Two Flights Up (3 page)

She seldom saw him, but he made his presence felt in the house from the first. He whistled a great deal in his room—maybe to keep his courage up, for the bond business was not particularly good—and sometimes on the stairs, until the atmosphere of terrible good breeding over the place caught him about halfway up or down, and he stopped.

Now and then through an opened door he saw the tea table in the drawing room, but he was never asked in for tea again. The three ladies would be sitting there, Mrs. Bayne erect and Aunt Margaret sewing at her “fancy-work,” and the girl would be lying back in a big chair with her eyes shut.

There would be a genteel little trickle of conversation going on, but the girl did not seem to talk. If one of them saw him she would bow politely, but that was all. So far as sociability went he might as well have been cast away on an island. Better. There would have been no girl there.

As a matter of fact, he got to worrying about the girl. She was so lovely and so useless. And anybody could see with half an eye that they were just two jumps ahead of poverty, for all their airs. Why the devil didn’t she go out and get an honest job of work? She looked as if she had brains. Or marry the thin fellow who hung around?

Once indeed he took his courage in his hands and stopped at the drawing-room door. They had not heard him come in, and he saw at once that he had chosen an inopportune moment; the aunt was walking up and down the floor, looking flushed, and the girl had picked up the sewing and was being useful for once. Mrs. Bayne was rigid and upright in her chair.

Just as he got to the door the aunt was speaking:

“I’ve done the best I know how, I’ve slaved and worked to my limit. And now when I suggest a perfectly reasonable thing—”

He moved away hurriedly, but the conversation followed him up the stairs.

“I have simply said, not in my house.”

“Then where? On a park bench, I suppose!”

“Don’t be vulgar, Margaret,” said Mrs. Bayne coldly.

Later on, when peace seemed to be restored, he went down again with his belated invitation to the movies, but Mrs. Bayne declined.

“We never go,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

He felt a strong inclination to slam the front door as he went out, but he did not. He had seen Holly’s face, and perhaps for the first time he had an inkling of what her life might be.

H
E DISAPPROVED OF THEM
all, but the household began to interest him considerably. After all, a man cannot live in a family without establishing some sort of tangential relationship. And not only were they mysterious; he fancied they were in trouble. He began, too, to be conscious that the girl was not the idler he had thought her.

He never saw a servant about, nor did he ever see any evidence that any of them laboured, save Margaret. But before he got downstairs in the morning the hall and steps had already been cleaned for the day. Somebody rose very early, and he thought he knew who it was.

One afternoon he came home to find Brooks’s car at the curb, and laughter and cheerful talk in the drawing room. The tone of the house lifted after that, and as he was no fool he connected the two, not without bitterness.

Then, an evening or so later on, he came home rather late to find Margaret in the vestibule, looking cold and exceedingly unhappy.

“I’ve been ringing,” she said, “but I suppose they are asleep and don’t hear.” She remembered then that Warrington, like Mr. Brooks, was supposed to believe in a Hilda, and added something vague about servants in general. He admitted her, and she scuttled in and up the stairs before he saw her face, but he had an idea that she had been crying.

He began to feel that he was, in a small way, sitting on a volcano, and about as helpless as though he had been.

“Hang it all,” he reflected as he wound his watch that night, “if it wasn’t for their sickening pride a man could
do
something!”

Up to that time his conversation with them had been strictly of the yea, yea, and nay, nay order. So far as he had seemed to impress himself on their lives he might far better have been a stray dog they had taken in. As a matter of fact, he was almost exactly that, he reflected. It was a watchdog they had wanted.

But Holly’s problem was becoming fairly clear to him. If it had not been, a conversation he overheard through Margaret’s transom one night would have enlightened him. He was in his big chair by the empty hearth, reading, when Mrs. Bayne came up and into Margaret’s room.

He had never seen her do that before. His room was cold, and he had left the door open; such heat as there was seemed to come up the staircase well. So he heard some things that set him to thinking.

At first Mrs. Bayne’s voice was low, but it rose gradually.

“I’ve had disgrace enough,” was the first he heard. “Any more will kill me.”

