The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  “At six o’clock in the morning?”

  “Well, that’s when he expected to get there, wasn’t it? It meant frightfully fast driving in that wretched little rattletrap, of course, and he knows how I worry about his lunatic recklessness—though he’d probably just telegraph, after all—”

  “You are very devoted, then, to this young Mallory?”

  His voice was as level and pleasant as usual, but something in his eyes held her for a moment, riveted.

  “Devoted? What an absurd word; I—” She checked herself sharply, veiling the silvery candor of her eyes with a sweep of noncommittal lashes. “What does it matter about Dion? Of course I’m devoted to him—deeply. I was telling you about Fay.… About how I happened to go into the sitting room.”

  “Yes.… Because you wanted your book, and because you thought that it might not be possible for that telephone to ring.… And so then you went in, Tess?”

  “So then I went in.… She was lying curled up in the corner of the farthest love seat. I couldn’t see her face—she had one of her arms crooked up, and she’d buried her head in it. Her brocade bag was open on the cushion beside her, and there was a book that she must have been reading—I didn’t see what it was. There was—there was a whiskey bottle on one of the little end tables; it was almost empty, and there were two or three empty White Rock bottles beside it, and a glass bowl with some half-melted ice cubes. The highball glass was on the floor; it had rolled over to the edge of the hearth, and there was a little dark trickle between it and the love seat.… I thought—I thought that she’d been drinking again. I went over and put my hand on her shoulder and gave her a little shake.”

  “Poor Tess—my poor Tess—that now is all over. That you must forget.”

  She put her hand to her throat and swallowed twice as though it hurt her, her eyes, dilated and incredulous, fixed unwaveringly on his.

  “I can’t forget.… It felt … it felt as though I were shaking a rag doll. And suddenly I saw that there was another bottle standing there by the one that had held the whiskey—a little empty brown bottle standing on a scrap of paper. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even take my hand off her shoulder. I felt—I felt as though I were dying. I’ve never been frightened before in my life.… I think that it’s worse than dying.”

  “It was then that you telephoned to me?”

  “No, not then. One of her hands was swinging out over the end of the love seat nearest the glass, and after what seemed a hundred years I bent down—and touched it. In books it always says that when they’re dead, their hands are cold as ice. Why do books tell such lies, K? … Her hand was warm.”

  He said, his lips rather white:

  “It is a curious literary tradition. Actually, one must be dead for quite a number of hours before the—the body is cold.”

  Tess murmured in a small, dreadful, absent voice:

  “It didn’t make any difference, really—I knew that she was dead. But I couldn’t let anyone else see her until I was absolutely sure. Her bag lying there, half open, with her lipstick and cigarette box and her little white enamel mirror … I remembered what you’d said about mirrors, and I turned her head over on my arm and held it quite close to her lips.… It stayed as clear as though it had been polished.”

  He came to her swiftly, taking both her hands in his. They were as cold as Fay’s should have been.

  “With all my heart I wish that I could have spared you that,” he said.

  “Yes.… Probably I shouldn’t have done that. Because ever since I’ve felt so dreadfully ill. And I can’t be ill. Not now. Not yet.” She released her hands very gently, and said, looking down at them, “I put her back just the way she had been, and lifted the bottle off the scrap of paper, and read it through three times. It was after the third time that I went across the room and telephoned to you. I was right; the receiver was off the hook. It was so long before you answered that I could feel my hair turning white down to its roots.”

  Sheridan said, very gently:

  “I am more proud, more glad than I can say, that it was I that you called tonight. But why, Tess, did you ask me to bring the black bag?”

  “Because I thought that you would need it.”

  “But no, my dear, since you tell me that Fay has killed herself, there is no need for anything in this bag. I need only to help you to get in touch with your doctor; he—”

  She said, very clearly, her eyes on the black bag:

  “I never told you that she had killed herself. She was—murdered.… Shall we go in?”

