Well, I sat down and gave a laugh. “You think it’s as easy as that to talk with the dead, do you?”
“I think he’ll know I’m dying too, and have pity on me, and do as I ask.” I said nothing more, but packed up my things and went away.
VI.
That letter seemed to me a mountain in my path; and the poor young man, when I told him, thought so too. “Ah, that’s too difficult,” he said. But he told me he’d think it over, and do his best—and I was to come back the next day if I could. “If only I knew more about her—or about him. It’s damn difficult, making love for a dead man to a woman you’ve never seen,” says he with his little cracked laugh. I couldn’t deny that it was; but I knew he’d do what he could, and I could see that the difficulty of it somehow spurred him on, while me it only cast down.
So I went back to his room the next evening; and as I climbed the stairs I felt one of those sudden warnings that sometimes used to take me by the throat.
“It’s as cold as ice on these stairs,” I thought, “and I’ll wager there’s no one made up the fire in his room since morning.” But it wasn’t really the cold I was afraid of; I could tell there was worse than that waiting for me.
I pushed open the door and went in. “Well,” says I, as cheerful as I could, “I’ve got a pint of champagne and a thermos of hot soup for you; but before you get them you’ve got to tell me—”
He laid there in his bed as if he didn’t see me, though his eyes were open; and when I spoke to him he didn’t answer. I tried to laugh. “Mercy!” I says, “are you so sleepy you can’t even look round to see the champagne? Hasn’t that slut of a woman been in to ‘tend to the stove for you? The room’s as cold as death—” I says, and at the word I stopped short. He neither moved nor spoke; and I felt that the cold came from him, and not from the empty stove. I took hold of his hand, and held the cracked looking-glass to his lips; and I knew he was gone to his Maker. I drew his lids down, and fell on my knees beside the bed. “You shan’t go without a prayer, you poor fellow,” I whispered to him, pulling out my beads.
But though my heart was full of mourning I dursn’t pray for long, for I knew I ought to call the people of the house. So I just muttered a prayer for the dead, and then got to my feet again. But before calling in anybody I took a quick look around; for I said to myself it would be better not to leave about any of those bits he’d written down for me. In the shock of finding the poor young man gone I’d clean forgotten all about the letter; but I looked among his few books and papers for anything about the spirit messages, and found nothing. After that I turned back for a last look at him, and a last blessing; and then it was, fallen on the floor and half under the bed, I saw a sheet of paper scribbled over in pencil in his weak writing. I picked it up, and, holy Mother, it was the letter! I hid it away quick in my bag, and I stooped down and kissed him. And then I called the people in.
Well, I mourned the poor young man like a son, and I had a busy day arranging things, and settling about the funeral with the lady that used to befriend him. And with all there was to do I never went near Mrs. Clingsland nor so much as thought of her, that day or the next; and the day after that there was a frantic message, asking what had happened, and saying she was very ill, and I was to come quick, no matter how much else I had to do.
I didn’t more than half believe in the illness; I’ve been about too long among the rich not to be pretty well used to their scares and fusses. But I knew Mrs. Clingsland was just pining to find out if I’d got the letter, and that my only chance of keeping my hold over her was to have it ready in my bag when I went back. And if I didn’t keep my hold over her, I knew what slimy hands were waiting in the dark to pull her down.
Well, the labour I had copying out that letter was so great that I didn’t hardly notice what was in it; and if I thought about it at all, it was only to wonder if it wasn’t worded too plain-like, and if there oughtn’t to have been more long words in it, coming from a gentleman to his lady. So with one thing and another I wasn’t any too easy in my mind when I appeared again at Mrs. Clingsland’s; and if ever I wished myself out of a dangerous job, my dear, I can tell you that was the day…
I went up to her room, the poor lady, and found her in bed, and tossing about, her eyes blazing, and her face full of all the wrinkles I’d worked so hard to rub out of it; and the sight of her softened my heart. After all, I thought, these people don’t know what real trouble is; but they’ve manufactured something so like it that it’s about as bad as the genuine thing.
