Holmes came out haggard, hair awry, shirt open down to his abdomen, cuffs open, shoelaces untied, even his belt buckle unfastened.
A prim, mousy little figure of a middle-aged woman, sitting under the antlered hat rack near the door, stood up. She wore an ill-fitting tweed suit, steel-rimmed spectacles, and had her graying hair drawn tightly back into an unsightly little knot at the nape of her neck.
“I’m the new typist, Mr. Holmes. Mr, Trent says he hopes I’ll be more satisfactory than the last one he sent you.”
The Cameron girl had come to the doorway of her room, opposite them, drawn by the sound of his emergence.
“I’m afraid the damage has been done already,” he said with a glance at her. “Did you come prepared to stay?”
“Yes.” She indicated a venerable Gladstone bag on the floor beside her. “Mr. Trent explained the work would have to be done on the premises.”
“Well, I’m glad you got here. I’ve already done six chapters into the machine. I don’t know how fast you are, but itil take you at least three or four days to catch up.”
“I’m more accurate and painstaking than I am speedy,” she let him know primly. “I pride myself on never having had so much as a comma misplaced on any of my typescripts.” She folded her hands limply together, dangled them out before her.
“Sam, carry Miss—I didn’t get your name.”
“Miss Kitchener.”
“Carry Miss Kitchener’s bag up to the front second-floor room.”
The Cameron girl came toward him, a look of sulky disapproval on her face, as soon as he was alone. “So we’re going to have Lydia Pinkham with us for a while.”
“You seem put out.”
“I am.” She wasn’t being playful about it, either; she was seething. “A woman likes the run of the place. This was ideal.”
He gave her a long, level look. “Ill bet it was,” he said dryly, turning away at last.
Sam said later, “We’re sure getting a run of women out here! Maybe you better do your work in town, where it’s nice and lonely, after this, Mr. Holmes.”
“I have an idea they’ll be thinning out soon,” Holmes answered, brushing his hair at the mirror.
The three of them sat back after Sam had taken out the dessert plates. Freddy Cameron still had the sulky look on her face. Throughout the meal she had tried, much to his amusement, to give the other woman the impression she was a legitimate member of the household.
“Sam,” he called. And when the man had returned to the doorway, “How long since you’ve had a night off?”
“Pretty long. But ain’t no use in having one out here. There’s no place to go.”
“Tell you what HI do. I’ll treat you to one in the city. Ill drive you over to the station when I go out for my usual evening spin. There are some things I want you to stop in and get at the flat in town while you’re there, anyway.”
“I’d sure like that! But will you be able to get along without me, Mr. Holmes?”
“Why not? You’ll be back by midmorning. Miss Cameron can rustle up breakfast for me, like she did today.”
Her face brightened for almost the first time since the typist’s arrival. “Can I!”
“And I can build my own fire when I’m ready to start work in the morning. Just see that there’s enough wood on hand.”
It was nearly eleven when he drove slowly back to the house alone, after dropping off his loyal retainer at the depot. The German shepherd, aloof as usual, sat in the seat beside him. The countryside was as still as a grave. The road was empty; no speeding city taxi passed him tonight.
He put the car away himself, opened the house door with his own key. It seemed strange; he was so used to having Sam do these little things for him. The Cameron girl was standing out at the foot of the stairs, listening. A sound like frightened, low-pitched sobbing reached him from above.
She smiled inscrutably, thumbed the staircase. “The old maid’s walking out on you.”
“What d’you mean?”
“She’s packing up to go. She’s got the heebie-jeebies. Somebody threw a rock through her window warning her to clear out.”
“Why didn’t you go up and calm her at least?” he snapped.
“I didn’t have to. She came tearing down here to me in an 1892 flannel nightie and practically jumped into my lap for protection. That’s only the trailer you’re listening to now. I looked up the trains for her, as long as she wanted to leave that bad.”
“It would have surprised me very much if you hadn’t.”
