“Well?” Mrs. Ashby asked below her breath.
Charlotte did not move or answer. She was bending over the page with wrinkled brows, holding it nearer and nearer to the light. Her sight must be blurred, or else dazzled by the reflection of the lamplight on the smooth surface of the paper, for, strain her eyes as she would, she could discern only a few faint strokes, so faint and faltering as to be nearly undecipherable.
“I can’t make it out,” she said.
“What do you mean, dear?”
“The writing’s too indistinct… Wait.”
She went back to the table and, sitting down close to Kenneth’s reading lamp, slipped the letter under a magnifying glass. All this time she was aware that her mother-in-law was watching her intently.
“Well?” Mrs. Ashby breathed.
“Well, it’s no clearer. I can’t read it.”
“You mean the paper is an absolute blank?”
“No, not quite. There is writing on it. I can make out something like ‘mine’—oh, and ‘come’. It might be ‘come’.”
Mrs. Ashby stood up abruptly. Her face was even paler than before. She advanced to the table and, resting her two hands on it, drew a deep breath. “Let me see,” she said, as if forcing herself to a hateful effort.
Charlotte felt the contagion of her whiteness. “She knows,” she thought. She pushed the letter across the table. Her mother-in-law lowered her head over it in silence, but without touching it with her pale wrinkled hands.
Charlotte stood watching her as she herself, when she had tried to read the letter, had been watched by Mrs. Ashby. The latter fumbled for her glasses, held them to her eyes, and bent still closer to the outspread page, in order, as it seemed, to avoid touching it. The light of the lamp fell directly on her old face, and Charlotte reflected what depths of the unknown may lurk under the clearest and most candid lineaments. She had never seen her mother-in-law’s features express any but simple and sound emotions—cordiality, amusement, a kindly sympathy; now and again a flash of wholesome anger. Now they seemed to wear a look of fear and hatred, of incredulous dismay and almost cringing defiance. It was as if the spirits warring within her had distorted her face to their own likeness. At length she raised her head. “I can’t—I can’t,” she said in a voice of childish distress.
“You can’t make it out either?”
She shook her head, and Charlotte saw two tears roll down her cheeks.
“Familiar as the writing is to you?” Charlotte insisted with twitching lips.
Mrs. Ashby did not take up the challenge. “I can make out nothing—nothing.”
“But you do know the writing?”
Mrs. Ashby lifted her head timidly; her anxious eyes stole with a glance of apprehension around the quiet familiar room. “How can I tell? I was startled at first…”
“Startled by the resemblance?”
“Well, I thought—”
“You’d better say it out, mother! You knew at once it was her writing?”
“Oh, wait, my dear—wait.”
“Wait for what?”
Mrs. Ashby looked up; her eyes, travelling slowly past Charlotte, were lifted to the blank wall behind her son’s writing table.
Charlotte, following the glance, burst into a shrill laugh of accusation. “I needn’t wait any longer! You’ve answered me now! You’re looking straight at the wall where her picture used to hang!”
Mrs. Ashby lifted her hand with a murmur of warning. “Sh-h.”
“Oh, you needn’t imagine that anything can ever frighten me again!” Charlotte cried.
Her mother-in-law still leaned against the table. Her lips moved plaintively. “But we’re going mad—we’re both going mad. We both know such things are impossible.”
Her daughter-in-law looked at her with a pitying stare. “I’ve known for a long time now that everything was possible.”
“Even this?”
“Yes, exactly this.”
“But this letter—after all, there’s nothing in this letter—”
“Perhaps there would be to him. How can I tell? I remember his saying to me once that if you were used to a handwriting the faintest stroke of it became legible. Now I see what he meant. He was used to it.”
“But the few strokes that I can make out are so pale. No one could possibly read that letter.”
Charlotte laughed again. “I suppose everything’s pale about a ghost,” she said stridently.
“Oh, my child—my child—don’t say it!”
