by Zenith Brown
He looked up at the stairway that had held fast to the steel-supported transverse hallway that was now a balcony open to the winds and rain, the wall behind it intact with the supporting column of the chimney, with its Adam mantel and pale damask covering protected by the overhanging section of roof that still remained. The bare walls stood like pale spectres, dimly perceived as they caught the uncertain light filtering through the darkness from the nearest street lamps before it disappeared in the black shadow of the overhanging roof, dark homeless ghosts whose footsteps were the slow intermittent drip of rain drops collected in the trees, falling on the sodden leaves below. The broken walls were wrapped in curious silence, compounded of a thousand small familiar sounds, above which his own footsteps seemed so loud that he stopped for a moment, stopped and went on and stopped again—abruptly, this time—listening, every nerve instantly alert.
He was not alone. He looked quickly over into the central garden, and turned sharply again as a sound of something like a pebble falling focussed his attention back on the ruined house.
There was someone at the top of the stairway. A black shadow of what he had thought was a jutting section of the broken roof had moved, and in moving dislodged a fragment of rubble. Why ? he thought. Why should anyone be up on the stairway of a bombed-out house ? He moved forward a step with the quick impulse to call out “Who’s up there?” He changed his mind, walked briskly on past the house until he was halfway down the Square, crossed the road quietly, vaulted over the wattle fence into the garden, bent down and crept back until he could look up again at the shadowy stairway.
The deceptive interplay of sound and shadow could have fooled him, of course, he thought as he raised his head. But it hadn’t. A dark figure was moving cautiously down the stairs— from nowhere. It was a man, almost at the bottom step; and as Dan watched he disappeared for an instant, and appeared again gripping the solid board fence put up to keep pedestrians from falling into the area. Dan heard the sudden shower of old rubble that fell as the man pulled himself up and climbed over the barrier. He hurried swiftly away into the night, moving noiselessly—too solid for a ghost, too silent for an honest man.
Dan McGrath straightened up and stepped out into the path. The gate in the wattle fence was open a little. He started through it and stopped. There was no point in going over to Number 22 again. The man had gone, it was too dark to see anything. In the morning . . . He pulled the gate shut and turned back. The path he was on would cut through the garden; he could get out on his own side without going clear around the Square. He took half a dozen steps and froze to a dead stop.
A woman’s voice spoke, distinctly and without warning, and very close to him. He jerked his head around, saw no one, and looked quickly the other way.
“I said, what interest have you got in my house, young man?”
He heard the words as well as the voice this time, and took a step toward the bench at the side of the overgrown path, in front of a large clump of black straggling bushes. He saw the pale surface of her face almost as if she were a face speaking, disembodied except for face and voice. She was staring steadily at him. As the face moved, he was aware that she had been sitting there and was now rising and coming slowly toward him. He took a step backwards involuntarily. There was something terrifying about the heavy-lidded eyes fixed on him.
7
WHEN the face coming toward him in the dark said, “I’m Caroline Winship,” Dan McGrath was startled again by the quiet menace that he felt in those simple words. “This is my house. Why are you spying on it? What is it you want? What are you after ? ”
He was surprised to find his own voice steady. “Nothing whatever, Miss Winship. I was just coming by. I saw somebody on the stairs there. It seemed a funny place for anybody to—”
“I understand that you know my brother-in-law ?”
“Miss Winship—” He stopped, trying to think how to make her believe him. She was close to him; he could smell the faint odor of some dry scent that reminded him of an aunt of his father’s who thought once a year was enough to air her closets. Her head was trembling, almost with a palsied shake. Whether it was palsy, or anger, he couldn’t tell. He had a strong belief it was not fear.
“Look,” he said. “The answer is no. I do not know your brother-in-law.”
The hooded eyes looked steadily at him.
