Two Flights Up (7 page)

Holly had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It was Mrs. Bayne who had let the lot down: her husband, her sister, her child, and now himself.

He bathed and dressed absently the next morning, absorbed in his problem. It struck him rather humorously that the mere matter of carrying the securities was a delicate one. Suppose the bond had been recognized and traced to him? Wasn’t there a charge of receiving stolen goods? But even without that, suppose he met Mrs. Bayne on the stairs. What would he do, or say? Or she?

After he was dressed he got out the suitcase and laid it on his bed. It had some old foreign labels on it, and he regarded them with mixed feelings.

“So you’ve travelled, have you?” he reflected. “But of course you would. That was a part of the game, the whole damned snobbish game.”

He wandered to the window and looked down into the quiet street. And a large but lightly stepping gentleman who had been eying the house from the opposite pavement leisurely lighted a cigarette and moved on. Warrington did not notice him.

Still at a loss, he left the suitcase and went down the stairs, to find Holly patiently waiting for him in the lower hall. The strong morning light streamed in through the glass of the front door and brought out painfully her thinness and the tired lines about her eyes.

“I couldn’t go up to your room,” she said. “She’s awake, and not very well.”

“You still want me to get it out of the house?”

“Yes. That’s all I can think of. You see, my father is coming back. He’s been ill, and so they’re letting him out. Or maybe he hasn’t been ill; maybe he’s just pretending. I don’t know.” She smiled up at him painfully. “You see what it’s done to me. I don’t believe much in anything just now.”

“You can believe in me,” he said sturdily. “You have to have one anchor, and I’m it.”

“I do believe in you.”

But she did not look up.

Her idea was that he take the suitcase to Margaret’s and leave it there until he had seen the bank officials.

“You can’t do anything else with it,” she said. “I’ve thought and thought. You see, the lock’s broken, and anybody might open it.”

“All right,” he consented. “I’ll put some heavy twine around it, and then you can give me the address and the thing’s done. And now you’re to stop worrying! It’s all fixed and everybody’s happy. I’ll get a taxi and clear out.”

“If she heard a taxi, she’d get up and look out. She might think it was—Father.”

“All right,” he agreed, indomitably cheerful for her benefit. “Then I won’t get a taxi! Much as I dislike the plebeian street car …”

As he went up the stairs, he confronted Mrs. Bayne.

“I thought I heard voices,” she said plaintively. “Is Holly down there?—I want my tray, Holly.”

“Yes, Mother.”

He had to wait above until Mrs. Bayne had retired and closed her door. Then he went down, suitcase in hand. The Coxes’ address was on a slip of paper on the table, and he took it and went out.

Had he been less absorbed in his errand, he would have noticed that the large but lightly stepping gentleman followed him onto the car.

Margaret was at home. Before he rang the bell of the little apartment he could hear her singing inside. Coming down, he had not given much thought to Margaret save as to what he should tell her, but the singing gave him a surprise. He had never heard her sing before. He had somehow never thought of her as singing.

He had an instant picture of her on that kitchen floor months ago, of her silk stockings and beaded slippers, of the neatness of the organdie collar around her almost pulseless neck. And now she was singing.

Life was queer. It was darned queer.

She opened the door herself, a strange Margaret, lighted with happiness like a torch; a fulfilled Margaret, calm and unashamed.

“Why, upon my word!” she said. “Come in. I was just sweeping.”

He went in and deposited his suitcase on the floor, while Margaret eyed it curiously.

“I’m playing errand boy this morning,” he told her. “I’m to leave this here, and Holly will be in later to explain.”

Neither he nor Margaret noticed this use of Holly’s given name.

“Is it the lace? If that’s
all
lace—”

“Oh!” he said, grinning cheerfully at her. “I forgot one thing. You’re not to open it. You are to promise. Cross your heart you’ll put it in a closet and leave it there until further instructions.”

Margaret smiled in return.

“But what
is
it?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s a bomb, a clockwork bomb. Since you married Mr. Cox, I have been consumed by a burning jealousy, and now I propose to do away with Mr. Cox.”

