The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  “And what does he do now? Art work still?”

  “Not except as a side issue; he was with the Bureau of Printing and Engraving until very recently, doing some kind of technical work there—laboratory work, I think. But on the outside, he’s done a good many really lovely etchings and lithographs. Dion and I—and a lot of other people, if it comes to that—think that he has enormous talent. Lately he’s been especially interested in experimenting with some effects that make photographs look exactly like tinted dry-point etchings. He did an exquisite one of Fay.”

  “He was, you say, very much in love with Fay?”

  “Desperately, desperately in love with her.”

  The low voice was a shade lower.

  “And she—was she in love with him?”

  “I don’t know. She may have been. I gave up some time ago trying to find out who Fay was in love with.… I’m quite sure that she never dreamed of marrying him.”

  “And why are you so sure of that?”

  “I don’t think that he ever asked her to marry him. He loved her far too dearly for that. He hadn’t any money, of course—and even if he’d had any, his health would have put it absolutely out of the question.”

  “He has a loyal champion in you, at all events,” commented Karl Sheridan dryly, grinding out the tip of his cigarette against the jade ashtray that looked like a lotos leaf. “What is the matter with his health?”

  Did he only imagine again that swift flicker of the shadowy eyelashes?

  “Jerry’s never been even moderately well since the war. He crashed badly in 1918 and broke half the bones in his body, and after that he was in the hospital for a year and a half, and it left him with a wrecked heart, and some kind of spine trouble that still gives him actual torture. It all got so hideous lately that Dion literally forced him to turn in his resignation, so that he could try out what a complete rest would do for him.”

  “And what has it done for him?”

  “Nothing.” She spread out the little paper fan with a gesture at once controlled and violent. “Worse than nothing. He’s been in a private hospital near Baltimore for some time now.”

  “Near Baltimore, you say? Is it connected with Johns Hopkins?”

  “No; it’s a little west of Baltimore. It’s more of a sanitarium than a hospital, I suppose. Dr. Byrd is in charge of it.”

  “Dr. Byrd? Our too blue-eyed and curly-headed dinner companion of last night?”

  “That one; yes.”

  “This sanitarium—is it especially for the treatment of spinal disorders?”

  “I understand that it’s especially for the treatment of nervous cases.”

  “Do you happen to know its address?”

  “Yes. It’s called Stillhaven, Torytown, Maryland.”

  “And its telephone number?”

  “It’s a private number, but I know it. Have you a pencil?”

  Karl handed her a fountain pen, frowning abstractedly.

  “A pen, but no paper, it seems. Will you tell me where I can find a piece?”

  “This will do.” She smoothed out the creased yellow fan, wrote “Torytown 7362” across its face, swiftly and strongly. “They won’t let you talk to Jerry, though, I’m afraid. Was that what you wanted it for?”

  “Not necessarily. But what makes you so sure that I would not be able to?”

  “Because I was talking to Byrd’s assistant, Dr. McCarty, just a little while ago. I wanted to make sure that Jerry didn’t see about Fay in the papers tomorrow. But McCarty told me that he hasn’t been seeing any papers for some time. He hasn’t been seeing anything.”

  “His illness is actually very grave, then?”

  “I’ve told you already that it’s desperately grave. They say that he’s in a temporary state of collapse. Well, that may be what they call it. He’s dying, K.”

  “Poor devil!” He sat staring down somberly at the yellow paper in his fingers. “But this, Tess, is a telegram. Do you not wish to keep it?”

  “No—I remember perfectly what’s in it. It’s just from Dion telling me that he’d arrived safely and delivered the papers. He made splendid time, didn’t he? Almost incredibly good, when you realize that that time stamp means daylight saving.”

  “You wish me to read it?”

  “Of course you can read it! Did you think that he telegraphed me sonnets, darling?”

  “No,” he said. “That was not what I thought.”

