“Well, maybe they’re right at that,” he said. “Sooner or later peace has to come. How about a small drink to the idea, anyhow?”
They drank it together and in silence, and once more they were back where they had been a year ago. No longer master and man, but two friends of long standing, content merely to be together.
“So you’ve been doing fine without me, sir?” said William, putting down his glass.
“Hell, did you hear that?” said the Old Man innocently.
They chuckled as at some ancient joke.
It was after eleven when William in his socks made his way to the attic where the trimmings for the tree were stored. Sally was still awake. He could hear her stirring in her room. For a moment he stood outside and listened, and it seemed no time at all since he had done the same thing when she was a child, and had been punished and sent to bed. He would stand at her door and tap, and she would open it and throw herself sobbing into his arms.
“I’ve been a bad girl, William.”
He would hold her and pat her thin little back.
“Now, now,” he would say. “Take it easy, Sally. Maybe William can fix it for you.”
But of course there was nothing he could fix now. He felt rather chilly as he climbed the attic stairs.
To his relief the attic was orderly. He turned on the light and moving cautiously went to the corner where the Christmas tree trimmings, neatly boxed and covered, had always stood. They were still there. He lifted them, one by one, and placed them behind him. Then he stiffened and stood staring.
Neatly installed behind where they had been was a small radio transmitter.
He knew it at once for what it was, and a slow flush of fury suffused his face as he knelt down to examine it.
“The spy!” he muttered thickly, “the dirty devil of a spy!”
So this was how it was done. This was how ships were being sunk at sea; the convoys assembling, the ships passing along the horizon, and men like Jarvis watching, ready to unleash the waiting submarine wolves upon them.
He was trying to tear it out with his bare hands when he heard a voice behind him.
“Stay where you are, or I’ll shoot.”
But it was not Jarvis. It was Sally, white and terrified, in a dressing gown over her nightdress and clutching a revolver in her hand. William got up slowly and turned, and she gasped and dropped the gun.
“Why, William!” she said. “What are you doing here?”
He stood still, concealing the transmitter behind his stocky body.
“Your grandfather sent for me,” he said, with dignity. “He was planning a little surprise for you and the boy, in the morning.”
She looked at him, at his dependable old face, at the familiar celluloid collar gleaming in the light, at his independent sturdy figure, and suddenly her chin quivered.
“Oh, William,” she said. “I’ve been such a dreadful person.”
All at once she was in his arms, crying bitterly.
“Everything’s so awful,” she sobbed. “I’m so frightened, William. I can’t help it.”
And once more he was holding her and saying:
“It will be all right, Sally girl. Don’t you worry. It will be all right.”
She quieted, and at last he got her back to her room. He found that he was shaking, but he went methodically to work. He did what he could to put the transmitter out of business. Then he piled up the boxes of trimmings and carried them down the stairs. There was still no sign of Jarvis, and the Old Man was dozing in his chair. William hesitated. Then he shut himself in the sitting room and cautiously called the chief of the local police.
“This is William,” he said. “The butler at Major Bennett’s. I—”
“So you’re back, you old buzzard, are you?” said the chief. “Well, Merry Christmas and welcome home.”
But he sobered when William told him what he had discovered. He promised to round up some men, and not—at William’s request—to come as if they were going to a fire.
“We’ll get him all right,” he said. “We’ll get all these dirty polecats sooner or later. All right. No siren. We’ll ring the doorbell.”
William felt steadier after that. He was in the basement getting a ladder for trimming the tree when he heard Jarvis come back. But he went directly up the back stairs to his room, and William, listening below, felt that he would not visit the attic that night.
He was singularly calm now. The Old Man was sound asleep by that time, and snoring as violently as he did everything else. William placed the ladder and hung the wax angel on the top of the tree. Then he stood precariously and surveyed it.
“Well, we’re back,” he said. “We’re kind of old and battered, but we’re still here, thank God.”
Which in its way was a prayer too, like the Old Man’s earlier in the evening.
He got down, his legs rather stiff, and going into the other room touched the sleeper lightly on the shoulder. He jerked awake.
“What the hell did you do that for?” he roared. “Can’t a man take a nap without your infernal interfering?”
“The tree’s ready to trim,” said William quietly.
Fifteen minutes later the nurse came back. The bedroom was empty, and in the sitting room before a half-trimmed tree the Old Man was holding a small—a very small—drink in his hand. He waved his glass at her outraged face.
“Merry Christmas,” he said, a slight—a very slight—thickness in his voice. “And get me that telegram that came for Sally today.”
She looked disapprovingly at William, a William on whom the full impact of the situation—plus a very small drink—had suddenly descended like the impact of a pile-driver. Her austere face softened.
“You look tired,” she said. “You’d better sit down.”
“Tired? Him?” scoffed the Old Man. “You don’t know him. And where the hell’s that telegram?”
She brought it, and he put on his spectacles to read it.
“Sally doesn’t know about it,” he explained. “Held it out on her. Do her good.” Then he read it aloud. “Home for breakfast tomorrow. Well. Love. Merry Christmas. Tony.”
He folded it and looked around, beaming.