She ignored that. “Some mischievous kids must have done it, don’t you think?”
“Undoubtedly,” he said as he started up. “Only there don’t happen to be any for miles around here.”
Miss Kitchener was packing things into the Gladstone bag, between whiffs at a bottle of smelling salts. There was a fist-size rock on the table, and a crudely penciled scrap of paper that had been wrapped around it lay nearby. He read the message on it.
Get out of that house before morning or you won’t live to regret it.
One of the small partition panes in the window was shattered into a star-shaped remnant.
“You’re not going to let a little thing like that get you, are you?” he suggested.
“Oh, I couldn’t sleep a wink tonight after this!” she snuffled. “I’m nervous enough other nights as it is, even in the city.”
“It’s just a practical joke.”
She paused uncertainly in her packing. “Wh-who do you suppose … ?”
“I couldn’t say,” he said decisively, as though to discourage further questioning on that score. “Did you look out, try to see who was down there at the time?”
“Dear me, no! I ran for my life down the stairs as soon as I’d finished reading it. I—I feel so much better now that you’re back, Mr. Holmes. There’s something about having a man in the house—”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t want to oblige you to stay here if you’re going to be frightened and uncomfortable. I’m willing to drive you in to the station and you still have plenty of time to make the quarter-of-twelve train. You can do the typing next week in the city, when I come back. It’s entirely up to you.”
The avenue of escape he was offering obviously appealed to her. He saw her look almost longingly toward her open bag. Then she took a deep breath, gripped the foot rail of the bed with both hands as if to steel herself. “No,” she said. “I was sent out here to do this work for you, and I’ve never yet failed to carry out anything that was expected of me. I shall stay until the work is complete!” But she spoiled the fine courage of the sentiments she was expressing by stealing a surreptitious after glance at the shattered window.
“I think you’ll be all right,” he said quietly, with a half-formed little smile at the corner of his mouth. “The dog’s an effective guarantee that no one will get in the house from outside. And my own room’s right down at the other end of the hall.” He turned to go, then turned back to her again from the doorway. “There’s a small revolver kicking around in one of my bureau drawers somewhere; would you feel any better if I looked for it and let you keep it here with you tonight?”
She gave a squeak of repulsion, palmed her hands at him hastily. “No, no, that would frighten me more than the other thing! I cant bear the sight of firearms of any descripton, I’m deathly afraid of them!”
“All right. Miss Kitchener,” he said soothingly. “You’re showing a considerable amount of gallantry in remaining—even though there’s really nothing to be worried about—and I won’t forget to speak favorably to Mr. Trent about it.”
The Cameron girl was in the far comer of the living room, turning over a rifle in her hands, when he appeared unexpectedly in the doorway a few moments later. His descent must have been quieter than he realized.
He clasped hands behind his back, tilting the tail of his coat up out of the way. “I wouldn’t monkey around with any of those if I were you. I think I already told you las
t night they’re kept loaded.”
She looked over at him, hesitated a moment before putting it down, even turned full face toward him with it still clasped in her hands but crosswise to her own body.
He didn’t move. There was a dancing quality in his eyes, as though his muscular coordination was prepared to meet a need for instantaneous action, but he didn’t show it in any other way.
She stood the gun up against the wall, ostentatiously brushed her hands. “Sorry. Everything I seem to do is wrong.”
His hands unclasped, the skirt of his coat fell flat. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that. Everything you seem to do is right.”
He sat down in the “inspiration chair.” She hovered around uncertainly in the background. “Am I intruding?”
“You mean at the moment or by and large?”
“I mean at the moment. By and large I am, I don’t need to be told that.”
“No, you’re not intruding at the moment. I don’t mind your being in here.”
“Where you can keep an eye on me,” she finished for him with a satiric laugh. Her eyes went up toward the raftered ceiling. “Did she decide to stay?”
“Much to your regret.”