“Why shouldn’t I say it, when even the bare walls cry it out? What difference does it make if her letters are illegible to you and me? If even you can see her face on that blank wall, why shouldn’t he read her writing on this blank paper? Don’t you see that she’s everywhere in this house, and the closer to him because to everyone else she’s become invisible?” Charlotte dropped into a chair and covered her face with her hands. A turmoil of sobbing shook her from head to foot. At length a touch on her shoulder made her look up, and she saw her mother-in-law bending over her. Mrs. Ashby’s face seemed to have grown still smaller and more wasted, but it had resumed its usual quiet look. Through all her tossing anguish, Charlotte felt the impact of that resolute spirit.
“Tomorrow—tomorrow. You’ll see. There’ll be some explanation tomorrow.”
Charlotte cut her short. “An explanation? Who’s going to give it, I wonder?”
Mrs. Ashby drew back and straightened herself heroically. “Kenneth himself will,” she cried out in a strong voice. Charlotte said nothing, and the old woman went on: “But meanwhile we must act; we must notify the police. Now, without a moment’s delay. We must do everything—everything.”
Charlotte stood up slowly and stiffly; her joints felt as cramped as an old woman’s. “Exactly as if we thought it could do any good to do anything?”
Resolutely Mrs. Ashby cried: “Yes!” and Charlotte went up to the telephone and unhooked the receiver.
(Saturday Evening Post 203, 25 April 1931)
Confession.
I.
This is the way it began; stupidly, trivially, out of nothing, as fatal things do.
I was sitting at the corner table in the hotel restaurant; I mean the left-hand corner as you enter from the hall… As if that mattered! A table in that angle, with a view over the mountains, was too good for an unaccompanied traveller, and I had it only because the head-waiter was a good-natured fellow who … As if that mattered, either! Why can’t I come to the point?
The point is that, entering the restaurant that day with the doubtful step of the newly-arrived, she was given the table next to me. Colossal Event—eh? But if you’ve ever known what it is, after a winter of semi-invalidism on the Nile, to be told that, before you’re fit to go back and take up your job in New York—before that little leak in your lung is patched up tight—you’ve got to undergo another three or four months of convalescence on top of an Alp; if you’ve dragged through all those stages of recovery, first among one pack of hotel idlers, then among another, you’ll know what small incidents can become Colossal Events against the empty horizon of your idleness.
Not that a New York banker’s office (even before the depression) commanded a very wide horizon, as I understand horizons; but before arguing that point with me, wait and see what it’s like to look out day after day on a dead-level of inoccupation, and you’ll know what a towering affair it may become to have your temperature go up a point, or a woman you haven’t seen before stroll into the dining-room, and sit down at the table next to yours.
But what magnified this very ordinary incident for me was the immediate sense of something out of the ordinary in the woman herself. Beauty? No; not even. (I say “even” because there are far deadlier weapons, as we all know.) No, she was not beautiful; she was not particularly young; and though she carried herself well, and was well dressed (though over-expensively, I thought), there was nothing in that to single her out in a fashionable crowd.
What then? Well, what struck me first in her was a shy but intense curiosity about everything in that assemblage of commonplace and shop-worn people. Here was a woman, evidently well-bred and well-off, to whom a fashionable hotel restaurant in the Engadine during the summer was apparently a sight so unusual, and composed of elements so novel and inexplicable, that she could hardly remember to eat in the subdued excitement of watching all that was going on about her.
As to her own appearance, it obviously did not preoccupy her—or figured only as an element of her general and rather graceful timidity. She was so busy observing all the dull commonplace people about her that it had presumably never occurred to her that she, who was neither dull nor commonplace, might be herself the subject of observation. (Already I found myself resenting any too protracted stare from the other tables.)
Well, to come down to particulars: she was middling tall, slight, almost thin; pale, with a long somewhat narrow face and dark hair; and her wide blue-gray eyes were so light and clear that her hair and complexion seemed dusky in contrast. A melancholy mouth, which lit up suddenly when she smiled—but her smiles were rare. Dress, sober, costly, severely “lady-like”; her whole appearance, shall I say a trifle old-fashioned—or perhaps merely provincial? But certainly it was not only her dress which singled her out from the standardized beauties at the other tables. Perhaps it was the fact that her air of social inexperience was combined with a look, about the mouth and eyes, of having had more experience, of some other sort, than any woman in the room.
