The Spiral Staircase (11 page)

And all these complex passions were slowly merging on one person whom she believed to be the other woman in the case. She was obsessed with the idea that Stephen was turning her down for the sake of the flaxen-haired barmaid at the Bull.

The help, in spite of her new frock, might have been invisible, for she passed her without the slightest notice. And when Helen reached the kitchen, Mrs. Oates also received her with silent gloom.

It seemed as though the mental atmosphere of the Summit was curdled with acidity.

“You won’t have to hold back dinner much longer,” said Helen in the hope of cheering Mrs. Oates. “The doctor will soon be gone.”

“It’s not that,” remarked Mrs. Oates glumly.

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Oates.”

“What’s he done?”

“Nothing. But he’s always here, night and day, so that, a woman can’t never be alone. Don’t you never get married, miss.”

Helen stared at her. She had always admired the goodnature with which Mrs. Oates accepted her husband’s laziness and supplemented his efforts. Although he did not pull his weight, she always made a joke of it, while a rough, but real, affection turned their partnership into very good company.

“It’s for better, or worse,” said Helen tactfully, “and I can understand Mr. Oates grabbing you; because he could see you were a ‘better’. Now, I can’t see the man who’d marry Nurse Barker… . I wonder if she drinks.”

“Eh?” asked Mrs. Oates absently.

“Well,” shrugged Helen, “she was probably right to insist on having the brandy, even if Miss Warren does say that the oxygen is Lady Warren’s life.”

Mrs. Oates only stared at Helen-her brow puckered as though she were grappling with a complicated sum in vulgar fractions. Presently, however, she finished her calculations, and gave her own jolly laugh.

“Well, you don’t often see me under the weather, do you?” she asked. “And, talking of husbands, the best is bad, but I’ve got the best… . Now, my dear, just listen for the doctor. Directly he goes, I want to slip upstairs with a bit of pudding for Nurse.”

Helen vaguely resented the attention as treachery to wards herself.

“Take her tipsy-cake, to go with her brandy,” she ad vised.

“Now, somebody’s on her hind-legs.” Mrs. Oates laughed. “But she’s got to go through the night on only a snack. She may look like a slab of stale fish, but a nurse’s life is a hard one.”

Helen felt ashamed of her resentment, as she waited on the kitchen stairs, which was her listening-in station. She was still puzzled by Mrs. Oates’ changes of mood, for she was not temperamental by nature.

For no explicable reason, she swayed to and fro, like a weathercock. Whence came the mysterious wind which was blowing on her?

“There’s something wrong about this house, tonight,” decided Helen.

Hearing Dr. Parry’s voice in the distance, she shouted to Mrs. Oates, and dashed up into the hall. Directly he saw her, Dr. Parry came to meet her. His face was red and he bristled with suppressed anger.

“Miss Capel,” he said, using the formal voice of a stranger, “if there is any question of your sleeping with Lady Warren, tonight, understand, I will not sanction it.”

Helen realized, at once, that Nurse Barker had overreached herself with her high-handed methods. Although her heart sang at her release, experience had taught her the advantage of appealing to the fount of authority.

“Yes, doctor,” she said meekly. “But if Nurse Barker goes to Miss Warren, she’ll get her own way.”

“In that case,” he said, “I’ll go straight to the Professor. No woman shall bullyrag me. If there’s any opposition to my orders, some other doctor can take the case. I only hang on, because my own mother—the dearest soul—had a tongue which would raise a blister on a tortoise’s back. For her sake, I’ve a bit of a weak spot for the old b-blessing.”

Helen drew back when they reached the Professor’s study.

“Come in with me,” said the doctor.

In spite of her awe of the Professor, Helen obeyed eagerly. The curiosity which would have propelled her to visit any strange and savage beast in its lair, made her anxious to see her employer in his privacy.

She was struck by the resemblance to Miss Warren’s room. Like hers, the furniture was merely incidental to the books and papers-supplemented in the case of the Professor, by files and shelves of volumes. of reference. There was no trace of the comfort usually characteristic of a man’s den—no shabby Varsity chair, no old slippers, or tobacco-jar.

The Professor sat at his American roll-top desk, his finger-tips pressed against his temples. When he looked up, his face appeared blanched and strained.

“Headache?” asked the doctor.

