Austin crossed and uncrossed his legs impatiently and waited for Dr. Seymour to appear in the doorway. Nora’s letter he had put off answering until it was too late for anything but remorse because he hadn’t answered it. He wasn’t, as she thought, indifferent to her feelings or to what happened to her, and never had been. He didn’t despise her and there was no reason for her to feel that she had forfeited all claim to his approval and friendship. She had done nothing wrong. If anyone was to blame, he was, for not realizing sooner that there was no way he could guide her through an emotional crisis that he himself was the cause of. But to think of her lying there day after day, in pain, not wanting to live because she thought the one person in the whole world that she loved had no use for her, that she was nothing, that there was no place for her anywhere … You’re young, Nora. This won’t go on forever. And I do love you, in a way.… No, that isn’t right. It’s not love exactly but tenderness and concern. I want you to be happy and to have everything that life has to offer. I don’t want you to lose hope or think that you have to compromise. I want you to go on fighting for the things you believe in. The feeling I have for you isn’t like the feeling I have for Martha or for anybody else. It’s somehow different and unlimited, and whether we see each other or not …
When Dr. Seymour walked in, he brought with him the hurry of an orchestra conductor arriving late with the audience already seated and impatient and the musicians waiting in the pit. He was a clean-shaven man in his sixties, small-boned, brusque, with mild blue eyes that had a certain vanity in them (his treatment of chronic nephrosis had been published recently in the monthly bulletin of the American Medical Association) and very little interest in or patience with people who were walking around on their two legs.
“How’s everything at home?” he asked.
“All right,” Austin said.
“Nothing happening yet?”
Austin shook his head.
“It will shortly,” Dr. Seymour said. “If it doesn’t we’ll make it happen. Her pains should have started by now.… About this visit upstairs—I don’t want you to tire her out, do you understand? If it had been anybody else, I wouldn’t have let them come, but I know I can depend on you not to stay too long. Terrible thing that was. I don’t know why people can’t learn not to pour kerosene on a fire. Remember now—five minutes and no more.”
7
If everything I do is wrong, Austin said to himself as he paced the length and breadth of his office overlooking the courthouse square, then I will not do anything. I will not raise my hand.
The meeting with Nora in Room 211 of the hospital had not come off the way he had hoped it would. Instead of putting her mind at rest, he had had to go searching from room to room, all up and down the corridor, looking for a nurse to come and quiet Nora’s hysterical weeping, and then he had to stand, shamefaced and humiliated, while the nurse gave him a piece of her mind.
He would not try to help anybody in trouble ever again. There was no help, and even if there were, he was in no position to offer it. He could only make things worse—unbearable trouble out of what was no greater and no less a calamity than being born. After this he would keep out of it, let them sink or swim.
It was a pity Martha wasn’t at the hospital. She ought to have seen that performance. If he told her about it now, she wouldn’t believe it. Nobody would, in their right mind, but it was the last show of that kind he would ever put on. He knew now what it was and why he did it. Other men were vain of their appearance or their clothes or because they were attractive to women or because they could drive a four-in-hand, but he had to be better than anybody else; he had to distinguish between right and wrong.
She came to his office that day all dressed up in a long white dress and a big hat with red roses on it, but that was all the good it did her. He was incapable of doing anything that wasn’t upright and honest. He couldn’t carry on behind his wife’s back with some girl who threw herself at him because that wouldn’t be Austin King. He didn’t laugh at Nora or treat her like a child (which was what she was) or lose his temper or do anything that would have made it easier for her to forget him or him to forget her. He sent her away thinking of him as a sincere, high-minded man who wouldn’t allow himself to fall in love with her because he was already married to somebody else. For that she admired him, naturally, because she was young and didn’t know any better. But he knew better. And so did Martha. After they were married, he expected Martha to be to him what his mother was to his father—unquestioning, loyal, bound by a common purpose. He waited to hear her say to Ab Your father says … in the same tone of voice his mother used with him, and Martha never did and never would. He had made her marry him against her will, or if not against her will, then before she was ready. He rushed her into it. Later he said If she won’t work with and beside me, then I will do it for both of us … In his pride he said I can do everything that is necessary. I can make a marriage all by myself.… Well he hadn’t, and the only thing that seemed at all strange was that he had tried so hard, that it was so hard for him to stop trying, even when he no longer cared what happened unless possibly something inside him didn’t want to try, didn’t want their marriage to work out.
And how did he know that his mother was unquestioning, loyal, and devoted? When the first of the year came around, his father, confronted with a long bill from Burton’s, walked the floor night after night worrying about where he’d get the money to pay it and shouting Why did you need these three spools of cotton thread? and What’s this five yards of flowered calico? and then his mother cried and in the end went right on charging things. They were in business together, the business of having a home and raising a family. And if he hadn’t been trying so hard not to discover it, he would have seen, by the time he was ready for long pants, that nobody loves, that there is no such thing as love.
