Two Flights Up (2 page)

“I should think they would spill,” she said once to Aunt Margaret.

“It’s a pity they don’t,” said Aunt Margaret tartly.

She had a diagram in her hand and was putting down funny little cards at each place, each with a name on it.

At five minutes to eight Mother would come down the stairs and Father would follow her, and then, like the dining table, the staircase would begin to bloom. Ladies in evening dress would come up, give their wraps to the housemaid, all in black with a neat white apron, and wait for gentlemen who were laying off shiny high hats and overcoats somewhere else. From the third-floor landing Holly, looking down on them, had a curious impression of nakedness. Everything was lost to her from above but their bare shoulders, backs and bosoms.

On the hall table Otto had carefully laid out tiny envelopes, each with a tinier card inside it, and as each gentleman went down he received one, looked at the name on the card and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. It was the name of the lady he was to “take in.”

Up to the top landing would come a strange medley of odours, perfume and soup and tobacco smoke, and through it came Otto’s voice, announcing sonorously, “Mr. and Mrs. Wrigley,” “Miss Van Dusen,” “Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby-Jones,” and so on, and then there would be a procession of queer, foreshortened figures past the newel post below toward the dining room, and it would be all over.

She would crawl back into bed in the third-floor front room, to which she had been temporarily moved for the party, and the street lights would make strange shadows on the walls. …

On the day Warrington was to move in Holly stood in that same room and remembered those things. She had, curiously enough, no recollection of her father’s going away. He had not entered her daily life sufficiently for her even to notice his absence immediately. He might have been gone three days or a month before she asked her Aunt Margaret where he was. And Margaret had said:

“He’s gone away, dear.”

“Gone where?”

“He’s gone abroad,” said Margaret, after a moment’s thought. “I wouldn’t talk to your mother about it. She isn’t very well.”

For some years Holly really thought he had gone abroad. She was thirteen when they told her; they had to, then, because at the public school somebody had said something. Oh, yes, she had gone to the public school. When her mother had objected Aunt Margaret had insisted on that.

“You don’t want her an ignoramus, do you?” she had demanded.

So she knew. It did not greatly hurt her. She had been a quiet child, softly pretty, and as she was never allowed to play with the other children anyhow, she felt no ostracism. And then she had found a way to assert herself which puzzled them and left them at a loss.

“Holly, Holly, oh, my golly!” they would call after her.

And she would answer them in French.

“I despise you, and you cannot injure me,” she would say. It left them uncomfortable and thwarted.

She had, as she grew up, no world outside of the schoolroom and the quiet house where now her mother and Margaret lived and slowly “rotted,” as Margaret put it. Once a year the Parker car stopped at the door, and Sally Parker, Mrs. Bayne’s cousin, got out and came in. Sam, her husband, was making them a small allowance and had secured them the house. Occasionally, too, the chauffeur would leave a box, and after that for a while Mrs. Bayne or Margaret or Holly, as the case might be, would blossom out in fresh garments and maybe go to church.

Mrs. McCook, who kept boarders across the street, was not blind to these coincidences.

“I haven’t seen that before, Clara,” she would say to her maid of all work. “Come here and look. Did you notice that car here last week?”

And Clara would answer yes or no, as the case might be.

It was, as a matter of fact, due to one of Sally Parker’s madeover velvet suits that Holly had met Furness Brooks again. She had gone to St. Andrews, sitting well to the back, for the one-time despised mayor had taken the Bayne pew and become a vestryman. And Furness had seen her and asked who she was.

“Holly Bayne!” he said. “Why, I used to know her at dancing school!”

He had spoken to her afterward, and walked home with her. (Perhaps, to that list of names which were to alter Howard Warrington’s life and nearly wreck it, it would be well to add Sally Parker’s.)

A certain amount of all this went through Holly’s head that afternoon. The room was ready; it was swept and scoured and dusted. The big chair which had been moved up there when her father went away was by the hearth, although just why was problematical. They had not arranged to supply the roomer with a fire, so she had not laid one.

“If he wants a fire he will have to pay extra,” Mrs. Bayne had replied sharply to her suggestion. “When it’s cold enough, we’ll light the furnace.”

