Two Flights Up Read online

  “Seems to me somebody’s very quiet to-day,” he remarked, with an attempt at joviality.

  “I feel quiet,” she said.

  Mrs. Bayne, who was expansively present, looked at her with a certain irritation. If, as she frequently told Margaret, Holly was going to be silly about Furness, she was through. Simply through. It was the chance of a lifetime. So she might have said something sharp, but fortunately the bell rang just then and she smiled sweetly instead.

  “You go, darling,” she said to Holly. “I dare say Hilda is busy.”

  Yes, she had invented a Hilda by that time, poor lady, for Furness Brooks’s benefit. The first time she said it Holly had given her a hard, straight look, but after that she had let it go. It was so characteristic, and somehow so pitiful.

  So Holly went, and the total result of Hilda plus uncertainty was that Warrington, landing bag and baggage on the doorstep, met with a reception rather different from what he had been led to expect. He was received, not by Mrs. Bayne, but by a very pretty but reserved young woman who greeted him unsmilingly, and who surveyed his bags in a cold and detached manner.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to carry those up yourself,” she said.

  “I dare say that won’t permanently injure me,” he replied cheerfully. But she ignored that, and by the time he had carried in his traps she had disappeared.

  It annoyed him, somehow. Hang it all, he was no interloper. They’d advertised, hadn’t they? Hang these decayed gentlewomen, anyhow. As for that girl—

  “Probably hates it,” he reflected, as he staggered up under his burden. “Hates me, too. Too good to work; waiting for some man to carry her away from here and keep her!”

  He was still muttering to himself when he breathlessly reached the top. But the room was comfortable, large and airy, and if the furniture showed wear it was heavy and well polished. He put down his bags and moved to the window.

  He had a new sense, after much wandering, of peace and sanctuary.

  “They won’t bother me and I won’t bother them,” he reflected, of the household.

  But, oddly enough, they began to bother him almost at once. For, after nearly falling down a dumb-waiter shaft that night while hunting for a bath, in his pajamas and dressing gown he stealthily opened Margaret’s door by mistake. And Margaret was standing by her window, softly weeping.

  He retreated into his own room again and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Now what the hell’s all that about?” he considered.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOLLY HAD GONE INTO the hall, and from beyond the closed doors came voices and the sounds of bags. Mrs. Bayne rattled the china, but it did no good, and when Holly returned she sent her out again.

  “Run and bring the toast, will you, darling?” she said. And to Furness: “Really, this servant question …”

  “It’s the same everywhere,” he agreed. “The Barrs—the J. L. Barrs, you know—took a butler and two footmen to Florida, and when the parlourmaid left, they struck. Absolutely struck.”

  Holly had said nothing when she came in, and now she went out again, still silent. For a moment he had thought she was going to say something, and he wondered if Mrs. Bayne had sent her out so she would not. Drat the woman, anyhow; she was always hanging around.

  But Mrs. Bayne was speaking:

  “Have you ever considered—is it one lump or two? I used always to remember, but nowadays I so seldom …” She sighed. “Have you ever considered, Furness, how alone we are here? Just three women, and no man in the house?”

  Mr. Brooks felt a sudden cold dew on his forehead, and very nearly dropped the teacup.

  “It must be lonely,” he managed.

  “It is worse than that; it is hardly safe. There have been nights when I have not been able to sleep.”

  “You might get a dog.” He brightened at the thought. “I might be able to get you a dog.”

  She hardly heard that, so concentrated was she on her explanation.

  “Well, I am happy to say that I have just changed all that. A very charming man, a broker, I believe, is to make his home with us from now on. A—a paying guest.”

  “Now I call that downright sensible of you,” said Brooks, greatly relieved. “He’s a lucky chap.”

  “I’m so very glad you approve,” said Mrs. Bayne.

  And then Holly had brought in the toast, to find Mr. Warrington an accepted fact in the drawing room, and Furness Brooks’s prominent blue eyes fixed on her with a new speculation in them.

  “What sort of fellow is he? Young?”

  “I can hardly tell you. He’s that sort. Not of our world, of course, but what does that matter? We shall hardly see him.”

  Brooks’s opinion, however, both of Mrs. Bayne’s sensibility and her powers of observation fell considerably within a day or two, when he beheld the paying guest on the doorstep. He was certainly young, and he was far from unhandsome. And the very fact that he produced a latchkey and admitted Holly’s suitor gave that gentleman an attack of inferiority complex that was as unusual as it was surprising.

  “Coming in?” Warrington said, holding the door open.

  Mr. Brooks passed him, eying him as he did so.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks very much.”

  There was a certain aggressiveness in the way he laid his hat and gloves on the hall table, and nothing particularly pleasant in his prominent pale eyes as he watched the newcomer go up the stairs.

  It seems probable that up to that time he had been merely playing with the thought of Holly. His visits there satisfied his vanity, and he often had a sort of godlike feeling with the older women. Out of his largess of news and gossip he fed them, and he bridged the gulf between their lost world and themselves.

  But shortly after this incident he dropped in to tea at the Willoughby-Joneses and casually mentioned the Baynes. He was, so to speak, testing the ice.

  “Bayne?” said that important lady. “You don’t mean Tom Bayne’s family? Don’t tell me you’re going there!”

  The ice, he saw, was very thick.

  “I drop in once in a while. They’re pretty lonely.”

  “Well, they should be,” Mrs. Willoughby-Jones had snapped. “If I hadn’t happened to have overdrawn my account just then I’d have lost a lot. And most people did. Where is the money? Have they got it?”

  “If they have they’re not spending it,” said Mr. Brooks. “And the girl’s rather nice, you know.”

  Mrs. Willoughby-Jones eyed him shrewdly.

  “It won’t do, Furney,” she said. “You’ve got your people to consider, and your friends. You can’t raise the dead, and Annie Bayne is socially dead. Has been for ten years.”

  She was curious about them, however. There was a move on, she had heard, to get Tom Bayne out of the penitentiary. “His kidneys have gone wrong, or something.” She was opposed to it herself. They had spent a lot, the Baynes, but she never had believed they had spent it all. He probably had a good bit tucked away somewhere.

  “How do they live?” she asked. “I know the Parkers help them, but it isn’t much.”

  “They live like ladies. Of course, the house is getting shabby, but they keep a servant.”

  “And three women there! I wonder if Sam knows that.”

  He saw it was no good, and for a few days he stayed away from Holly. He was not ready to pay the price for her. But it was no use; before long he was back again.

  Those few days, however, were trying ones at Ninety-one Kelsey Street. Each afternoon Holly’s mother made her dress, and small cakes from Simmons, the grocer, were brought in; each afternoon the three ladies foregathered in the drawing room and drank their tea, and Margaret hemmed her eternal napkins, holding her work close to her eyes.

  At six o’clock or so Mrs. Bayne would sigh and, having glanced out through the curtains, go up to her bedroom, and Holly would clear away.

  She began to wonder which was worse, to have Furness come or not.

  �
��Why don’t you send Furness a note?” Mrs. Bayne asked one day. Holly’s colour rose.

  “I can’t coax him back, Mother. Why should he come, anyhow? I never have anything to say to him.”

  “You have plenty to say when he’s not around.”

  Holly’s quiet world seemed to have been violently upset. Even Margaret was queer; she spent more time at the store than she used to, and alternated between a sort of secret happiness and long periods of despair, both apparently causeless. The only cheerful normal person in the house was the lodger.

  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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HE 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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MARGARET 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: