Warning Hill

by John P. Marquand

  Mr. Jellett paused, as he might have paused at a directors’ meeting, set down his glass, and placed the tip of his fingers together; and there he sat, a plump little man in a carefully pressed dinner coat. It all was most astonishing because he was so insignificant, and looked so very dull. As Tommy Michael stared at Mr. Jellett, for the life of him he could not think of a word to say, and yet he was no longer surprised. It was remarkable to remember that surprise left him in a moment. He remembered that a gilded clock chimed on the mantelpiece in a sweet birdlike way. Mal was the one who spoke first. Mal pushed toward Mr. Jellett so violently that Tommy seized his arm.

  “Hey!” cried Mal. “What do you think Tom Michael is—you damned old fool?”

  “Wait,” said Tommy, “don’t say that.” The strangest thing about it was that he did not grow angry. “Mr. Jellett’s only trying to do the best he knows how.”

  He knew he was perfectly right. Mr. Jellett was doing his very best. He was trying to bolster up a wall, invisible, but none the less real, which was crumbling all about him. There was a marvellous certainty about Mr. Jellett. He at least was serene in his confidence that all the Jelletts were of finer clay. He was only using Tommy Michael as he had used people all his life. “They are rotten,” Miss Meachey had said. “All of them are rotten.” As far as Mr. Jellett went, it was not so.

  “That’s right,” said Mr. Jellett. “That’s what I’ve always tried to do—my best. I’ve built this house for my children. I’ve given them everything, and if all I’ve got back is—” Mr. Jellett pursed his lips and, for a second, his eyes grew narrow, “is a plugged nickel, I can’t help it. I’m taking a licking when I thought I’d never take another. Say the word, Michael. My check book’s in the drawer.”

  There was more to it than anything that Mr. Jellett said. There was a hint of so many things which Mr. Jellett had tried to do, most of which had failed. And Tommy had a new conviction which he had never possessed before. The Jellett house was crumbling like the Michael house. Its garden would be choked with weeds some day, and the paint would be off its shutters: and Graf ton Jellett guessed it. There were forces with which he could not cope.

  “I’m sorry,—” Tommy began. It was surprising to remember that he told Mr. Jellett he was sorry.

  “Sorry, eh?” Mr. Jellett leaned forward slightly. “There’s nothing to be sorry about—for you. You can do this perfectly easily, and no one will think less of you. You’re just that much different from us. You can see what I mean? You couldn’t once, but I’ll bet you see it now.”

  “Yes,” said Tommy, “I know what you mean. There is that difference.”

  He would always be a village boy to Mr. Jellett, no matter what he did.

  “Well,” said Mr. Jellett, “always let the other fellow make the offer, if you can. If you won’t, I will, and I won’t be sharp. I’m not forgetting what you did tonight. There are reasons to me why money doesn’t count in this. What would you say—to a hundred thousand dollars?”

  Involuntarily Tommy looked at Mal. Mal’s face was blank. His mouth was opened wide.

  “I’m sorry,” Tommy dusted his fingers against his trench coat very carefully. “It won’t do any good—to talk like this.”

  “Rubbish!” said Mr. Jellett. “That’s more money than you’ll ever make—and here—I’ll throw in something more. I’ll have you here to dinner the week after it’s done—both of you. How’s that?”

  “Thanks.” In spite of himself Tommy felt his lips twitch. “I don’t want to come to dinner.”

  “You don’t want to, eh?” said Mr. Jellett and leaned forward. “Then—what the devil do you want—more money?”

  “No,” said Tommy Michael. “I don’t want anything at all.”

  “Rubbish!” said Mr. Jellett. “Two hundred thousand, and give me that land down by the beach.”

  It was like him still to be thinking of that land right to the very end.

  “Come on, Mal,” said Tommy. “Let’s be going.”

  “Confound it!” Mr. Jellett was on his feet. “What the devil’s the matter?”

  As he answered, Tom Michael found himself smiling suddenly not altogether pleasantly. “Take the land down by the beach,” he said. “I’ll give it to you. Take it and go to the devil!”

  “Eh?” said Grafton Jellett.

  Yet even then Tommy was not angry. In that moment he seemed detached from anger; he seemed to be dealing with quantities that were as absolute as time.

  “I mean,” said Tommy, “that I don’t want anything you want; that’s what I mean. I used to, but not any more. When I was listening to you, I was thinking that. I supposed that’s why I listened. Now wait! Don’t think it’s temper when I tell you this. I don’t know whether you’ll believe, but it’s the truth. Mary wouldn’t marry me, if you paid a million dollars—not Mary Street. She’s—oh, what’s the use? It would only sound like rot, if I told you. I’m Tommy Michael, and she’s Mary Street, and you can’t change it. You might have once, but you can’t change it any more.”

  Tommy turned on his heel and slipped his arm through Mal’s, and pulled Mal toward the door. He did not look back at Mr. Jellett, nor did he answer when Mr. Jellett spoke.

  “That’s all rot, of course,” said Mr. Jellett, and he laughed. “You’ll come back. They always do.”

  “Aw—go to hell! You make me sick,” roared Mal.

  Then they were out in the hall.

  “Now look, Mal,” he was saying, “there isn’t any use—”

  And then he stopped, with his sentence in the air. Another door had opened, making a rectangle of light, and Marianne was standing in it, in a dark blue dress with bare white arms and shoulders, and Tommy Michael stopped and his heart was in his throat.

