Skyscraper

by Faith Baldwin

  He dropped a little behind the others. The hedge was high, it grew in ordered circles. Lynn walking beside him in very high heels, turned her ankle, and cried out, for a brief moment, at the sharp pain.

  He said, “What is it?” anxiously.

  “Nothing—my ankle. It’s all right now.”

  The others had reached the end of the hedge, had turned and were coming back on the other side, toward the water. “Take my arm,” said Dwight. “Can you manage to get back to the house?”

  She could manage. She set her foot gingerly upon the path and clung to him for an unpremeditated instant. They were quite alone, in the moonlit world of the garden. Near them a sun dial, wreathed in roses, was no reminder of the flight of time. Separated from them by the hedge, unseen, the other walked and laughed. But Sarah, missing her host, missing Lynn, paused a moment, anxious.

  Dwight’s arm was around Lynn. For a heartbeat’s space he held her, close—much closer than any turned ankle warranted. He said softly and quite clearly. “Oh, my dear—you very sweet person—”

  And Sarah heard.

  A moment later they had rounded the hedge, and Dwight was calling to them. “Wait a moment, will you! Lynn’s turned her ankle.”

  “But it’s all right now,” she protested.

  It was all right. Right enough to dance later with Dwight, with Travis, with Millie’s weary husband. It was late when they said good night and went to bed. Sarah and Lynn must make an early start in the morning. Dwight was driving them and Travis up. Millie and Jack would have the house to themselves for a time: they never started anywhere before eleven, they protested.

  Early to rise and late to bed. But sometime between retiring and rising, Sarah, after Lynn slept, crept down the hall to the back stairs and put her feet cautiously upon them, listening to the creaking which seemed so loud, as loud as the beating of her heart.

  Down the passage and to Dwight’s door. She paused there, and drew the severe robe of heavy silk about her. Her heart beat so violently, it was as loud as her knock upon his door; louder.

  “Come in,” said Dwight, wondering what Wilkins wanted. Or could it be Millie? No, perish the thought. She wasn’t that much of a fool.

  Dwight’s room opened on a terrace of brick, completing this small wing. He was standing at the French windows, in his pajamas, smoking. Sarah came into the room. Her eyes were enormous; her plain and pleasant face was tragic, it was old. And there was in it emotion that he had not seen for many years—from her. A bitter jealousy, with which she strove; a warning; a fear; and a question.

  “Why, Sarah,” he said, startled out of all poise. “Why, Sarah!”

  Heaven knew what passed through his mind at that moment, what fleeting explanations, solutions, expectancies. He was sorry for them a moment later, a little ashamed.

  She said, harshly, insistently, “Lynn—I had to ask you about Lynn—Are you in love with her, David—and if you are—what are you going to do about it?”

  14

  DWIGHT GIVES HIS WORD

  THE FRENCH WINDOWS STOOD OPEN. OUTSIDE, a red moon was falling swiftly through starry space to her close. Soon it would be very dark, and very hushed, before the pale prelude to the dawn.The room was scented with tobacco smoke, with the odor of leather, with the tenuous persistence of roses. And it was so still that Sarah could hear the soft, enchanted murmur of water on the beach, the stifled sighing, in the branches, of a vagrant wind.

  Dwight leaned against the window frame. He felt slightly ridiculous, in the long tunicked Russian pajamas of heavy silk. He said a thing, sparring for time, which was small and mean; which he regretted. He asked lightly, “Not jealous, are you, Sarah?”

  She flushed, without beauty. She answered, her eyes on his, “No, I’m not jealous, David—I’m afraid.”

  But she was jealous; she knew it. She could have scotched the little snake at her heart, set her heel upon its bright, dangerous, lifted head. She must destroy it. While he murmured, “Shut the door, come in, you can’t stand there; what will people say?” and laughed a little, remembering, perhaps, as she forlornly remembered, a time when what people said—or thought—had meant so little to her, to both of them. She tried to destroy her enemy. She tried to think: of what am I jealous? Not, any more, of his love, or his desire for another woman. No, never any more. Not jealous, in the common sense, of Lynn, whom she loved. Oh, not that. Jealous, it might be of all Lynn stood for, youth, grace, possible radiant surrender, laughter, life—

  Jealous, too, of David’s personal integrity, of the delicate balance of that curious unacknowledged relationship which was between them. So, she said, shutting the door, and coming into the room, a few deliberate steps, “David, you’ve got to be honest with me. You’ve always been honest with me before. You can’t do this to—Lynn. You can’t,” she said, “do it to me.”

