Two Flights Up (16 page)

For just a minute her mind turned to her husband. He had made her promise to send it to the Harrison Bank. Well, so she would, but there was no hurry about that, either. They would get it all except the one bond, or maybe two; surely that was little enough, considering what she and Tom had paid for it.

Out of her new peace and odd lightness of mind she pitied him. He had paid, over and over, and now he was sick. He had always loathed being sick; it had made him as sulky as a bad child. It seemed strange now to think that once he had lived in this very room, shared this very bed.

It would be even stranger, too, to have him back again. A little bit of coquetry revived in her; she wondered if she had changed very much. Her former fastidious distaste of having him back was softened. They would have to be kind to him, she and Holly. But Holly would not be there; she was going to be married.

She rose after a while and got her nail file and a clean handkerchief from her dresser. She had a dislike of soiling her fingers. Then from the mantelpiece she cautiously took down a candle, and, lighting it, went into the passage. Holly had not moved.

As Mrs. Bayne mounted the stairs, she felt dizzy and weak; her knees shook, and the candle wavered, but she went on and up, with a faint smile on her face. Up and up. Past Mr. Warrington’s door, carefully, carefully; the attic steps now, and a strong draught from some open window, almost blowing out the candle. And then the top of the stairs and the end of all worry. And treasure trove.

She placed the candle on the top of a packing box and set to work. The trunk had to be moved, and it would not do to drag it along the floor; she inched it over, lifting it first at one end and then at the other; a dozen, two dozen efforts, each of which made her dizzy and more shaken. But at last the boards were uncovered. Oh, sweet boards, oh, beautiful burden-lifting boards! She sat down and ran her delicate hands across them.

Then she lifted them.

T
HE CEREMONIES WHICH HAD
preceded Howard Warrington’s incarceration were of the simplest. He was taken before the desk of the police sergeant in the basement of the City Hall, booked as a suspicious character, and, after a superficial search, was placed in a detention cell, one of a dozen or so along a small cement-floored corridor—an interior cell, lighted only indirectly from the windows by the Sergeant’s desk outside.

As a place of detention it was admirable; as a sanctuary for rest and thought it was beyond words. There was a constant movement along the cement floor of the corridor outside, and in the cubicle next to him a little Italian, brought in with a demijohn of wine, alternately wailed and chattered to himself.

Police of various ranks came and went, their heavy voices echoing and reechoing. Men mopped the floor, rattled brass cuspidors and dragged chairs about. Over all was the thick odour of unwashed human bodies, poor sanitary arrangements, carbolic acid, and dead cigar ends.

He sat down on his bench bed and lighted a cigarette, and almost immediately men all about him began to beg for tobacco. He tossed a half-dozen or so across the passage, but one of them fell short, and there ensued a struggle between two Negroes to reach it. There was no humour in their efforts, but grim and desperate resolution; they stretched and panted, grunted and cursed, and on this strange contest a dozen other men gazed, their faces pressed against the bars.

Toward night he began to suffer from claustrophobia; in the dim light the cell seemed to be closing in on him, and the air to be heavy and unbreathable; he was covered with cold sweat. But he knew the claustrophobia was only a reflex of his own mental condition, his inner conviction that he was trapped and done for. Men did not suffer this ignominy to have it forgotten. They went on through life, marked men, shamed men. Guilt was news; but exoneration was buried in the back pages.

And who was there to exonerate him? Mrs. Bayne. Suppose he broke his promise to Holly and told them that? How could he prove it? And what would Holly do? He knew quite well what she would do. She would simply repeat that she had taken the bond herself and given it to him to sell.

Round and round. Round and round. The Italian wailed and babbled. Drunks came in, were shoved along the corridor and locked away. Then there was a scuffle going on outside, and a voice that seemed to echo out of some troubled dream. He sat up and listened to it. It was truculent, drunken, and familiar.

“You leggo me,” it was saying. “I’m all right. Wha’ the hell you doin’ anyhow? Leggo, I tell you.”

It was James Cox. Honest James Cox.

They dragged him past the cell and on to an empty one farther along. Warrington heard the metallic crash as they closed and locked him in, heard James stumble to his bed and drop on it, still thickly muttering, and later on heard his heavy breathing as he slept.

