The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  So that’s where those eighteen bottles had come from. That’s where the jovial doctor from Baltimore had come from, too.… He thrust away the glass that Mallory was holding out to him with so violent a gesture that Mallory caught at his arm.

  “Nothing, thanks—nothing—”

  “Here, I say, old man—what’s up? Carrie Nation’s dead and buried, if you hadn’t heard the news.”

  Dead and buried; yes.

  “Ten thousand pardons, Mallory; I’d just remembered something, and it knocked everything else clean out of my mind. This is mine? It looks a most admirable starter—and, as you say, the night is young!”

  But the night was old, and tired, and empty. It had lasted too long, he thought, even before it had begun.

  V

  Tea Party

  If Karl Sheridan had thought the night too long even before the Stirlings’ party was half over, by the time that Timothy’s low, obsequious knock sounded on the door the following morning, he knew all too well just exactly how eternity might taste on a reluctant tongue. It tasted bitter.

  He lay flat on his back for a moment, watching the breeze stir the crisp folds of the organdy curtains, and the pale gold of the sunlight deepening until it warmed and brightened every inch of the dark, satiny gleam of the fine old furniture. He had been watching it for a long time.… It made him think of Sunday mornings in Surrey when he’d awakened late to realize that it was holiday time and that he was in his English cousin’s nursery. Well, this was holiday time, too, and he wished, with a violence that jerked him up on one elbow and half out of bed, that he were safe back in the nursery.

  The knock sounded again, a little more insistently, and he pulled himself up against the pillows, calling in a voice that he hoped did not sound as irritated and embittered as he felt:

  “Very well, very well, come in, then!”

  Timothy was very small, and very black, and very, very old. He came in as cautiously and delicately as Agag walking before Samuel and placed the tray with its glittering load of silver across Sheridan’s knees with the same exquisite caution.

  “Good-morning, sah. Mr. Mallory’s ordahs was to bring the breakfas’ to you at nine o’clock. Ah hope that you found your night comfortable in every way?”

  “Thanks, Timothy,” replied the young man in the large four-poster bed noncommittally. “Mr. Mallory told me last night what excellent care you and Susan take of him, and if this breakfast is a sample of it, he has clearly understated the case!”

  He surveyed the frosty glass of orange juice and the crisp brown balloons of the rolls with undisguised approval, as Timothy whisked the cover off the miniature silver chafing dish with all the pride of a master prestidigitator, and a truly ineffable odor, bland and intoxicating, flooded the room.

  “Timothy, what in the name of all the good little gods of the kitchen is this ambrosial concoction?”

  “That, sah,” elucidated Timothy, beaming like a small ebony Cheshire cat as he poured a stream of black amber from the slender Georgian coffee pot and laced it generously with cream, so proudly clotted that he was obliged to spoon it from the round little jug, “that, sah, is kidney stew, treated like we treats terrapin in this vicinity. Are you acquainted with terrapin, sah?”

  “Unfortunately, no. I am beginning to believe that my past life has been an entire loss. And this brown pot that smells of fruit and nuts and flowers, what does it contain, Timothy?”

  “That there little pot, sah, holds some of Susan’s spiced peach preserve with white almonds that she put up last August. She is right sinfully proud of that preserve, sah.”

  “It would be sinful if she were not proud of it,” said Sheridan judicially. Propped against the glazed white of the linen pillows, his dark young face looked once more gay and relaxed. “As well as singularly stupid—and even without seeing her I am profoundly convinced that Susan is not only virtuous but possessed of the most penetrating intelligence. No one less endowed could have made these really remarkable rolls.… Does Mr. Mallory feast in this royal state every morning?”

  Timothy’s cat whiskers quivered with delight at this obviously sincere tribute.

  “He does pretty fairly well at breakfast, yes, sah. He runs a little more to crumpets and that bacon that’s more like ham that he gets from Ireland, but he came to have a right good appetite for spoon bread and waffles with chicken gravy a good while back. Shall I open those curtains a little bitty further, sah? It’s a right pretty morning out.”