“My brother-in-law is dead. I’m sure you’ve not come all the way to London to do his family, or any member of it, the great injustice of bringing him to life again. His wife is ill. She is a very susceptible woman. His daughter has been brought up to believe he was a—a kind and gentle person. I can’t believe you would wilfully set out to hurt people whom you do not know and have no reason to hurt. Good night, young man.”
He stood in the middle of the overgrown path watching her heavy figure move along it, her stick supporting her over the uneven ground, and then looked back, wondering, at the ruins of her house. She must have been out there waiting, not for him obviously, as she had no way of knowing he would come, but for her brother-in-law. It only made everything more puzzling. If her friend Mr. Sidney Copeland thought he was a confederate, and Mary thought he was a policeman, just what, he wondered, did Miss Caroline Winship think he was, appealing to him simply as a decent human being? He looked over at Number 4. She was going inside. He saw her thick figure outlined in the door for a moment before it closed, and he looked up then through the plane trees at the top floor where his friend Mr. Pinkerton was. The light was on there. He could see a small oblong segment of it, beyond the stone coping. And the light shouldn’t be on. A sudden cold hand gripped his heart as he went rapidly through the garden and across the street.
“Oh, he’s doing very nicely.” Mrs. Beckwith smiled at him as he cleared the top three steps. “You needn’t have been worried. A little peculiar, perhaps. He would write a letter for me to put in the post tonight, and I thought it best to humor him.” She fished in her pocket. “Would you like to see it?”
Dan shook his head. It was probably to the Lord Chamberlain, but that was someone else’s problem. He opened the door quietly. Mr. Pinkerton was sleeping peacefully. He turned back.
“Thanks very much,” he said. “How much—”
“Mr. Pinkerton paid me.” She took off her cap and picked up her coat. “Two ladies and a gentleman came up to see him. A heavy-set lady and another who doesn’t look very well. The young gentleman was quite anxious to talk to him. He just left a few moments ago. They didn’t see him—or Miss Grimstead. She came up too.”
“Thanks,” Dan said.
Reflecting that he liked Mrs. Beckwith, he went back into his room. Eric, he thought, had got here first. That meant that Mary would no doubt be in for it. He put his hand in his raincoat pocket and took out her book. “Masterpieces They’ve Never Found,” He looked at it for an instant, put it down on the table and hung up his raincoat. He looked at his bed and along the hall at Mr. Pinkerton’s closed door, pulled the chair up to the table and sat down, knowing that once he got in bed no book ever written would keep him awake. He opened the book, and was next conscious of coming up from some bottomless abyss, cramped and cold, aware that he had fallen profoundly asleep and was struggling for breath. He jerked bolt upright and opened his eyes, and saw her.
The woman was there by his table, clutching at it with one hand, the other at her throat, gasping, struggling in a paroxysm of suffocation. Her face was swollen and suffused. He leaped to his feet and caught her by the shoulders, holding her steadily while she struggled and finally caught her breath. She sank exhausted into the chair that he pushed under her with one foot.
Cold perspiration stood out on his forehead, and his hands were shaking as he fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. He remembered that she was struggling for air and put it back. Then, as he stood looking helplessly at her, he gave a sudden start of recognition. This must be Mary Winship’s mother. She had the same thick dark eyebrows and long lashes lying like wet silk on her h
igh cheekbones as the suffused swelling went down in the flesh covering them. There were streaks of grey in her hair, but it had been black, and was still curly, and she had the same pointed chin.
She was lying back in the chair, the pulse in her throat pounding, her breast rising and falling heavily under the silk padded robe she had wrapped around her. Then her eyelids, delicate, almost transparent, folds of violet, fluttered and opened. Her eyes were Mary’s eyes, but faded and tired, as they met his in sudden mute and poignant appeal.
“I’m Louise Winship,” she whispered. “Have you—a message for me? I’m Mrs. Scott Winship . . .”
She thinks you know him too. This isn’t funny any longer. This is getting grim.
He leaned forward and took her hands, clasped together in her lap, in both of his.