But of what sort? That was what baffled me. I could only sum it up by saying to myself that she was different; which, of course, is what every man feels about the woman he is about to fall in love with, no matter how painfully usual she may appear to others. But I had no idea that I was going to fall in love with the lady at the next table, and when I defined her as “different” I did not mean it subjectively, did not mean different to me, but in herself, mysteriously, and independently of the particular impression she made on me. In short, she appeared, in spite of her dress and bearing, to be a little uncertain and ill at ease in the ordinary social scene, but at home and sure of herself elsewhere. Where?
I was still asking myself this when she was joined by a companion. One of the things one learns in travelling is to find out about people by studying their associates; and I wished that the lady who interested me had not furnished me with this particular kind of clue. The woman who joined her was probably of about her own age; but that seemed to be the only point of resemblance between them. The newcomer was stout, with mahogany-dyed hair, and small eyes set too close to a coarse nose. Her complexion, through a careless powdering, was flushed, and netted with little red veins, and her chin sloped back under a vulgar mouth to a heavy white throat. I had hoped she was only a chance acquaintance of the dark lady’s; but she took her seat without speaking, and began to study the menu without as much as a glance at her companion. They were fellow-travellers, then; and though the newcomer was as richly dressed as the other, and I judged more fashionably, I detected at once that she was a subordinate, probably a paid one, and that she sought to conceal it by an exaggerated assumption of equality. But how could the one woman have chosen the other as a companion? It disturbed my mental picture of the dark lady to have to fit into it what was evidently no chance association.
“Have you ordered my beer?” the last comer asked, drawing off her long gloves from thick red fingers crammed with rings (the dark lady wore none, I had noticed.)
“No, I haven’t,” said the other.
Her tone somehow suggested: “Why should I? Can’t you ask for what you want yourself?” But a moment later she had signed to the head-waiter, and said, in a low tone: “Miss Wilpert’s Pilsener, please—as usual.”
“Yes; as usual. Only nobody ever remembers it! I used to be a lot better served when I had to wait on myself.”
The dark lady gave a faint laugh of protest.
Miss Wilpert, after a critical glance at the dish presented to her, transferred a copious portion to her plate, and squared herself before it. I could almost imagine a napkin tucked into the neck of her dress, below the crease in her heavy white throat.
“There were three women ahead of me at the hairdresser’s,” she grumbled.
The dark lady glanced at her absently. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t matter?” snapped her companion. “That I should be kept there two hours, and have to wait till two o’clock for my lunch?”
“I meant that your being late didn’t matter to me.”
“I daresay not,” retorted Miss Wilpert. She poured down a draught of Pilsener, and set the empty glass beside her plate. “So you’re in the ‘nothing matters’ mood again, are you?” she said, looking critically at her companion.
The latter smiled faintly. “Yes.”
“Well, then—what are we staying here for? You needn’t sacrifice yourself for me, you know.”
A lady, finishing her lunch, crossed the room, and in passing out stopped to speak to my neighbour. “Oh, Mrs. Ingram” (so her name was Ingram), “can’t we persuade you to join us at bridge when you’ve had your coffee?”
Mrs. Ingram smiled, but shook her head. “Thank you so much. But you know I don’t play cards.”
“Principles!” jerked out Miss Wilpert, wiping her rouged lips after a second glass of Pilsener. She waved her fat hand toward the retreating lady. “I’ll join up with you in half an hour,” she cried in a penetrating tone.
“Oh, do,” said the lady with an indifferent nod.
I had finished my lunch, drunk my coffee, and smoked more than my strict ration of cigarettes. There was no other excuse for lingering, and I got up and walked out of the restaurant. My friend Antoine, the head-waiter, was standing near the door, and in passing I let my lips shape the inaudible question: “The lady at the next table?”
Antoine knew every one, and also every one’s history. I wondered why he hesitated for a moment before replying: “Ah—Mrs. Ingram? Yes. From California.”
“Er—regular visitor?”
“No. I think on her first trip to Europe.”
“Ah. Then the other lady’s showing her about?”
Antoine gave a shrug. “I think not. She seems also new.”
“I like the table you’ve given me, Antoine,” I remarked; and he nodded compliantly.