  She turned the handle where the “Do Not Disturb” sign still dangled its gay warning, and crossed the threshold with her long, light step, not stopping until she was half across the room. After a moment of rigid incredulity, he followed her.

  It was a far cry, surely, from the day nursery of the Stuart babies to the lucid, sophisticated charm of the great square room before him. All tawny buff and cream and black and silver, it looked as serenely self-assured as though it had just been sitting for its portrait to Country Life or House and Garden, sleek perfection from the miniature grand piano in the right-hand corner to the backgammon table by the door, ready and waiting with its square counters of malachite and lapis-lazuli, and its sturdy, lovely chairs of black and silver, that might have come from Malmaison or Pompeii. His eyes, servants trained to vigilance even when the sick nerves rebelled, moved alertly from the half-opened door at the left that led to Tess’s room back to the closed one at the right—the door to the room that not so long ago had belonged to Fay. This other one, quite close to him, must be the kitchenette. How mannered, artificial, and yet individual it all was—the glossy little gardenia trees in their crystal pots on tall black columns, blooming fragrant and thrifty on either side of the doors—the swift blue and silver and emerald gleams of the tropical fish, flashing lazily by through enchanted forests in the great curved tanks below the open windows—the books that completely framed the fireplace at the far end of the room, blossoming in a gay tapestry from floor to ceiling.… But even the books had been forced to flower only in emerald and jade and turquoise, black and sapphire and cream and silver. Even the love seats that flanked the Persian tiled fireplace … He halted, feeling something deep within him twist and sicken, but his eyes, relentless and unwearied, continued steadily about their business.

  She was lying curled up in the far corner of the creamy leather love seat, her head buried in the curve of her arm, so that only the bright clustering hair and the fairy delicacy of the close-set ear were turned towards them. So small—so small—no larger than a child of ten, surely, lying there with all the limp, confiding grace of a weary child, one bare hand dangling helplessly above the overturned glass. Even her hair might have belonged to a child, with its lustered, springing abundance and its gay color of daffodils shining in the spring sunshine. It looked as though it would smell of spring—and sunlight—and flowers.… He passed his hand over his eyes, set his teeth, and took a step towards her.

  She was wearing lounging pajamas made of some shimmering green stuff, cool and silvery and acid as young leaves in April, girdled about with a wide sash of turquoise blue that matched the childish morocco sandals with their absurd round toes. Like a little Persian page from a long-forgotten fairy tale—a little page dreaming contentedly of golden fish in a dancing fountain—of silver apples, high on a jade tree.… He took another step and lifted the swinging hand in his. It was still quite warm and flexible—so tiny in its boneless, velvety perfection that it seemed incredible that it should ever be cold, and quiet, and stiff. He circled the slight wrist with his fingers, his eyes on the thin trickle of liquid drying at the edge of the tall glass.… After a minute he let the hand swing free and rose to his feet.

  “The mirror did not lie,” he said. “God, what a world! … What is in that brown bottle, Tess?”

  She said tonelessly, her eyes on the bottle:

  “Hyoscine hydrobromide. You can see.… It’s printed on the label.�
��

  “Hyoscine? Now why in God’s name did she have hyoscine?”

  “Because I got it for her. It’s a sedative, isn’t it?”

  “You got it for her?” At the look on her face he pulled up sharply, checking the blank amazement in his voice. “As you say, it is a sedative—though hardly a usual one. Where is this note that you spoke of?”

  She made an almost imperceptible gesture towards the table where it lay in the halo of the lamplight, a little pale square no larger than the palm of her hand, covered with small black words as exquisitely precise as those in a mediæval manuscript.

  “She wrote always like that?” he asked incredulously. He could see the knuckles whiten in the hands that Tess Stuart had linked behind her back.

  “Yes; always. It’s a kind of printing that she invented when she was a little girl. She could do it like lightning.”

  “No, but it is amazing!”

  He stretched his hand toward it, and she cried with a sudden, appalling violence:

  “Don’t touch it. Don’t—don’t touch it!”

  He drew back, staring at her blankly.

