Two Flights Up (4 page)

“Your name Cox?” he asked.

Mr. Cox wheeled. “Yes. I guess you’ve got the advantage of me.”

“You don’t know me. I have a message for you. Let’s get out of this crowd.”

Outside on the pavement Mr. Cox fell into step beside him. He strode along, stretching himself to keep up with Warrington’s longer strides, for never, under ordinary circumstances, would he allow another man to outstep him. That was written all over him.

Outside of a jeweller’s window down the street they paused, and Warrington conveyed his message.

“She’s been sick?” said Mr. Cox anxiously. “Why didn’t she send me word before this?”

“I rather gathered that it isn’t easy to get word to you.”

“Easy! I’ll tell the world it isn’t easy. How is she now?”

“She’s better. She says next week will be all right. Look here, Mr. Cox, why don’t you get her out of there?”

“Get her out? Don’t you suppose I would if I could? Haven’t I tried for over a year?”

“Then get her,” said Warrington briefly.

Mr. Cox peered up at him, anxiety written clearly on his face. “Why do you say that?” he demanded. “Not that it’s any of your damned business, but if you know anything, you’d better tell me.”

His manner was truculent, his voice raised.

Warrington told him. He had all the average man’s objection to interfering in the affairs of other people, but the picture of Aunt Margaret on the kitchen floor rose in his mind and cut off all other thoughts. She wasn’t going to try that again, not if he could help it.

But he had not counted on Mr. Cox. Mr. Cox went berserk; he strode up and down the pavement, angrily talking and finally fairly shouting. Passers-by looked at him wonderingly; some dodged past, and others moved slowly, smiling. He was temporarily quite mad.

Warrington felt ridiculous—ridiculous and angry. He tried leading Mr. Cox away by the arm, but he would not be led. And finally a policeman wandered up, listened a moment, and then touched Mr. Cox on the arm.

“Better go around the corner and talk about your troubles,” he said.

It is doubtful if Mr. Cox even heard what he said. He came to himself, saw the hand on his arm, and stiffened.

“Take your hand off me,” he yelled.

The policeman’s smile died. He held on.

“Then behave yourself,” he said.

Suddenly Mr. Cox hauled off and hit him, and was promptly placed under arrest!

At the station house later they only reprimanded him and let him go, a crushed and terribly humiliated little man; but his name was on the blotter, and so was Warrington’s, for that matter. He walked out into the street, no longer attempting to keep pace with the taller man, not even talking.

He stopped at the corner, however, and made a sort of apology.

“First time in my life
that’s
happened to me,” he said. “Sorry I got you into it. I guess I was excited.” He hesitated. “I’ll be thankful if you don’t tell Margaret. She’d feel responsible, seeing that it was—” His voice trailed off. He stood for a second uncertainly. “I’m going to get her out of that hell hole,” he said thickly, and turned abruptly, disappearing down a side street.

So Warrington was not as surprised as he might have been to come home a few days later and find an expressman taking out a trunk, and in the lower hall Aunt Margaret, gloved and hatted, and with a spot of colour in her thin cheeks. Holly was with her, but Mrs. Bayne was not in sight.

“Not leaving us, are you?” Warrington asked.

“I’ll be coming back again,” she said. “At least I hope—”

Suddenly her chin quivered; she gave a quick glance at the staircase, which remained obstinately empty; then she wrung his hand, coughed, and went out onto the doorstep, to turn there to Holly.

“Tell your mother I said good-bye.”

“I will. And remember, just be happy, Aunt Margaret.”

“I’d be a good bit happier if you—”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Holly hastily. “You’d better hurry.”

Margaret walked away, and the expressman drove off. Holly stood on the doorstep with a queer breathless look on her face; then she turned and went quietly into the house.

Warrington thought about that a great deal. The old house was quieter and more depressing than ever; indeed, for a week or so there was no tea table laid in the drawing room, and Mrs. Bayne had her meals in her bedroom. Holly was carrying trays once more.

“Nothing seriously wrong, I hope?” he asked her one day, finding her stopped halfway for breath. He had time to look at the tray. It contained a sizable meal.