Well, he was finished. Let the bills accumulate on the hall table. He was tired of paying bills. Mr. Holby could find a new partner and take over the front office for himself, as he had all along wanted to do. This wasn’t really his office anyway but his father’s, and he couldn’t fill his father’s place here and ought never to have tried. He ought never to have tried to do anything. What happened was bound to happen, from the beginning, and all you needed to do was to lie back and let it happen.…
The ringing of the telephone broke in upon his thoughts. He stopped and waited a moment, and then realized that it was nearly seven, that Miss Stiefel had gone home, and the outer office was dark. Like a man walking in his sleep, he made his way a step at a time towards the ringing, which was repeated and insistent and like a voice calling his name. With his hand on the receiver he hesitated.
I’m through, he said to himself. Let accident decide. Let——
The telephone stopped ringing.
8
“About six o’clock or a little after,” Mrs. Potter said. “We were all at the supper table, and I heard her call Austin, so I put down my napkin and went up to see if she wanted anything and——”
“You say the pains have stopped coming?” Dr. Seymour said.
“They stopped soon after I talked to you,” Mrs. Potter said.
“How long did she have them?”
“Oh, about an hour,” Mrs. Potter said. “I had some trouble getting you at first. I called your office and they told me you were at the hospital and when I called the hospital they said you had just gone, so I waited and called the office again, and that time——”
“I’ll go on up and have a look at her,” Dr. Seymour said. He took off his coat, his scarf, and his fur-lined gloves and left them in a neat pile on the chair in the hall.
“She’s resting quite comfortably,” Mrs. Potter said. “I took her up some toast and tea, and she ate that, and she says she feels fine.”
“I’d much rather she didn’t feel fine at this point,” Dr. Seymour said, and started up the stairs.
When he came down ten minutes later, Mrs. Potter said, “Is ev
erything all right?”
“No,” Dr. Seymour said, “it isn’t. The pains may start again in a little while, but if they don’t——Where’s Austin? Why didn’t he call me?”
“Cousin Austin isn’t here,” Mrs. Potter said.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Potter said. “When he didn’t come home for supper, I supposed that he had made some other plans. But Martha doesn’t know where he is either.”
“Did you call his office?” Dr. Seymour said.
“I’ve called three times,” Mrs. Potter said.
“Well, keep on trying,” Dr. Seymour said. “I don’t like what’s going on upstairs. I’m going to move her to the hospital, and then if anything happens, we’re at least prepared for it.”
“She was expecting to have the baby here,” Mrs. Potter said.
“I don’t care where she was expecting to have it,” Dr. Seymour said, “and two hours from now she won’t either, I hope. I want you to go up now and get her dressed and ready. Don’t hurry her. I don’t want her to be frightened. Just get her dressed and bring her downstairs. The telephone is in here, isn’t it?”
9
“He was here,” the waitress in the dining-room of the Draperville Hotel said. “He came in and ordered the steak dinner.”
“What time was that?” Randolph asked.
“About seven o’clock or a little after.”
“You’re sure it was Mr. King and not somebody else?”
“Oh, no,” the waitress said. “It was Mr. King all right.”
She was tired and her feet hurt. From years of watching people cut up their food and put it away, a mouthful at a time, she had contracted a hatred of the human race (and of travelling salesmen in particular) that was like a continual low-grade fever. If arsenic had been easily obtainable and its effect impossible to trace, she would have sprinkled the trays with it and carried them into the dining-room with a light heart. But the handsome young man with the Southern accent confused and troubled her. She wanted to say to him, with her hand on his coat-sleeve: Why do you care? Instead she said, “He sat over at that table in the corner and he was alone. At least—no, I’m sure there wasn’t anybody with him. I noticed that he didn’t eat anything after it was brought to him, and I meant to ask if his steak was all right, but I was busy and pretty soon he got up and went out.”
“How long ago?”
“Oh, maybe half an hour, maybe a little more. I couldn’t say exactly. He left a dollar bill on the tablecloth, and the dinner only came to——”
“If he comes back,” Randolph said, “tell him to call home immediately—no, tell him to go straight to the hospital.”
“Is anything wrong?” the waitress asked, ready to cut her gown of green an inch above her knees, be his footpage, run barefoot by his side through moss and mire, and tell no man his name. Her question went unanswered.
As Randolph opened the door of the hack that was waiting outside, he said, “Drive around to the south side of the square. He may have come back in the meantime.”
There were no lights in the windows that were lettered Holby and King, Attorneys at Law.
“I’m going to try once more, even though the place is dark. Keep an eye out for him. He may be walking around the streets somewhere,” Randolph said to the cabman. He jumped out of the hack, ran up the stairs, and rattled the doorknob. It was still locked.
“Austin?” he shouted.
There was no answer. Randolph pounded on the locked door, waited and then pounded again. A door opened at his back and Randolph, turning around, saw Dr. Hieronymous, the osteopath. He was a large man with grey hair and a grey face. With his hands he could easily have broken the door down for Randolph but his voice was mild and he said, “Were you looking for somebody?”