  “But why not, Tess? You, then—you have not touched it?”

  She whispered, even her lips white:

  “No.”

  “But why not?”

  “I don’t know. Why didn’t I? … Why didn’t I? … I don’t know.…” After a moment she unclasped her hands, looked at them as though they belonged to a stranger, and said with a sigh of utter exhaustion, “I think that it was because I knew—I think that it was because even then I knew—that it wasn’t meant for me.”

  “Not for you? For whom, then, Tess?”

  “I don’t know.… If we knew that, we’d know everything, wouldn’t we? … But there are things in that note that simply can’t be meant for me.”

  “What things?”

  “That part at the end—the part where she says that she loved me. She didn’t love me. She hated me. And the part there, where it sounds as though she’d threatened before to commit suicide, and that I’d made her stop—look, here where it says ‘This is the end.’ That never happened, K. It couldn’t have happened, ever. Nothing, nothing in heaven or earth or hell could have made Fay commit suicide.”

  He bent his head over the little black words, his face rigid in its concentration.

  DARLING:

  It’s too bad that you couldn’t stay home for just one evening, isn’t it? Especially when you knew how horribly I needed to see you, after the rotten mess I’ve made trying to work things out by myself. Well, this is the end. I’m through. If you aren’t here by eleven I’ll go straight ahead and do what I told you—and this time you won’t be here to frighten me out of it. I don’t suppose that you’ll believe me, damn you, but darling, you’re the only person I’ve ever loved. Ever.

  FAY.

  He read it through, twice, without stirring, and when he finally looked up, the lines between his eyes had deepened.

  “Why are you so very sure, Tess, that Fay would not have killed herself? That is not the letter, I think, of a very happy person. Not even of one who cared much for life.”

  “She wasn’t happy. She was desperately, frantically unhappy. I don’t know how much she cared about life, but I do know how much she cared about death. She was simply insane on the subject; even the word made her sick with terror. I mean actually, honestly sick. I’ve seen her—oh, a hundred times—get up and leave the room because someone just mentioned it—and she wouldn’t come back. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t go to the theater—or the opera—or the movies—because she simply didn’t dare risk it. She’d close any book that had as much as the word on the page, and once when our car was caught in a traffic jam beside the hearse in a funeral procession, she fainted dead away.… It’s the only time she ever fainted in her life.”

  “I see. It was, then, a real complex?”

  Tess Stuart gave a rather dreadful little laugh.

  “You can call it any nice, scientific name that you want to; ‘obsession’ and ‘psychosis’ and ‘neurosis’ are pretty ones, too, aren’t they? I tell you that she was diseased on the subject; she was stark, raving mad. She’d have gone through every torture the Spanish Inquisition ever thought of—she’d have spent her life eating dry bread and drinking stale water—she’d have rotted to pieces from leprosy—before she’d have lifted one hand to kill herself.”

  His eyes traveled, slowly, from the tall, pale girl beside him to the small figure on the end of the sofa. When he looked back, he was as pale as she.

  “Do you know why she felt this terror?”

  “I know quite well, unfortunately.… When she was six years old, a governess who had a beautiful Swiss accent, three irreproachable Newport references, and a few complexes of her own tied her up to a bedpost and beat her into convulsions while she assured her that little girls who weren’t good—little girls who stole expensive perfumes from their excellent governesses—would go to hell when they died, and burn forever.”

  “I have never believed much in hell,” said Karl Sheridan evenly. “But I am quite sure that the good Lord will invent one where that excellent Swiss governess may burn through several eternities.”

  “I wish I were quite sure of it,” she said, with a deadly gentleness in her voice that went through him like a small, cold wind. “But I’m afraid that even Mademoiselle Neubahr can’t make me believe in hell. It doesn’t seem a very—witty—solution of the crime-and-punishment situation, does it? … But Fay believed in it, and she believed that she was going there. She hadn’t been a good little girl at all, you see; she’d done some things that were even worse than stealing Cœur de Jeannette.… She was only six when that happened, but that’s the first reason why she couldn’t possibly have killed herself.”