“No,” she said briefly. “Nothing serious.” She refused his offer of assistance, but it is rather a pity that he did not look back as he went on up. She was staring after him, at his broad shoulders, his air of solid dependability, with something of the same look with which she had followed Aunt Margaret that last day. But he went on.

Later he heard the doorbell, and Furness Brooks’s high, slightly affected voice in the lower hall. A slightly possessive voice, too, it seemed to him.

When he went out to his dinner, the drawing-room door was closed, and there was a low murmur of voices beyond it.

O
NE HAS TO REMEMBER
, in order to understand what followed, Howard Warrington’s total ignorance of the household. He had never heard of Tom Bayne, defaulting cashier of the Harrison Bank. He had no background whatever for Mrs. Bayne, or Margaret, or for Holly.

His occasional glimpses into their lives were those of the individual who, confronted with a series of peepshows at a fair, looks in each for a second and then passes on.

There was, for him, no such understanding as Mrs. McCook’s across the street, a few days after Mrs. Bayne was up and about again.

“There’s a taxicab at Ninety-one, Clara!” she called. “It must be about time—yes, it is! Mrs. Bayne’s getting into it. That big fellow who’s got the third-floor front is helping her. I haven’t seen that duvetyne before.”

No, it meant nothing to him. Not the taxicab, nor Mrs. Bayne’s grim set face, nor Molly’s depressed one. Odd to think it, too, considering how vitally that visit of Mrs. Bayne’s to the penitentiary was to affect him. Odder still to know that he never noticed the change in her on her return. He looked in and saw her in her customary seat in the drawing room, her hat still on her head, quite alone and gazing at nothing with singular intensity.

She had never even heard Warrington come in.

He did not know of the invisible bands that were closing around Holly, and how Margaret’s desertion and this visit of Mrs. Bayne’s were acting on her. Nor did he overhear, who seemed always to be overhearing things, the conversation between Holly and her mother which took place after he went upstairs.

“Here’s your tea, Mother. You mustn’t look like that. I’m sure that he’ll get better.”

Mrs. Bayne did not turn her head. She merely moved her eyes until they rested on the girl.

“Better!” she said. “Of course he’ll get better. They’re letting him out.”

“When?”

Mrs. Bayne said nothing. She took off her hat, still with that fixed and dreadful look, and picked up her cup before she spoke.

“And all my plans for you—gone.”

“Don’t worry about me just now, Mother. When is he coming?”

“In a month, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t care.”

Then suddenly Mrs. Bayne broke down. She sobbed out all her troubles, her thwarted hopes for Holly, Margaret’s marriage, their poverty, the old disgrace, and now this new trouble. All of life had let her down, everybody, everything. She wanted to die. She couldn’t go on any longer.

It was not new to Holly. She had heard it all before. But now there was a difference; there was an underlying current of reproach for her. She could help if she would; at least she could save herself out of the wreckage. She knew well enough that such salvage was to save her mother as well, to reinstate her, but she shut her mind to that.

By the time Mrs. Bayne ceased and wiped her eyes, she had made up her mind. After all, what did it matter? What were dreams against this stark reality?

“If you think marrying Furness would help,” she said slowly, “I will do it.” She hesitated. “It doesn’t seem entirely fair to him, but if he understands that I don’t care very much, one way or the other—”

“You wouldn’t dare to tell him that!” protested Mrs. Bayne.

“Don’t you think I ought to? I can’t pretend. I never could.”

And to do her credit, Holly did tell Furness. Not precisely in those words, but he understood her well enough.

“I don’t feel the way you—seem to feel about it,” she said honestly. “I don’t know many people, and of course I—” she smiled faintly—“I don’t know anything at all about love. Only I thought it would be different.”

He was not a bad sort, and that touched him.

“Give me a little time,” he said. “Let me teach you a bit. Naturally you don’t know about love, dearest. How could you, shut away like this?”

It was speedily evident, however, that time was the last thing in Mrs. Bayne’s mind. The essence of the contract, to her, was haste; to get it settled and announced before Tom Bayne came back, to commit Brooks beyond withdrawal. And Furness Brooks, not without his own trepidations, played her game for her.

Howard Warrington came home one day to find a limousine at the door, with two men in livery, and a Pekingese looking out through its plate-glass windows, and in the drawing room Mrs. Bayne was entertaining a caller.