  The telegram was a day letter, sent from New York at six twenty-five that morning. It read:

  PRETTY GOOD TIME FOR A HOME BODY LIKE DION SHOULDN’T YOU SAY AND YOU’RE THE GIRL WHO KNOWS WHY I MADE IT THE PAPERS ARE IN THE HANDS OF THE DISTINGUISHED OLD PORPOISE WHO STARTED ALL THE RUMPUS AND AFTER BREAKFAST A NAP AND A SHAVE I KNOW ONE FELLOW WHO WILL BE HEADING SOUTH AGAIN I SHOULD ARRIVE AROUND FOUR DO I BY ANY CHANCE KNOW ONE LADY WHO WILL BE WAITING DION

  Karl Sheridan read it through once, unstirring, but the second time, if Tess had been looking, she would have seen the little muscle twitch in his cheek. But as it happened she was not looking. Her eyes were on the cream-and-golden freesias, and her lips were curved in something so small, sedate, and secret that it hardly merited the title of a smile.

  “It is not a sonnet, certainly,” commented Sheridan urbanely. “But the amateur critic might discern in it a certain lyric note that is usually lacking in day letters! You still expect me to entertain the possibility that Mallory might have been engaged to Fay, Tess? You expect me to believe that this telegram was sent to his future sister-in-law?”

  Tess murmured, her eyes luminous with that strange serenity, half-tolerant amusement, half-careless compassion, that was her inheritance from some ancestress a thousand years older in days and nights of hard-won wisdom:

  “K, you’re unbelievable! What in heaven’s name is the matter? If anything comes up that suggests that Dion Mallory takes an interest in me that isn’t entirely brotherly, I watch you turn into an alien enemy before my eyes. Don’t you like Dion?”

  “I have rarely seen anyone that I liked better.”

  “Well, then, don’t you like me?”

  “You, Tess, as I suspect that you know very well indeed, are that one that I like even better.”

  “Well, but then, darling? What earthly difference can it make to you whether Dion is agreeable enough to find me agreeable? Or whether it gives me a good deal of unconcealed delight that he does? Are you trying to tactfully convey to me that your intentions are honorable, or are you just being a good, upstanding dog in the manger?”

  Sheridan, folding the paper along its original creases with scrupulous care, placed it and the fountain pen in the pocket that contained Mallory’s note to Fay.

  “Like you,” he said, the young smile flashing briefly across the tired, dark face, “I am somewhat in doubt. Not as to whether they are honorable, but as to whether they are intentions. In either case, it is somewhat academic, is it not?”

  “Oh, much worse than that! … Why don’t you like me as much tonight as you did last night, K?”

  “Perhaps because I have ceased to resemble that Queen in Alice in Wonderland who had to run like mad to keep in the same place.” He smiled again, leaning a little towards her. “I fear, alas, that I have moved already into the next square of the chess board! Tess, tell me, this party tonight is largely for the press, you say?”

  “Largely, yes—though that needn’t discourage you. You’ll be infatuated with the lot of them, and Freddy and Noll will be there, and the Lindsays, and the Chevaliers, and Dion, and dozens of others.… Why? What is it? Is there something especial that you want to find out about them?”

  “Yes. Tess, do you not think that it is possible that among all those people whose business it is to buy news—and to sell it—I might stumble across that one you call X?”

  “I think that anything is possible.” She lifted her hands wearily to the honey-colored coils that framed the clear, undaunted face. “Are you going to use a divining rod?”


  “As a matter of fact, I doubt whether I shall need one.… Tess, had it never occurred to you that Fay herself might be your X?”

  “Oh, never, never; that’s absolutely impossible. The column started years ago, when Fay was a fifteen-year-old baby in a convent near Florence.”

  “And she could not have taken it over from someone later? After all, X is at best a not very distinctive nom de plume.”

  “It’s fairly distinctive as far as half of the population of these United States is concerned. I think that you’d agree that X had a peculiarly distinctive style if you ran through a few of his columns—”

  “The style has never varied?”

  “Oh, the columns weren’t always as bad as they are now, of course. They started out by being fairly mild, fairly amusing gossip—and then they got to be a little less mild and a little more amusing—and then frankly scandalous—and now—oh, now—so damnable, so revolting that I can’t even read them. And more and more about the people we know.” She wrung her hands together once, hard, and said in a low, bitter voice behind which something young and distraught fought with tears, “People that seemed charming, and decent, and amusing. People that I loved.”