  He had not made a name for himself through being stupid. He had not earned—and flung away—and earned again, large, solid fortunes, by being insensitive and blind. He couldn’t turn this off lightly, with a word of reassurance—“Sarah, don’t be silly. There’s nothing in it. Can’t I be attentive to a pretty girl”—plaintively—“I like pretty girls, without your getting all worked up over it? Run along to bed, do, there’s a darling.”

  No, he couldn’t say that. Instead he said, and reached for a bathrobe of brocaded silk, belting it about his slim waist, “Sit down. We’ll talk this thing out.”

  She sat down, docilely enough. He took the chair near her, at his small, fine desk. He was tired, he discovered suddenly. Yet a moment before he had been so far from tired. Wilkins? He hoped to heaven Wilkins wouldn’t come in now with his unservile—”You should be in bed.” Through the door on the little library he could see his bedroom, the bed turned down, waiting, the carafe on the night table, the book he was reading, the soft light on. What had possessed him to wander about the library? To write three letters to Lynn which were now destroyed and in the waste basket? And eventually to lean against the window frame and look toward the dreaming garden and the flowing water and wish impossible things, impossible even if they should come to pass?”

  It struck him as enormously comic, as tremendously traffic, that he and Sarah Dennet should be sitting thus, at this time of night alone, shut in, in the quiet of the big friendly house, a lamp burning, and the fragrance of summer in the room. Once, a thousand years ago, it had been heaven to be with her thus, alone, enraptured, alien from the world.

  Why not now?

  He thought, fleetingly, that the question contained most of the love tragedy in the universe.

  He turned his attention to Sarah. She was sitting wearily in the deep chair, in a strangely humble position, somehow, for one usually so almost irritatingly erect, sure, of herself. Her hands were lax at her sides. He thought. There isn’t much use lying—to her—she always knew when I lied, there, toward the end. He thought, if one could put her in the wrong, get at this from an angle disadvantageous to her—it was not unkindness nor even self-protection. He was merely not a lawyer for nothing, as his clients very well knew.

  “Sarah”—his voice low, restrained, a shape reproachful—“Aren’t you taking a rather unfair advantage of me?”

  She knew what he meant, shrank back against the chair, cowered, as if the touch of padded upholstery meant safety. They hadn’t, for years, spoken of the days gone by. They had agreed to that. No use. No use stirring embers; and when embers have become ashes even more futile to blow upon them and watch the gray wisps drift upon uncaring air.

  He had liked that about her so much. The only woman he had ever known who would not say, long after love had perished, “Do you remember—”

  She answered, as steadily as she could, “I didn’t mean to—you know that. Lynn, Lynn means a great deal to me. Oh, why can’t you leave her alone, David?” Her big fine hands writhed, twisted, “Why can’t you leave her alone?—She’s so young—”

  “Am I’m so old?” he murmured wryly.


  “No, I didn’t mean that.” She didn’t. She stared at him, eyelids torn wide open. Old? Dwight? Not by any standards.

  “What did you mean?” he pressed her.

  Her hands were quiet again.

  “She doesn’t know much about life—She’s pretty innocent, David.”

  “Lynn? Lynn?” his voice was tender, he couldn’t, for his life, prevent it. “How old is she—twenty-two? Twenty-two-year-old girls, nowadays, dear Sarah!—”

  “Oh, why do you twist the things I say?” Her voice rose a little.

  He said, “Hush!” compellingly.

  She quieted, went on, dully, “Can’t you see what I mean by innocence? I don’t mean an ignorance of pitfalls. Lynn’s modern enough, sane enough, for that matter. But she doesn’t know what life can do to—to a girl. David, she’s happy, she’s in love. Tom Shepard’s a decent sort of boy. They’ll quarrel and be reconciled a hundred times before they marry. Can’t you let her alone, leave her to him? She belongs to him.”

