by Leslie Ford
She hesitated, undecided and rather anxious-eyed. As well she might be, I thought. For all she knew her precious brother-in-law might easily decide to take another nocturnal prowl for checking-up purposes. If he believed her story about my status as a Colonel Primrose stooge and stool-pigeon, she must realize how slender the thread was that my life hung on just then. I knew she didn’t trust Roy Cather any farther than he trusted her. I had an odd feeling standing there: I didn’t know whether to be grateful for her anxiety and indecision, or to admire the fortitude with which she was leaving me, for all she knew, to get my throat cut. I thought that glibly enough then, without myself actually realizing how ghastly near the truth it was, and that without actually meaning to, it was in point of fact precisely what she was deciding.
“Good night,” she said again. She closed the door. I heard her cross the passage and close the door of her sitting room. Then there was silence, profound, penetrating and alive the instant it descended. I felt as if I had a sense of trapped dismay crawling up and down my spinal column.
I looked out onto the lanai and across the black void that was the garden under me to the deeper black of the mountains looming up beyond the ravine. My dismay sharpened acutely as I realized I might as well be standing in the center of a brightly lighted stage. There was no audience, I hoped, except leaves and trees and solid rock—as long as Roy Cather stayed underground anyway—but I had the feeling of being watched by a thousand silent hidden eyes. I turned out the light, turned it out as quickly as I possibly could.
For a moment the darkness had a pleasant quality of safety. I felt my way over to the dressing table, put my bag with the keys to Roy Cather’s prison down on it and sat down to get my eyes used to the absence of light. I don’t know what there is about darkness and silence that makes one listen so intently, unless it’s something out of all our primeval past, but I was listening with almost painful intensity. Or perhaps my inner ear had already caught the quiet sound of footsteps on the lanai matting.
I waited, holding my breath, and then let it go abruptly with profound relief. It was Mary. Her figure was outlined against the star-lit night as she stopped at the rail for an instant, looking down into the garden.
She turned and crept into my room.
“Here I am,” I said.
“Sssh.” She touched my shoulder in the dark. “Come on in here.”
It was the strangest conference I’ve ever been a member of. We closed the bathroom door, turned on the light and sat side by side on the slippery edge of the green-enamelled tub, the drip-drip-drip of a defective shower head behind us punctuating our hushed talk with a kind of ominous persistence.
“Kumumato knows I’ve got his keys,” she said softly. “There are just the two—Dad’s and the one in the pantry for the servants. He can’t get out. It’s a special lock. The wood’s only a facing—the door’s off an old safe from the office. It locks automatically when the bolt slips and makes the place blast-proof. That’s why Dad used it—it’s very fancy. So he’s in all right. The question is, what do we do next?”
“Right,” I said.
She looked up at the dripping shower. There was something frustrating and drearily hopeless about the sound of it. She got up abruptly, tried to turn it off and made it worse. She sat down again with a shrug.
“Listen,” she said, very quietly. “You’ll be furious with me, but I . . . I listened in on your phone call from Colonel Primrose. In Dad’s study. I didn’t mean to, really, at first, and only for a minute. Just long enough to——”
“That’s all right,” I said.
“It’s not, really, of course. I was hoping it was him. It just sort of popped into my mind when I heard him ask for you that it was him maybe.—Where is he? Isn’t he coming out to see you?”
“I thought he would,” I said.
“I thought so too. That’s why I locked him in. I thought Colonel Primrose could . . . sort of take over for us. I thought he’d be decent about it—for Mother and Dad, I mean.”
She hesitated. “He would be, wouldn’t he, Grace?”
She looked so pathetically in earnest that I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth.
“As decent as he could be, I guess.”
Even that was wishful thinking on my part, knowing as I did that decency is a very relative term in the grim business Colonel Primrose is in. What she’d think was decent would probably be what he’d regard as a complete betrayal of his duty. However . . .