Early in the morning the cells were evacuated, and a shuffling line of men moved out along the corridor, for hearings, sentences, and fines. James Cox was among them, his head bent, his gait unsteady. As he passed, Warrington saw the bewilderment in his face.

At nine o’clock they took Warrington back to the District Attorney’s office. He had not shaved for two days, and he felt less a man for the dark stubble on his face. His linen, bad enough the morning before, was in deplorable condition, and opposed to him the District Attorney, newly shaven, rested and carefully dressed, had an advantage he was quick to feel.

“All right, Warrington. Come in.” And when he had sat down: “Well, you’ve had time to think. How about it?”

“I’ve had time to think, but that’s about all.”

“We don’t claim to run a first-class hotel,” said Phelps comfortably. “Still, you must have come to some sort of a conclusion.”

“I have, to this extent. I’ve got a right to an attorney, and before I make any statement I want advice.”

“That’s up to you. If you’re innocent you’ve got every chance, here and now, to come clean on the story. If you’re guilty, you’d better get an attorney, because you’re going to need one.”

“I’ll have the attorney,” he said doggedly.

The District Attorney sat back in his chair and eyed him keenly.

“Would it make any difference in your attitude,” he said, “if I told you Mrs. Bayne died last night?”

Warrington leaped to his feet.

“Dead!” he cried. “Dead! Good God!” He swayed as he held to the back of his chair. “Well, that’s that,” he said unsteadily.

“So it does make a difference?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess it ends it; that’s all.”

“Ends what?”

He made no reply. Hope was dead in him; there would be no confession now from Mrs. Bayne, no anything. If he claimed now that it was the dead woman who had given him the bond, they would laugh at him. Even Holly could not swear to that; she had only his word for it.

Holly! He steadied himself.

“I suppose I couldn’t go up there?” he asked, after what seemed a long time. “You see, I’ve been like part of the family, in a way. I wouldn’t like her—like them—to think I’m not—interested.”

“And incidentally to find out where you are, eh? Maybe to see Cox—”

“Oh, damn Cox!” he shouted suddenly. “What do I care about Cox? I don’t care if I never see him again. I’ve got a right to go, haven’t I? Look at me! I haven’t seen a razor for two days. I need linen. I don’t suppose you’ll lock me up indefinitely without any clothes, will you?”

He looked disreputable, tortured. His absurd anticlimax was an appeal, shouted in furious tones.

“We don’t want any more tricks, Warrington.”

“You let me go up there. After that you can boil me in oil, if you like.”

They let him go. Watching him, Phelps was certain that the death of Mrs. Bayne marked some sort of crisis in the affair, but what that crisis might be, he had no idea.

“You talk it over with the daughter,” he said. “If she’s ready to swear on her oath that she gave you that bond to sell, and the suitcase later on, she can clear you. If she can’t or won’t do those things—”

“She never saw the bond. I’ve told you that.”

T
IMES, LIKE THE STRUCTURE
of society, change; and neighbourhoods alter also. Holly could still remember her mother’s horror when Simmons’s grocery was established at the corner, and also that day, a year ago now, when the McCook family moved in at Ninety, across the street from the Bayne house, and at once advertised for boarders.

Mrs. Bayne from that time on had behaved precisely as though Number Ninety had been eliminated from Kelsey Street. She still recognized Eighty-eight and Ninety-two, but there was, according to her view, no Ninety at all.

But Ninety, after the manner of such affairs, was extremely cognizant of Ninety-one.

“Stuck up things!” said Mrs. McCook. “Believe me, Clara, I’m sorry for them. They’re that poor and dirty proud. Putting on all those airs, and like as not nothing to eat in the house.”

But although she might pity and scorn them, her interest in them grew rather than abated. Especially was this the case after she had learned their story at the grocery store. The first visit or so of Furness Brooks she observed carefully, and one day she confided to Clara that:

“The girl over at Ninety-one has a fellow. Not much to look at, either.”

“He’s got a car,” said Clara, as though that answered the objection.