  “Why, Tommy,” said Marianne, and her voice was very soft, almost a whisper.

  She had been waiting all the time. Tommy could tell that much, in spite of her surprise.

  “I didn’t think,” there was a catch in her voice that he had often heard before, “I’d be so glad to see anybody, Tommy.”

  “Didn’t you?” said Tommy.

  Now it was very strange. Her voice did not ring right and neither did his voice, and yet his heart was hammering and all his blood was in his face. She had never seemed so delicately beautiful, or so desirable to touch.

  “Tommy,” said Marianne, and nodded at Mal, “Hubbard will show him out.”

  “Will he?” said Tommy, in a queer choked way, and he hardly knew that he was answering. All that night, he always said, his mind played the strangest tricks. It kept jumping backwards almost to the beginning, and he was thinking that nothing was ever wholly over. Inside you were the embers of everything that happened, ready to flare up again when the fire was raked. “Thou turnest man to destruction!” Now it was odd that he should remember his Aunt Sarah reading it years ago. “Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep—”

  “Silly!” Marianne was whispering. “Of course he will. Tommy, come in here. I want to say something. I want—”

  “No,” said Tommy, “not to-night. I’ve got to be going home.”

  “Silly,” began Marianne, “you don’t know what I want. If you did—”

  It was curious to realize that nothing mattered to Marianne. Not a thing that had happened had made an impression and she would always be wanting while anything was left to want. Tommy’s cap was on a high Italian chair. He stepped toward it.

  “It might be something you wanted once, Tommy,” ended Marianne.

  Something very remarkable had happened. He still wanted nothing the Jelletts had to give.

  “Why, Marianne,” he said, and laughed. Hubbard had appeared by then and was standing by the great front door. “All right, Hubbard. Good night, Marianne.”

  Always, no matter how carefully he considered, all his memories of that night were unconnected and grotesque, but behind them all was an elation which he could not quite define. There was a softness in the mist and vi
gor in the wind, which filled him with a deep new strength, and all the while he was thinking. He was thinking the strangest thoughts.

  They only came clear to him when he was at home, for he stopped at his own house that night. He remembered he was standing in the dark front hall, with a match flicking in his hand. There was oil in the glass lamp on the table still, though it was thick and yellow. The wick hissed and spluttered in a most uneven way before the flame caught hold, and there was a pervading damp and musty smell, and mysterious creakings in the dark. Then, as the flame grew higher, he saw the dusty wall paper, and the mirrors and the chairs: and at the same time he must have seen the rest. The dinginess did not depress him, nor the damp or cold, nor all the memories with them. He found himself staring into the mirror, and he could see his own shape in the dusty glass with wide eyes and half-opened mouth.

  “Do you know what?” he heard himself saying. “Do you know what?”

  His own voice rang back at him through the stillness, but he was not surprised. At last a revelation was on him, for at last he knew exactly what he was thinking—and why he felt so free. It was only what so many had endeavored to tell him all that while,—his mother, his Aunt Sarah, old Mr. Danforth, and the rest; but until then he had never believed. All that while he had been struggling with an idea, which at last was broken down,—the most absurd idea, and yet the only one which had mattered in his life. For his struggle with that idea had led him where he stood, staring at the gutting lamp wick, while the smoke curled up toward the ceiling.

  And he knew what, just as surely as though a voice had told him from the dark. He had grown stronger and they had not Yes, he had grown stronger every time he had hit the ground; and somehow everything that lay behind him seemed soft and bright, as though a kindly beam from that lamp had struck it. Of course no one was there to hear him, but nevertheless he spoke out loud, because in some way his speaking seemed a perfect vindication; and he always said that he could almost believe that he was speaking to something, though nothing was there at all but the silence and the damp.

  “Do you know what?” said Tommy Michael, and his voice told of his own surprise; “I’m better than they are—that’s what. And what’s more, I have been better all the time!”

  About the Author

  John P. Marquand (1893–1960) was a Pulitzer Prize—winning author, proclaimed “the most successful novelist in the United States” by Life magazine in 1944. A descendant of governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, shipping magnates Daniel Marquand and Samuel Curzon, and famed nineteenth-century writer Margaret Fuller, Marquand always had one foot inside the blue-blooded New England establishment, the focus of his social satire. But he grew up on the outside, sent to live with maiden aunts in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the setting of many of his novels, after his father lost the once-considerable family fortune in the crash of 1907. From this dual perspective, Marquand crafted stories and novels that were applauded for their keen observation of cultural detail and social mores.

  By the 1930s, Marquand was a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, where he debuted the character of Mr. Moto, a Japanese secret agent. No Hero, the first in a series of bestselling spy novels featuring Mr. Moto, was published in 1935. Three years later, Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Late George Apley, a subtle lampoon of Boston’s upper classes. The novels that followed, including H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), So Little Time (1943), B.F.’s Daughter (1946), Point of No Return (1949), Melvin Goodwin, USA (1952), Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955), and Women and Thomas Harrow (1959), cemented his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of contemporary New England society and one of America’s finest writers.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1920, 1930 by John P. Marquand

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1573-8

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT

  FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

  EBOOKS BY JOHN P. MARQUAND

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia