Warning Hill

by John P. Marquand

  A fat square woman was seated by the window, with stolid red hands folded on a clean white apron. She was Mrs. Jiggs, known in Michael’s Harbor as a practical nurse, which was a good enough title, for there was no illusion or evasion once Mrs. Jiggs came in. Mrs. Jiggs dispensed with her professional smile when she saw Tommy.

  “Sh!” hissed Mrs. Jiggs. “She’s resting. It’s her heart. Oh, me, she’s had an awful spell!”

  “Hey?” It was marvellous how Aunt Sarah could catch the faintest snatches of conversation. “Sell? We don’t have to sell anything.”

  “I said—spell,” hissed Mrs. Jiggs.

  Estelle Michael was lying so motionless that she did not seem alive. Her head was propped up by a pillow; her hair was in two braids, one over each shoulder, and the hardness had left her lips. As Tommy leaned over her, she opened her eyes, and Tommy had the oddest thought that he was not looking at his mother at all, but into the face of a pale and frightened child.

  “No, no, no,” Aunt Sarah was whispering behind Tommy’s back. “I don’t have to sell anything, I’ll have you know, Mrs. Jiggs, in spite of what people say. No, no, no, I’ve got enough to live on while I’m above-ground, and I can pay for a funeral too.”

  “Tom,” said his mother, in a thin voice exactly like a little girl’s. “Is that you, Tommy dear?” How seldom she had ever called him “Tommy dear!” Tommy had knelt by the bed and held one of her hands which had grown oddly frail. “Tell that old woman to leave the room, and—that Mrs. Jiggs!”

  “Hey?” said Aunt Sarah. “What’s that? Is she asking for me? Here I am, Estelle.”

  “Is she pretending she doesn’t hear me? Tell her to leave the room.” Again his mother’s voice’ was faint and thin. “Tell her she won’t bully you and me any longer—no, not any longer, Tommy dear.”

  “Hey?” said Aunt Sarah. “Pretending I don’t hear?”

  Tommy knew that she had heard it all, if only from the way her head went back and from the way she drew her shawl about her, as he helped her up and led her to the door.

  “Have they gone, Tommy?” said his mother. “Tommy, talk to me. I want to hear you talk, Tommy. Where did you go to-night?”

  And Tommy Michael told her, kneeling on the straw matting beside that hideous yellow bed, and ever afterwards he was glad he told her everything there was to tell. He told her about Marianne, beginning with the carriage down the road. He told of the garden at Warning Hill and of the sideboard with its gold, and of the nights he ran away to play upon the beach, when he got that note from Marianne. Whatever it was that had stilled his speech was gone. She was no longer older than he or stern, as she lay there so very still, robbed of her harsh energy and pride. Nor was she angry or even disapproving at the wild flight his fancy took, when he told her all he meant to do, because he would be a great man some day. He could never think of those minutes as being so very sad. They both seemed to be like children, stealing a minute from Time, when his back was turned, looking at his glass. She was smiling exactly like a child, or perhaps as she may have smiled when she first heard Alfred Michael speak.

  “Tommy,” she said, “I’m so glad, Tommy dear … so glad: I used to be a little afraid that you’d be like every one else and … and they can’t stop you now, Tommy. I want to tell you something. Don’t worry about Aunt Sarah. Do you know what I’ve found? I found her bank books in the desk to-night. I shouldn’t have looked, I know. It gave me a dreadful turn because, Tommy, she’s been saving money all the time. And when I told her what I thought, I … something stopped inside me. Remember, you won’t have to work for her any more. Tommy, it’s a little funny, isn’t it? She’s been saving money all the time.”

  It always seemed strange that he could smile, without a touch of bitterness. All the mornings when Tommy had brought Aunt Sarah’s bank books to be mailed with never a thought that she was not drawing from the columns, all the catalogue of Aunt Sarah’s acid complaints seemed to be echoing yet, mingling with the thumping of her cane upon the stairs. Something was grotesque and something else was marvellous, even at that hour, in the thought of that old woman deceiving them both.