“That depends on what you call disgrace. You don’t think it’s disgraceful to try to marry Holly to that popinjay. I do.”

“I’m warning you. If you do it, I’m through, Margaret. And Holly’s through too. Have you thought of that? Do you suppose Furness Brooks would stand for that?” Her voice softened. “It’s her only chance, Margaret.”

He closed his door then, feeling as uncomfortable as though he had been willfully listening; and after he had undressed and put out his lights, he stood by his window thinking things over. Damn the house, anyhow! All he had asked of it was peace and a roof, and all he was getting was the roof. He stood, tall and broad in his pajamas, and stretched out his arms to their full muscular length. He was ready to crush a mountain, and all he had were the molehills of quarrelsome women.

But he lay awake for a long time, wondering how Margaret proposed to disgrace the family.

Time went on. He came and went; he began to nod to Mrs. McCook, sweeping the pavement across the street; now and then he bought some apples at Simmons’s grocery and carried them home in a paper bag; and sometimes he walked to the car with Mr. Williamson, the life-insurance agent in Eighty-seven. He was a part of the street more than of the house he lived in, at that time.

If he felt an increasing resentment at the sight of Furness Brooks’s car as he turned the corner on his way home, he kept it to himself. There was perhaps less spring in his step those days as he walked along, but that was all.

He recognized that of the three women in the house, occupied with their mysterious troubles, Mrs. Bayne showed the least strain. Holly seemed thinner, and Margaret was almost always in her room now. When he saw her, she startled him; she was gaunt and hollow-eyed, and there was a set look of despair on her face.

One day he was shocked, passing Mrs. Bayne’s door, to hear Holly say:

“But why? Why? You—you aren’t omnipotent, Mother. You’re not—God!”

“Oh, Holly!” Mrs. Bayne wailed. And then a loose step on the staircase had creaked, and there was a sort of stricken silence. Margaret’s door had been closed when he reached the top floor.

He slept badly that night, and at two o’clock he roused with a start and sat up in bed. There was a faint odour of escaping gas in his room. He got up and went out into the hall; it was stronger there, and suddenly he thought of Margaret across the hall. Of course it was silly, but there it was.

He knocked at her door, and receiving no answer, he opened it. It was dark, and there was no odour of gas at all, so he quietly closed it and went downstairs.

As he went, the gas was stronger; it was quite thick in the lower hall, as if it came from the kitchen. To save his life he couldn’t find a light switch. He had been in the house three months, but beyond his first visit, he had been politely restricted to the hall and the two flights of stairs to his room, so that he had to guess his way to the rear. Of course he didn’t dare to strike a match.

He bumped into the dining-room table, found the swinging door into the pantry, and another door which should have opened into the kitchen. But it did not, for it was locked from the other side.

That scared him. He got back into the hall and tried another door there which he had just remembered, but it was locked too, and whatever he may have thought before, he knew now that sheer stark tragedy was on the other side. Somebody was locked in there—deliberately locked in.

Afterward he had no very clear memory of what happened. He ran out the front door and along the narrow side entry to the kitchen door, but it was locked too. However, there was a window, and he broke the glass. Gas came pouring out at once, but he took a long breath, opened the catch and raised it, and crawled in. He fell over something almost immediately.

All this, you see, in the dark. He hadn’t an idea who it was, except that he was fairly sure it wasn’t Mrs. Bayne. All the time he was opening the doors and letting the air in, he was feeling pretty sick, for a horrible fear was eating him. He thought it might be Holly.

But it wasn’t Holly. It was Margaret, neatly stretched out on the worn linoleum, with all the burners of the gas range open and a cushion from “Hilda’s” rocking chair under her head. She had put on her one good pair of silk stockings and her beaded slippers, and had evidently intended to die like a lady. Her left hand was tightly clenched.

However, she was not dead.

M
ARGARET WAS ILL FOR
some time. Nobody explained anything to him, but now and then he met Holly on the stairs with her tray, and there was a queer, absent look in her eyes. Once he met her in the lower hall and carried the heavy tray for her; she followed docilely enough, and when he gave it to her at the top, he said:

“That’s too heavy for you. Why not let Hilda carry it?”