“So-so,” was the reply.

Helen bit her tongue to keep back her impulsive offer of aspirin, as she felt that professional advice should take preference.

“Take anything?” asked Dr. Parry casually.

“Yes.”

“Good… . The new nurse wants Miss Capel to take duty, tonight. I forbid it. Lady Warren’s heart is in a bad way, and she is in too critical a condition to be left in the charge of an untrained girl. Will you see that this order stands?”

As he listened, the Professor kept his fingers pressed over his eyeballs.

“Certainly,” he agreed.

When they were outside, Helen turned to the doctor, her eyes limpid with gratitude.

“You don’t know what this means to me,” she said.

“You—”

She broke off at the shrilling of the telephone-bell. As the instrument was in the hall, she rushed to answer it.

“Hold on, please,” she said, beckoning to Dr. Parry. “The call’s for you. Someone’s ringing up from the Bull. He asked if you were here.”

With her evergreen interest in the affairs of others, she tried to reconstruct the inaudible part of the conversation from listening to Dr. Parry’s end of the line.

“That you, Williams?” he asked. “What’s the trouble?”

His casual tone dulled to incredulity, as he heard, and then sharpened to a note of horror.

“What? … Impossible… . What a horrible thing. I’ll come at once.”

When he hung up, his expression testified to the fact that the telephone-message had proved a shock. While Helen waited for him to speak, Miss Warren came into the hall.

“Was that the telephone-bell?” she asked vaguely.

“Yes,” replied Dr. Parry. “Do you remember a girl Ceridwen Owen-who used to work here? Well, she’s dead. Her body has just been discovered inside a garden.”

AN ARTICLE OF FAITH

As Helen heard the name, she remembered the gossip in the kitchen. Ceridwen was the pretty sluttish girl, who used to dust under Lady Warren’s bed, and whose lovers waited for her, outside the house, with, the patient fixity of trees. She believed she had actually seen one of them in the plantation, whose vigil had certainly proved in vain.

“Rum thing,” said Dr. Parry. “Williams says that when Captain Bean was coming home from market he lit a match to find the keyhole. That’s how he chanced to see her-huddled up in a dark corner of his garden. He came, at once, hell-for-leather to the Bull, and ask Williams to ring my house. My housekeeper told them to try the Summit.”

“Very shocking,” observed Miss Warren. “I suppose it was some seizure. Her color was unusually high.”

“I’ll soon find out,” announced Dr. Parry. “What beats me is this. The Captain’s cottage is only the other side of the plantation. Why didn’t he come over here, instead of running nearly a mile to the Bull?”

“He had quarrelled with my brother. The Professor pointed out a scientific slip in one of his articles. And I believe there was trouble with Mrs. Oates over some of his eggs.”

Dr. Parry nodded with complete comprehension. Captain Bean was a morose and hot-tempered. recluse, who would reject Einstein’s Theory and the charge of supplying a bad egg with equal fury. He kept a small poultry-farm, did the work of his cottage, and wrote articles on the customs and religions of native tribes in unfrequented quarters of the Globe.

Dr. Parry knew that his life of isolation tended to a lack of perspective, which would exaggerate a trifling grievance to the intensity of a feud; and he guessed that he would prefer to plough through torrential rain rather than ask a neighbor for the use of his telephone.

“I’ll cut across the plantation,” he said. “It will be quicker. I’ll come back for my bike.”

The booming of the dinner-gong speeded his parting, but he left a sense of tragedy behind him. When the family was gathered around the table in the dining-room, the subject of Ceridwen cropped up with the soup.

Newton and his wife were not interested in the death of a domestic, but Stephen remembered her.

“Wasn’t she the lass with the little dark come-hither eye and a wet red mouth?” he asked. “The one Lady Warren coshed?”

“An animal type,” remarked Miss Warren. She hastened to add, in a perfunctory voice, “Poor girl.”

“Why-poor?” asked Newton aggressively. “We should all envy her. She has achieved annihilation.”

“‘Healed of her wound of living, shall sleep sound,’” murmured his aunt, adapting the quotation.

“No!” declared Newton. “No sleep. Too chancey a proposition. One might wake again. Rather—‘I thank with brief thanksgiving whatever gods there be, that no life lives forever, that dead men rise up never, that even the weariest river—’”

“Oh, dry up,” broke in Stephen. “Even a river does that, when it’s been in the sun.”