“How’s that for a surprise?” he demanded. “Merry Christmas! Hell, it will be a real Christmas for everybody.”
William stood still. He wanted to say something, but his voice stuck in his throat. Then he stiffened. Back in the pantry the doorbell was ringing.
The Lipstick
I WALKED HOME AFTER the coroner’s inquest. Mother had gone on in the car, looking rather sick, as indeed she had done ever since Elinor’s death. Not that she had particularly cared for Elinor. She has a pattern of life which divides people into conformers and non-conformers. The conformers pay their bills the first of the month, go to church—the Episcopal, of course, never by any chance get into anything but the society columns of the newspapers, and regard marriage as the sine qua non of every female over twenty.
My cousin Elinor Hammond had openly flouted all this. She had gone gaily through life, as if she wakened each morning wondering what would be the most fun that day; stretching her long lovely body between her silk sheets—how mother resented those sheets—and calling to poor tired old Fred in his dressing room.
“Let’s have some people in for cocktails, Fred.”
“Anything you say, darling.”
It was always like that. Anything Elinor said was all right with Fred. He worshipped her. As I walked home that day I was remembering his face at the inquest. He had looked dazed.
“You know of no reason why your—why Mrs. Hammond should take her own life?”
“None whatever.”
“There was nothing in her state of health to have caused her anxiety?”
“Nothing. She had always seemed to be in perfect health.”
“She was consulting Doctor Barclay.”
“She was tired. She was doing too much,” he said unhappily.
Yet there it was.
Elinor had either fallen or jumped from that tenth floor window of Doctor Barclay’s waiting room, and the coroner plainly believed she had jumped. The doctor had not seen her at all that day. Only the nurse.
“There was no one else in the reception room,” she testified. “The doctor was busy with a patient. Mrs. Hammond sat down by the window and took off her hat. Then she lit a cigarette and picked up a magazine. After that I went back to my office to copy some records. I didn’t see her again until—”
She was a pretty little thing. She looked pale.
“Tell us what happened next,” said the coroner gently.
“I heard the other patient leave about five minutes later. She went out from the consulting room. There’s a door there into the hall. We have that arrangement, so—well, so that patients don’t meet. When he buzzed for the next case, I went in to get Mrs. Hammond. She wasn’t there. I saw her hat, but her bag was gone. I thought she had gone to the lavatory. Then—” She stopped and gulped. “Then I heard people shouting in the street and I looked out the window.”
The coroner gave her a little time. She got out a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.
“What would you say was her mental condition that morning, Miss Comings? Was she depressed?”
“I thought she seemed very cheerful,” she said.
“The window was open beside her?”
“Yes. I couldn’t believe it until I—”
He excused her then. She was openly crying by that time, and it was clear that she had told all she knew.
When Doctor Barclay was called—he had come in late—I was surprised. I had expected an elderly man, but he was only in the late thirties and quite good-looking. Knowing Elinor, I wondered. She had had a passion for handsome men, except for Fred, who had no looks whatever. Beside me I heard mother give a ladylike snort.
“So that’s it!” she said. “She had as much need for a psychiatrist as I need a third leg.”
But the doctor added little to what we already knew. He had not seen Elinor at all that morning. When he rang the buzzer and nobody came he had gone forward to the reception room. Miss Comings was leaning out the window. All at once she began to scream. Fortunately a Mrs. Thompson arrived at that time and took charge of her. He had gone down to the street, but the ambulance had already arrived.
He was frank enough up to that time. Queried about the reason for Elinor’s consulting him he tightened, however.
“I have many patients like Mrs. Hammond,” he said. “Women who live on their nerves. Mrs. Hammond had been doing that for years.”
“That is all? She mentioned no particular trouble?”
He smiled faintly.
“We all have troubles,” he said. “Some we imagine, some we magnify, some are real. But I would say that Mrs. Hammond was an unusually normal person. I had recommended that she go away for a rest. I believe she meant to do so.”
His voice was clipped and professional. If Elinor had been attracted to him it had been apparently a one-sided affair. Fred, however, was watching him intently.
“You did not gather that she contemplated suicide?”
“No. Not at any time.”
That is all they got out of him. He evaded them on anything Elinor had imagined, or magnified. In fact he did as fine a piece of dodging as I have ever seen. His relations with his patients, he said, were particularly confidential. If he knew anything of value he would tell it, but he did not.
Mother nudged me as he finished.
“Probably in love with her,” she said. “He’s had a shock. That’s certain.”
He sat down near us, and I watched him. I saw him reach for a cigarette, then abandon the idea, and I saw him more or less come to attention when the next witness was called. It was the Mrs. Thompson who had looked after the nurse, and she was a strangely incongruous figure in that group of Elinor’s family and friends. She was a large motherly-looking woman, perspiring freely and fanning herself with a small folding fan.
She stated at once that she was not a patient.
“I clean his apartment for him once a week,” she said. “He has a Jap, but he’s no cleaner. That day I needed a little money in advance, so I went to see him.”
She had not entered the office at once. She had looked in and seen Elinor, so she had waited in the hall, where there was a breeze. She had seen the last patient, a woman, leave by the consulting room door and go down in the elevator. A minute or so later she heard the nurse scream.
