaders.

  This man had been given the impression that the Revolution would be bloodless. He had willingly joined the
striking union, the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the “I Won’t Work” party. Its members were contemptuously called Wobblies). Now he was in a state of extreme agitation. He kept insisting to Mary that he was no traitor, but …

  His wife and children were safe in Tacoma. But what if, like so many other shipworkers’ families, they’d been in Seattle when the takeover occurred? He’d got the message that tonight was the night. The power plant would be cut off, the city would go dark, then the looting and burning and—he couldn’t say what—would begin. He could not bear to let this happen. He hadn’t dared alert the police, at last he’d gotten up nerve enough to telephone city hall. When the Wobblies marched that night, they were accosted by ex-Texas Ranger and present mayor Ole Hanson with a posse of armed civilians. A few shots were fired, then they all went home. Sic transit the Revolution.

  Just why this disaffected ex-IWW member had chosen to trust his story to Mrs. Rinehart can only be conjectured. The man might have hoped that she’d spread the alarm about would-be insurrectionists who might threaten other cities. Perhaps he’d felt a need to confess and she’d seemed like the sort of woman who would understand. Maybe he’d just wanted to meet a celebrity.

  Mary had said the right things, no doubt, and shoved the incident to the back of her mind. Now that strange conversation came back to her and the creative juices began to flow. A Poor Wise Man is rather a prissy title for a book about sabotage but the convoluted story of how a young drugstore clerk mobilized a town is grim enough, except when the bluebird of happiness makes a cameo appearance at the end of the story.