“It’s the only thing to do,” she said practically. “There’s nothing else. We’ll just have to take it, that’s all. It’s ghastly, but that’s the way it is.”
There’s a kind of realism in the young that’s very moving. Hers was to me then. I don’t think she would have acted differently if she’d known what she was actually doing, to herself as well as the others.
“So, we’ll keep him locked up tonight, and we’ll get Colonel Primrose in the morning. I’ll . . . have to tell Mother, I guess. After we get hold of him.”
She got up.
“Where are the keys? I don’t want you to be responsible for them.”
“They’re in my bag, on the dressing table.”
“I’ll just leave them there, then. It’s a better place than in my room.”
She put her hand on the glass door knob and paused.
“Do you think . . . Swede’s going to come back—to stay?”
She asked it without turning her head.
“I think so,” I said.
“What’s the matter with the other two? What are they so worried about him for? Are they . . . are they afraid he’s going to fall in love with me again?”
That was definitely a question I didn’t want to answer. I said, “It looks to me as if Tommy has already done that himself, hasn’t he?”
She looked at me quickly then, her face suddenly lighting with that spontaneous laughter of hers that she must have learned, some way, from living up there where the sun could shine brilliantly ten feet from where it was pouring black clouds of rain.
“That’s the game I know about now,” she said. “I’ve got the ground rules this time. And he’s really fun, isn’t he?”
“Just be sure he’s got the ground rules too, won’t you, angel?” I said smiling.
She laughed softly and turned off the light before she opened the door and slipped out. I heard her brush against the stool in front of the dressing table and the sound of my bag being picked up off the glass top before she went lightly across the room out onto the lanai. Or I assumed she’d gone out that way. I closed the door, turned the light on again, washed my face and got ready for bed, struggled for a moment with the shower and ended by putting the bath mat under it to deaden the drip.
When I went back into the room the door into the passage was open a little, not shut the way Alice Cather had firmly left it. The instant alarm I felt I managed to put aside, realizing that Mary had no doubt gone that way instead of the other. I managed to put it aside, but there must have been a large residue of it left, for I couldn’t help opening the door farther and looking out into the passage. It was dark as pitch. There wasn’t even a line of light under Alice Cather’s door. That may have had some connection with the sudden impulse I had too. But I think my conscience was more deeply concerned then. I was suddenly acutely worried. If anything did happen, it was going to be very difficult to explain the facts to Colonel Primrose without looking precariously like an accessory after the fact.
And the fact that I already was, of course, made it seem more imperative that I get in touch with him at once, by hook or crook. There was no point in calmly waiting until morning.
I looked at my clock on the table between the beds. The illuminated hands stood at twenty-five minutes past twelve. He should be wherever he was staying by this time, and there were only three hotels he was likely to be at. That must have decided me, I think, because I didn’t stop to think any more about it. I slipped as quietly as I could out of the doo
r and down the passage to the phone in the entrance hall. I didn’t turn on the light to look up the phone numbers. It was easier to get them from Information.
I took down the phone and waited. Nothing happened. There was nothing but the blank hollow sound that comes with a disconnected telephone. That was all. The phone was dead as a door nail. And it couldn’t be the little maids and the boy friends again. I was not only convinced of that; I was convinced it hadn’t ever been the little maids at all. It was somebody who didn’t want the telephone to ring . . . or didn’t want any one in the house calling any one outside. It was simply a technique of modern warfare, the disruption of communications, and it was as effective on this small scale as on a larger.
I put the phone down and sat there in the dark wishing . . . wishing first that I had never set foot in Honolulu, T. H., and second that I was back in my own room without having to get there. It’s always so much easier to go some place under a sudden impulse than it is to get back again.
In this instance, however, the difficulty was after I’d got back. Alice Cather’s light was on, this time, and as I reached my door she opened hers. She had on a light wool robe but she hadn’t been in bed. Her hair was still neatly waved and her lipstick hadn’t been washed off.