“I thought just as a sort of welcome …”

“If you start it you’ll have to keep it up. And what do you mean by welcome? He’s not entering the family!”

“No,” said Holly. “I suppose not. Still, he’s to be in our house. He’ll be a part of us, whether we like it or not.”

“Why? He’s not getting his food here. He’ll be in and out, that’s all, and mostly out.”

Margaret—this was in the drawing room at tea; they mostly had tea there and then no supper, or some bread and jam before going to bed—Margaret had smiled faintly over her sewing. But Mrs. Bayne had not noticed her; she seldom did.

The result of all this was that Holly was puzzled, as she surveyed the room.

She had never seen this young stranger, but soon he would be there. How did one treat people like that, who were in one’s house but not of it? She was still uncertain when she went downstairs to dress for Furness Brooks’s afternoon call, and later on that gentleman found her detached and unapproachable, and it rather fanned the ardour of his new flame.

“Seems to me somebody’s very quiet to-day,” he remarked, with an attempt at joviality.

“I feel quiet,” she said.

Mrs. Bayne, who was expansively present, looked at her with a certain irritation. If, as she frequently told Margaret, Holly was going to be silly about Furness, she was through. Simply through. It was the chance of a lifetime. So she might have said something sharp, but fortunately the bell rang just then and she smiled sweetly instead.

“You go, darling,” she said to Holly. “I dare say Hilda is busy.”

Yes, she had invented a Hilda by that time, poor lady, for Furness Brooks’s benefit. The first time she said it Holly had given her a hard, straight look, but after that she had let it go. It was so characteristic, and somehow so pitiful.

So Holly went, and the total result of Hilda plus uncertainty was that Warrington, landing bag and baggage on the doorstep, met with a reception rather different from what he had been led to expect. He was received, not by Mrs. Bayne, but by a very pretty but reserved young woman who greeted him unsmilingly, and who surveyed his bags in a cold and detached manner.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to carry those up yourself,” she said.

“I dare say that won’t permanently injure me,” he replied cheerfully. But she ignored that, and by the time he had carried in his traps she had disappeared.

It annoyed him, somehow. Hang it all, he was no interloper. They’d advertised, hadn’t they? Hang these decayed gentlewomen, anyhow. As for that girl—

“Probably hates it,” he reflected, as he staggered up under his burden. “Hates me, too. Too good to work; waiting for some man to carry her away from here and keep her!”

He was still muttering to himself when he breathlessly reached the top. But the room was comfortable, large and airy, and if the furniture showed wear it was heavy and well polished. He put down his bags and moved to the window.

He had a new sense, after much wandering, of peace and sanctuary.

“They won’t bother me and I won’t bother them,” he reflected, of the household.

But, oddly enough, they began to bother him almost at once. For, after nearly falling down a dumb-waiter shaft that night while hunting for a bath, in his pajamas and dressing gown he stealthily opened Margaret’s door by mistake. And Margaret was standing by her window, softly weeping.

He retreated into his own room again and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Now what the hell’s all that about?” he considered.

H
OLLY HAD GONE INTO
the hall, and from beyond the closed doors came voices and the sounds of bags. Mrs. Bayne rattled the china, but it did no good, and when Holly returned she sent her out again.

“Run and bring the toast, will you, darling?” she said. And to Furness: “Really, this servant question …”

“It’s the same everywhere,” he agreed. “The Barrs—the J. L. Barrs, you know—took a butler and two footmen to Florida, and when the parlourmaid left, they struck. Absolutely struck.”

Holly had said nothing when she came in, and now she went out again, still silent. For a moment he had thought she was going to say something, and he wondered if Mrs. Bayne had sent her out so she would not. Drat the woman, anyhow; she was always hanging around.

But Mrs. Bayne was speaking:

“Have you ever considered—is it one lump or two? I used always to remember, but nowadays I so seldom …” She sighed. “Have you ever considered, Furness, how alone we are here? Just three women, and no man in the house?”

Mr. Brooks felt a sudden cold dew on his forehead, and very nearly dropped the teacup.

“It must be lonely,” he managed.

“It is worse than that; it is hardly safe. There have been nights when I have not been able to sleep.”