“I’m looking for Mr. King,” Randolph said.
“He was just here,” Dr. Hieronymous said. “At least I heard somebody come up the stairs. I don’t know whether it was Mr. King or not.”
“About five minutes ago?”
“Why, yes,” Dr. Hieronymous said. “I’d say it was about that. Not more then ten minutes anyway.”
“And was there anybody just before or just after?”
“No, I don’t think there was.”
“Then it wasn’t Mr. King you heard, it was me,” Randolph said, and resumed pounding on the door.
10
The nurse rang the bell of the elevator repeatedly before the elevator ropes and then the elevator descended past their eyes. It was operated by a lame Negro who had difficulty opening and closing the doors. This elevator and the one in the county courthouse were the only permanent mechanical contrivances for levitation in Draperville.
“We’re going to put you in the room at the end of the hall,” the nurse said as she stepped out of the elevator. “It’ll be quieter.”
“I’m not sensitive to noise,” Martha King said.
“I was thinking of the other patients,” the nurse said cheerfully and then laughed. The laughter was not unkind but merely a way of sweeping up the pieces of a joke that, never much to begin with, had finally come apart in her hands.
The room at the end of the hall had two windows, one looking out on Washington Street and the other on the street in front of the hospital, where Dr. Seymour’s horse and rig were waiting, with the reins tied to the hitching post.
This is not at all the way I wanted it to be, Martha said to herself. I thought I’d be at home, in my own bed, with everything around me the way it always is. I thought Austin would …
“Do you want a cup of tea?” The floor nurse asked.
“Yes, I do,” Martha said. “I had some tea just a little while ago, but I’m terribly hungry.”
“You’ll have to work fast,” the floor nurse said, “or you’ll be hungry a long time. How long ago was your first baby born?”
“Four and a half years ago.”
“Dr. Seymour is going to deliver you?”
“Yes,” Martha said.
“The first thing to do is to get into bed,” the nurse said. “Do you have any pains now?”
“No,” Martha said. She surrendered her pocketbook and gloves, and allowed the nurse to help her off with her coat.
Standing across the street from Mike Farrell’s saloon, Austin heard mournful singing, and then an argument that ended abruptly with the sound of breaking glass and a man being thrust out through the swinging door.
In the alley that ran beside the pool hall, Austin stopped beside a window with the blind drawn three-quarters of the way to the sill, offering a view of several pairs of feet under a table. The window was open about an inch, and the watcher heard the sound of cards being dealt and shuffled and dealt again, and very little difference between the moment of triumph and the moment of disaster.
He stood in the alley looking under the drawn blind for a very long while. On a street beyond the post office, where there was a row of shabby houses, Austin leaned against a tree and saw the third house from the corner visited by a man on guard against watchers—a man who came in stealth and left twenty minutes later, less alive and (judging by his walk, his carriage) less hopeful than when he came. The man who crossed over to the other side of Lafayette Street to keep from being recognized, Austin would not have known anyway, but neither did he know the man with the miner’s cap who spoke to him by name.
Here and there he saw a light in some house, a night light left burning for a child or a sick person afraid of the dark. Austin was grateful for any illumination—for the dim light in the lobby of the Draperville Hotel, and for the light in the hackstand next door, and for the light in Dr. Danforth’s livery stable, where Snowball McHenry slept on a pile of horse blankets.
The jewellery store had an iron grating across the windows and a heavy padlock on the door, and a light was left burning so that Monk Collins, the policeman on night duty, could see into the back of the store. Shapiro’s Clothing Store and Joe Becker’s shoe store were da
rk, and so was the hardware store, the barber shop, the lumber yard, the two banks. The signboards outside of Giovanni’s confectionery and moviedrome (where, if you bought an ice-cream soda, you could sit in the back room and watch a moving picture of a man hanging over the edge of a cliff by his fingers) had been taken in off the sidewalk for the night, but there was a light on the first floor of the courthouse, for the night watchman, and the second floor of the telephone building, and there were also the overhead arc lights where Austin King met and parted company with his shadow. The shadow under the arc light disturbed him as no reflection in a mirror ever had. For a moment it was recognizable, and then as he took a step toward the periphery of the circle of light, the shadow stretched out into a hideous distortion hanging between one shape and the next.
The sound of a violin coming through closed shutters kept Austin standing on the sidewalk in front of a shack on Williams Street for twenty minutes, during which time he experienced all the sensations of earthly happiness. The music stopped and Austin walked on.
Standing across the street from the jail he found himself talking to an old man named Hugh Finders, who had been connected with a brutal murder some twenty years before. Where he came from, Austin had no idea. The old man simply materialized out of the night.
“I seen you around, since you were in kneebritches,” he said to Austin, “but this is the first time I ever talked to you, I guess. Everybody’s so busy these days. I see them ride by in their fine carriages, but they don’t have no time to talk to poor old Hugh.”
Time Will Darken It Page 31