“Listen, Mrs. Winship,” he said as earnestly as he could. “This is all a mistake. I don’t know your husband. I don’t know him at all. I’ve never seen him in my life. Please believe me.”
Her eyes opened wider for an instant before she closed them and let her head sink back on the chair.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I thought . . .”
Her voice trailed off.
“I am too,” Dan said gently. “If I could have helped you any way. You see, Mrs. Winship, this is the whole story about why I’m here ... I met your daughter Mary during the war. I only saw her once, but I fell in love with her then. And I’ve come back now to find her. That’s why I’m here now. I’m still in love with her. I want her to marry me if she will.”
Her eyes had opened, wider than before. He smiled at her. “No mother ought to act this surprised when a guy says he wants to marry her daughter, Mrs. Winship.”
“But it—it is surprising, Mr. McGrath. I wasn’t aware she knew any Americans.” She drew her hand across her forehead in a vague bewildered gesture. “I’m sorry. I expect perhaps there are lots of things I don’t know.”
He kept himself from saying “You and me both,” and smiled down at her.
“You wouldn’t want to tell me what all this is about, would you?” he asked soberly. “Maybe I could be of some use. Would it—do you want to find your husband? Your sister—”
He stopped, and went on. “Your sister said he was dead—”
Her hands, still in his, had become very quiet.
‘‘I’m not just being curious, Mrs. Winship,” he said. “Believe me. I’ve told you I want to marry Mary. I mean that seriously, Mrs. Winship. And it seems to me there’s something going on around here that’s got all of you six jumps ahead of the loony bin. Maybe there’s something somebody could do.”
“I—I don’t understand you, Mr. McGrath.”
It was just as well, he thought. She drew back, disengaging her hands.
“My sister Caroline prefers to think my husband is dead because she is a person of intense convictions. She thinks my husband treated me and Mary unfairly, a long time ago. She never forgets, or forgives.”
He saw her pallid face quiver as she added hastily, “I’m not being disloyal to my sister. She’s enormously kind and patient, and she’s not a patient woman. She’s taken care of me and Mary ever—ever since my husband went away. We had—no resources of our own, and I have asthma very badly.”
“Lady, you don’t have to tell me that,” Dan thought. He felt the prickle of cold sweat on his brow again.
Mrs. Winship was silent for a moment. “You asked me if I want to find my husband,” she said at last, speaking very slowly, almost as if she were speaking to herself rather than to Dan McGrath. “I do, desperately. I was terribly in love with him. It was all so—so difficult. I think I’m—”
She broke off abruptly, giving her head a quick bewildered shake.
“What am I—what am I saying?”
She made a sudden movement forward and pushed herself to her feet.
“I’m being absurd. Why should I wish to find him, Mr. McGrath?”
She said it so breathlessly that he looked at her in quick apprehension.
“Why should—I simply misunderstood. I thought you’d seen him, and perhaps you could—tell me if he’s well—and happy.”
She went quickly to the door. “Good night. I’m sorry I wakened you.”
He watched her move unsteadily along the hall. As she reached the head of the stairway beside Mr. Pinkerton’s door and turned to go down he stood there still, looking quietly after her. He was suddenly, and only then, aware that he had seen her before. She was the woman he had seen coming out of the little Welshman’s room—or going into it—before he knew who she was, and before he had gone into Mr. Pinkerton’s room to find him lying on the balcony. He turned away slowly. From below he could hear a door open and close so softly that if he had not been intensely alert he would not have heard it at all through the creeping and oppressive silence of the sleeping house.
He looked at his watch and was surprised to find it was almost three o’clock. His sense of time, disrupted by the transatlantic change, was slow to readjust itself. He realized now that he must have been asleep much longer than he had thought, and remembered suddenly, thinking back, that he had sat down to read the book Mary Winship had left with him. He looked down at the table, then at the floor, and under the cushion in the chair. The book was nowhere in sight.
