Читать книгу The Wall - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 4

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That day I went over the house with Mrs. Curtis, the wife of the caretaker. Spring and fall she opens and closes it, but this time she had a report to make.

She stood uneasily in her neat print dress and looked distressed.

“It’s about the bells, Miss Lloyd,” she said. “Curtis has gone over them, but he can’t find anything wrong.”

“What do they do? Whistle?” I asked.

She looked almost shocked.

“They ring,” she said, in a portentous voice. “They ring when nobody pushes them.”

“Probably a crossed wire,” I told her. “If they keep on I’ll have them looked over.”

She let it go at that, although she seemed uneasy. And I may say here and now that the bells still remain a mystery. They rang all summer, in season and out. They cost me a sprained ankle, and they almost drove the household crazy. Then they stopped, as suddenly as they had begun.

Ridiculous? Perhaps. I have a strong conviction that whatever another and better world may be, it is too busy to lift furniture or push bell buttons.

Nevertheless, the fact remains. They rang.

But that day I dismissed them lightly. I went over the house dutifully in Mrs. Curtis’s small starchy wake; and since it enters considerably into this narrative perhaps I should describe it here.

As I have already said, it is a big house, sprawled so close to the waterfront that at high tide it seems to be at sea. A long drive from the main road leads in to it, and entering from it to the right are the dining room, pantries, servants’ hall and kitchen.

To the left are the family rooms, the library and beyond it overlooking the garden what used to be Mother’s morning room, both of them connecting by doors with the long drawing room which overlooks the bay and takes the entire front of that side of the house.

Upstairs are the bedrooms, almost a dozen of them, with bathrooms scattered hither and yon. Both Mother’s and Father’s rooms are locked off and never used, Mother’s room overlooking the garden and Father’s next to it. Then comes Junior’s nursery and the suite used by Mary Lou and Arthur. My own is in the center, with a sitting room adjoining and this upper porch outside them both.

In other words, with one exception the house and property bear a sort of family resemblance to nine out of ten of the summer estates on the island, built by and for large families, the children eventually marrying or going away and the houses remaining, mute reminders of simpler and livelier days.

That one exception, however, is noteworthy. Mother had always maintained that we children invariably chose the summer holidays to be ill, and after a sequence of chicken-pox, measles and whooping cough she fitted up what she called the hospital suite. The one we used was the quarantine room to us always, and the other in those early days was the pesthouse.

“Why the pesthouse?” I asked Arthur.

“Trained nurses are pests, aren’t they?” he answered.

Which seemed entirely adequate to me then.

They lay, those rooms, on the third floor of the house, and were accessible only by a steep narrow staircase from the main hallway on the second floor. The day and night nurseries lay beneath them, and how we hated being exiled to them! Mother looking at a thermometer and saying resignedly: “Well, you have some fever. You’d better go upstairs until the doctor comes, just to be safe.” And Arthur—or I myself—catching up some books and a nightgown, and then dragging up the steep staircase.

“I tell you I feel all right, mother. What’s a fever, anyhow?”

“Go up when you’re told. I’ll send Fräulein in a minute.”

“But listen! I feel fine. I—”

“Arthur!”

There would be a bang of a door above, followed by a sulky silence; and later on Doctor Jamieson would climb the stairs and tell us to put out our tongues.

But—and this, too, is important—we did not always stay there. Arthur was not long in finding a way out. We were convalescing from scarlet fever when he discovered it, lying side by side in the twin beds, with a screen between us at necessary intervals.

He was frightfully bored, and so one night he simply slid down the drain pipe to the drawing room roof, and from there climbed a trellis to the garden below. He gathered up a starfish or two from the beach, made a triumphant re-entry and put one of the things on me!

I must have yelled, for the nurse came in, and I can still remember Arthur’s virtuous face.

“I think she’s delirious again,” he said, looking concerned. “She thinks she’s seeing things.”

“What things?” said the nurse suspiciously.

“Oh, fish and that kind of stuff,” he said, and crawled into bed, taking his trophies with him.

I had not been there for years when Mrs. Curtis took me up that day. In some ways it had changed. The outer or nurse’s room still contained a cot bed, but it had become a depository of everything else, from old window screens to long-forgotten toys, from broken china, chests and trunks to ancient discarded furniture.

Mrs. Curtis eyed it apologetically.

“There’s no place else to put the stuff,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with it.”

The other room, the sickroom proper, gave me almost a shock. It was as though no years had passed at all, and I was there once again, an unwilling child being sent to Coventry.

There were the two beds, neatly and freshly made. There was the worn rug, and the bookcase with some of our ancient books in it. Even the small bathroom was ready, with soap and towels. I suppose Mrs. Curtis had kept it like that for years, and I felt distinctly guilty.

But it smelled a little musty, and I went over and opened a window.

“My brother and I used to get out this way,” I said. “By the drain pipe.”

“It’s a wonder you didn’t break a leg,” said Mrs. Curtis severely.

I went downstairs then, leaving the window open; but some of the gaiety had gone out of the day. It was hard to compare the lighthearted Arthur of his teens with the Arthur of today. I had adored him, but I had seen him go through the hell that only a woman can make of a man’s life. And even his freedom had cost him too much. He had been willing to pay any price to be free, however.