  “Tommy,” his mother was speaking again, “I’m so glad, Tommy dear. I’m glad for everything, I guess … Tommy, tell me some more about Marianne before I go to sleep.… You always talked of sailing boats when you were a little boy.”

  Then the time when he was little came back from the mist. He even remembered the poem he had made up, lying in the tall grass by the summer house, and he heard himself repeating it, as he knelt beside the bed.

  “Then I will get a boat with a big sail, a big sail

  And I will sail it and sail it fast

  And the wind will blow it until it goes rush and splash

  Where the waves are on the rocks.”

  But all the while, in back of Tommy’s mind, another voice was speaking, and praying to its god a prayer that would have brought laughter to any earth-bound mortal’s heart, as it rose from that stormy ground where childhood and manhood meet.

  “Oh, Lord,” Tommy was praying, “she thinks I’m as good as any one; oh, Lord, won’t you make me so,—if not for me, for her? Won’t you make me so that no one will be ashamed of me—for my mother’s sake, oh, Lord?”

  They were kind to him; every one was kind, Duncan Ross and Mr. Danforth and the rest, but Mary Street was the one who knew that something was done forever, and she was the one who told him, the week his mother died.

  The wind was blowing off Welcome River, and the waves were rippling on the muddy shore, and the ducks in the Street dooryard were walking toward the river in a solemn even row. Mal was painting a gunning float. His shirt and trousers were splashed with the slate-gray paint, and Mary Street was watching. She was in a new dress, and she kept looking toward the road beyond the broken paling fence, and she was the one who saw him first. She watched him walking toward them without any sign of welcome.

  “Tom,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

  Mal Street looked up and scowled.

  “Aw, shut up!” said Mal. “What’s getting into you, anyways? Tom’s come to see his friends.”

  Mary shook her head, and her face was like a stranger’s and her voice.

  “No,” she said, “we’re not friends of his, Mal. Can’t you see?—it isn’t like it used to be.”

  And Tommy heard himself speaking in sudden futile pain, for, sure enough, something had gone, something which he had always known.

  “That isn’t so,” he said. “You know it isn’t so.”

  But even as he spoke, he knew that she was right, and it hurt him more than he cared to think. It left him bewildered and he could not understand. Yet even Mal must have seen it, though he flung his paint brush slap against the boat.

  “Hell!” cried Mal. “Of course it ain’t Tom isn’t skunk enough to forget his friends.”

  Then Mary smiled, and suddenly her glance was warm and friendly.

  “No,” she said, “it isn’t that, but can’t you see? Tommy isn’t here.”

  “Not here?” shouted Mal. “Are you going crazy, kid?”

  Then she reached for Tommy’s hands and smiled up at him, not bitterly, but as though they had a jest in common beyond Mal’s stolid reach.

  “Of course he isn’t here,” she said. “He’s gone and left us both behind—the way he ought to, just the way he ought to. And you were always going to do it, weren’t you, Tom? And I’m glad of it. Yes, I’m glad. Tom, I’m not angry any more, because it was just right. Tommy, don’t you see?”

  But somehow it did not seem right, now that she had said it, for suddenly he was ashamed. And she was better than he was, now that her hands were in his, gripping him very tightly, better, stronger, wiser.

  “Mary,” he began, “Mary—”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t be silly, Tommy—dear. I used to be, not you. You’re going places, and you’re going to see all sorts of things, all the things I want to see, I know. You’ve got
to. Don’t you see you’ve got to? And you mustn’t come back. You mustn’t ever. I don’t want it—ever. Do you remember when I sent you in the boat, ever so long ago? You’re sailing off again. Tommy, don’t you see? You’re going, and I’m going and—and that’s all.”

  “Hey!” shouted Mal. “Are you crazy? Where the blazes are you going?”

  Mary shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but somewhere—somewhere. Tommy and I can’t stay like you.”

  “Mary,” Tommy said, and all at once his voice choked him, “I’m not going anywhere. I—”

  But Mary laughed and snatched her hands away.