“Darling!” she exclaimed. “What on earth! What are you prowling around at this time of night for?”
It may have been the way she said it, I suppose, or no doubt it was for some reason quite irrational. But I was suddenly annoyed and irritated beyond endurance. It may have been pure frustration, but I didn’t stop to think of that. I was just plain mad as hops.
“Look, Alice,” I said. “Let’s stop all this nonsense. It’s simply stupid. I’m prowling around because I went to the telephone to call Colonel Primrose.”
In the oblique light from the sitting room I saw her lips tighten.
“Oh, really?” she said. “Is . . . Colonel Primrose——”
“Yes, he is,” I said. “But your phone’s dead again.”
Her eyes lighted with relief.
“The maids, probably. They’re so silly.”
“Rot,” I said sharply. “The phone is cut off on purpose.”
“On purpose? Darling, what is the matter with you?”
There was not a flaw in the smoothly lacquered surface. That made me angrier still, and I did something that I suppose I should never, never in the world have done.
“There is nothing the matter with me, Alice,” I said deliberately. “And there’s no use of playing this crazy game a minute longer. I did see your prowler, as you call him, last night. He got my room mixed up with yours . . . as you know . . . and he nearly scared the daylights out of me. And he still does. And I know he’s in the air-raid shelter right now——”
“Oh, Grace!” she said.
Her voice and manner were perfect, I suppose. The voice had the weary patience of a martyred saint dealing with a disturbed but harmless schizophrenic.
“Darling, what are you talking about? I told you about my prowler because I was afraid you might have waked and been alarmed. But I assure you, my dear Grace, he’s not here now. There is nobody in the air-raid shelter . . . nobody at all! You’re just tired and overwrought, darling.”
If she hadn’t said that last I might possibly have had the coolness to have pretended I believed what she’d said before. But the tired and overwrought gambit was to me and has always been a very, very red flag to a frenzied bull.
I suppose I absolutely snapped at her, I was so furious.
“We’ll see in the morning . . . he’s locked in for the night!”
She had turned a little at the first, shrugging her shoulders, agreeing that in the morning we would see. Then she stopped. She didn’t stop all at once. It was as though the stopping was taking place nerve by nerve and muscle by muscle, in a delayed, creeping traumatic shock.
“Locked?”
I saw her lips move, but the sound from them was barely audible even across the tiny passage.
Her eyes widened with a sudden frantic realization of what I’d really said.
“Not locked, Grace,” she whispered.
“Locked,” I said. “With a key.”
Her hands, shaking as if they were palsied, crept to her throat.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
She really couldn’t speak at all for an instant. Then she said, again so I could barely hear her, “Oh, my God! The phone . . . the telephone”
Her face was terrible. It wasn’t white, or gray. It was an awful pale ghastly green. She tried to move, staggering a step or two down the passage, before she crumpled silently on the floor.
13
THE FIRST-AID TRAINING I TOOK AT THE beginning of the war was so spotty I’ve always been thankful I was never called on to use it. I managed, though, to get Alice onto my bed and get her feet higher than her head and some cold water on her face, but mostly on her hair and the silk blanket spread. I was pretty unnerved myself and in a minor state of shock—from dismay at my own stupidity as much as anything. As soon as I could leave her I was going to dash over to the other wing and get Mary. But I didn’t have a chance. Almost as if she was aware of what was in my mind, and before I’d have thought she was really conscious, she caught my hand.
“Don’t go,” she whispered. She moved her head weakly from side to side. “I can’t stand it, Grace. I can’t bear it.”
She kept moving her body as if she were in actual physical pain as well as emotional. And I felt like a dog. If only I’d had sense enough to keep my mouth shut! Still, I told myself, it was a shock that was bound to come. It would have been just as bad in the morning with Colonel Primrose’s coming.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “Oh, dear, what shall I do—what shall I do?”