  “I see. You do not think that Fay was clever enough to imitate the very individual style of this X?”

  “Oh, K, you don’t see anything! Fay isn’t clever at all. She’s simply ravishingly pretty, and she has a rather flippant, reckless way of saying things that lots of people find amusing—the same sort of idiots who think a spoiled child defying its parents is just too cunning for words. I don’t like spoiled children. And Fay really is stupid—the kind of blind, reckless stupidity that makes the child smeared from ear to ear with jam swear that it’s never been near the jam pot—the special kind of lunacy that makes a man yell, ‘You can’t put me in jail!’ straight through the bars of his jail cell. Fay’s just as stupid as that, truly.” She halted abruptly, raising one hand to whitening lips, and said in a small empty voice, “I’d forgotten. Was—was, I mean, of course. She was stupid. It sounds worse when you say it that way, doesn’t it? When you say it that way, it sounds—terrible.”

  “But one little word cannot change truth, can it, Tess? You who are so very honest, and see things so straight and clear, know that, surely. Dead or alive, poor child, the fact still remains that she was wild, reckless, and blindly stupid. Death cannot alter facts—only feelings.”

  “And feelings don’t make much difference, do they? I know. I know.… You do, too, don’t you, K? We’re both of us realists—the nice kind, of course, who go in for nonsense in the moonlight and Strauss waltzes and flowers that smell too sweet to be true. But all the time the things that we’re really after are facts.” He lifted a protesting hand at the soft, controlled bitterness of her voice, but the silver-gray eyes, blind with unshed tears, did not heed him. “We know that what’s really important—what’s really important is the shape of the glass that she drank that stuff out of—and a little pinch of gray powder—and an inch of brandy gone from a bottle—and a little square of red glass. You’re right—it isn’t death that matters. If she weren’t dead those facts wouldn’t be exciting at all, and you and I wouldn’t have a chance to show how clever we are, would we?”

  She flung the words at him like a challenge, chilled and sharp as steel, and suddenly he felt steel of his own flash out to meet it.

  “What you are saying now is nonsense, pure and simple, and if I may say so, not very courteous nonsense.”

  She echoed, the blind eyes still on his:

  “Courteous?”

  “Exactly. You know perfectly well—as well as I—that the facts of which I spoke were not of those trifles that you have so ironically dramatized, but one simple and, I assure you, profoundly significant truth.… If you cannot face the fact that death should neither cancel nor sentimentalize Fay’s life, you are wasting both your time and mine. Because unless I know the entire truth as to how she lived, it will be impossible for me to tell you how she died.”

  “You are not wasting your time,” she told him evenly, her eyes as hard as his. “I am perfectly capable of facing that fact.… What more do you want to know about what Fay—was?”

  “You will possibly recall that it was you yourself who told me that Fay was a spoiled, reckless, and stupid child.” There was not even an echo of the gentle and courteous K behind the curt accents of the voice that undoubtedly belonged to Mr. Sheridan of the Viennese Criminalistic Institute. “That is the truth?”

  “You’re rather cruel, aren’t you? It was stupid of me not to realize that.… Yes, it’s quite true. She was horribly spoiled. Like a little, hard green fruit, so badly bruised when it was small that before it had a chance to ripen it was rotten down to its core.”

  “I see. And you said also that you did not like spoiled children. Did you like Fay, Tess?”

  She stared at him for a moment, voiceless, incredulous, and then dropped her face in her hands, as though the long, slim fingers were bars that could close him out, that could close her in.

  “No,” the voice behind the bars told him. “No, I didn’t like her. I don’t believe that anyone in the world liked her.… But I loved her a little, I think. I think that I loved her rather a lot.”

  In a voice that was once more K’s, profoundly touched and gentle, he said, “Then I have indeed been cruel—and stupid, too. Will you forgive me?”