  “There was more than one reason, then?”

  “There were two, that I know of.… She was eight when she found my mother in the courtyard.” She put out her hand, steadying herself against the chair back. “You didn’t even know that my mother was dead, so naturally you don’t know how she died, do you, K?”

  He shook his head, a sudden dreadful premonition knocking at his heart as to just what the small, light, shining thing that had been Fay Stuart had found waiting for her in the courtyard eleven years ago.

  “She jumped out of a window,” said Tess Stuart. “Out of a third-story window. She had to, you see, because my father had locked her in her room and gone off to the office with the key in his pocket. She wasn’t the kind of a person that you can lock in a room.”

  “Tess,”—he came a step closer to her—“do not tell any more.”

  “I have to tell you. I have to tell you everything, because if I don’t, you won’t help me. I’m telling you this to show you why you must.… My father—my father’s a dreadful person, K. I have to tell you that, too, because I don’t think other people would; I don’t think they know. You have to be in his family to know—or perhaps his clerks and stenographers do, and the people who work under him. I’m not sure. If you talked to him, you’d think he was a very polite, rather flowery old thing; a little pompous and stiff, but quite intelligent and awfully pleasant. Really, he’s a devil and a bully and a monomaniac—simply glutted and obsessed with the importance of being Fuller Stuart the eighth. He’s like glass—cold and hard and empty. There’s nothing there to get hold of—nothing but coldness and hardness and emptiness around a little hot flame of pride.”

  “It is your father of whom you are speaking, Tess?”

  “Yes—my father.” She put her hands to her head, again pressing back the pale shining hair as though it were too heavy to be borne. “It was my father who locked my mother in her room that afternoon, so that she couldn’t have tea with the young man that he was pleased to consider her lover.… Such a nice, tall boy, K, with white teeth and an English voice. He used to come nearly every afternoon and read her respectful, impassioned little poems by Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore, and drink three
cups of strong tea with rum in it, and smile at her as though she were the Blessed Damozel herself. Mother always let me stay, too, to have my own special cambric tea and toast and marmalade. His name was Don.… I did so like him, K.”

  Karl Sheridan said:

  “He sounds like a good fellow—I can see very well why you would like him.”

  “Dad was off on one of his eternal commissions—Hayti, I think—and when he came back, Jules, his fine, thoroughly bribed butler, reported that Don had been there five times in the last week—and Father told Jules that when Don arrived that afternoon, he was to be informed that Mrs. Stuart had seen him for the last time in her life.… The police asked me quite a lot of questions about it all; I was eleven years old, you see, and not a bit stupid.… Dad locked Mother in her room at four. I’d gone over to drink cocoa and play charades with one of the Chilean minister’s small daughters and Fay was off roller-skating in Dupont Circle with the governess, a nice little curly-headed Scandinavian moron.… She skated on ahead through the back door into the courtyard—the governess had stopped on the corner for a good, animated conversation with a friend, and Fay knew that orders were to go in the back way if we had skates or bicycles.… And so she dashed straight on in, whooping like a good little banshee—and ran square into Mother.… She was eight years old, K, and simply mad about Mother. Everyone was, if it comes to that! But none of us ever saw her again except Fay and the police. They said that no one could see her—not possibly.… Fay screamed for three solid hours without stopping, and then she went off into some kind of stupor, just lying there and staring at everyone, with poor little crazy eyes and cracked lips that she couldn’t close. And from that day to this, she’s never mentioned Mother’s name.… Doesn’t that seem terrible to you, K? Mother, who used to climb two flights of stairs every night in her little high heels to kiss us goodnight and turn out the light.… Mother, who always smelled of iris and clove pinks, and had a dimple in her cheek, and lashes so long that they made shadows.… I’m not a coward, and it’s wicked of me, but, K, I’m glad—I’m glad that it wasn’t I who skated into the courtyard that afternoon.”