Time Will Darken It (43 page)

“That
was
Dave Purdy, wasn’t it?” Austin asked.

Miss Stiefel nodded.

“Did you tell him I was busy?”

“No,” Miss Stiefel said. “He wanted to see Mr. Holby.”

“But I handle all his legal business,” Austin said. “Mr. Holby doesn’t know anything about it.”

“Shall I ask him to step in on his way out?”

“Never mind,” Austin said. And then, as she was leaving the room, “Will you let me know when Mr. Holby is free?”

Although he had not asked her to, she closed the door into the outer office, absentmindedly, perhaps. But it could also be, Austin realized suddenly, that she was following instructions from Mr. Holby—instructions based on the fact that the junior partner was socially no longer an asset to the firm.

When Miss Stiefel opened the door half an hour later, Austin was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, and she had to speak to him twice before he heard her.

“Mr. Holby is free now.”

Mr. Holby didn’t as a rule stand upon his dignity. If he knew that Austin wanted to see him, he came to Austin’s office. In a dull flush of anger, with the words of his resignation all framed in his mind, ready to offer if the occasion required it of him, Austin got up and went through the outer office. Mr. Holby went right on reading for a moment and then, glancing up, said, “Did you want to see me, young fellow?” He had not called Austin “young fellow” since the early weeks of their partnership.

Austin sat down. Mr. Holby offered him a cigar but no explanation of Dave Purdy’s visit. Austin was sure that Mr. Holby would have preferred to ignore the incident. Mr. Holby didn’t like explanations when rhetoric would do just
as well. When the occasion demanded—in cross-examination, for instance—he could get to the point with the speed and directness of aim of a rattlesnake.

“Dave Purdy came to see you instead of me,” Austin said.

Mr. Holby nodded. “He wanted to change his will. Nothing very complicated. I made a note of the change. Would you like to see it?”

“No,” Austin said, “if he came to see you about it, you’d better go ahead and handle it. What I want to know is if there have been any others?”

For almost half a minute Mr. Holby didn’t reply, and Austin saw that he was trying to make up his mind whether to take refuge in pompous vagueness or to speak frankly. In the end he took the cigar out of the corner of his mouth and spoke frankly.

“It’s the women. They’re out to get you.”

“Why? How do you know?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Holby said. “I only guess it; what usually happens when a man begins having trouble with his wife. They band together and take her side, and if they want to, they can do a good deal of damage in a business way.”

“But I’m not having trouble with my wife,” Austin said, with a rising sharpness in his voice.

“I didn’t say that you were,” Mr. Holby said blandly. “These stories start circulating, sometimes with no basis in fact, or at best a very slight one, and the first thing you know——”

“You’re sure that’s why Dave Purdy came to see you instead of me?”

“Positive.”

“Have there been others?”

Mr. Holby inhaled twice in succession on his cigar and then nodded slowly.

“Would you like to dissolve the partnership?” Austin asked.

“It may not be necessary,” Mr. Holby said. “It all depends on what happens. I mean between you and Martha.”

“But I tell you——”

“I know I can speak frankly to you,” Mr. Holby interrupted, “as one man of the world to another. Miss Ewing, I’m sorry to say, has done a good deal of talking. I’m no saint and I don’t know anybody who is, but you can’t expect to have an affair with another woman right under your wife’s nose and not get into trouble. I’m not blaming you for it. Miss Potter is a very attractive young woman and it was probably something that you couldn’t either of you help. What’s done is done, and there’s no use crying over spilt milk. We’ll——”

“If you’d just listen to me for a minute!” Austin exclaimed. “Miss Ewing is as mad as a March hare. She——”

“The time has come,” Mr. Holby said, “for
you
to listen to
me
. We’ll weather the storm, and I don’t mind telling you there has been a storm. It isn’t only a matter of people coming to me instead of you. Bud Ellis has served notice on me that he is taking his business to Chappell and Warren from now on. Well, let him, I say. It’s going to cost him a pretty penny before he’s through. Meanwhile, anything you can do to patch things up between Martha and you, I advise you to do. Take some time off. Take a trip with her somewhere. It’ll be all right with me.”

“I’m afraid I can’t afford a trip just now,” Austin said. “And Martha is expecting a baby in January, so I doubt if she’d enjoy it.”

“Suit yourself,” Mr. Holby said, and got up from his desk and went toward the hatrack. Standing in the door, with his overcoat on and his silk muffler neatly arranged, he turned and said, “If Martha would care to talk to me, I’d be very happy to see her at any time,” and went out, leaving Austin alone, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his eyes staring, and his anger with no outlet.

