Every hour on the hour. That phrase took on a special meaning it had never had before; not in all the thousands of times I’d heedlessly heard it parroted, intruding on something else. Something to be obliviously tuned out of the way, until it was over and the basic program had resumed its flow. One thing I knew was sure: I’d never again be able to hear that stencil, that catch phrase, without a shudder running through me, without the memory of pain awaking again and aching again. It would mean, for all time to come, these hours of this day. Slowly, so slowly, passing one by one.
I think noon was the first time, after my return from the airport. They sent someone up to knock on my door and summon me, but I met the envoy on the stairs, on my way down. I’d been marking the time up there as closely as they.
I came into the living room, and they were all gathered there ahead of me, motionless, silent, in a tableau of breathless attention. Mrs. Hutchins standing by the cabinet itself, with her hand out touching a corner of it, as though fearful that if she raised that hand the flow of revelation about to come would automatically cease. The Swedish girl Signe again crouched low on the floor before it; and for all I know she had remained there that whole time. Another of the maids standing midway along the wall, between entrance and radio cabinet, pressed self-effacingly back against it, her hands hidden behind her. The chauffeur just outside the room entrance, as befitted one whose duties were not supposed to bring him within doors unless summoned. And the cook still farther back, peeping arrestedly out of the door that led into her domain, head inclined in taut listening. And Weeks, the butler.
I came unobtrusively into their midst. I saw them all trying not to stare at me, to avoid incommoding me. Somebody shifted a chair a trifle, in unspoken offer, but I shookmy head and continued on over to the window, and stood there with my back to them.
“Every hour on the hour, the latest news bulletins. There has been no further word of the transcontinental air liner missing since eleven o’clock last night. Fourteen passengers were aboard, and the plane is believed to have been forced down somewhere in the region of the Rocky Mountains—”
I took a deep breath, to see me back upstairs again, past all of them. I turned, and the room was empty. They had all gone, they had all slipped out tactfully, most likely at some unobtrusive signal from Mrs. Hutchins.
I moved away from the window. It was still going on, in a sort of horrid parody of itself. “For those of you who tuned in late, we repeat: There has been no further word of the transcontinental—” I stepped quickly over to it and switched it off. Then I went upstairs, up the empty staircase, past the considerately closed doors.
I didn’t cry; I cried scarcely at all. Crying was for little woes, not for this. I endured this seated at the dressing table for the greater part of the time, my forehead resting upon it, arms folded back over the top of my head. Quiet like that, unmoving like that. A little cut-glass bottle had fallen over close beside me; I saw it there, but I let it be.
At one I went down again, and then at two; at three, and then again at four, to these séances of communal misery and anguish. “Every hour on the hour, the latest news bulletins. Every hour on the hour, the latest news bulletins.” And then nothing else. Until I thought I would go mad. Until it caught on inside my head, as well as on the outside, and there was no longer any way of stopping it, the turning off of the dial was no longer enough. “Every hour on the hour, the latest news bulletins. Every hour on the hour—”
Around half past four or so, one time there was a timid knock outside the room door, and for an instant a solitary flametongue of hope shot upward through me, sudden and flaring and quickly checked. It was gone before I had even moved to look toward the door, or risen to go to it. For the knock was too timid and uncertain to be the harbinger of any sort of news, whether bad or good.
I opened the door and Signe was standing there, holding a steaming cup of coffee on a small tray, and with a mutely pleading expression on her face. She was afraid even to ask me to accept it, just held it gingerly toward me, ready to withdraw it again at the first sign of refusal, lest she trespass on my misery. Which, to tell the truth, was what she was doing.
I took it from her, as a quicker way of having done with her presence, and particularly that look on her face, than to refuse it and entail the consequence of having her linger on there and importune me. I closed the door and set the cup down somewhere and didn’t touch it thereafter. The steam slowly spent itself and left it, and it stayed there, still and darkling.
I recognized that the focus of this pall of fear and grief that hung over me was not the catastrophe itself or even the loss that it had wrought; it was the fact of having been forewarned against it. There was a curious sort of clammy terror in that, there was horror, there was—I don’t know what. There was a nightmare feeling heavy upon me, and not even the fact that the destructive climax was already past and no longer still ahead, could lessen it any. Without this, I would still have been stricken, yes, at such news. But I would have been stricken in the full of daylight. Now I was stricken down in a night of my ownmaking, a night of themind.
I screamed in the turmoil of my mind: Those things aren’t known ahead! They can’t be! It isn’t true, it isn’t true!
And lo, the answer would come back each time: But it is. You know it is. Don’t let your heart lie to you. It was told to you, and you knew it. She came to you and told you. She came to you and wept. She risked dismissal—and she finally provoked it—solely to tell you.