I was surprised, therefore, that when I came down to dinner that evening I had been assigned to another seat, on the farther side of the restaurant. I asked for Antoine, but it was his evening off, and the understudy who replaced him could only say that I had been moved by Antoine’s express orders. “Perhaps it was on account of the draught, sir.”
“Draught be blowed! Can’t I be given back my table?”
He was very sorry, but, as I could see, the table had been allotted to an infirm old lady, whom it would be difficult, and indeed impossible, to disturb.
“Very well, then. At lunch tomorrow I shall expect to have it back,” I said severely.
In looking back over the convalescent life, it is hard to recall the exaggerated importance every trifle assumes when there are only trifles to occupy one. I was furious at having had my place changed; and still more so when, the next day at lunch, Antoine, as a matter of course, conducted me to the table I had indignantly rejected the night before.
“What does this mean? I told you I wanted to go back to that corner table—”
Not a muscle moved in his non-committal yet all-communicating face. “So sorry, sir.”
“Sorry? Why, you promised me—”
“What can I do? Those ladies have our most expensive suite; and they’re here for the season.”
“Well, what’s the matter with the ladies? I’ve no objection to them. They’re my compatriots.”
Antoine gave me a spectral smile. “That appears to be the reason, sir.”
“The reason? They’ve given you a reason for asking to have me moved?”
&nbs
p; “The big red one did. The other, Mrs. Ingram, as you can see, is quite different—though both are a little odd,” he added thoughtfully.
“Well—the big red one?”
“The dame de compagnie. You must excuse me, sir; but she says she doesn’t like Americans. And as the management are anxious to oblige Mrs. Ingram—”
I gave a haughty laugh. “I see. Whereas a humble lodger like myself—But there are other hotels at Mont Soleil, you may remind the management from me.”
“Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur—you can’t be so severe on a lady’s whim,” Antoine murmured reprovingly.
Of course I couldn’t. Antoine’s advice was always educational. I shrugged, and accepting my banishment, looked about for another interesting neighbour to watch instead of Mrs. Ingram. But I found that no one else interested me…
II.
“Don’t you think you might tell me now,” I said to Mrs. Ingram a few days later, “why your friend insisted on banishing me to the farther end of the restaurant?”
I need hardly say that, in spite of Miss Wilpert’s prejudice against her compatriots, she had not been able to prevent my making the acquaintance of Mrs. Ingram. I forget how it came about—the pretext of a dropped letter, a deck chair to be moved out of the sun, or one of the hundred devices which bring two people together when they are living idle lives under the same roof. I had not gained my end without difficulty, however, for the ill-assorted pair were almost always together. But luckily Miss Wilpert played bridge, and Mrs. Ingram did not, and before long I had learned to profit by this opportunity, and in the course of time to make the fullest use of it.
Yet after a fortnight I had to own that I did not know much more about Mrs. Ingram than when I had first seen her. She was younger than I had thought, probably not over thirty-two or three; she was wealthy; she was shy; she came from California, or at any rate had lived there. For the last two years or more she appeared to have travelled, encircling the globe, and making long stays in places as far apart as Ceylon, Teneriffe, Rio and Cairo. She seemed, on the whole, to have enjoyed these wanderings. She asked me many questions about the countries she had visited, and I saw that she belonged to the class of intelligent but untaught travellers who can learn more by verbal explanations than from books. Unprepared as she was for the sights awaiting her, she had necessarily observed little, and understood less; but she had been struck by the more conspicuous features of the journey, and the Taj, the Parthenon and the Pyramids had not escaped her. On the subject of her travels she was at least superficially communicative; and as she never alluded to husband or child, or to any other friend or relative, I was driven to conclude that Miss Wilpert had been her only companion. This deepened the mystery, and made me feel that I knew no more of her real self than on the day when I had first seen her; but, perhaps partly for that reason, I found her increasingly interesting. It was clear that she shrank from strangers, but I could not help seeing that with me she was happy and at ease, and as ready as I was to profit by our opportunities of being together. It was only when Miss Wilpert appeared that her old shyness returned, and I suspected that she was reluctant to let her companion see what good friends we had become.
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