As he looked slowly around the small barren room he saw that something else was wrong. He went over to the dresser. The slide fastener of his briefcase was halfway from the end, where it always stuck if it was pulled together in a hurry. He picked the case up and opened it. It had his toothbrush in one side, with a couple of handkerchiefs. In the other side was a letter from Richards & Case, Attorneys-at-Law, Baltimore, Maryland, wishing him bon voyage and success on his mission to London. It was the law office where a job was waiting for him when he got back home. He picked it up and looked down at the last paragraph again.
“This firm has a distinguished record in tracing unknown and missing persons. In view of the special nature and urgent demand of the situation in hand, we confidently expect you to uphold our reputation on the present project.”
It was meant to be funny. They all knew he was coming to London to find a girl whose name he did not even know—on a wild goose chase he might as well get out of his system so he could settle down and go to work.
He closed the briefcase and put it down, wondering how long he had actually been asleep. How long had Mrs. Scott Winship been in his room with him dead to the world? If she had not had that sudden paroxysm of strangulation and waked him, would he ever have known she had been there—if the slide fastener had not stuck?
He picked up the briefcase, took the letter out and read the last paragraph again. He had not thought it was particularly funny when he had got it at the airport. Mrs. Scott Winship would have no way of knowing it was even meant to be. On the other hand—the book would have been on the table just in front of him, perfectly ordinary like any other red book. Not a book you would recognize and spot at once—unless you already knew and were looking for it.
And the only person who knew he had the book was Mary Winship. If she had come home . . . He shrugged his shoulders, glanced at his watch again, put the briefcase away and got out his pajamas. He seemed still to be getting more and more entangled in a web of circumstances, all pointing directly to Daniel McGrath as a heel of the foulest order. He was still trying unsuccessfully to figure it out when he turned off the light and went to bed.
“Breakfast is served, sir.”
The white-coated waiter Dan had been sleepily watching for the last moment or two announced the fact with impeccable formality as he switched on the table light. It gave an enlarged effect of throwing open the doors of the master’s chamber and summoning him forth to the luxurious comfort of his own morning room, to the manner born, with a fire burning cheerfully in the grate. As the bed was less than two feet from the table, and it was a minor miracle that the man had been able to see enough in the grey gloom seeping down from th
e single window in the mansard roof to lay the cloth and the gleaming array of silver-covered dishes on it without waking him sooner, Dan looked at him with admiration. He was at the door about to retire into the hall, and stopped there, looking back over his shoulder.
“Good morning, sir. I’m Pegott, your permanent valet, sir.”
Dan said “Good morning,” and reached for his bathrobe at the foot of the bed. Impeccable, he thought, really was the word for Pegott. He had understood the Pegotts of Old England were a vanished race, the gentlemen’s gentlemen gone along with the barons of beef and Devonshire cream, as dead as Walking Stewart and the five-bottle men with gout and purple livers. But the whole thing was a gross libel propagated by Opposition. The permanent valet proved it: his white coat and black bow tie, his adam’s apple cradled in the starched angle of his wingtip collar, above all his manners that enabled him to make a suite of one attic trunk room and overlook Dan’s toothbrush and twisted tube of paste still on the towel lying on the dresser. Pegott was perfect of his kind, perhaps too perfect for his age, which could not have been more than thirtyish.
He was still at the door. Dan stuck his feet into his slippers, expecting him to say “Will there be anything else, sir? Thank you, sir?” Instead he said, “I beg your pardon, sir. Do I understand from the manageress that you are leaving us today?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“In that case would you permit me to have a few words with you when you have finished your breakfast, sir ? ”
“Sure,” Dan said. Why not ? he thought. He had had words with practically everybody else. More than a few with Miss Myrtle Grimstead, to say nothing of Mr. Sidney Copeland; with Miss Caroline Winship, with Mary herself—rather heated ones, on the whole, now he thought of them again—and possibly significant words with Mrs. Winship, and with little Mr. Pinkerton. He was curious about what they would be with Pegott. He looked at him with more interest.