“But unfortunately, I am not drunk,” said Newton. “No one could be, in this house.”

“There’s always the Bull,” Stephen reminded him.

“And a devastating barmaid,” said Simone, with meaningin her voice.

“Oh, Newton knows Whitey all right.” Stephen grinned. “But I’ve cut him out. I always do that, don’t I, Warren?”

Helen was glad of any interruption, however uncomfortable. It had been distasteful to listen to a dreary Creed of Negation when every cell in her body rejoiced in life. What had hurt her even more, was the hint at a denial of the soul.

Her submerged sense of hostess made Miss Warren rouse herself from her dream. Although she was unconscious of Stephen’s provocative grin, Simone’s slanting glances of passion, and Newton’s scowl, she was aware of some poisoned undertow. She changed the subject, after looking across at the Professor, who sat with his eyes covered by his hand.

“Is your head aching again, Sebastian?” she asked.

“I hardly slept last night,” he said.

“What are you taking, Chief?” enquired Newton,

“Quadronex.”

“Tricky stuff, Better be careful of your quantities.” A sarcastic smile flickered round the Professor’s dry lips.

“My dear Newton,” he said, “when you were an infant you squalled so ceaselessly that I had to administer a nightly sedative, for the sake of my work. The fact that you survive is proof that I need no advice from my own son.”

Newton flushed as Stephen burst into a shout of laughter at his expense.

“Thank you for nothing, Chief,” he muttered. “I hope you manage your own affairs better than you did mine.”

Helen bit her lip as she looked round the table. She reminded herself that these people were all her ethical superiors. They were better-educated than herself, and had money and leisure. The Warrens had intellect and culture, while Simone had travelled, and had knowledge of the world.

She always sat silent through a meal, since it would require moral courage for her to take any part in the general conversation. Miss Warren, however, usually made some attempt to include the help.

“Have you seen any good Pictures, lately?” she asked, choosing a subject likely to appeal to a girl who never read the Times.

“Only films of general interest,” replied Helen, whose recent visits to a Cinema had been confined to the free show at Australia House.

“I saw the Sign of the Cross, just before I left Oxford,” broke in Simone. “I adore Nero.”

The Professor showed some signs of interest.

“Sign of the Cross?” he repeated. “Have they revived that junk? And does the proletariat still wallow in an orgy of enthusiasm over that symbol of superstition?”

“Definitely,” replied Simone. “The applause was absurd.”

“Amusing,” sneered the Professor. “I remember seeing the Play-Wilson Barrett and Maud Jeffries took the leading parts with a, fellow-undergraduate. This youth was devoted to racing and completely unreligious. But he developed a sporting interest in the progress of the Cross. It appealed to him as a winner, and he roared and clapped, in its scene of ultimate triumph, while the tears rained down his face in his enthusiasm.”

The general laughter was more than Helen could bear.. Suddenly, to her own intense surprise, she heard her own voice. “I think that’s-terrible,” she said shakily.

Everyone stared at her surprised. Her small face was red, and puckered up, as though she were about to cry.

“Surely a modern girl does not attribute any virtue to a mere symbol?” asked the Professor.

Helen felt herself shrivelled by his gaze, but’ she would Not recant.

“I do,” she said. “When I left the Convent, in Belgium, the nuns gave me’ a cross. It always hangs over my bed, and I wouldn’t lose it, for anything.”

“Why not?” asked Newton.

“Because it stands for—for so much,” faltered Helen.

“What—exactly?”

Helen felt tongue-tied, under the battery of eyes.

“Everything,” she replied vaguely. “And it protects me.”

“Archaic,” murmured the Professor, while his son continued his catechism.

“What does. it protect you from?” he asked.

“From all evil”,

“Then as long as it hung over your bed I suppose you could open your door to the local murderer?” laughed Stephen.

“Of course not;” declared Helen, for she stood in no awe of the pupil. “The Cross represents a Power which gave me life. But it gave me faculties to help me to look after that life for myself.”

“Why, she believes in Providence, too,” said Simone.

“She will tell us next she believes in Santa Claus.” Hard-pressed, Helen looked around the table. She seemed ringed about with gleaming eyes and teeth, all laughing at her.