Holly, in a new frock, was listlessly sitting near by, but there was nothing listless about Mrs. Bayne.

“Personally,” she was saying, “I prefer a church. I was married in St. Andrews, and it would be only right for Holly. Holly darling, you run out and bring in the toast. Hilda is so frightfully slow.”

Mrs. Willoughby-Jones was not listening, however. She was gazing at the large young man absorbedly picking up his mail in the hall. She watched him drop a letter, ignore it, and dazedly gather up his evening papers and disappear. But she had seen his face in the mirror, and he had certainly looked very odd.

She wanted to ask Mrs. Bayne who he was, but to Mrs. Bayne there had been no young man in the hall. So far as Mrs. Willoughby-Jones was concerned, it was clearly Mrs. Bayne’s attitude that the front door had not closed and that nobody had passed by.

But he had passed by. What is more, he knew his way about now, and he did not go up the stairs. He went straight back to the kitchen, closing the door carefully, and faced Holly, who was making toast with a sort of grim expertness in an otherwise empty kitchen.

She looked up at him and went a little pale.

“So!” he said violently. “Hilda’s slow making the toast. Hilda! Hilda! You know darned well that there isn’t any Hilda.”

“That’s my affair, Mr. Warrington,” said Holly.

“Not by a damned sight,” he said loudly. “I don’t get it. It makes me sick. It’s hypocrisy. It’s worse than that, even. It’s—”

His own fury shocked him. She was staring at him in bewilderment, and he got out a handkerchief and mopped his face.

“Sorry!” he said rather hoarsely. “I suppose I’m excited. I was in the hall, and I heard your mother—”

“Yes?”

“Look here, do you care for that Brooks fellow?”

“I am going to marry him.”

“That’s not what I asked you,” he said loudly again. He pulled himself together once more, however, and went on more quietly. “What I mean is this: is it more of the ‘Hilda’ stuff, or isn’t it?”

She examined the toast and turned it before she answered. Then her reply was rather as if she spoke to herself.

“We can’t all let her down,” she said.

“Let who down?”

“Mother. First Father did, and then Aunt Margaret. It’s killing her.”

“What’s Aunt Margaret done?”

“She’s married a clerk in the store where she—a clerk in a store.”

He stared at her incredulously.

“Oh!” he said at last. “Oh, that’s what she’s done! My God, and you call that letting her down! Why, your Aunt Margaret’s got more guts in a minute than you’ll have all your life. Wake up, girl. You’re living in a real world, not a world of ladies and gentlemen.” His voice rose; his collar felt too tight for him. He ran a finger inside it.

“Marry your popinjay!” he said. “Go on mincing through life. Drink your tea and hold your little finger out! I’m through.”

Suddenly he saw the engagement ring on her left hand, and he lifted it and looked at it. From the ring he looked at her hand; it was small and shapely, but it bore the scars of “Hilda’s” work, of much living service. Involuntarily she tried to close it, like Margaret, and the sight made him wince.

“You poor little fool,” he said gently, and kissed it.

A
FTER THAT WARRINGTON DID
not see her very much. When he did, he fancied that she was thinner; there were hollows in her cheeks he had not seen before. And once downtown he saw her on a street corner, talking to Margaret, who was looking younger by years and with her left hand no longer clenched.” It gave him an actual pain at the heart to see that Margaret was growing younger and Holly older.

They did not see him, and he passed by.

But if Holly was looking worn and wretched, Mrs. Bayne was expanding daily. Cars came and people called. Old friends, who had apparently forgotten her, drove up in limousines and drank her tea and munched Holly’s toast. And when they were about to go, she would touch the bell and summon Hilda to let them out.

As Hilda never came, they would let themselves out, but the proper gesture had been made. Inefficient servants they could understand; no servants they could not.

But no young people came. The rallying was of the older generation. The young ones did not know Holly.

And Holly was puzzled about her mother. There was a strange excitement about her quite foreign to her. From the day of the engagement she had been like some one who carries, warm and safe, a wonderful secret. She would sit and plan, not talking much, but with a half smile on her lips. Out of these pleasant reveries she would rouse, to speak of the wedding. Always it was the wedding.

“You really should have bridesmaids,” she would say.