by Rufus King
Mrs. Giles walked up shallow granite steps and into a vestibule the walls of which had been studded (by Papa) with shells that had been gathered from the seven seas. She pressed the doorbell and, while waiting, was wearied by the broad stretch of waving hay that had once been a lawn, and the storm-vivid view of the flowing river with its tree-lined banks and the further distant hills.
Thunder jarred. A bird flashed vividly on slanting wings. It made her think of Kent. It made her wish for him. To have him there.
CHAPTER 3
During the interminable time it was taking Ella to make a wraithlike journey to the door Mrs. Giles had the opportunity to wonder briefly at the sight of a pair of bicycle handle bars just visible in the once-formal shrubbery that flanked the porch.
Her legs were jumpy from so much standing at the bond sale, and it seemed hours before Ella finally let her in and offered, instead of the usual pleasant greeting, a pair of firmly compressed lips. She was a small white-haired woman and always made Mrs. Giles think (since Ella had returned to service) of a disintegrating bee.
“A Miss Effie Ashley is calling, madam.”
“Ashley? I don’t believe I know her.”
“No. Miss Ashley is in the drawing room.”
Mrs. Giles eyed an overnight bag and a good-sized cardboard box on the floor near the door.
“Whose are those?”
“Miss Ashley’s, madam.”
“Did she say why she is calling?”
“It’s about a room,” Ella said bitterly.
“Oh. Thank you, Ella.”
Mrs. Giles could feel disintegration increasing in Ella as she passed her. She crossed a large tapestry rug which Papa had picked up in Aubusson and entered a great oblong room freighted with massive furnishings of teakwood and plum-colored velvet. The walls were heavy with large canvases (also picked up by Papa) depicting a gamut from the spirited charges of Arabs on horseback to such dreamy idylls as a ragamuffin stooping for a crust of bread adrift in a well-organized gutter.
Ella had turned on but few of the lamps, and Mrs. Giles brought Effie Ashley more sharply into focus as she neared the chair on which Miss Ashley was continuing to remain seated.
No, Mrs. Giles decided, I simply can’t. I won’t.
Years ago Mrs. Giles had seen that delightful actress, Jeanne Eagels, portraying the role of Sadie Thompson in Rain, and Miss Ashley’s general facade revived the memory to an alarming degree. It was perfectly true that Sadie Thompson had, just prior to the final curtain, exposed a heart of gold, but it had been buried for three solid acts, and Mrs. Giles had no intention whatever of having any such acts gone through in her house.
Not with Kent coming home from Washington for part of his leave.
Even without that. Not in any case.
“Miss Ashley?”
“I am. Are you Mrs. Giles?”
“Yes.”
It being impossible to ask Miss Ashley either to sit down or not, Mrs. Giles yielded to her jumpy legs and took a chair herself. A waft of strong, heady scent beat against her and evoked those deplorable advertisements in which swooning women were seen in a state of total collapse (moral) as the result of a drop and a dab behind each ear.
“I’m here about a room.”
“So my maid told me, Miss Ashley. I don’t quite understand how you knew. The newspapers do not carry my advertisement until the morning.”
“I heard you talk to that man at the bond sale, the one who bought your etching. I got your address from an old buzzard with a gardenia in his lapel who was auctioning off the stuff.”
“That would be Mr. Cyrus Hastings, Sr.,” Mrs. Giles said frigidly.
“So? I’m a gun inspector at the Merle plant and I’ve been sleeping on a cot stuffed with shredded cement in a fourth-rate flophouse. I beat it out here because I figured it would be quiet.” Miss Ashley peered through heavily mascaraed eyelashes into vault-like shadows. “And God knows it is.”
Mrs. Giles was rapidly being reduced into a chilled blancmange.
“I am sure, Miss Ashley, you will be able to find some other place where the atmosphere will be more compatible.”
“Not a chance. Honestly, do you think I’d be here if I could have? I’ve pedaled around this town after leaving the shop until my legs are dead.”
