by Rufus King
Contents
NEVER WALK ALONE
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
NEVER WALK ALONE
Also published as The Case of the Dowager’s Etchings.
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1944 by Rufus King. Copyright renewed 1972.
All rights reserved.
*
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
CHAPTER 1
The etching was small in size and depicted a stag who, at eventide, had stepped down to a forest pool for a drink. There was a certain charm: a peaceful quality devoid of the usual animal alarms of that nineteenth-century genre in American art when the common practice was to freeze all stags at bay. Unhappily, there was very little of true genius to commend it.
Mrs. Giles did not like to linger too conspicuously before the etching, even though the sight of it hanging on a wall for public exhibition stripped her of five decades and hastened disturbingly the tempo of her heart.
She was a tall woman and still held a willowy effect in her seventieth year; an effect which during her youth had invariably caused her to be compared with the abstract and slightly consumptive-looking women made fashionable by the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. All through her life this willow quality had surrounded her with a paradox, for Mrs. Giles in reality enjoyed the physical stamina of an amazon.
She saw Dawn Davis, the society columnist of the town’s Bridgehaven Gazette, bearing toward her through the crush. She decided, from her hat, that Miss Davis had been on a looting expedition in New York. It was the type of hat that Mrs. Giles had often wondered about, while knowing perfectly well it would never go with the silver pompadour and soft-coiled bun to which, through the maelstrom of fashions, she had continued to cling. Apart from everything else, the hat would never stick.
“Surely you aren’t here, Mrs. Giles,” Miss Davis said. “It’s the millennium.”
Dawn Davis had a husky, almost masculine voice from what some snipers attributed to chain martini drinking. She capitalized on a hale and direct attack. She swiftly noted for her column, “Town Tid-Bits,” Carrie Giles’s conservatively dripping dark foulards, the white glace kid gloves, the Baba-au-Rhum straw hat with its dash of velvet violets, and the museum-piece brooch-watch of emeralds and gold.
Mentally she niched Carrie Giles among Madame Tussaud’s waxworks (English Nobility Groups), although her next morning’s column would say: “Among the Sunday crush of Bridgehaven’s heavily overflowing defense-plant workers and the town’s younger-matron set it was a breath from the world’s golden age to come upon the aristocratic Mrs. Chatterton Giles. Rarely during recent years has Mrs. Giles left the shelter of her magnificent estate, River Rest, on the outskirts of Bridgehaven: a house which still predominantly stands out as a bastion for formality and elegance in a society now so attenuated that it might be called dead. Nothing but…”
What had brought the old dame out of her gold-plated and shadow-boxed warren today anyhow? Miss Davis wondered. Buying war bonds via this public sale of contributed objets d’art (Miss Davis cast a hasty look around the walls and shuddered) could hardly have done it. The Carrie Gileses still left in this world handled their patriotism and their charities privately, as everything they had done all their lives had been private, with a distaste amounting to nausea at any publicity.
“What did bring you here?” Miss Davis asked directly.
“My grandson, I think.”
“Kent? But I thought he was overseas.”
“He is, Miss Davis. In a sense.”
Dawn Davis had a nose beyond teatime chitchat. She scented Front Page.
“Would you mind telling me what you mean by that?”
“I think I am glad to. I have heard there is nothing new left to learn when you are seventy. I am speaking of human relationships, Miss Davis, and not of the whisking contraptions in metal and plastics which astound us so freshly each day. I refer to a code of living.”
“And you’ve learned something new?”
“Yes. It is not enough to give material things. You must also give a part of yourself. Of your heart. I say this with sincere humility and with considerable diffidence, because I doubt whether anyone might any longer find a share in me attractive.”
Miss Davis dispersed the swift vision of a Carrie Giles disjointed, and batted platitudes aside. She wanted news.
“I still don’t see what this has to do with Kent.”
“I am somewhat vague on the point myself, although I feel instinctively that I am right.” Mrs. Giles’s fine gray eyes clouded. “I have felt wretched. Increasingly wretched.”
“Why?”
“The pleasantness, the comfort, the security of my home, Miss Davis. The food on my table. The assurance that I will have the sustenance of three meals a day and will sleep in a comfortable bed every night.”
“And Kent can’t?”
“No, it both is and it isn’t Kent. I think I express myself badly. It is the spirit he serves rather than himself. Kent is a soldier from a long line of soldiers. When I vision him in his fighting plane, the honor and the duty and the glory are all his. They would remain his even though his plane should fall. To take with him always.” Mrs. Giles swept a willowy look over the crush. “This is more what I mean.”
It still failed to make sense.
“These defense workers?”
“They and the others. All the people who fight without arms. They have no glory to take into death with them. Only discomfort and torment.”
“But these lads and lassies—have you any idea how much they are pulling down per week, Mrs. Giles?”