It isn’t so! It isn’t true, I tell you (and over goes the chair, and down goes the little scent flask that was already overturned)! I won’t have it! I won’t believe it! A plane engine goes wrong, and the plane crashes into flames against the midnight mountainside. But only a minute before, thirty seconds before, until that engine developed trouble, the pilot himself, sitting before it, did not know what was going to happen. Not a living soul on that plane knew what was going to happen. That is the way things are. That is the way God in his goodness orders things to happen. And yet you are trying to tell yourself that a girl three thousand miles away from there, here in the East, two whole days, three whole days before, knew it was going to happen that way? A little chambermaid, a little drudge, a little what not—
But— And so low and quiet the answer, yet so implacably inescapable, like a whisper close beside the ear:
Here, look over this way, toward the door. About where that chaise is. She stood in this very room, on that very spot you’re looking at now, that night. Didn’t she come up here? Didn’t she twist her hands about like this, trying to find the words for it? Open the closet. Look in there, under that cellophane wrapper, toward the left. That flowing white dress. If you take it out, there’ll be a spot on it; a spot that her foreknowledge and fear caused her to make.
Jean, drink some brandy. Don’t let those thoughts in. Keep drinking it until you’ve drowned them, burned them out, every one. Reel around and fall down, if you must, but keep those thoughts out. There’s madness at the end of them.
They knocked to find out what was the matter, I was overturning so many chairs and things, stumbling around, already more intoxicated with fear and my own groping for an answer than I could have been with any brandy.
“No, I’m all right; don’t notice,” I called out. “Bring me up some brandy. Bring me up the whole decanter, and put it down outside the door.”
There was no whisper of knowledge ahead? You yourself had no inkling, even if secondhand, transmitted from her? Liar. Cowardly liar. Then why did you stop your car, and leave it, and go in and all but send a telegram, last night at six? Then why did you pick up the phone, in this very room, before twelve, and call his hotel? Why did you pick it up a second time, at twelve itself, and call the very airport, as a last resort?
Do you deny you did those things? You admit it. Then if you admit doing them, do you deny you had a premonition? You admit having it. Then if you admit having it, do you deny that she was the source of it? Y
ou admit she was the source of it. Then if you admit she was the source of it, do you deny that she, at least, had forewarning, and tried to transmit it to you?
Brandy, quick, brandy! All the brandy you can swallow.
It didn’t help, it didn’t do much good. Thoughts are stronger than alcohol. It burned swiftly downward, like a flame in reverse, as when that knock had come on the door before, and then it flickered bluely, and went out again almost at once.
Your hands are cold, and you’re shaking. You spill more than you can get to your lips. When you were four or five, and you went to Sunday school for the first time, they told you all about God. You’d never heard of Him before. But you weren’t frightened. Because that was positive. That was walls about you. That was a roof over your head. Now you’re twenty. And now you’re frightened, frightened sick. Because this is negative. This takes the walls away, and takes the roof from over your head. You’re alone now and naked and very small against the night wind.
They don’t know. They can’t know.
They did. Someone did.
Someone came running, and knocked on the door, and this time called through it without waiting.
“There’s some news on, Miss Reid. You’d better come down quick.”
I flung the door back, and brushed by them, and ran all the way down the stairs, the robe I had on streaming out from my shoulders like a pennant, the forgotten decanter still grasped in my hand.
I’d already missed it. “—since eleven o’clock last night.” But it would be repeated, the newscaster was still on. It couldn’t have been good; I noticed they didn’t try to tell me what it was, any of them. They sidled out of the room, and only Mrs. Hutchins was left, lingering there over by the door, as if to see whether she could be of some help to me in the moment that was about to come.
I saw that I was holding the decanter in my hand, and I set it down absently. The opening of the newscast came around again, and I held my head bent very low and stood very still.
“For those of you who tuned in late, we repeat. The transcontinental air liner that has been missing with fourteen passengers aboard, was sighted about an hour ago by rescue planes. It came down in deep snow on the side of a mountain, in a remote inaccessible spot. They report there were no signs of life, and it is considered unlikely that there are any survivors. It may take some time for rescue parties on the ground to reach the spot. Nothing had been heard from the plane since eleven o’clock last night.”
I reached out and turned it off.
Mrs. Hutchins took a half step to come back to me.
I warded her off slightly with my hand. “It’s all right,” I said quietly. “I’m going up to my room again.”
She made a choked sound in her throat, and disappeared.
Then presently I was back within my own room again. I suppose I’d walked up the stairs. The house was quiet, the house was in mourning. It was still bright out, and the brightness came through the windows in talcumlike effusion, but it was that transitory brightness that precedes extinction, that overreaches itself and then dies. Just as a match flame will flare wide again an instant before it is gone.
I’d put on my dress, I saw. I was taking down a coat from the closet, removing a hat from the little wooden stand it was pegged on. I was moving about, imminent to departure. I caught my own reflection passing back and forth in the glass several times, and that showed me what I was doing.
I’m not sure that I knew what I meant to do, where I was going, at first. Or perhaps I did. The mind is not a printed page that can be referred back to once a particular passage has gone by.
I came out and closed the door of my room, coat slung over my arm, hat slung heedlessly onto my head. I plumbed the depths of my bag for my car keys, made sure they were there. And by now I knew what I was going to do, but not why, nor what it would gain me.