It seemed to me I sat there with her a very long time. The grip of her hand tightened after a while. She was trying to think. As Mary had said, you could always tell. There was a kind of inner concentration that was plainly visible on her face even with her eyes closed. I only wished I could go farther and read what it was she was thinking, but I couldn’t. And I wouldn’t have dared to try to guess.
She drew herself up then and sat with her body against the headboard.
“Listen, Grace.”
It was an impulse of weakness, I suppose, that quivered for an uncertain moment on the threshold of her mind before she controlled it. And control it she did.
“You wouldn’t understand. You’ll . . . just have to wait, and forgive me if you can.”
She shook her head abruptly then and blinked her eyes.
“For Heaven’s sake,” she said, very much if not entirely like her old self again. “What is the matter with me? What happened? Did my heart act up again? I should have warned you. It always frightens me too—I get hysterical.”
“Okay, dear,” I said. I got up, and this time she made no move to stop me. If that was the story, as fantastic in its way as the one about the GI from the jungle training center on the windward side of the Island was in its, I was in no mood to argue.
She got up and came unsteadily to where I was standing by the dressing table, and put her hand on my arm.
“You terrified me for a moment, Grace. The idea of that poor child being locked up in the shelter is awful. He’d smother to death in the first place, and if Harry finds it out and reports him, goodness only knows what they’ll do to him. How long has he been there?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. I really had no idea of what to say.
“You look exhausted, dear, and I know I am. I must get to bed. Do get some sleep. I tell you, Grace, you’re simply imagining things . . . but we’ll certainly get in touch with Colonel Primrose the first thing in the morning, as soon as it’s light, and let him look around. I knew they’d been all over the hills, the last few days, looking for somebody. It never occurred to me for an instant it might be that poor boy. I thought some civilian might have got lost. Didn’t you see the planes yeste
rday? They were flying very low, and there were several details around the Pali.”
I was thinking of the day before. The planes Swede had spotted were searching planes. I thought of the evasive answer the officer had given me on the Pali, and wondered if it could conceivably be Roy Cather they were hunting. But if they knew some one had come stealthily on the Island, it would be a Japanese they would be hunting, and in the caves and the oriental districts. They wouldn’t be expecting a traitor of their own blood.
“Now go to bed, Grace—you really distress me.”
She was herself again except for the pallor she couldn’t control by sheer will power.
“If he really is locked up,” she said calmly, “and isn’t smothered, we’ll turn him over to Colonel Primrose. Or I’ll call G2. Now relax and go to sleep, angel.”
I didn’t go to sleep, when she left, and I didn’t relax, for that matter. I didn’t know what I was going to do, except that I was going to wait and telephone Colonel Primrose if it was the last thing I ever did. Also, I was going to keep an eye on that air-raid shelter so that if she and Kumumato had a way of letting him out that Mary didn’t know about, they’d see me sitting like a death’s head up on the lanai watching them. How I expected to do both at the same time I wasn’t sure.
I was confident of Mary, that she was telling the truth about there being only two keys, and that she wouldn’t under any pressure turn them over to her mother. I had no doubt that her mother would bring such pressure. Obviously if the shelter was locked it could only have been done by either Mary or Harry Cather, and she could dismiss her husband at once, knowing it was Mary who had been with me outside after Roy Cather left her and returned to his handmade cave under the garden. Harry Cather was completely out of it, as remote and detached, in fact, as he was in spirits when he moved around the house, as if in it but not entirely of it, as I’d already thought of him.
I put a quilt around my shoulders, turned off the light again and went out on the lanai. It was quite cold for the sub-tropics, and dark except the sky that seemed almost light in contrast with the blackness of the ravine and the mountain range stretching off into the distance. I wrapped the quilt around me, my eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the dark and the outlines of the garden and pool and steps, and sat down on the bamboo chaise longue to keep a childish vigil. And I kept it. I was disturbed only once. That was when Alice Cather came back to my door inside.