But she only said: “Thanks very much.” And added, as if it were forced out of her: “You are very kind, always.”

From the night he had broken his way into the kitchen and thought it might be Holly, he had never fooled himself at all. He was in love with her, ridiculously, sickeningly. He was in love with her. He did not even approve of her, except now and then; he thought she was idle and inbred. He compared her with his mother and sisters back in Elkhart, Indiana, and he knew she was all wrong. But there it was. He thought about her at night, sitting in his chair, and got up and stamped off to bed, as if he would crush the wretched thing under his feet, only to waken up and think about her again.

“The sooner she marries Brooks, the better,” he told himself. “This isn’t sane. I’m not sane. I’m not getting enough exercise.”

He took to going to the Y.M.C.A. gymnasium after office hours. He would come home after that, to put on a clean collar and get ready to go out for his evening meal, at the Sign of the Red Rose around the corner. But if he left his door open, he often heard Margaret and Mrs. Bayne coming up, and knew that they had left Holly alone with Furness Brooks.

One evening he accidentally knocked Mr. Brooks’s hat off the table and put his foot on it, and went out somewhat cheered, but feeling slightly silly. And on that very night he took the second step which was to involve him so hopelessly later on. The first, of course, was the day he took the room.

He went out of the house in rather an unpleasant humour, as has been indicated, and at the small brick-paved side passage that had once had a sign on it, “Tradesmen’s Entrance,” somebody was standing. Even in the light of the street lamp, which made a sort of polished shield on the shining pavement below it and left the regions outside of it entirely dark, he did not at first recognize Margaret.

She had a shawl over her head, and her face looked white and strained.

“Mr. Warrington,” she said, in a half whisper.

He stopped, of course, and then he knew her. “You oughtn’t to be out here, you know,” he told her. “It’s cold to-night.”

She said something about only being there for a minute, and then stepped out onto the paving and looked up at Mrs. Bayne’s windows. They were lighted, and she seemed relieved.

“I wonder—” she began. “I hate so to bother you, but I can’t get out, and there is something I ought to do. Want to do,” she corrected herself. “I was to meet somebody tonight. A man. A friend.” She was breathless. She put a hand to her flat chest and, as if the very words were treasonable, looked up at the windows once more.

“And you’re not able to? Is that it?”

“I’m not very strong yet, and besides—”

“Where were you to meet him?” She told him, still in the hushed, breathless voice.

“I don’t know what you’ll think of me,” she finished. “My sister doesn’t like him—doesn’t approve of him, rather. But it’s all right. It’s really all right.”

“Why, of course it’s all right. Why shouldn’t you have a friend if you want one? It’s your life, you know. You’ve got to live it.”

It struck him later on that that was hardly a tactful speech, considering how nearly she had come not to living it at all. But she did not seem to mind it. She gave his arm a furtive touch, and a moment later she had disappeared into the passage again.

He went on, pondering the situation. So Margaret had a lover, after all! Queer! You never could tell whom the thing would strike. Looking at her, he’d have said—

So that was why he had found her in the kitchen, almost lifeless! Her one chance, perhaps, and her sister would not let her take it. Well, he was for her; for her and the Mr. Cox who was to meet her outside the Palace picture house that night. Not a young man, she had described him; he was to have iron-gray hair and probably a soft gray hat, but maybe a cap. Sometimes he wore a cap; it was less trouble in the movies. And he would be walking about, waiting.

He thought a great deal about the affair as he ate his dinner. He did not know a great deal about love, but somehow he had always thought of it as concerning only the young. Apparently he had been wrong. It went on and on. One might have the damnable pain at any age. There was no immunity. Maybe you fought your way out of one torture only to meet up with another later on.

He felt very low in his mind, and even reflecting on Furness Brooks’s hat no longer comforted him.

He found Mr. Cox without any trouble. He was a commonplace-looking little man, and the commonplaceness was not decreased by the fact that that night he wore the cap. As the vessel of a romantic and clandestine passion he was disappointing, but there was a sort of belligerent honesty about his face that Warrington approved of.