  The sun, thus encouraged, poured itself even more recklessly into the pleasant, spacious room, lavishing its golden generosity on everything from the chintz that looked like a garden in full bloom to the black lacquer and glittering chromium accessories of Sheridan’s cherished microscope, now as comfortably installed on the long table opposite them as though it had been an integral part of the original scheme of decoration. It lingered, too, on the row of small objects marshaled before it, formal as museum exhibits. A three-inch cylinder of tooled brown leather. Three yellow pencils. A scant square inch of red glass, its edges taped in black. A little stack of papers securely anchored under his thin gold watch, but not so securely that the breeze did not catch and flutter the straying yellow edge of a telegram, revealing the corner of a gray envelope and a slip of creamy paper.

  There was another object standing at the end of the row, quite invisible to anyone save the luckless occupant of the bed—and to him more relentlessly and hatefully real than all the other detestable exhibits put together: a bottle of curaçao, half filled, the pale amber of the liquid cutting sharply across its label. Karl Sheridan bestowed a scowl of unqualified disapproval on the entire row and concentrated on his breakfast.

  They had been the last thing that his tired eyes had rested on as he had finally called it a day and a night, turning his face with a grimly weary determination to the wall, thoroughly fed up on the story that those small, stubborn objects were still trying to tell him. The sunlight on them then had been the youngest and shyest gilding, instead of this flooding opulence, but he cared for their cryptic confidences as little by one light as the other. Any one of a dozen people might quite possibly have sent to the hell that she feared that small shining creature known as Fay Stuart, they whispered insinuatingly; any one of four very probably had—and out of those four there was only one that it did not sicken him to the bone to think of sending after her.… Well, when he got this tray off him, he’d show them the proper place for inanimate objects, and put them in it, too.

  “And Mr. Hardy, whose room I have been so fortunate as to temporarily inherit,” he inquired casually, “did he also fare so sumptuously? If so, Susan must have passed busy mornings indeed!”

  Timothy’s wizened black countenance instantly assumed the uncanny, inscrutable glitter of a very small, aged, and intelligent monkey.

  “Mr. Jerry, sah? Mr. Jerry did not care much for his breakfast. Mos’ generally he did not have what you could rightly call a breakfast. He was—he was right poorly in his health.”

  “So I had heard. Rotten luck, poor fellow! He was by way of being an artist, was he not, Timothy? I wish that he had left some traces behind to remind me of it! Artists are a distinct hobby of mine—but the ones that I know are not so shockingly tidy as Mr. Hardy seems to have been.”

  His eyes wandered regretfully over the bare, palely tinted walls, over the shining, noncommittal spaces of the swept and garnished room.

  “Mistah Jerry is not what anybody in this world could call tidy—no, sah!” relied Timothy, softly emphatic. “Mistah Mallory, he come up hisself yestiddy afternoon, after he got back from that trip to New York, an’ clean up everything with Susan an’ me to give him a hand with the movin’ and the polishin’ and sweepin’. He was right anxious that everything should be spick-an’-span for you, so he pile everything out in that there hall closet where Mistah Jerry keeps a lot of the li’l’ doodads he fusses roun’ with.… Shall I come back for this heah tray, Mistah Sheridan, or do you like that I
should wait for it?”

  “Just wait, will you? I have only this one small bit of roll to finish, and I do not think it possible to move without bringing this whole glorious structure down with a crash.… There! That is farewell to the best breakfast that I or any other lucky fellow ever ate.… Mr. Mallory has not yet left for the embassy?”

  Timothy, halfway between door and bed, paused to shake a reassuring head.