“Does it matter? I understand from your own paper, Miss Davis, that local housing conditions are so critical that many of these workers are crowded into trailers and tents and hovels, and that those who are fortunate enough to get rooms are being charged a shocking rental fee.”
“Perfectly true.”
“These men on our home front are dying just as combat soldiers are dying. The mortality rate from accidents is, I understand, very high. Do you begin to see what I mean? Mere money is futile. I could give them plenty of that. But they already have plenty.”
Miss Davis found herself dithering.
“Am I mad, or are you leading up to the fact that you are going to throw open River Rest to war workers?”
“I am. I have four guest rooms which are going to waste and I shall rent them at a nominal fee. I would prefer letting the workers stay there for nothing, but to do so would lower their self-respect and put them under the onus of an obligation.”
“Good lord.”
“It is a drop in the bucket with conditions being what they are, but I shall feel happier for having done it. I am glad we have run into each other. Perhaps you will advise me as to the pro
per column—the ‘Lodgers Wanted,’ I think?”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Giles,” Miss Davis said softly. “I will take care of it. I and the city editor.”
“Thank you. As for the fee?”
“There won’t be any. Unless it’s a rebate.” Miss Davis looked at Carrie Giles with fresh eyes. “You haven’t changed or discovered anything new, Mrs. Giles. You’re still exactly what women of your upbringing have always been.” She shook off sentiment and said, “I feel like a snipe, but I still want to know why you’ve come to this sale and what it has to do with Kent. Also why he’s overseas, but only in a sense.”
“Kent did rather well with some adversaries several weeks ago. He is returning on leave to take part in a bond drive that Washington is organizing. Mr. Roosevelt will decorate him.”
Miss Davis was beginning to feel glutted.
“Will you go to Washington?”
“No. But I think all these confusing emotions were what brought me here today. Last year I would have sent Spenser to bid in some object for me. I am ashamed of the fact. I brought down something of my own, this little etching. Fifty years ago it was thought that I had a flair. You know the blindness of parents? Papa was certain of genius. He made one of the attic rooms into a studio. He bought me one of Payne and Sons’ Albion hand presses and an absurd amount of India paper and bond paper, as well as the minor paraphernalia. All of those things, with my genius, are now smothered under a foot of dust.”
Miss Davis tried more closely to inspect the calmly drinking stag. A stocky, plain-faced, middle-aged man with thinning russet hair was planted before the etching, absorbed by it. He smiled at Miss Davis and said, “It means home to me. It’s beautiful.”
Miss Davis smiled automatically back and supposed he had a pool or something in a woods in Maine. Certainly there was nothing stag-like about him. She turned again to Mrs. Giles and saw her flushing delicately with pleasure.
“Mrs. Giles, I think it charming.”
“My dear, don’t be kind. Any illusions I may have had about my work are also under the dust with the other stuff. But I wanted to give something that I valued because it was a part of me. I thought it best to be here in case—well, I would like it to have a purchaser.”
The plain-faced man turned and said to Mrs. Giles, “You mustn’t feel like that. It’s very good. I once studied etching at the National Academy. That was quite a few years ago. I see you prefer the gliding needle.”
“Yes, there seemed a sweep.”
“I’ll admit that it does give a greater appearance of freedom, but I’ve always felt there is nothing quite like the bold use of the burin.”
Miss Davis (she knew her fellow artists) saw no further profit in lingering. She said good-by and breasted the crowd and was gone.
“My name is Smith. Mrs. Giles. Dugald Smith. I know your name because I couldn’t help but overhear you and Miss Davis talking.”
Mrs. Giles extended her hand and received a warm, rugged grip.
“It has been a great many years since I have had the pleasure of talking with a fellow etcher, Mr. Smith.”
But Mr. Smith was finished, temporarily, with art.
“I hope you won’t think me abrupt,” he said, “but if you had been through what my nephew and I have you would understand. You are doing a very fine thing in opening your house to defense workers. I know that as soon as Miss Davis prints the fact in her paper you will be mobbed. I would like to speak for my nephew and myself right now. We’re at the Collins plant. Will you take us?”
Now that she was face to face with it as a fact rather than in warm emotional theory, Mrs. Giles felt a delicate cold shock, like a swimmer’s toe before plunging into breakers. For a flash the thought of disrupting her secure and comfortable privacy with the constant presence of strangers revolted her, but it was a very brief flash.
“I shall be honored, Mr. Smith. Where and when may I send Hopkins for you and your nephew, and your things?”
CHAPTER 2
Twilight had fallen and the summer air was brooding with a hint of storm as Mrs. Giles left the exhibition hall. How kind that plain and rugged Mr. Smith had been to bid the etching in for a one-hundred-dollar bond. Sunday strollers were lethargic under the sullen humidity of the gathering weather, but Mrs. Giles was still roseate within her newly established love for her fellow men, and she felt singularly akin to the passers-by as she made her way toward the victoria drawn up at the curb.