She laughed outright then, and her laughter was as strange and surprising as her singing.

“Then I shall put it in his closet,” she said. “And it will destroy his rows and rows of shoes. That will be your revenge, for he is frightfully vain about his feet. Of course, he has to be on them all day, and to change his shoes rests him.”

She took him around to see the flat, leading him first into the bedroom, where she placed the suitcase in James’s closet and showed him the tidy line-up of shoes. And after the shoes she showed him the further extravagances of James’s neckties.

“Look!” she said. “Did you ever see so many ties?”

“Looks like the wealth of Ormus and of Ind to me.”

But after he had seen it all, the imitation ivory toilet set which had been a recent gift, the shining kitchen, and had even opened a tap to show how hot the water ran, she turned to him with a different note in her voice—as if the Margaret who had married James Cox had retired, and the Margaret of the old house was back again.

“Do you know they are letting Tom Bayne out?”

“I learned it this morning.”

“But it’s dreadful. What will they do? And what will Furness Brooks think about it?”

A hot wave of anger flushed him.

“What the deuce would he think? He’s known about it all along, hasn’t he?”

“I know. But people had forgotten it, and now it’s all brought up again. And a church wedding! Her father can’t give her away.”

He controlled his voice with an effort.

“If he thinks about that at all, then he doesn’t deserve her. And if he doesn’t deserve her, I hope to God he doesn’t get her.”

His sudden anger surprised him. He had thought he had schooled himself better, and Margaret’s eyes were wide.

“What I mean is,” he said more quietly, “you and I can’t help that, can we? We’ll have to let it work itself out.”

Just inside the entrance door stood Margaret’s work basket, and a piece of heavy ivory-white satin lay on the top of it. As he was taking his leave, his eyes fell on it, and when he stopped outside at the elevator to light a cigarette, his hands were shaking.

“I’m in fine shape,” he told himself grimly. “Shot to pieces, by heck! I’ll have to stop smoking.

And comforted by that masculine panacea for all ills, went down and out into the street. As with most such resolutions, however, he forgot it almost at once, and a short time after lighted another cigarette for the mere pleasure of observing that his hands were all right again!

By the time he reached the bank he had managed to concentrate on his business there. But the concentration did him very little good. That distinguished citizen and president of the reorganized Harrison Bank, Mr. Samuel Parker, had just sailed for Europe. This from the door man. And inside the bank an absent-looking youth raised his eyes from figures of incredible size to tell him that the vice president was down with influenza.

“What’s the cashier’s name?” he asked, irritably resorting to somewhat smaller fry.

“Gilbert. He’s on jury duty just now.”

“Then who the hell’s running this bank?” he demanded. But the absent youth went back to his figures, and Warrington retreated to the street, uneasy and at a loss. How about going to the district attorney? But that meant the law, and probably publicity; he had a cynical belief that district attorneys thrived on publicity. No, that wouldn’t do. He’d have to wait till he could manage to think things out.

It was in this frame of mind that he bumped into a passer-by and angrily told him to look out what he was doing. And the passer-by snapped back: “Look out yourself, you darned fool!” It was Furness Brooks.

F
URNESS HAD BEEN IN
a state of rage since the announcement in the papers the evening before of Bayne’s approaching release.

By direct appeal he had managed to engineer a few callers to the Bayne house, but as time went on, it became more and more clear to him that he could not force them back into society. And for all his lack-lustre eyes, he was shrewd enough. He knew that his present semi-popularity was due largely to the demand for unattached men at dinners, and the bits of gossip he could carry from one tea table to another.

With the failure of his campaign, therefore, it was plain to him that his popularity would cease with his marriage. Some men held on, he knew, but that was because they had married girls who could hold up their own end in the frivolous give and take of smart groups. With the same clear view he took of himself, he knew that Holly would never do that.

“Why don’t you smoke?” he asked her once. “Everybody does, you know.”

“I have tried. I hate it.”