  “No, sah. He have just finished his own breakfas’ when I brought you youah tray, and he ask me to tell you that he will step up an’ see you round half-past nine—befoah he goes along to the embassy.” He managed his exit through the door to the hall with the same catlike dexterity that he had employed on entering, and stood balancing delicately on his toes, one hand still on the doorknob, his head cocked appreciatively in the direction of the stairs, up which came floating the sound of a young, strong voice, thoroughly intoxicated by spring and its own easy, radiant swing. “That theah is Mistah Dion now. He has what I should call a mighty pretty singing voice, and he most surely does use it.… Shall I close the door, sah?”

  “On the contrary! He has what I, too, should call a mighty pretty singing voice. Leave it open, by all means, and a thousand thanks to you and Susan!”

  He leaned back, hands linked loosely about his hunched knees, watching Timothy’s minute figure vanish around the curve of the stairs—listening to the careless magic of the distant voice. The tune was changing, and for a moment he was standing again in the Stirlings’ crowded, smoky little room.…

  “When the felon’s not engaged in his employment,”

  caroled Dion Mallory with considerable abandon:

  “Or maturing his felonious little plans,

    His capacity for innocent enjoyment

  Is just as great as any honest man’s.”

  Sheridan, the lines deepening between his eyes, and the gray-green eyes themselves darkening to the curious black gray of rain-wet slate, reached absently for the cigarette case beside the bed.

  “Our feelings we with difficulty smother

    When constabulary duty’s to be done …

  Oh, take one consideration with another,

    A policeman’s lot is not a happy one!”

  No, thought Sheridan grimly, his eyes, watchful through the curling gray wreaths, fixed on the neat row of objects before the microscope—not a happy one.… Not, something clear and ominous as a bell tolled deep within him, in any possible case a happy one … no matter what that relentless row of small, ambiguous traitors eventually confided in him. That was about the only thing in the world on which score he was entirely clear.

  “When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done,

  The policeman’s lot is—not—a—happy—one!”

  Still listening to the full-throated mockery of the mournful plaint swell to a truly magnificent crescendo, the young man from Vienna ground out the tip of the half-finished cigarette with a valedictory gesture, and slipped, tightlipped, from the insidious shelter of the stacked pillows. For a moment he stood motionless, staring at the microscope and its attendant satellites, and, girding the cords of the darkly brocaded dressing gown twice about the lean, hard waist with a vicious tug, he crossed to the long table.

  “When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling,

  When the cut-throat isn’t occupied in crime—”

  He wrenched the center drawer open, sweeping his prize exhibits into it with a reckless dexterity that his alma mater in Vienna would have both admired and deplored, and slamming it to with a vigor that rocked him back on his heels.

  “He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling

  And listen to the merry village chime.”

  … In the bathroom just beyond, he turned the coldwater faucet on full tilt, plunging his head into the icy downpour, as though the crystal-green rush held blindness and deafness and oblivion in its healing torrent. But clear above the rush of the waters, another sound rose clearer still:

  “When the coster’s finished jumping on his mother,

  He loves to lie a-basking in the sun—”

  The sun.… Yes.… The sun was good, too. Had Fay Stuart loved the sun? Incredible, to be done with sun and moon and stars forever.… He lifted his head, swept the hair back from his brow in two curt strokes of the brush that left it dark and sleek as a seal’s flank, and stood scowling at the mirrored reflection.… What of that other face that the mirror had held prisoner a thousand times—that young, suffering face, at once gay and stricken—Jerry Hardy’s face, that Tess had said looked like a little boy’s, punished for something that he had never done? From the frame that stood on Mallory’s admirable Chippendale desk downstairs, it had already smiled a brilliant welcome to them when they had crossed the threshold of the sitting room in the extremely small hours of the morning. Sheridan had known without asking who he was, this blond and gallant boy, with the dimple barely flickering in the young curve of the cheek, and the Royal Flying Corps cap cocked recklessly on one side of his head.… But would the mirror have recognized even dimly the blithe lieutenant in the haunted face that of late had shadowed it, day after day, night after night? It was, decidedly, a highly dubious and not particularly pleasant speculation.