“You might get a dog.” He brightened at the thought. “I might be able to get you a dog.”

She hardly heard that, so concentrated was she on her explanation.

“Well, I am happy to say that I have just changed all that. A very charming man, a broker, I believe, is to make his home with us from now on. A—a paying guest.”

“Now I call that downright sensible of you,” said Brooks, greatly relieved. “He’s a lucky chap.”

“I’m so very glad you approve,” said Mrs. Bayne.

And then Holly had brought in the toast, to find Mr. Warrington an accepted fact in the drawing room, and Furness Brooks’s prominent blue eyes fixed on her with a new speculation in them.

“What sort of fellow is he? Young?”

“I can hardly tell you. He’s that sort. Not of our world, of course, but what does that matter? We shall hardly see him.”

Brooks’s opinion, however, both of Mrs. Bayne’s sensibility and her powers of observation fell considerably within a day or two, when he beheld the paying guest on the doorstep. He was certainly young, and he was far from unhandsome. And the very fact that he produced a latchkey and admitted Holly’s suitor gave that gentleman an attack of inferiority complex that was as unusual as it was surprising.

“Coming in?” Warrington said, holding the door open.

Mr. Brooks passed him, eying him as he did so.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks very much.”

There was a certain aggressiveness in the way he laid his hat and gloves on the hall table, and nothing particularly pleasant in his prominent pale eyes as he watched the newcomer go up the stairs.

It seems probable that up to that time he had been merely playing with the thought of Holly. His visits there satisfied his vanity, and he often had a sort of godlike feeling with the older women. Out of his largess of news and gossip he fed them, and he bridged the gulf between their lost world and themselves.

But shortly after this incident he dropped in to tea at the Willoughby-Joneses and casually mentioned the Baynes. He was, so to speak, testing the ice.

“Bayne?” said that important lady. “You don’t mean Tom Bayne’s family? Don’t tell me you’re going there!”

The ice, he saw, was very thick.

“I drop in once in a while. They’re pretty lonely.”

“Well, they should be,” Mrs. Willoughby-Jones had snapped. “If I hadn’t happened to have overdrawn my account just then I’d have lost a lot. And most people did. Where
is
the money? Have they got it?”

“If they have they’re not spending it,” said Mr. Brooks. “And the girl’s rather nice, you know.”

Mrs. Willoughby-Jones eyed him shrewdly.

“It won’t do, Furney,” she said. “You’ve got your people to consider, and your friends. You can’t raise the dead, and Annie Bayne is socially dead. Has been for ten years.”

She was curious about them, however. There was a move on, she had heard, to get Tom Bayne out of the penitentiary. “His kidneys have gone wrong, or something.” She was opposed to it herself. They had spent a lot, the Baynes, but she never had believed they had spent it all. He probably had a good bit tucked away somewhere.

“How do they live?” she asked. “I know the Parkers help them, but it isn’t much.”

“They live like ladies. Of course, the house is getting shabby, but they keep a servant.”

“And three women there! I wonder if Sam knows that.”

He saw it was no good, and for a few days he stayed away from Holly. He was not ready to pay the price for her. But it was no use; before long he was back again.

Those few days, however, were trying ones at Ninety-one Kelsey Street. Each afternoon Holly’s mother made her dress, and small cakes from Simmons, the grocer, were brought in; each afternoon the three ladies foregathered in the drawing room and drank their tea, and Margaret hemmed her eternal napkins, holding her work close to her eyes.

At six o’clock or so Mrs. Bayne would sigh and, having glanced out through the curtains, go up to her bedroom, and Holly would clear away.

She began to wonder which was worse, to have Furness come or not.

“Why don’t you send Furness a note?” Mrs. Bayne asked one day. Holly’s colour rose.

“I can’t coax him back, Mother. Why should he come, anyhow? I never have anything to say to him.”

“You have plenty to say when he’s not around.”

Holly’s quiet world seemed to have been violently upset. Even Margaret was queer; she spent more time at the store than she used to, and alternated between a sort of secret happiness and long periods of despair, both apparently causeless. The only cheerful normal person in the house was the lodger.