  “Yes,” she said, “we’re both going. Good-by, Tommy dear.”

  A motor horn was blowing shrill and discordant from the street as Mary said good-by, and some one was calling.

  “Mary! Come on, can’t you?”

  “Hey!” cried Mal. “Who’s that sport out there in that bus?”

  Then Mary turned on them, her head high, with that wild swiftness that had always lain behind her calm.

  “It’s Sherwood Jellett, if you want to know. He’s come to take me for a ride. Good-by. I’m going.”

  “The blazes you are!” roared Mal. “Don’t you know no better, you snappy little fool?”

  But she was gone already, running toward the broken palings of the street, but even as she ran, she turned her head, lithely, quickly. She was like a shadow running.

  “Good-by!” she called again. “You’re not the only one who knows them up at Warning Hill.”

  And Tommy and Mal Street stood staring at each other, without knowing what to say.

  “Gosh!” said Mal. “She shouldn’t be going out with him, but you can’t stop her. No, sir, you can’t stop her when she gets like that.”

  XVIII

  It was the thirty-first of August, nineteen-seventeen, when Tommy stood for the first time in his life on Mr. Jellett’s steps at Warning Hill. It was when he had been made a reserve officer, with the bars of a first lieutenant upon his shoulders and crossed muskets on his collar, fresh from the Plattsburg camp. An officer’s garrison cap shaded his eyes. His fingers played nervously at his pockets, smoothing out his blouse, made rather more hastily than well by one of those army tailors whose shops once appeared like mushrooms just outside the Plattsburg gates. Incongruous though the thought may be, he was not unlike a drab species of butterfly, hatched like so many thousands of others, after three months of frantic incubation, into a new existence.

  It was Tommy Michael, standing beneath Mr. Jellett’s porte-cochère. His face was thinner and sharper; the lines of his jaw were harsh, but he was Tommy Michael.

  There he was on Mr. Jellett’s steps, and now, as on every other journey, it did not seem so odd that he had reached those steps at last. Before him was an iron grilled door with plate glass behind it. Through the glass he could see a vestibule, paved in black and white marble, with a red carpet running up the middle to a second door. There was an utter absence of life as Tommy stood there. A pair of yew trees by the steps were as exquisitely groomed as horses. The blue gravel of the drive was so freshly raked that Tommy was almost positive, without hearing a sound or seeing a soul, that the marks his boots had made two minutes back were already perfectly obliterated.

  For the life of him Tommy could not help wondering why it was that the inhibitions of childhood stuck to him like a spell. Only an hour before as he had stood in his own hall at home until his eyes should grow accustomed to the dark of the closed shutters, he had found himself listening for his mother’s voice and the tapping of Aunt Sarah’s cane. He had started when Jim Street, who was with him, spoke.

  “Yes,” Jim Street had said, “I’ll see to having it painted. I’m good enough for that.”

  It would have taken more than painting to make poor Jim Street new. His fingers had grown so gnarled and twisted and his body so racked by rheumatism that he could not scull a float of hold a gun. It did not make much difference, since shooting was no longer good. The ducks had grown so shy you could not get among them. They were frightened, Jim Street said, by the lights from automobiles along the road. Jim Street would sit watching those motors, morose and hollow-eyed, with his long face scarred by sleepless nights. Tommy could not get the two Jim Streets straight, the one who was with him and the magnificently lazy man he used to know.

  “And the roof shingled,” said Tommy. “And the carriage house—you’d better tear it down.”

  “Yep,” said Jim Street, “there ain’t no use in carriages any more, and hell—how they used to drive ’em, before the roads was all made hard! Well—that’s all, ain’t it? I’ll just be limping home.”

  As Tommy spoke he knew it was nearly all—all there was to a hundred pleasant hours, some of the few he had ever known.

  “I’ll leave you a check to-night,” said Tommy, “before I take the train—and keep the change, Jim, if I don’t get back.”