  She said, as though his voice had not reached her:

  “You see, I couldn’t help remembering that frantic, wretched little scrap in the nursery bed, twisting and turning to get away from something that she wasn’t ever, ever going to get away from—too terrified to sleep, too terrified to make a sound, too terrified to shed a tear. K, how could she—how could she—”

  The brave voice broke suddenly and piteously, and he sat quite still, waiting for the tears to break, too—the tears that would fall through those closed fingers, releasing her from the nightmare of reality that still held her in its grip. Poor child—poor child—how could he, who had sat there cold-eyed, rating her like any bullying fool, have forgotten even for a moment how young she was—how terrified—how helpless in spite of all her defiant valor—no, how helpless because of it, since it would not let her break? He was on his knees beside her in one swift flash of movement.

  “Tess—you cannot, then, forgive me? It was myself that I was angry with, not you—so angry that I struck out at the first thing near me. I think that I must have lost my mind.”

  She took her hands from her face, slowly, and placed them lightly in his.

  “No, no—you mustn’t do that. Such a nice mind, K! It’s I who should ask you to forgive me. I realize now that I shouldn’t ever, ever have involved you in all this darkness and horror and wretchedness; if I hadn’t felt the world rocking straight out from under my feet last night, I wouldn’t have done it, truly. Because, after all, it was my world, not yours—not yours at all.”

  He wanted to lay his hot cheek against those hands that were as cool and fresh as the freesias above her heart, and tell her the truth that was still so new and strange that he himself could not believe it. He wanted to say to her very quietly, very gently, so that it would not startle her, “My world is yours, Tess. You are my world.”

  Not now. Not yet. Not until he had made one more turn down the crooked lane—one turn that would tell him whether ahead of him lay darkness—or light.

  He bent his head, touched the hands in his very lightly with his lips, released them, and rose to his feet.

  “Let us then forget all this foolish talk of forgiveness, shall we? It is an empty little word; I think that we two have something better to give each other. As for your world, whatever it may hold, I am more proud than I can say that you permit me to share it. See, I have brought you tears again—I who would bring you nothing all the days of your life but loveliness and delight. What should you say to me, Tess?”

  “I should thank you. I do thank you.” She was on her feet bes
ide him. “It wasn’t you who gave me those foolish tears.… I like to have you scold me; no one ever does it any more, and I need it badly. I’m spoiled, too, you know. Not as spoiled as Fay—still, spoiled enough.… I’ll see you again tomorrow?”

  “Very surely you shall see me again tomorrow. Shall I come at this time, or would earlier in the day be better?”

  “This time, I think—or even later. You’re going to the Lindsays’, aren’t you? It will probably be an awfully late party; they don’t dine before nine. But I’ve explained to Dion that you are helping me, so he’ll understand, and drop you on his way home.”

  “Mallory knows, then, that you believe it to be murder? Was that really necessary?”

  “Actually, I don’t think that it was. I believe that he was as sure as I was from the first that it was murder. You see, he knew Fay, too.”

  “You do not think that he might feel it is his duty to attempt to shield someone?”

  “You mean Jerry, don’t you? No, I don’t think he feels that it will be necessary. I’m quite sure that you are wrong.”

  “Have I said, Tess, that I thought it was Jerry? Till tomorrow night then, it is good-bye, is it riot?”

  “I wish that it didn’t have to be.” She laid her hand on his sleeve, and for a moment he felt her fingers tighten convulsively, like a panic-stricken child. “If only I could make the servants believe that you were an old friend, then you could come in the daytime easily, couldn’t you? But this way—”

  He could feel the muscle in his cheek contract, but he only said very gently:

  “This way you can have the real old friends, can you not? And if I actually need you during the day, I can call you?”

  “Oh, surely, surely, any time—always. Good-night, darling.”

  “Sleep sweet, Tess, and have all good, kind little dreams. You must have them, because they are your heritage.”

  Afterwards, he tried to remember whether the drive in the taxi to the Stirlings’ was long or short, and to save his life he could not.… He could remember that there were stars in the sky, and that the air was sweet and cool; he could remember touching the pocket that held the little case of backgammon markers, and Mallory’s letter, and Fay’s note, and the yellow telegram with the telephone number written across it. He could remember the feeling beneath his fingers of the iron railing that led up the steps to the Stirling house.