“Well,” she said in a fever, “well, Cora—the letter? Have you brought me the letter?”
I pulled it out of my bag, and handed it to her; and then I sat down and waited, my heart in my boots. I waited a long time, looking away from her; you couldn’t stare at a lady who was reading a message from her sweetheart, could you?
I waited a long time; she must have read the letter very slowly, and then re-read it. Once she sighed, ever so softly; and once she said: “Oh, Harry, no, no—how foolish” … and laughed a little under her breath. Then she was still again for so long that at last I turned my head and took a stealthy look at her. And there she lay on her pillows, the hair waving over them, the letter clasped tight in her hands, and her face smoothed out the way it was years before, when I first knew her. Yes—those few words had done more for her than all my labour.
“Well—?” said I, smiling a little at her.
“Oh, Cora—now at last he’s spoken to me, really spoken.” And the tears were running down her young cheeks.
I couldn’t hardly keep back my own, the heart was so light in me. “And now you’ll believe in me, I hope, ma’am, won’t you?”
“I was mad ever to doubt you, Cora…” She lifted the letter to her breast, and slipped it in among her laces. “How did you manage to get it, you darling, you?”
Dear me, thinks I, and what if she asks me to get her another one like it, and then another? I waited a moment, and then I spoke very gravely. “It’s not an easy thing, ma’am, coaxing a letter like that from the dead.” And suddenly, with a start, I saw that I’d spoken the truth. It was from the dead that I’d got it.
“No, Cora; I can well believe it. But this is a treasure I can live on for years. Only you must tell me how I can repay you… In a hundred years I could never do enough for you,” she says.
Well, that word went to my heart; but for a minute I didn’t know how to answer. For it was true I’d risked my soul, and that was something she couldn’t pay me for; but then maybe I’d saved hers, in getting her away from those foul people, so the whole business was more of a puzzle to me than ever. But then I had a thought that made me easier.
“Well, ma’am, the day before yesterday I was with a young man about the age of—of your Harry; a poor young man, without health or hope, lying sick in a mean rooming-house. I used to go there and see him sometimes—”
Mrs. Clingsland sat up in bed in a flutter of pity. “Oh, Cora, how dreadful! Why did you never tell me? You must hire a better room for him at once. Has he a doctor? Has he a nurse? Quick—give me my cheque-book!”
“Thank you, ma’am. But he don’t need no nurse nor no doctor; and he’s in a room underground by now. All I wanted to ask you for,” said I at length, though I knew I might have got a king’s ransom from her, “is money enough to have a few masses said for his soul—because maybe there’s no one else to do it.”
I had hard work making her believe there was no end to the masses you could say for a hundred dollars; but somehow it’s comforted me ever since that I took no more from her that day. I saw to it that Father Divott said the masses and got a good bit of the money; so he was a sort of accomplice too, though he never knew it.
(Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan 99, December 1935)
Duration
Duration.
I.
The passage in his sister’s letter most perplexing to Henly Warbeck was that in
which she expressed her satisfaction that the date of his sailing from Lima would land him in Boston in good time for cousin Martha Little’s birthday.
Puzzle as he would, the returning Bostonian could get no light on it. “Why,” he thought, after a third re-reading, “I didn’t suppose Martha Little had ever had a birthday since the first one!”
Nothing on the fairly flat horizon of Henly Warbeck’s youth had been more lacking in relief than the figure of his father’s spinster cousin, Martha Little; and now, returning home after many years in distant and exotic lands (during which, however, contact by correspondence had never been long interrupted), Warbeck could not imagine what change in either Martha Little’s character or in that of Boston could have thrust her into even momentary prominence.
