Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 4

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❧ When Mrs. Mary Agnes Wedge entered the flower-bowered lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, she created quite a little stir, even in that place which is accustomed to and somewhat blasé about the visitations of rajahs from India, oil millionaires from Texas, and world-publicized nymphomaniacs from Hollywood. This was perhaps natural, since she was a rather important and regular guest, who expected, received, and paid for the very best the house afforded in accommodations and services.

The desk clerk, a polished young man with a well-groomed thin mustache, advertised his recognition of her with a smile and almost a flourish.

“Good morning, Mrs. Wedge,” he said in his best brisk-cordial manner. “Delighted that you’re to be with us again. Pleasant flight across, I trust?”

“Dull,” she replied wearily, signing the registration card.

The clerk clucked sympathetically. “Monotonous, of course—all that water. You’ll be wishing to rest, no doubt. The luggage you shipped ahead arrived in due time and we took the liberty of depositing your things in the suite we set aside for you. I hope you’ll find everything in order. Is there anything special you desire?”

“You might send up a gin-and-tonic. And a breakfast menu.”

“Thank you. At once, ma’am.” The clerk was unsurprised. It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning, but this guest was just off a transpacific plane from Hawaii, and perhaps a gin-and-tonic before breakfast was indicated in her case.

A girl at the switchboard behind the desk spoke to him.

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Wedge,” said the clerk as Mary Agnes turned away from the desk. “Long-distance has been trying to reach you.”

“From where?” she asked.

“Your home, I believe, ma’am. Jericho, Kansas.”

“Oh.” Flat, uninterested voice.

“They’ve been calling the past hour,” volunteered the clerk.

“I suppose so. The plane was late.”

“Will you take it in your suite?”

“Yes. I’m going up now.”

“Thank you. The operator will get your connection.”

Preceded by the bellboy, she passed toward the elevator, slender in an angularly graceful way, her dark traveling suit, the mink stole on her arm, her jewelry, hose, and slippers all advertising expensive good taste. Nobody could call Mary Agnes Wedge beautiful, yet she caught every eye in the flower-filled lobby in that brief parade.

The suite into which she was ushered overlooked the hotel’s gardens, which are famous. She glanced from an open window, inspected the closets to see that her dresses and coats had been hung in them carefully, directed the bellboy where to place the two bags she had brought on the plane, tipped him and dismissed him. Then, with a woman’s immediate instinct, she went to a full-length mirror and gave herself a quick survey, with a particularly searching scrutiny of her face.

The face was not without its charm, although it was too thin, almost emaciated from continual dieting. Cheekbones and chin were prominent, the greenish eyes deep set with a light etching of lines disguised with make-up at the corners, the nose delicately aquiline, and the mouth firm and straight—too firm and thin, perhaps, so that she found it necessary to soften it by widening and curving the lips with the red smear of her lipstick. Her crisp hair, cut in a fashionably short mode, was brown, almost black, with a stylized streak of gray, and her skin was darkly tanned—she was fortunate in always taking a good color under the sun, and she had devoted some weeks of idleness to this end in Honolulu.

All in all, she saw in the mirror a rather haughty face, a face faintly hinting discontent, a face men sometimes found attractive, but women, with healthy feminine hatred, often described as “hard as nails.”

“I’m looking a little scrawny around the neck,” Mary Agnes said to herself, half aloud.

She had passed her fortieth birthday; and she was becoming increasingly conscious of fading youth, and dreading the appearance of what women call a “crepe throat.” Indeed, she had begun to arrive unconsciously at an age when she dressed not so much to attract men as to annoy other women.

Leaving the mirror, she sat down beside a table on which a telephone rested. This morning she felt tired and debilitated. Habitually she traveled by air, because habitually she was in a hurry to get places. Yet, though she always assured herself that air travel is the safest mode of transportation and quoted to herself those figures about millions of passenger miles per accident, she was never quite at ease during a flight; and the one from the Islands had been a long one. She had taken Dramamine to counteract her tendency to air sickness, and it was supposed to make one sleepy. But while it numbed her senses, the drug did not induce slumber, and she spent the hours in a sort of dulled wakefulness, unable to dismiss from her mind the inevitable little gnawing worry that always was with her when she was flying over all those interminable miles of menacing gray ocean. Now she confessed to an inner sag of weariness, and it made her impatient with herself, and with life in general.

The telephone on the table suddenly jingled. She lifted the receiver.

“Mrs. Wedge?” inquired an operator’s tinny voice.

“Yes. This is she.”

“Ready with your call from Jericho.”

“All right.”

“Go ahead, Jer-r-r-richo,” the voice trilled.

Over the wire came a tentative questioning. “Hello? Hello?”

She knew the voice. It was her husband.

“Hello,” she said. “Hello, Wistart.”

“Mary Agnes? Is that you, honey?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you——”

“Yes, I know. The plane was late. Head winds.”

“Bet you’re tired, poor girl.”

“I’m fine. I can never sleep on a flight, but otherwise fine.”

“How’s good old Honolulu?”

“Oh, all right. About as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Anyone interesting at the Royal Hawaiian?”

“Some movie people. Making a picture in the Islands. I met a few of the cast—John Wayne, Lana Turner, John Qualen. Danced with admirals and sugar millionaires and all that sort of thing. Oh, just about what you’d expect at that hotel.”

“Get a good suntan?” he next said.

“Yes. I simply lived on the beach.”

This senseless preliminary of banalities annoyed her. Why was Wistart calling her so soon and so insistently and then spending all this time talking about minor, unimportant things?

“Listen, Wistart,” she said impatiently, “this call is costing money, isn’t it? What did you want to say to me?”

A moment’s hesitation at the other end of the wire. Then, “When will you be coming home?”

“I don’t know. A month or so. You know I plan to go down to Balboa with the Kerstings. And there are a lot of other things I want to get done—shopping and so on——” She grew vague.

“Well——” He hesitated again. She could hear him breathing over the phone. At last he said, “I wish you could arrange somehow to come on now, honey.”

It grated on her to have him call her “honey.” The word was commonplace, and besides neither of them, really, felt in the least that way about each other.

“In heaven’s name, why?” she demanded sharply.

“Oh—just wish you could.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No—not exactly.”

“Wistart, is it the Clarion again?”

She could almost see the sullen, defensive look come into his face at her tone. He said, “It’s a pretty long story over the phone.”

“There’s no reason to be mysterious!”

Now he grew dogged. “You know I hate discussing matters over the long-distance.”

She knew that stubbornness of his, which was his substitute for strength, and it exasperated her.

“Listen, Wistart,” she said icily, “if it isn’t important enough to discuss over the phone, it certainly isn’t important enough to bring me back to Kansas in January weather.”

He seemed to consider that, but for some obscure reason he evidently had made up his mind. “Well, then, when will you be coming?” he asked.

“I’ve already told you I’m not sure yet. I can’t stand Jericho in midwinter!”

“Well—if that’s the way it is—I suppose that’s that——”

“Is this all you wanted to say?”

“Yes, I guess it’s all.”

“I think we’d better hang up then.”

“If you change your plans will you wire me?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Then good-by. Give my regards to the Kerstings and—and anyone else you see out there that I know. And take care of yourself, honey.” His voice seemed to drag.

“Good-by, Wistart.”

The receiver clicked.