The voice struck Mrs. Giles as being oddly like Dawn Davis’: husky and low, but not quite so pleasant. Sinister? In the way that a jungle sound would be sinister? No, it was something more difficult to define. Unbred, she thought, and then flushed slowly. What right, what earthly right in these troublous days, had a useless old woman such as herself to feel like that?
She visioned Miss Ashley in action: overalls, a grease-grimed face, dead-tired on her feet, the clashing roar of vast machines and the blinding flare of molten metal (this extraordinary vision of factory life was the result of a motion picture in which Mrs. Giles had observed one of the more hairy-chested of the male stars defeat the efforts of a foreign saboteur to blow the place up), and then, after all this, she saw Miss Ashley cycling home with dead legs to a flophouse and seeking repose on a hard, lumpy mattress. For America.
Capitulation was impulsive and swift.
“Your things are out in the hall, Miss Ashley?”
“Some of them, yes. All I could carry in one load on my bicycle.”
“Hopkins will take them up. Come with me. I will show you to your room.”
“How much?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What’s the price?”
“Oh—that. What would you care to pay?”
“Look, I don’t know what the gag is, but they’ve been soaking me three and a half a night for that rejected foxhole I’m in now.”
Mrs. Giles’s impression of flophouses was also cinematic, and outrage filled her.
“Inconceivable!”
“I really wouldn’t mind staying here. I’ll feel that I’m on the wrong side of a tomb’s door, but you can get used to anything.”
She can’t, Mrs. Giles thought, be a day over twenty-two. Not in years. And under that bright hard coating of cheap sophistication there lurked a desperate urgency. For what? Not for the need of comfortable shelter in itself. It was something more vital than that. A fugitive quality? Could you pin it down into terms of escape? No, this also did not satisfy.
“Will five dollars be satisfactory, Miss Ashley?”
“I thought so. That’s thirty-five per.”
“My dear, I mean a week.”
Miss Ashley’s eyes were weighted with suspicion.
“I’m going to tell you something, Mrs. Giles. If Mercury wasn’t in the sign of the Scorpion I’d pass this up.”
“I don’t understand—that’s astrology, isn’t it?”
“It is. And I’ll take a chance.” Effie Ashley stood up. She glanced at an efficient polished-steel wrist watch. “I’ll bicycle in and get supper and pick up the rest of my things. I will be back here at eight.”
“Couldn’t Hopkins get them when he drives in for Mr. Smith and his nephew? I would be most happy to have you dine this evening.”
“No. I don’t want board. I eat out a lot.”
It was abrupt. Very abrupt, Mrs. Giles thought. Was there, she wondered as she watched the curious swiveling effect of Miss Ashley’s departing rear, a touch of panic about it? She was too tired to have it matter. A nice warm bath—just soaking in it and not thinking about anything at all for a while—that would be it. Then dinner. She would feel refreshed and ready to face the arrivals later.
She headed for the stairs.
CHAPTER 4
Miss Ashley cycled with skill and swiftness. Night was fast falling, and the storm had already heralded its closeness with a few spatters of rain. She hated to get wet. Other things she didn’t mind—plenty of other things—but there was something about rain-drenched clothes which drove her into a rage.
She dismounted before a paint-peeled two-story frame house with a short front lawn of sun-bake
d grass. This lawn was enlivened by two weedy beds of starved pansies and a large tree trunk in the hollow of which nested nasturtiums and a broken quart beer bottle.
She went inside and looked through a small pile of mail lying on an aggressively cherry table. There was nothing for her. Miss Ashley had not seriously expected that there would be, but it was better to make sure. She stood for a moment in the hall’s gloom and over-lived-in smell. Just what about mail. It would never do to have it forwarded to River Rest (boy, what a joint!), certainly not the type of stationery she received.
She carried the problem upstairs with her and into a large closet which boasted one window, an iron cot, a chair, and little else. She started to fill a big zipper bag with the things still hanging on a row of hooks that were screwed lackadaisically into one wall.
“Surely you’re not leaving us, dear,” said the wheezy voice of Mrs. Aldershot.
Mrs. Aldershot, the woman who owned the house, had heaved her considerable girth just inside the door. She looked like something that had been cooked in oil, Italian style.