“She was leaning out the window yelling her head off,” she said. “Then the doctor ran in and we got her on a couch. She said somebody had fallen out, but she didn’t say who it was.”
Asked how long she had been in the hall, she thought about a quarter of an hour. She was certain no other patient had entered during that time. She would have seen them if they had.
“You are certain of that?”
“Well, I was waiting my chance to see the doctor. I was watching pretty close. And I was never more than a few feet from the door.”
“You found something belonging to Mrs. Hammond, didn’t you? In the office?”
“Yes, sir. I found her bag.”
The bag, it seemed, had been behind the radiator in front of the window.
“I thought myself it was a queer place for it, if she was going to—do what she did.” And she added, naively, “I gave it to the police when they came.”
So that was that. Elinor, having put her hat on the table, had dropped her bag behind the radiator before she jumped. Somehow it didn’t make sense to me, and later on, of course, it made no sense at all.
The verdict was of suicide while of unsound mind. The window had been examined, but there was the radiator in front of it, and the general opinion seemed to be that a fall would have to be ruled out. Nobody of course mentioned murder. In the face of Mrs. Thompson’s testimony it looked impossible. Fred listened to the verdict with blank eyes. His sister Margaret, sitting beside him and dressed in heavy mourning, picked up her bag and rose. And Doctor Barclay stared straight ahead of him as though he did not hear it. Then he got up and went out, and while I put mother in the car I saw him driving away, still with that queer fixed look on his face.
I was in a fine state of fury as I walked home. I had always liked Elinor, even when as mother rather inelegantly said, she had snatched Fred from under my nose. As a matter of cold fact, Fred Hammond never saw me after he first met her. He had worshipped her from the start, and his white, stunned face at the inquest only added to the mystery.
The fools, I thought. As though Elinor would ever have jumped out that window. Even if she was in trouble she would never have done it that way. There were so many less horrible ways. Sleeping tablets, or Fred’s automatic, or even her smart new car and carbon-monoxide gas. But I refused to believe that she had done it at all. She had never cared what people thought. I remembered almost the last time I had seen her. Somebody had given a suppressed desire party, and Elinor had gone with a huge red letter “A” on the front of her white satin dress.
Mother nearly had a fit when she saw it.
“I trust, Elinor,” she said, “that your scarlet letter does not mean what it appears to mean.”
Elinor had laughed.
“What do you think, Aunt Emma?” she said. “Would you swear that never in your life—”
“That will do, Elinor,” mother said. “Only I am glad my dear sister is not alive, to see you.”
She had been very gay that night, and she had enjoyed the little run-in with mother. Perhaps that was one of the reasons I had liked her. She could cope with mother. She could, of course. She wasn’t an only daughter, living at home and on an allowance which was threatened every now and then. And she had brought laughter and gaiety into my own small world. Even her flirtations—and she was too lovely not to have plenty of them—had been lighthearted affairs, although mother had never believed it.
She was having tea when I got home. She sat stiffly behind the tea-tray and inspe
cted me.
“I can’t see why you worry about all this, Louise. You look dreadful,” she said. “What’s done is done. After all, she led Fred a miserable life.”
“She made him happy, and now she’s dead,” I said shortly. “Also I don’t believe she threw herself out that window.”
“Then she fell.”
“I don’t believe that either,” I said shortly.
“Nonsense! What do you believe?”
But I had had enough. I left her there and went upstairs to my room. It wasn’t necessary for mother to tell me that I looked like something any decent dog would have buried. I could see that for myself. I sat down at my toilet table and rubbed some cream into my face, but my mind was running in circles. Somebody had killed Elinor and had gotten away with it. Yet who could have hated her enough for that? A jealous wife? It was possible. She had a way of taking a woman’s husband and playing around with him until she tired of him. But she had not been doing that lately. She had been, for her, rather quiet.
Plenty of people of course had not liked her. She had a way of riding roughshod over them, ignoring their most sensitive feelings or laughing at them. She never snubbed anyone. She said what she had to say, and sometimes it wasn’t pleasant. Even to Fred. But he had never resented it. He was like that.
I could see the Hammond place from my window, and the thought of Fred sitting there alone was more than I could bear. Not that I had ever been in love with him, in spite of mother’s hopes. I dressed and went down to dinner, but I was still out of favor. I couldn’t eat, either. Luckily it was mother’s bridge night, and after she and her three cronies were settled at the table I managed to slip out through the kitchen. Annie, the cook, was making sandwiches and cutting cake.
“It beats all, the way those old ladies can eat,” she said resignedly.
I told her if I was asked for to say I had gone to bed, and went out. Fred’s house was only two blocks away, set in its own grounds like ours, and as I entered the driveway I saw a man standing there, looking at it. I must have surprised him, for he turned suddenly and looked at me. It was Doctor Barclay.
He didn’t recognize me, however. I suppose he had not even seen me at the inquest. He touched his hat and went out to the street, and a moment later I herd his car start off. But if he had been in the house Fred did not mention it. I rang and he himself opened the door. He seemed relieved when he saw me.
Alibi for Isabel: And Other Stories Page 16