“Twelve thousand a year!” I said, when he told me. “But that’s ridiculous, Arthur.”

“That’s Juliette’s price, and she sticks to it,” he said grimly.

“It isn’t as though you’d done anything. After all, you are letting her divorce you, when it ought to be the other way.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Marcia!” he groaned. “It doesn’t matter where the fault lies. I haven’t been perfect, and I’m not hiding behind her skirts. I want to get out of it, and I’ll have to pay.”

Even at that it had not been easy, for Juliette quite plainly did not want the divorce. Things suited her as they were. She was well if not lavishly supported. Her apartment was large and usually filled with people, and while Arthur worked in his law office and often brought work home at night, her time was pretty much her own. There were stories about her, but I doubt if he ever heard them, and I resolutely shut my ears.

So he bought her off. He did not want to marry again, at that time. He had not even met Mary Lou. But Juliette had made him wretched. He had no real home. She refused to have children, and she was forever and eternally in debt.

Not until she had gone did he discover how much she owed; to dressmakers, to bootleggers—it was still prohibition then—to restaurants and hotels. She even owed at her bridge club. I remember going into the apartment the day she left for Paris and finding Arthur in what had been her boudoir, sitting at her desk with his head in his hands.

He looked up when he saw me.

“See here, Marcia,” he said, “what would you pay for my half interest in Sunset?”

I sat down abruptly. The room was still in wild disorder. Juliette had made a clean sweep of her belongings, but she had left behind her a litter of tissue paper, torn-up letters in the fireplace, old evening slippers and half-empty jars and bottles. It had been an attractive room, jade-green curtains and mauve brocaded furniture as a background for her blond prettiness. Always before I had seen it filled with expensive flowers, silver photograph frames with pictures signed to her in terms of endearment, and the thousand and one trinkets with which she always cluttered her life. Now it looked stark and bare.

“I mean it,” Arthur repeated. “You like the old place, and it’s too far for me to go nowadays.”

“You like it too, Arthur.”

“I suppose I could still have the quarantine room now and then,” he said. “Good Lord, Marcia, how far that seems from all this.”

He told me then that Juliette owed the best part of twenty thousand dollars, debts contracted in his name. As a parting gesture she had piled the bills on her desk, and on top of them to hold them in place she had put a grotesque china figure of an urchin with his thumb to his nose. I had never thought of Arthur as a violent man until I saw him pick up that figure and smash it on the hearth.

It seemed to surprise him, for he looked at it and then grinned sheepishly.

“Sorry,” he said. “I feel better now. Well, what about Sunset?”

In the end I bought it from him, using more of my depleted capital than I cared to think about, but at least saving his credit and, as it turned out, his happiness. A year later he had married Mary Lou, and the nightmare days were over.

Fortunately I was busy that day, and so I put Juliette resolutely out of my mind. What I wanted was a round of golf; but what I found waiting for me as I went downstairs was Lizzie, with her mouth set and a long grocery list in her hand.

“I’ll trouble you to order some food for the house,” she said. “That is, if you want any dinner, miss.”

“I do. I want a lot of dinner,” I told her.

That pleased her. She even condescended to smile.

“You order it and I’ll cook it,” she said.

But I did not eat much dinner that night, or indeed for many nights to come.

I got out the car and went to the village in a more cheerful mood. It was pleasant to be back. It was pleasant to meet the tradespeople, most of them old friends. It was pleasant to be clean and cool, and to know that tomorrow I could slip off the old float and swim, even if the water was cold. It was even pleasant to be Marcia Lloyd, aged twenty-nine but perhaps not looking it. I remember taking off my hat and letting the sea breeze blow through my short hair; and that Conrad, the butcher, eying me so to speak between chops, said I looked like a bit of a girl.

“Just for that,” I said, “you’ll have to give me a slice of bologna sausage. Do you remember? You always did.”

He grinned and gave it to me. But he added a bit of advice to it.

“You’re kind of alone out there, aren’t you?” he said. “No neighbors yet.”

“I have the servants.”

“They’d be a lot of help! See here, Miss Marcia, things have changed since we’ve had the bridge, and cars are allowed on the island. Used to be you could go to sleep and leave the front door open if you felt like it. Nowadays—well, I’d lock up the place if I were you. Away off like that by yourself it isn’t necessary to take any chances.”

I refused to be discouraged, however, and I did the rest of my buying in high spirits. It was just as I left the fish market that the blow fell.

I remember that I was carrying a basket of lobsters fresh and lively from the pots, their claws propped open with bits of stick but their energy in no wise diminished by the seaweed which covered them; and that just as the mainland bus stopped one of them escaped and made for the gutter with incredible speed.

By the time I had retrieved it, my hat on one side of my head and my language totally unbecoming a lady, I heard a cool amused voice at my elbow.

“What would Mother have said!” it observed. “Such language. Don’t faint, Marcia. It’s me!”

It was Juliette—Mrs. Juliette Ransom as she now called herself—taller and better looking than I had remembered her, but with the old familiar mockery lurking about her mouth. She was extremely well-dressed, and she eyed me curiously.

“How on earth do you keep your figure like that?” she said. “You look about sixteen.”

I found my voice then.

“What on earth are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m visiting you,” she said, still in that cool amused voice. “Can you control those lobsters in your car, or do I take a taxi?”