13

On the morning of the day before Christmas, Martha King did not come downstairs and the door of her bedroom remained closed. Austin stayed home that day and Ab followed him wherever he went, except that she was not allowed to use the basement stairs, which had no railing, and so, while he was searching for some boards to make a stand for the Christmas tree, she stood at the top and asked questions of the dark and dusty rooms below. With the wreath of holly on the front door, the red candles on the mantelpiece in the living-room and the study, and the tree lying on its side beside the icebox on the back porch, her mind was crawling with questions, the answers to which bred new questions that occasionally had to be repeated because Austin’s mind was taken up with matters that had nothing to do with Santa Claus.
Put her to bed and keep her in bed
, Dr. Seymour had said. The slight hemorrhaging had lasted only that one day, but the fear that it might begin again at any time kept Austin from sleeping, made him irritable and unlike himself. If she’s only all right, he said to himself as he came up the stairs with the boards for the stand; if she just gets through this last month without any more trouble, that’s all I ask.

With Ab after him, he went to the pantry and began searching through the drawer where the hammer should have been and wasn’t. I should have realized, he said to himself, that something was the matter, that it was different this time from the way it was before Ab was born. I should have gone and talked to Dr. Seymour myself. Instead of which, I was so immersed in my own affairs that I——“Frieda, have you seen the hammer? It should be here in this drawer.”

“No, Mr. King,” Frieda said from the kitchen. “You were the last person that used it. If it isn’t there, I don’t know where it could be.”

The Kings’ new cook was a middle-aged widow who had raised a family of five sons and then, just as she, was ready to sit back and be taken care of by them, they had one after another married. She was very religious, with thin tight lips and a streak of grey running through her hair. They ate early on Wednesday evening so she could get to prayer meeting on time, but that wasn’t of course the same thing as contributing to the support of foreign missionaries in far-off places like India and China, who would have been grateful (she managed to convey as she cleared the table) for the piece of gristle, the remainder of a slice of bread that Austin or Ab left on their plates.

The hammer turned out to be in the larder, a room that Austin King hadn’t been in for over a month.

“How does Santa Claus bring presents to children who live in a house where there isn’t any fireplace?” Ab asked at his elbow.

Austin answered this question to the best of his ability and then said, “Now if somebody hasn’t made off with the nails.”

“With his bag and all the presents?” Ab asked.

“Certainly.”

With the boards, the hammer, and nails, Austin went out to the back porch and saw a grey sky and soft rain descending. The ground, which should have been covered with snow, was soggy after a week of rain.

“How does Santa Claus get here in his sleigh if there’s no snow?”

“There’s plenty of snow at the North Pole,” Austin said, sawing at one of the boards he had brought up from the basement. When he had finished making the stand, he nailed it to the bottom of the tree and carried it through the kitchen, the pantry, and the dining-room, leaving a trail of pine
needles behind him, and discovered that the tree was too tall to stand upright in the bay window of the living-room.

He decided that, for the sake of the shape of the tree, he would have to rip the stand apart and saw another foot off the trunk. He dragged the tree through the house once more, and out on the back porch.

If she takes good care of herself, Austin said to himself, as he pried the stand apart, and if she gets plenty of rest. And if I see to it that nothing happens that could in any way upset her …

But suppose she does take care of herself and something happens to her anyway?
said the rain, the same slow steady rain that was falling on the graves in the cemetery.
Suppose you are left in this house? Suppose you have to go on living without her, the way other men have had to do who lost their wives?

She’s just got to be all right, Austin said to himself.

The stand, which had been all right the first time, now gave him trouble. The tree leaned to one side, and so he tried more nails, explaining meanwhile to Ab about Mrs. Santa Claus and her remarkable geese.

“And whenever she plucks one of her geese, it snows.”

“Then why doesn’t she pluck one of them now so Santa Claus’s sleigh will have something to run on?” Ab asked.

“Because nothing is ever that simple.”

“Why isn’t it that simple?”

The tree, when he stepped away from it, teetered and in a spasm of exasperation he threw down the hammer and cried. “Oh, Abbey, I don’t
know
!”

She backed away from him in surprise. He had never before spoken sharply to her and now, just when everything else was so confusing, it turned out that with him, too, there was a line that she must not cross. She looked at him as if, before her eyes, he had suddenly turned into a stranger. He picked her up in his arms and carried her into the house.

“You stay inside with Frieda,” he said. “You’re getting cold.”

He was once more her kind, patient father, but that did not in any way alter what had just happened.

She sat watching him from a remote sofa while he set the tree up in the alcove of the living-room. Her face was long and thin with reproach. When he sat down beside her and lifted her onto his lap, her expression changed gradually. He saw that she had forgiven him and that she had another question which she was afraid to ask. He was tired to death of questions, hers and his own and everybody else’s, and he sat holding her and looking at the bare Christmas tree. At last, feeling her so quiet against him, he said, “Well, Abbey, what is it?”

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