I went rearward along the upper hall, instead of down the stairs, and when I’d reached the door of Mrs. Hutchins’ room, I dabbed at it twice with one fingernail. It made a small ticking sound, but she must have heard it. She said, “Come in,” and I opened it and went inside.
She had been sitting in a rocking chair close by the window, looking out. Her attitude, before she had seen me and destroyed it by moving from it, suggested melancholy affliction. A sense of loss that, if not as acute as my own, was at least fully as sincere. For her head had been tilted considerably sideward, as if she were looking slantwise out the window at an acute angle of perspective close to the outer wall of the house—though she obviously was not looking at anything out there at all—and the flat of her hand supported that overturned side of her face, covering it, almost as though she had a toothache and was trying to relieve it by pressing intensely upon it. A small handkerchief lay untended in her lap, as if left there after recent use.
Then she moved at my entrance, and showed nothing. Which was her nature. To feel, perhaps, but never to display.
She rose and stood inquiringly before the chair, which simmered slightly with its loss of weight.
“Grace, have you the address of that girl that was here? Could you let me have it if you do?”
“Eileen?” she said. “Eileen McGuire? Yes, I have it.” Her face showed nothing. She went to her desk and opened it. She was an orderly and systematic person. She seemed to have a card-index filing systemfor all those who had worked for us, past and present. I had never inquired into her habits of management before. In a moment she was holding a withdrawn card in her hand.
“Shall I give it to you, or do you want me to get in touch with her for you?”
“No,” I said, “I want to go there myself.”
“It’s in the city.” She read the street and number from the card. “She’s at one-twelve Holden Street.”
“Thank you. I’ll remember that.”
She put the card away. She gave me a look that was so articulate it held me for a moment as I was about to turn through the doorway.
“Did you want to say something to me?”
She spoke so low I barely caught it. “Don’t go there, Jean. It may not be good for you to do that.”
I saw that she knew the reason for the dismissal. I hadn’t known until now whether any of them did or not.
“I have to go somewhere,” I said. “There isn’t any other place that I can go.”
I closed the door after me, and went downstairs through the tactfully hushed house, and out into the tarnishing gold of the evening. I got the car out, and started back upon the long road to the city.
I hadn’t known there was such a street until now. There were so many things I hadn’t known until now. I wouldn’t have known where to find it unaided. I coasted up alongside the traffic patrolman on duty in the main square, and leaned out.
“I’m looking for a Holden Street. Can you tell me how to get there?”
“Och, that’s way over in the back part of town,” he said thickly. He glanced at the car, and he glanced at me, as though trying to link us up with such a destination. He waved those behind me on their way around the momentary impediment I made. “Tell you what you do, you keep following Third Street straight along. You’ll be able to pick it up out along there, when you’re getting toward the end of it.”
I drove along this wide, ugly channel for what seemed like endless miles, past brick brewery chimneys and coalyards and dully glistening gas tanks sheathed with mesh wiring. The lights came on suddenly, but they only emphasized its barren width and drab dinginess; they were set so far apart and they stretched in two such long lines into the distance that they only made it seem lonelier and more forlorn.
The day was dead, and this section was its cemetery. An ugly yellow murk hung low across the western sky, where elsewhere it was gold, and the rest was a sooty wash, like smudged charcoal drawings of houses and street vistas thumbed out of all clarity.
I asked again, of the attendant of an ice truck that was standing before a plant for loading, and he told me where to turn off, and how to go
thenceforth, to reach this Holden Street. In a little while after that, I was in it. The beams of my lights made a great scar down it that brightened its surface more than it could ever have been brightened before.
It wasn’t what I’d expected, after the section I’d just come through. It was poor, yes; threadbare-poor. But it wasn’t derelict, nor slatternly, nor a slum. It was genteel, sedate in its poverty.
It was a row of flats, all of one height, one shape, one size. You couldn’t tell where one ended and another began, save that there was a doorway breaking into them every so often. Each with the same short flight of iron-railed steps marking it. The windows, where there were lights behind them to give them depth, were neatly curtained, and the glass was unobtrusive in its cleanliness, and more than one had boxes of earth with geraniums planted in them standing on their ledges. Anyone with a penchant for exact social stratification would have classified it at the level where upper lower class meets lower middle class.
I found the number of the house I wanted, and I stopped, and turned off my lights, and sat still for a moment, arm dangling full length down the outside of the car.
A little girl came spilling out of the next-closest doorway and shrilled into the gloom: “Tiny! Mamma says you should come up now or she’s going to give it to you for making her send down special!”
A second figure joined her, there was a brief ear-splitting wrangle, and then they both disappeared inside once more. It became as quiet again as it had been before.
A man came shuffling up the street, tired from his work, and glanced at me and the motionless car with a sort of passive curiosity, and went in the doorway I sat keeping my vigil before.
My downfallen hand struck the side of the car door. I thought, It isn’t from here—it isn’t from any of these houses— that knowledge of that could have come ahead of time. No, I must be mistaken, I must be in the wrong place!
And yet the plane was down, and a girl who came from this street had told me it would be, before it ever left.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 7