Even in his own large family connection, where, to his impatient youth, insignificance seemed endemic, Martha Little had always been the most effaced, contourless, colourless. Nor had any accidental advantage ever lifted her out of her congenital twilight: neither money, nor a bad temper, nor a knack with her clothes, nor any of those happy hazards—chance meetings with interesting people, the whim of a rich relation, the luck of ministering in a street accident to somebody with money to bequeath—which occasionally raise the most mediocre above their level. As far as Warbeck knew, Martha Little’s insignificance had been unbroken, and accepted from the outset, by herself and all the family, as the medium she was fated to live in: as a person with weak eyes has to live with the blinds down, and be groped for by stumbling visitors.
The result had been that visitors were few; that Martha was more and more forgotten, or remembered only when she could temporarily replace a nursery governess on holiday, or “amuse” some fidgety child getting over an infantile malady.
Then the family took it for granted that she would step into the breach; but when the governess came back, or the child recovered, she disappeared, and was again immediately forgotten.
Once only, as far as Warbeck knew, had she over-stepped the line thus drawn for her; but that was so long ago that the occasion had already become a legend in his boyhood. It was when old Mrs. Warbeck, Henly’s grandmother, gave the famous ball at which her eldest granddaughter came out; the ball discussed for weeks beforehand and months afterward from Chestnut Street to Bay State Road, not because there was anything exceptional about it (save perhaps its massive “handsomeness”), but simply because old Mrs. Warbeck had never given a ball before, and Boston had never supposed she ever would give one, and there had been hardly three months’ time in which to get used to the idea that she was really going to—at last!
All this, naturally, had been agitating, not to say upsetting, to Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, and absorbing to the whole immense Warbeck connection; the innumerable Pepperels, Sturlisses and Syngletons, the Graysons, Wrigglesworths and Perches—even to those remote and negligible Littlest whose name gave so accurate a measure of their tribal standing. And to that ball there had been a question of asking, not of course all the Littles—that would have been really out of proportion—but two or three younger specimens of the tribe, whom circumstances had happened to bring into closer contact with the Warbeck group.
“And then,” one of the married daughters had suggested toward the end of the consultation, “there’s Martha Little—”
“Martha?” old Mrs. Warbeck echoed, incredulous and ironic, as much as to say: “The name’s a slip of the tongue, of course; but whom did you mean, my dear, when you said ‘Martha’?”
But the married daughter had continued, though more doubtfully: “Well, mother, Martha does sometimes help us out of our difficulties. Last winter, you remember, when Maggie’s baby had the chickenpox … and then, taking Sara’s Charlotte three times a week to her drawing-class … and you know, as you invite her to stay with you at Milton every summer when we’re at the seaside…”
“Ah, you regard that as helping you out of a difficulty?” Mrs. Warbeck drily interposed.
“No, mother, not a difficulty, of course. But it does make us feel so safe to know that Martha’s with you. And when she hears of the ball she might expect—”
“Expect to come?” questioned Mrs. Warbeck.
“Oh, no—how absurd! Only to be invited …” the daughters chorussed in reply.
“She’d like to show the invitation at her boarding-house…”
“She hasn’t many pleasures, poor thing…”
“Well, but,” the old lady insisted, sticking to her point, “if I did invite her, would she come?”
“To a ball? What an idea!” Martha Little at a ball! Daughters and daughters-in-law laughed. It was really too absurd. But they all had their little debts to settle with Martha Little, and the opportunity was too good to be missed. On the strength of their joint assurances that no risk could possibly be incurred, old Mrs. Warbeck sent the invitation.