  “Does she?” His eyes were unpleasant. “If she does, then why worry? She won’t be hurt. No one willo be hurt, except, perhaps, myself.”

  A tactit enough acknowledgment. She felt with the most curious warning agony of compassion and protection that she did not want him to be hurt, she couldn’t endure it, she would sacrifice anything, herself, Tom, Lynn, even Lynn.

  But that was madness. With the balanced cells of her brain she knew that David Dwight would not be hurt; not really; or thought she knew it. She said, “You do love her then? But you won’t be hurt, David; you—you’ve cared for women before.”

  “Yes. And had them for the most part,” he agreed cheerfully, brutally, “and then lost them, somehow; and been hurt, for a time. But—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  It was on his lips to say it—but this is different. She had heard that before. For a moment they stared at each other, across miles, across years.

  She said bitterly, “I’ve been a fool. All my fault. I never thought, never dreamed—”

  “Why not? You knew me, Sarah, you have known me for a long time,” he reminded her.

  “Yes—but Lynn? My friend—my”—she stumbled, she said it bravely—“my almost daughter, the daughter I might have had.”

  “Sarah, do you realize you’re talking like a very bad play?”

  “Oh, perhaps. Life,” she said uneasily, “is like a play—a very bad play, I expect. But to use me as a convenience—”

  “Is that where the shoe pinches, Sarah?”

  In part, it was. But she had herself in hand now, and answered, “No, not altogether. I can’t have you taking Lynn’s happiness from her.”

  “Are you sure it’s happiness?” His mouth twisted. He said violently, “What can that cub give her that I can’t?”

  “Life. Youth—”

  “Oh, youth!” He dismissed it with a gesture. “What does she want from life, a home, shelter, love passion? I can give her these things. As well as Tom Shepard. Better.”

  “He can give her marriage,” Sarah said.

  There was a species of sick triumph in her eyes. Marriage—David Dwight had not been able to give her marriage; at least, he had not wished to be able—And now, for a long time, his rather legendary wife had served him as protection—

  In the scant minute which elapsed before Dwight answered, he thought and realized a number of things. Marriage—with Lynn? It had not occurred to him. Why should it have done so? At first, a pretty girl, a desirable girl; one played with the idea of pretty girls and then, perhaps, with the pretty girls themselves. Later, with the intrusion of Tom, one resigned oneself to a waiting game. Waiting for what? Seduction was an abhorrent word, a word not in Dwight’s working vocabulary. But if a girl turned to one on, say, the rebound, of her own free will, was that seduction?

  No, not exactly. If he had had that goal, and end to waiting, in his mind, he put it aside now. Marriage with Lynn. His breath quickened at the thought, his heart pounded, he clenched his hands in the pockets of the dressing-gown. To teach Lynn to love, to show Lynn the wide reaches of this very glorious world, to be guide and mentor and lover, to slip back into unthinking youth again through the elixir of her youth, to dream, perhaps of a child, of children—not of the rangy uninteresting girls who bore his name, whose blood was tinged with his own, but of boy children, sturdy, brown babies, with Lynn’s gray eyes—

  That the present and only Mrs. David Dwight might be persuaded to release him he knew; none better; he had known it for a long time; but the idea had not appealed to him, had far from suited his book. But now! He laughed, a short, excited sound, curiously brutal, curiously exultant. There sat Sarah, the faint, sickened triumph still in her eyes. She thought she had him. She was wrong. He had her; he had, on the instant, everything that made life worth living. “He can give her marriage,” Sarah had said. Well—

  “That, too, might be arranged,” said Dwight, coolly.

  She shuddered away from him. “No!”

  “Yes. Mrs. Dwight,” he smiled maliciously, “is rather bored. Or so I’ve heard. She might be persuaded, for a consideration.”

  Yes, he knew she could be persuaded. But the consideration must be very large. Far, far larger than he could afford. His thoughts turned back swiftly to his conversation with Lynn on the previous night. If there were anything in it—by all the unholy gods, what curiously poetic justice!