She sighed elaborately. “We either understand each other too well or not at all.”
That was the last thing either of them said. The fire had dwindled to a garnet glow, dark as port. The rest of the room was all blue shadow. Just their two faces stood out, pale ovals against the surrounding gloom. A cricket chirped in the velvety silence outside that pressed down, smothered the house like a feather bolster.
He rose to his feet at last, and all you could see rising was the oval of his face; the rest of him already blended into the shadows. He went outside to the stairs, and the scuffing measure of his tread was audible going slowly up them. She stayed on in there, with the garnet embers and the guns.
He closed the door of his room after him, but he didn’t put on the light. It was hard to make him out in the India-ink blackness. White suddenly peered faintly over there by the door, in two long columns and a little triangular wedge, and he’d doffed his coat without moving away from before the door seam. A chair shifted, and the white manifestations ebbed lower on it but still there up against the door. A shoe dropped an inch or two, with the sound a shoe makes; then its mate.
The cricket went on outside, and the silence went on inside, and the night went on outside and in. Once, an
hour before dawn, a faint disembodied stirring of air seemed to come into the room, but not from the direction of the window, from the direction of the door—as though he had eased it narrowly open without permitting the latch to make any sound. A floorboard creaked in the distance, somewhere far below. Maybe it was just the wood contracting from the increasing night-long coldness. Or maybe stealthy pressure had been put upon it.
Nothing else sounded after that. After a long while, the extra little swirl of air was cut off again. Outside, an owl hooted in a tree and the stars began to pale.
The Cameron girl was unusually vivacious at breakfast, perhaps because she had had the making of it. She was whistling blithely when Holmes came down, a derelict with a shadowy jawline and soot under his eyes. Miss Kitchener was there ahead of him, shining with soap and water, her nocturnal timidity a thing of the past—at least until the coming night.
“You ladies’ll have to excuse me,” he said, tracing a hand down his sandpapery face as he sat down.
“It’s your house, after all,” Freddy Cameron pointed out.
Miss Kitchener contented herself with a thin-lipped smile, as though there were no excuse for personal untidiness under any circumstances.
The German shepherd came muzzling up to him, evidently remembering yesterday. He ignored it. Freddy Cameron breathed, so low he barely caught it, “No poison test today?”
He shoved his chair back. “Sam’ll be back about noon, to take up where he left off. I’m going in there now and expect to be left undisturbed.”
“HI go upstairs and begin my typing,” Miss Kitchener said. “I don’t believe you’ll hear me from where you are.”
“I’ll paint Easter eggs,” Freddy Cameron said disgruntledly.
He closed the living-room door after him, thrust cords of wood into the fireplace, kindled a wedge of newspaper under them. He stripped the oilcloth hood off the dictating machine that stood on the table, adjusted it to the best of his ability but with an air of somewhat baffled uncertainty, as though Sam had usually been delegated to attend to this detail along with all the others. The “inspiration chair,” he noticed, was slightly out of true with the diagonal pattern of the carpet. He shifted it slightly, smiling a little to himself, as if at his own idiosyncrasies. Then he picked up the speaking tube appended to the machine, sat back, everything in readiness for a long day’s creative work. Everything but one thing…
The apparatus made a muted whirr, waiting. The necessary flow of thought wouldn’t seem to come. Inspiration appeared to be log-jammed. He glanced helplessly up at the row of his own books on a shelf, as if wondering how he’d done it before.
A floorboard creaked unexpectedly somewhere near at hand. He whirled around in the chair, frowning menacingly at the supposed interruption.
There was no one in the room with him at all; the door was still securely closed. The flames leaped higher behind him, filling the cavern of the fireplace with heat and a crimson rose glow.
The Cameron girl snapped her head around, found his eyes boring into her from the doorway some five minutes later. “Wh-what happened?” she faltered uneasily. “No quarantine this morning?”
“I seem to have hit an air pocket. Come in here, will you? I want to talk to you. Maybe that’ll help to get me started.”