The night of the ball came; and so did Martha Little. She was among the first to arrive, and she stayed till the last candle was blown out. The entertainment remained for many years memorable in the annals of Beacon Street, and also in the Warbeck family history, since it was the occasion of Sara’s eldest engaging herself to the second of Jake Wrigglesworth’s boys (now, Warbeck reflected, himself a grizzled grandparent), and of Phil Syngleton’s falling in love with the second Grayson girl; but beyond and above these events towered the formidable fact of Martha Little’s one glaring indelicacy. Like Mrs. Warbeck’s ball, it was never repeated. Martha retired once more into the twilight in which she belonged, emerging from it, as of old, only when some service was to be rendered somewhere in the many-branched family connection. But the episode of the ball remained fresh in every memory. Martha Little had been invited—and she had come? Henly Warbeck, as a little boy, had often heard his aunts describe her appearance: the prim black silk, the antiquated seed-pearls and lace mittens, the obvious “front”, more tightly crimped than usual; how she had pranced up the illuminated stairs, an absurd velvet reticule over her wrist, greeted her mighty kinswoman on the landing, and complacently mingled with the jewelled and feathered throng under the wax candles of the many chandeliers, while Mrs. Warbeck muttered to her daughters in a withering aside: “I never should have thought it of Martha Little!”
The escapade had done Martha Little more harm than good. The following summer Mrs. Warbeck had chosen one of her own granddaughters to keep her company at Milton when the family went to the seaside. It was hoped that this would make Martha realize her fatal error; and it did. And though the following year, at the urgent suggestion of the granddaughter chosen to replace her, she was received back into grace, and had what she called her “lovely summer outing” at Milton, there was certainly a shade of difference in her subsequent treatment. The younger granddaughters especially resented the fact that old Mrs. Warbeck had decided never to give another ball; and the old lady was fond of repeating (before Martha Little) that no, really, she couldn’t; the family connection was too large—she hadn’t room for them all. When the girls wanted to dance, their mothers must hire a public room; at her age Mrs. Warbeck couldn’t be subjected to the fatigue, and the—the over-crowding.
Martha Little took the hint. As the grand-children grew up and married, her services were probably less often required, and by the time that Henly Warbeck had graduated from the Harvard Law School, and begun his life of distant wanderings, she had vanished into a still deeper twilight. Only once or twice, when some member of the tribe had run across Henly abroad, had Martha’s name been mentioned. “Oh, she’s as dull as Martha Little,” one contemptuous cousin had said of somebody; and the last mention of her had been when Warbeck’s sister, Mrs. Pepperel—the one to whom he was now returning—had mentioned, years ago, that a remote Grayson cousin, of the Frostingham branch, had bequeathed to Martha his little house at Frostingham—”so that now she’s off our minds.” And out of our memories, the speaker might have added; for though Frostingham is only a few miles from Boston it was not likely that many visitor
s would find their way to Martha Little’s door.
No; the allusion in this letter of Mrs. Pepperel’s remained cryptic to the returning traveller. As the train approached Boston, he pulled it from his pocket, and re-read it again. “Luckily you’ll get here in good time for Martha Little’s birthday,” Mrs. Pepperel said.
The train was slowing down. “Frostingham,” the conductor shouted, stressing the last syllable in the old Boston way. “Thank heaven,” Warbeck thought, “nothing ever really changes in Boston!”
A newsboy came through the Pullman with the evening papers. Warbeck unfolded one and read on the first page: “Frostingham preparing to celebrate Miss Martha Little’s hundredth birthday.” And underneath: “Frostingham’s most distinguished centenarian chats with representative of Transcript.’’’’ But the train was slowing down again—and here was Boston. Warbeck thrust the paper into his suit-case, bewildered yet half-understanding. Where else in the world but in Boston would the fact of having lived to be a hundred lift even a Martha Little into the lime-light? Ah, no; Boston forgot nothing, altered nothing. With a swelling heart the penitent exile sprang out, and was folded to the breasts of a long line of Warbecks and Pepperels, all of whom congratulated him on having arrived from the ends of the earth in time for Martha Little’s birthday.
II.
That night after dinner, Warbeck leaned back at ease in the pleasant dining-room of the old Pepperel house in Chestnut Street. The Copley portraits looked down familiarly from the walls, the old Pepperel Madeira circulated about the table. (In New York, thought Warbeck, Copleys and Madeiras, if there had been any, would both have been sold long since.)
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