Two Flights Up Read online

  “That’s too heavy for you. Why not let Hilda carry it?”

  But she only said: “Thanks very much.” And added, as if it were forced out of her: “You are very kind, always.”

  From the night he had broken his way into the kitchen and thought it might be Holly, he had never fooled himself at all. He was in love with her, ridiculously, sickeningly. He was in love with her. He did not even approve of her, except now and then; he thought she was idle and inbred. He compared her with his mother and sisters back in Elkhart, Indiana, and he knew she was all wrong. But there it was. He thought about her at night, sitting in his chair, and got up and stamped off to bed, as if he would crush the wretched thing under his feet, only to waken up and think about her again.

  “The sooner she marries Brooks, the better,” he told himself. “This isn’t sane. I’m not sane. I’m not getting enough exercise.”

  He took to going to the Y.M.C.A. gymnasium after office hours. He would come home after that, to put on a clean collar and get ready to go out for his evening meal, at the Sign of the Red Rose around the corner. But if he left his door open, he often heard Margaret and Mrs. Bayne coming up, and knew that they had left Holly alone with Furness Brooks.

  One evening he accidentally knocked Mr. Brooks’s hat off the table and put his foot on it, and went out somewhat cheered, but feeling slightly silly. And on that very night he took the second step which was to involve him so hopelessly later on. The first, of course, was the day he took the room.

  He went out of the house in rather an unpleasant humour, as has been indicated, and at the small brick-paved side passage that had once had a sign on it, “Tradesmen’s Entrance,” somebody was standing. Even in the light of the street lamp, which made a sort of polished shield on the shining pavement below it and left the regions outside of it entirely dark, he did not at first recognize Margaret.

  She had a shawl over her head, and her face looked white and strained.

  “Mr. Warrington,” she said, in a half whisper.

  He stopped, of course, and then he knew her. “You oughtn’t to be out here, you know,” he told her. “It’s cold to-night.”

  She said something about only being there for a minute, and then stepped out onto the paving and looked up at Mrs. Bayne’s windows. They were lighted, and she seemed relieved.

  “I wonder—” she began. “I hate so to bother you, but I can’t get out, and there is something I ought to do. Want to do,” she corrected herself. “I was to meet somebody tonight. A man. A friend.” She was breathless. She put a hand to her flat chest and, as if the very words were treasonable, looked up at the windows once more.

  “And you’re not able to? Is that it?”

  “I’m not very strong yet, and besides—”

  “Where were you to meet him?” She told him, still in the hushed, breathless voice.

  “I don’t know what you’ll think of me,” she finished. “My sister doesn’t like him—doesn’t approve of him, rather. But it’s all right. It’s really all right.”

  “Why, of course it’s all right. Why shouldn’t you have a friend if you want one? It’s your life, you know. You’ve got to live it.”

  It struck him later on that that was hardly a tactful speech, considering how nearly she had come not to living it at all. But she did not seem to mind it. She gave his arm a furtive touch, and a moment later she had disappeared into the passage again.

  He went on, pondering the situation. So Margaret had a lover, after all! Queer! You never could tell whom the thing would strike. Looking at her, he’d have said—

  So that was why he had found her in the kitchen, almost lifeless! Her one chance, perhaps, and her sister would not let her take it. Well, he was for her; for her and the Mr. Cox who was to meet her outside the Palace picture house that night. Not a young man, she had described him; he was to have iron-gray hair and probably a soft gray hat, but maybe a cap. Sometimes he wore a cap; it was less trouble in the movies. And he would be walking about, waiting.

  He thought a great deal about the affair as he ate his dinner. He did not know a great deal about love, but somehow he had always thought of it as concerning only the young. Apparently he had been wrong. It went on and on. One might have the damnable pain at any age. There was no immunity. Maybe you fought your way out of one torture only to meet up with another later on.

  He felt very low in his mind, and even reflecting on Furness Brooks’s hat no longer comforted him.

  He found Mr. Cox without any trouble. He was a commonplace-looking little man, and the commonplaceness was not decreased by the fact that that night he wore the cap. As the vessel of a romantic and clandestine passion he was disappointing, but there was a sort of belligerent honesty about his face that Warrington approved of.

  “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, disapp
earing 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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ONE 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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AFTER 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.