  That there had never been rumor of Dwight’s wife freeing him before this, Sarah knew. She looked at him incredulously. The arrangement had, so far, been an exceptional convenience to him.

  “Marriage,” he went on, enjoying himself, loathing himself, a veritable battlefield, “marriage by bell and book, a home, children. Can your candidate do more?”

  “No.” But now suddenly she thought she had conquered; she said, again, in triumph.

  “She loves Tom. She doesn’t love—you.”

  “No,” he said frankly, “she doesn’t love me—yet.”

  “You think you can make her love you—all you stand for? David, it wouldn’t be love, it would be glamor, enchantment, it would be—betrayal of the most material sort—”

  He rose, faced her, smiling very slightly.

  “Sarah, we are getting nowhere. We are, I take it, enemies?”

  “Enemies,” she agreed, low. She too rose. They regarded one another warily, they were duelists, dealing with clumsy words, yet they bore invisible weapons, weapons of the spirit, which nevertheless drew blood.

  “An armistice?” he suggested, after a long minute. “As long as Tom Shepard is in the picture, I’ll keep out. Does that satisfy you?”

  She thought she had won. She thought that this was his way of telling her so. Her hands went out to him, and drew back, fell at her sides.

  “Your word of honor, David?”

  He was a little pale. He had his code. He asked, “Must I?” and then nodded gravely enough. “My word of honor, then, as long as Tom is in the picture,” he said.

  She told him, “You keep promises—honor promises. I know.”

  He knew too. He opened the door, held it for her. For an instant their eyes met, for an instant that unspoken, vanished thing was living, flashing between them for a second’s fraction.

  “Sarah, Sarita,” he said, and sighed, “life plays us idiotic tricks. Try to think that it wasn’t wholly my fault, my dear.”

  It had been years since he had called her Sarita, the silly, the sweet nickname. She was crying silently as she stumbled back along the passage and up the stairs, careless of how they creaked under her hurrying tread.

  Dwight went back to his room and stood again at the windows. He had given his word. As long as Tom were in the picture. But he had not promised to withhold his erasing hand—“I told him if he did this I’d never speak to him again.” He smiled and went, catlike, into his bedroom.

  15

  JENNIE’S BARGAIN

  IN THE MORNING THEY DROVE TO TOWN. “Sarah,” asked Dwight. “wi
ll you do me the honor?” and held open the door for her. Grimly, looking twenty years older than her age, she climbed in and sat beside him.

  “Here’s luck,” Travis hailed Lynn, his eye brightening as she took her place beside him.

  “Enjoying yourself?” Dwight asked Sarah as the miles unrolled beneath the wheels, while back at the place which had no name Millie and Jack Carter regarded each other without pleasure across their breakfast trays.

  “Please—”

  “I’m sorry, Sarah,” he said instantly; and was.

  Because of their early start and the scarcity of traffic, they came to the Seacoast Building on time. Lynn said delightedly, holding out her hand, “It was—gorgeous. I can’t thank you enough.”

  He replied coolly, smiling at her, “it was pleasant of you to come,” and turned to Sarah. Lynn, a little taken aback, watched them. Incalculable man! One moment he was your friend, dependable, you had only to reach out your hand for comfort. Nice, that feeling. Then, the next second he was less than you friend, more than your friend, caressing eyes and disturbing voice. That frightened you a little, but was—pleasurable. And then, again, as now, he was a hundred miles removed from friendship, and acquaintance merely, courteous, a little bored.

  Not that it matters—much.

  He said nothing of when they would meet again. It was the first time he had not given her a meeting to look forward to.

  She went to work, a little hurt, more than a little puzzled. But he lingered, detaining Sarah. “Will you lunch with me tomorrow?”

  “Why?”

  “You know why. We’ll talk of—cabbages,” he promised, “and kings.”

  “Well,” asked Tom, appearing at Lynn’s elbow toward luncheon time, “did you have a thrilling weekend—with Sarah?”

  He was ugly, definitely so. He had seen the car draw up, had seen the people in it. Lynn replied defiantly, “Very. And you needn’t take that attitude, Tom Shepard. I was with Sarah and you know it!”