“You sure you want me in there in the holy of holies?” she wanted to know almost frightenedly.
“I’m sure,” he said in a flinty voice.
She made her way in ahead of him, looking back across her shoulder at him the whole way. He closed the door on the two of them. “Sit down.”
^‘That chair? I thought no one else was allowed—”
“That’s Sam’s line of talk.” His eyes fixed themselves on her piercingly. “What’s the difference between one chair and another?” The question almost seemed to have a special meaning.
She sank into it without further protest. He squatted down, adding an extra log or two to the fire, which was only now beginning to draw, as though he’d had to start it a second time. Then he sat back diagonally opposite her, in a chair she had occupied whenever she had been in here before. He seemed to be watching her closely, as though he’d never seen her before.
“What 11 I talk about?” she suggested presently.
He didn’t answer, just kept watching her. A minute or two ticked by; the only sound in the room with them was the steadily increasing hum from the fireplace.
“Deep thought,” she said mockingly.
“Let me feel your hand a minute,” he said unexpectedly. She extended it to him indolently. The palm was perfectly dry. The wrist was steady.
He flung it back at her with such unexpected force that it struck her across the chest. He was on his feet. “Come on, get out of that chair fast,” he said hoarsely. “You sure had me fooled. What’s your racket, kid?”
But before she had a chance to answer, he was already over at the door, had thrown it open, was thumbing her out past him with an urgency that had something tingling about it.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” she drawled reproachfully as she regained her own doorway opposite.
“Keep out of the way for a while; don’t come in here, no matter what you hear. Got that straight?” Some of the rough edge left his voice as he called up the stairs with suddenly regained urbanity, “Miss Kitchener, could I speak to you down here a minute?”
The diligent pitter-patter of her typing, which had been like soft rain on a roof, broke off short and she came down unhesitatingly, at her usual precise, fussy little
gait.
He motioned her in. “How far have you gotten?” he asked, closing the door.
“I’m midway through the opening chapter,” she announced, beaming with complacency.
“Sit down. The reason I called you is I’m changing this lead character’s name to—No, sit down there, right where you are,”
“That’s your chair, isn’t it?”
“Oh, any chair. Sit down while I discuss this with you.” He forced her to take it by preempting the other one.
She lowered a spine stiff as a ramrod to the outermost edge of it, contacting it by no more than half an inch.
“Will changing his name give you any extra work? Has he appeared by name yet in the part you’ve already transcribed?”
She was up again with alacrity. “Just a moment, I’ll go up and make sure—”
He motioned her down again. “No, don’t bother.” And then with mild wonderment, “You were just going over that part, how is it you can’t recall offhand? Well, anyway, it occurred to me that in Northern stories readers are used to identifying French-Canadian characters with the villain, and therefore it might be advisable to—
Miss Kitchener, are you listening to me? What’s the matter, are you ill?”
“It’s too warm in this chair, the heat of the fire. I can’t stand it.”
Without warning he reached forward, seized one of her hands before she could draw it back. “You must be mistaken. How can you say the chair’s too warm for you? Your hand’s ice-cold—trembling with cold!” He frowned. “At least let me finish what I have to say to you.”
Her breathing had become harshly audible, as though she had asthma. “No, no!”
They both gained their feet simultaneously. He pressed her down by the shoulder, firmly but not roughly, so that she sank into the chair again. She attempted to writhe out of it sideways this time. Again he gripped her, pinned her down. Her spectacles fell off.
“Why is your face^so white? Why are you so deathly afraid?”
She seemed to be in the throes of hysteria, beyond reasoning. A knife unexpectedly flashed out from somewhere about her—her sleeve, perhaps—and was upraised against him across the back of the chair. Her hand was quick; his hand was quicker. He throttled it by the wrist, pinning it down over the chair top; it turned a little, and the knife fell out, glanced off the low fire screen behind her and into the flames.
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