“I am.”
Mrs. Aldershot indulged in a complacent sigh. Let her go. What earthly difference did it make? There were myriad others to take her place.
“Well, that’s the way it is nowadays. They come and go. I often say to Mr. Aldershot, ‘Will we ever settle down again and have the house to ourselves?’”
“You’re doing all right.”
“It’s the privacy I miss. By the way, dear—or no, let me see—”
“I’ve settled with you up to tonight.”
“Yes, now I remember that you have.”
Mrs. Aldershot eyed a slinky carmine velvet dinner dress being shoved into the zipper bag. She conquered envy with the mental comment that if that dress could talk!
She said, “Leaving town, dear?”
Miss Ashley felt a swift surge of relief. Of course that was the answer: have the indicative stationery redirected to some point outside of Bridgehaven. Any point.
“Yes, I’m leaving town.”
“Better job, perhaps?”
“Yes.”
“Where will I forward your mail, dear?”
How far was far enough?
“Buffalo.”
“Any address?”
“No, just Buffalo. General Delivery.”
“Well, now. Too bad it isn’t Detroit. Mr. Aldershot has an aunt in Detroit. She is sacrificing her rooms just as we are. Maybe she could have taken you in.”
“I’m sure she could have,” Miss Ashley said briefly.
Mrs. Aldershot compressed her moist little lips.
“I’ll take the key now, please.”
“Here it is. Good-by, Mrs. Aldershot.”
“Good-by, Miss Ashley. Just Buffalo, General Delivery. I’ll remember.”
Mrs. Aldershot almost closed the door. From a window of her ground-floor front she had observed Miss Ashley’s arrival at the house. She had been using her bicycle. The bicycle was standing right now out in the yard. Mrs. Aldershot could picture Miss Ashley in any number of odd antics but scarcely astride a wheel and pedaling her way to Buffalo. She opened the door again.
“About your bicycle, dear?”
“What about it?”
“Surely you’re not just going to leave it at the station?” Miss Ashley did an excellent job of repressing a nervous start.
“I’ve sold it to one of the workers out at the plant. She’s meeting me at the station and will take it there.”
Mrs. Aldershot’s smile all but vocally said maybe. However, it was none of her business, beyond her insatiable curiosity concerning other people’s business. This time she closed the door.
Miss Ashley put on a serviceable raincoat. The bicycle slip had momentarily shaken her. She determined in the future to take infinite care with details, especially when in the company of the world’s Mrs. Aldershots. Mrs. Giles out at River Rest would be different. Blankets of wool could be pulled over Mrs. Giles’s eyes without her knowing it.
But there would be the others.
Miss Ashley went downstairs and out into the night. The rain was still only desultory, and the protecting raincoat she had put on made her not mind it.
She strapped the zipper bag onto the bicycle’s luggage rack. She mounted and rode two blocks to a corner drugstore. She went inside and sat down at the soda counter.
“What will it be tonight, Miss Ashley?” an elderly wraith with wispy gray hair asked her.
“Number-two special with coffee, Jim.”
How about Jim? she wondered. Was he, like Mrs. Aldershot, one of the molehills which might become a mountain? Better spike him too.
Jim put the plate of chunky macaroni, potato salad, and two slices of tongue on the counter before her. He brought coffee, butter, and rolls.
“I won’t be seeing you again,” Miss Ashley said.
“No? Well, now, that’s too bad.”
“I’m shifting to Buffalo.”
He seemed politely indifferent. He said, “Nice town, Buffalo,” and moved on to another customer.
Miss Ashley ate. Her appetite was excellent. She finished her coffee and looked at her watch. Yes, the call ought to get through now.
She saw that the telephone booth at the end of the store was empty. She changed three dollars into silver at the cashier’s cage.
She went to the telephone booth.
She was careful about closing its door.
CHAPTER 5
The bath did not help much. Effie Ashley was with Mrs. Giles (mentally) during all of it, and regret increased that she had been swayed so swiftly into taking Miss Ashley in. There was a feeling (perhaps because desire impelled it so) that Kent was near. Or, if not near, that he would be with her soon.