Something of this warm and intimate kinship vanished as Hopkins creakily maneuvered himself down from the raised driver’s seat, and a hard-looking specimen in his best purple double-breasted said with an overlay of jeering viciousness: “So we share and share alike. The Spartan way of living, my foot!”
Kinship thinned still further as this commentary was somewhat well received. Mrs. Giles accepted Hopkins’ trembling old hand and settled back formally against gray whipcord. Several people, these newcomers to the town, stopped and watched the performance in silence.
She felt that they were speculating about her in this odd, almost tangible stillness, and for a moment her thoughts reverted to Charles Dickens with his portrayal in A Tale of Two Cities of the Paris mobs. She felt ashamed of this immediately. They were Americans as she was an American, and in their silent criticism the right was theirs.
She wanted a word, some password with which vocally she could tell them that they and she were one. And then she knew this was stupid because it was not true. She and her victoria with Hopkins and the roached black mare were a symbol of a favored class which in its dying, through the very apathies of its rich decay, had partially helped to bring the country to this pass. Leaders were no longer leaders when they ceased mingling with their followers and just wished to be let alone.
How could she say to them: “My husband contracted a fatal illness during the Spanish War. My son died on the banks of the Meuse. His wife could not survive him. Their child, my grandson Kent, now fights over southern seas”? Mrs. Giles knew obscurely but with a depressing certitude that even such avowals would not dispel the picture offered by the victoria and Hopkins and herself.
The carriage rolled into meager traffic, and Hopkins said, “I am sorry, madam.”
“Don’t be. They are tasting their day. We’ve finished with ours.”
“Yes, madam. Shall we go home?”
“Please.”
Papa, Mrs. Giles thought, would have raised a perfect hell of a scene. She had adored her father thoroughly and still did, even though she had come to realize in recent years that he had been the most thorough sort of American snob and autocrat, as well as a first-rate cutthroat capitalist. She smiled faintly at what would have been his reaction to her present intention with River Rest.
The smile did not linger.
What was it precisely that she had got herself into with this gesture which she still felt unshakably to be right? The simple mechanics of additions to the household became alarming, now that she considered them specifically. She had already announced her intentions to the servants and knew that they thought her mad. The house was stripped to a skeleton staff. Hopkins and Ella, both of whom had been pensioned several years ago, had willingly come back to replace Spenser and his wife after the Army had taken Spenser and his wife had joined the WAC.
Old Joel had come back, too, to potter futilely around the grounds. He had brought his niece with him to help out inside. She didn’t, any more than Ophelia would have. She was a pleasant girl, Leila, but not quite bright. Not dangerous, of course. Just not quite bright. All of them, except for Leila, were well over sixty and fluttered about the place like cobwebby wraiths.
Thunder came faint across the distant hills. Mrs. Giles decided that having Mr. Dugald Smith as the first lodger was a stroke of luck. She liked his solid forthrightness, and it would be pleasant, during evenings, to continue their discussion about etching. Possibly (why not?) they might even attempt a plate or two. It seemed almost wasteful not to with all of the parapherna
lia still being up in the attic studio. And she felt certain that Mr. Smith’s nephew, Fergus Wade, would be equally agreeable.
But who else?
What of the others who would come to her door and be taken in? She would have her suite and Kent’s room: ready for him when he came to see her after Washington. And Kent would know what it was all about. Much more clearly than Papa ever could have.
Possibly it was the depressive air, but suddenly Mrs. Giles felt terribly old and a wave of loneliness swept over her and the longing that Kent when he came would stay, that some miracle would make it possible for him never to leave her. This, she decided, was unspeakably selfish (as well as being quite impossible), and the wave receded. But it left her bleak. And, for no sound reason on earth, somewhat afraid.
The black mare turned between opened wrought-iron gates and went along a graveled driveway edged by disreputably unkempt lawns. Papa would have a fit, Mrs. Giles decided, if he could see the place now. It was odd how increasingly during her later years it was her father of whom she usually thought, rather than of her husband or of her son: of the small comforting things about childhood.
The house loomed impressively in the storm-light among great elm trees, and it felt good to be getting back home to it from the town. She paused for a moment beside the victoria, stood there with Hopkins after he had helped her out, drawing the past from him and feeling bulwarked by his familiar presence. She thought of him as a link with those whom she had loved: all of those dear lifelong friends whom she had outlived.
“I shall have to ask you to drive to town again after dinner, Hopkins.”
“Yes, madam.”
“Take the brougham, as it may storm. If you will go to the end of Joroloman Street you will find some tar-paper shacks. A Mr. Dugald Smith and a Mr. Fergus Wade will be waiting for you in the first shack on the right. Bring them and their luggage back here, please.”
“Yes, madam.”
“Thank you, Hopkins.”
“I can’t help saying it, but I hope nothing comes of this. Nothing bad, I mean.”
“We have finished with discussions about the matter, Hopkins.”