At seven-thirty in the morning it was Mrs. McCook’s custom to take a broom and, stepping out of her front door, from there to survey her world. Not that it varied from day to day. At such and such a time Mr. Williamson would leave Number Eighty-seven, the morning paper tucked in his overcoat pocket, and start out on his campaign to see that widows and orphans were not left penniless, but were adequately protected by life insurance. At such and such a time would the Moriarity boy run to Simmons’s grocery for the bread his shiftless mother had forgotten the day before. Bright and early, too, her basket on her arm, Mrs. Kahn, at Ninety-five, would start for the Kosher butcher shop in the next block; and the front door of the Bayne house would open, and Holly, looking neither here nor there, would brush off the front steps.

But on one never-to-be-forgotten morning Holly looked across the street and smilingly nodded to her. If a queen in a gilded coach had leaned out and bowed to her, she could not have felt more thrilled. It was only a day or so after that that she heard Mrs. Bayne was ill, and that Holly had telephoned from the grocery for the doctor. That afternoon she baked a cup custard, and putting it on her best plate, carried it across the street.

When Mrs. Bayne herself opened the door, she almost dropped it.

“I heard you were sick,” she said. “I just thought—it’s custard. It’s kind of light and nourishing.”

“That was very thoughtful of you. But I’m quite well now,” said Mrs. Bayne.

“You might as well take it.
I
haven’t got any use for it,” said Mrs. McCook, holding out the plate.

And Mrs. Bayne had taken it, very graciously.

“That terrible woman!” she said later to Holly. “She just wouldn’t let me refuse it.”

“Why on earth should you, Mother? You wouldn’t resent a card of sympathy, or flowers.”

“But food! I won’t have her running in and out.”

“I don’t think it would ever occur to her,” said Holly, with slightly heightened colour, and let it go at that.

On the same night, then, that James Cox had tried to drown his misery in bad bootleg liquor, at about two o’clock, the McCook doorbell rang and Mrs. McCook sat up in bed and prodded her husband.

“There’s the telegram, Joe,” she said.

Her sister was expecting her first confinement, and Mrs. McCook had been on pins and needles, as she said to Clara, for the last week.

But Joe was heavily asleep, and at last she herself got out of bed and in her nightgown went down the stairs. At first when she opened the door she saw nobody; then, looking down, she discovered a figure crouching on the doorstep.

“For mercy’s sake!” she said, peering down, “Who is it?”

The figure stirred and rose.

“It’s Holly Bayne,” it said in a lifeless voice. “Have you a telephone? The grocery’s closed.”

“What’s the matter? Who’s sick?”

“It’s my mother. I think—I think she’s dead.”

“Most likely she’s just fainted,” said Mrs. McCook reassuringly. “You wait a minute, and I’ll come right over.”

She did not go back upstairs. She picked up an overcoat from the hall and threw it over her nightdress, and thrust her bare feet into a pair of overshoes.

“Nobody’ll see me,” she said. “And a bad faint ain’t to be fooled with. Did you lay her flat?”

“She was fiat,” said Holly in her strange crushed voice.

“Believe me or not,” Mrs. McCook told Clara the next morning. “I knew the minute I went in that door, that it wasn’t a faint. I’m queer that way. I could
smell
death.”

And death it was.

Mrs. Bayne lay in the attic almost as she had fallen; the candle had burned low, and in its small and dying blaze her figure looked larger, more majestic than in life. It seemed to fill the attic room.

She lay almost as she had fallen, but not quite. Holly had turned her over—so that now her quiet face was toward the light—and had thrown a blanket over her. And she had replaced the boards! Mrs. McCook, kneeling beside the body, was directly over them.

Mrs. McCook touched the forehead; then she got up.

“You’d better come downstairs, honey,” Mrs. McCook said gently. “I’ll get Joe over, and you leave the rest to me.”

“Is she—”

“I’m afraid so, honey.”

Holly sat once more in the chair by the dying fire. It did not matter to her that heavy footsteps passed the door, that in that hour strangers were moving about the house and she herself was alone. Nothing mattered but the incredible fact that her mother was dead, and that she herself had killed her.

It was the shock that had done it—the discovery that the suitcase was gone. A little care, and she need never have had that shock. Some other way, any other way than the one she had taken, and she might have saved her.