What of Miss Ashley then? It was all right to say that Kent was a grown man, although Mrs. Giles from the telescopic viewpoint of her seventies viewed him as a large-sized child, and it was ludicrous to think of him as a tethered goat: a bait for a tigress to stalk during the few brief days he would be at River Rest, but Mrs. Giles was uncomfortable about it just the same.
When her thoughts had originally turned to taking in war workers they had not encompassed her own sex. A blind spot acquired through decades of distaste at the thought of woman labor persistently remained. No, the vacant guest rooms were to have been filled with sturdy, honest sons of toil. Definitely male. Like that good, honest, sturdy Mr. Smith. And not with any prototypes of Sadie Thompson.
Mrs. Giles’s awareness of sex in toto was not far removed from the cozy corner, an architectural bedizenment which in its long-last day had surely, when you came right down to it, been designed to arouse the beast.
She selected a violet crepe from her wardrobe, and further tremors of apprehension beset her as she put it on. The nation was at war and Kent was a soldier. Mrs. Giles boiled the unpleasant picture to its essence. The result, even without cozy corners, left Kent with a headful of military information which would surely be of priceless value to the enemy, and it easily translated Miss Ashley from a Sadie Thompson into something infinitely worse: a very potent Mata Hari.
The more Mrs. Giles pondered, the more it made perfectly good sense. Miss Ashley self-confessedly had overheard her conversation at the bond sale with Mr. Smith and, presumably, its prologue with Dawn Davis. She would know that Kent was expected at River Rest on leave and would rush, as she had rushed, to install herself (plus every nefarious purpose) at River Rest too.
Spies were everywhere. A thousand posters daily told one so. And if ever Mrs. Giles had seen a spy—Sadie Thompson was now definitely out—Miss Ashley was it.
She finished hooking the violet crepe and for a pleasantly inconsequential moment thought of those nice days in the then untroubled Paris where she had bought it.
A pier glass satisfied her that her choice was right: the dress was anything but formal and still offered a touch of quiet elegance for Kent’s sake should her strong intuition hit the jack pot and he s
hould, this evening, surprise her and appear.
The pier glass also told her that she was not alone.
Leila, old Joel’s niece, had made one of her typically secretive entrances into the room. Leila was willowy as Mrs. Giles was willowy, but in a much looser way. There was a flutter in it and that curious restlessness of hands, as if flowers were soon to be strewn.
Mrs. Giles repressed the start which these materializations of Leila always gave her. She liked old Joel and was grateful to him for having so willingly returned from his pensioned state of comfort even if only to potter. In consequence she felt in duty bound to like his niece, and Leila did help out about the house, no matter how witlessly or with what an innate incapability of dusting a room without giving the impression that she was conducting a séance. All of these things, with an additional touch of mild kleptomania, were a trial, but the girl was a pretty and a fundamentally harmless little thing, so Mrs. Giles put up with her quirks.
“What is it, Leila?”
One pale hand fluttered from behind Leila’s back.
“It’s a telegram, ma’am.”
Kent—surely Kent…
“Thank you, Leila.”
Leila’s best Ophelia smile was shrewdly bewitching.
“If I give it to you will you tell me what’s in it?”
“Yes, dear.”
Mrs. Giles read the telegram.
“Mr. Kent expects to be with us for breakfast,” she said.
Tears filled her eyes and she felt terribly shaken. In a fashion she was glad that Kent wasn’t arriving until morning, when his return to River Rest would be a normal one with Mr. Smith and his nephew and the menacing Miss Ashley all out of the house and busied in their factories for the whole heavenly day.
She went down to dinner with a thankful and happy heart.
Leila served, offering a stuffed baked pickerel bedded on fresh garden peas, in her mood of the Delphian sibyl just brinking on profound utterances.
“Ella is having a fit,” Leila said.
Mrs. Giles stopped thinking about the boniness of pickerel and their somewhat mushy texture when compared with the zing and firmness of a salt-water fish.