  There was a light clatter of feet on the stairs, and Sheridan, setting his teeth, retraced his steps swiftly and noiselessly across the bedroom floor. He had known for a long time that if you wanted someone to be entirely relaxed and at ease, the surest and simplest way to accomplish it was to be entirely relaxed and at ease yourself.… He particularly wanted Dion Mallory to be at ease.… There were several things that he needed to find out rather badly, and he could hardly fire questions like bullets if his quarry were on the wing.

  When Jerry Hardy’s friend crossed Jerry Hardy’s threshold, the policeman from Vienna was solidly and serenely installed in the four-poster bed, a book open on his knees, and the smoke wreaths mounting to the high ceiling.

  “Taking it easy, you lazy young devil?” Mallory’s voice was as warm and friendly as though the stranger from across the seas were a lifelong comrade. “How did Timothy do you at breakfast? Oh, God, Sheridan, I wish that you were in my boots, and I were in your bed! I never in my whole blighted life felt less like knitting official red tape into afghans for the blooming Empire. It’s the truth before heaven that if I don’t get my nine hours of sleep under my belt every night of my life, I’m no better than dead and buried the next morning! I’m no better than that this minute, and still and all in no less than that well-known split second I’ll have to be on my way like the prize carrier pigeon of the universe. Anything that I can do for you before I go, young fellow?”

  “Oh, many things!” replied Sheridan promptly. “The breakfast was incredibly admirable, of course, but there are still a good half-dozen things that I long to know about this mènage. Am I to take that bit about instant flight literally?”

  “Well, as one honest fellow to another, not if you can give me a fairly good excuse for staying! It’s a light day at the embassy, and if I check in anywhere around ten it will be quite all right. May I borrow one of those cigarettes? I’ve eaten the hearts out of my Gulaks these last few days, and there’s not a solitary crumb of one left in the house. Now then, if you don’t mind my cocking my feet up on our mutual furniture, I’m your humble and happy servant. What’s the first thing on your mind?”

  “As a starter, suppose you assume that, quite literally, all that I know about this more than delightful house is that I am fortunate enough to be in it. There is a sitting room next to this, I understand? Is that my private property? And what arrangement do we have as to lunching and dining?”

  “Good Lord, you must think that I’m the worst host this side of Tasmania! I clean forgot how little you knew about your own local habitation—as a matter of fact, I was so blind, deaf, and dumb with fatigue last night from my run to New York that the best that I could do was to point to your bed and fall into mine. The room next door is
your private property, naturally. If we’re ever in luck enough to both be here together instead of reveling about town in our best purple and fine linen, we’ll dine in my diggings below—if you’ll be affable enough to put up with me. Breakfast you already know about, and Susan will see that you get lunch here any time that you feel like it. Next, sir?”

  “Next, tell me something of this party that we are to attend tonight. At what hour is it, and do we wear black or white tie?”

  “Oh, I rather fancy that it’s dinner jackets with carnations on the lapels, and that it’s somewhere around eight, with the people dropping in somewhere around nine. You know the kind of thing—buffet supper on the terrace, quantities of very fairish champagne, and a swimming pool lit with blue moonlight, trick bars, elegant backgammon sets, and fiddles to dance to if you feel like dancing—and a little fellow with a little rolling-around piano who sings songs by Cole Porter and Noel Coward as though he were having an intrigue with the piano. All very romantic and festive and informal—gray caviar and pink chiffon and home at six in the morning if you’re lucky.”

  Sheridan selected another cigarette and eyed it pensively for a moment before he drew a leisurely match across the sandpaper of the packet.

  “It sounds a truly admirable party. Do the Lindsays always do you so well?”

  “As well or better. When it comes to parties, no one in these parts even touches them, and it’s a poor week that they don’t find a good excuse for giving one. This week it’s Jerry’s kid sister—she’s by way of being a first-rate actress, and she’s opening here in a try-out of Lonsdale’s new comedy at the National tonight, and dashing out to Green Gardens as soon as it’s over. Joan Lindsay and she went to Foxcroft together.”