  There had been an awkward silence. They both were passing through a hall of retrospect, where memories stood as futile as the objects of forgotten lives, which museums have disturbed to put upon their shelves. Jim Street cut a sliver from a cake of hard tobacco.

  “When you git there,” he said, “keep an eye out for Mal. He felt bad not to see you before he went.… Like as not he’ll get killed.… He was always hell for fighting, just like his old man was. Why, I can recall—but what the hell? So long, Tom, Mary’ll be back to-night. At six o’clock they leave off at the store.”

  There it came, inescapable, out of those other days. For the life of him, Tommy could not keep his face from growing red, though Mary was nothing at all to him, except as a part of that other time. She was only a figure in that background of faces which he had left ever so far behind. He could seem to see her as he might across a river, and yet his face grew red.

  Mr. Jellett’s house seemed like a castle even yet. Tommy could have walked to Mr. Danforth’s house without a qualm. He could have walked up the Country Club steps by then, serene in his self-confidence, but logic left him at Mr. Jellett’s gate. He had the most childishly embarrassed sensation, when he pushed the mother-of-pearl button beside that iron grilled front door. There was not the slightest sound of ringing. There was not the slightest creak of hinges as Hubbard opened that masterpiece of plate glass and iron and looked at Tommy Michael with the courteous wordless question which a good butler learns to phrase. If Hubbard was curious he did not show it. The times had grown puzzling, now that a whole new aristocracy had been created overnight by a single act of Congress. He must have seen Tommy Michael give a gulping swallow before he spoke.

  “Is—is—?” Tommy Michael’s voice trailed off into his throat.

  “Yes, sir?” And Tommy always said he spoke kindly, as butlers go. “You wanted to see some one, sir?”

  “Yes,” said Tommy. “Is Mr. Sherwood in?”

  It was not what Tommy had meant to ask. It was the result of a frantic groping for a reply. It was hard to believe. An inhibition of childhood, which he thought was dead was back.

  “No, sir,” said Hubbard; “Mr. Sherwood isn’t in.”

  Mr. Sherwood, it so happened, was generally out. Though Hubbard knew what most young gentlemen of a certain age were up to, he betrayed none of the deep wisdom which was his. He looked at Tommy in his uniform, thinking, probably, that riding breeches must be worn from infancy to be carried off. Hubbard’s eyes traveled to Tommy’s leather leggings—imitation pigskin.

  “Shall I say who called?” asked Hubbard, with his hand upon the door, but Tommy’s panic had vanished beneath Hubbard’s incurious stare.

  “No,” said Tommy. “Wait a minute. Is Miss Marianne at home?”

  Even as he asked it, Tommy hated himself. There was actually a quaver in his voice when he said “Marianne.” Tommy had that instinctive belief, possessed by all of us, that butlers are endowed with all sorts of uncommon faculties. But Hubbard did not bat an eye. He stood as benignly as Saint Pe
ter at the pearly gates.

  “Is she expecting you, sir?” he asked.

  “No.” Tommy had developed a most wonderful talent of being able to detach himself from all that was going on, if the time and place was right. Buzz—a locust in the trees was singing of the waning summer, and of the crickets soon to chirp on clear cool nights. Tommy seemed to be somewhere among those sounds, watching himself standing by the door.

  “No, she doesn’t expect me,” Tommy Michael said.

  Hubbard hesitated. It was hard to reach decisions as easily as one had once, now that the world was upside down.

  “Miss Marianne has another caller, sir,” Hubbard paused and coughed.

  “I supposed she would,” said Tommy. “I can’t very well come again. Will you give her this, please?”

  He awkwardly unbuttoned the upper left-hand pocket of his blouse, and produced a pencil and a card.

  “Give Miss Marianne this. I’ll wait for an answer.”

  He handed Hubbard a visiting card, across which he had written a sentence. Then he replaced his pencil and buttoned up his pocket. It had come over Tommy Michael all at once that his whole history was written on that bit of cardboard, all the aching of his back and head, all rebuffs and loneliness. The coal gas of a score of furnaces was in it, and the grease of waiters’ trays, and the cold of misty mornings.