He brought her a long shell cigarette holder one day, and as dutifully as she did everything those days, she tried it.

“You hold it like a fountain pen, honey!”

“Well, how on earth should one hold the thing?” she demanded. And then, sorry for her tone: “You can’t make me over, you know, Furness.”

She had managed part of a cigarette, and then put it down.

Nor did he try to fool himself as to Holly’s attitude to him. He had made no real headway with her. He could still feel the recoil as he put his arms around her, and her unconscious effort to get away.

“Don’t you like me to hold you?”

“But I feel so silly!”

“It isn’t silly to be in my arms.”

In the light-hearted but seriously pleasure-hunting group he knew best, girls gave their kisses so easily that they lost value. A caress had no more significance to them than a handclasp, hardly as much. Holly’s withdrawals therefore had the effect of stimulating his passion for her, and his vanity refused to admit the reason for them.

And the trap closed down. He brought her presents, sent her flowers. Mostly he saw her in the afternoons, as he was hurrying home to dress for a dinner somewhere afterward: holding desperately to his place in the sun, trying to have his cake and eat it too.

He had a fair income. His apartment was of the studio type, and now and then he sent out cards, and his Filipino servant Miguel brought in an assistant or two and he gave a party. Somebody sang, or he had a pianist and they danced, and the pantry became an extemporized bar. They were gay but sufficiently decorous, and they had had a certain vogue.

He had intended to give one for Holly after the engagement was announced, but the failure of his other campaign killed that idea. “Afterward, if they want me, they will have to take her too,” he reflected. But he was not as certain as he pretended to himself that “they” would want him. Like James, he used the word “they” rather often.

On the same evening, then, that James saw the announcement that Tom Bayne had been pardoned, Furness saw it, read it carefully, and flung down the paper angrily.

A dead scandal was one thing; a resurrected scandal in a morning coat, still with the prison pallor on its face, walking up the aisle at St. Andrews, was another. Of course it wouldn’t be; the Baynes had too much sense for that. It simply meant no wedding. It meant going to the City Hall or wherever one did go, and going through a formula more or less clandestinely. It meant—oh,
hell
!

He got into his dinner clothes morosely. At the Willoughby-Joneses’, where he was dining, he thought a small silence followed the announcement of his name, but conversation started again almost at once. He moved from group to group, watching with his pale blue eyes for any reservation, any indication of the social ticker that his stock had gone down. But there was none; society has its weaknesses, but it is well bred. It ignores what it cannot cover.

It was after dinner, when the men moved in a body from the library to rejoin the women that he had his first words with his hostess.

“I suppose you’ve seen it, Furney?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“What is there to do? Of course, the church wedding’s off.”

“But you’re going through with it?”

“I’d hardly call it that,” he said, showing a certain resentment. “The marriage will go on, naturally. It will be quiet, that’s all.”

“And you’ll be quiet afterward,” said Mrs. Willoughby-Jones. “I’m being brutal for your own good, Furney. How many evenings do you dine at home now? How are you going to get along without all this?” She gestured toward the crowded, noisy room with her fan. “How long will it last?”

“As long as I can make it last,” he said doggedly. But he was not so sure.

He won quite a little money that night at bridge, and somebody said to him:

“Does your—does Miss Bayne play?”

“No. She doesn’t,” he admitted.

There was a silence after that, and he went on playing his hand. But it came to him that all these people, all his world, disapproved of his marriage and expected it to fail. It roused something obstinate in him.

“I’ll show them,” he told himself. “They’re not marrying her; I am.”

And he felt a warm and voluptuous glow. It persisted until the small hours, when he finally pocketed his winnings and started home, and it drove him out of his way in his car to pass the Bayne house on Kelsey Street.

The house, as he had expected, was dark, but out of a small dormer window on the top floor, came a faint glow of light.

He concluded that “Hilda” was keeping late hours!

W
ITH THE SUITCASE OUT
of the house Holly felt that she could breathe again. She carried up her mother’s tray and coaxed her to eat some breakfast, but Mrs. Bayne was querulous and depressed.