Time Will Darken It (39 page)

She let the cat out every morning when she left for work and when she got home in the evening it was there waiting for her. She learned (or thought she learned) its habits and the cat learned hers. It was company, it was someone to talk to and worry over, and it was, in spite of its condition when she found it, a very superior creature. After she had fed it a few weeks it filled out and became quite handsome. But then it took to wandering, so that she never knew whether it would
be there or not when she was hurrying home. Sometimes it was gone for two or three days. And one morning when she opened the back door, she saw something that caused her to let out a low moan. What she took at first sight to be the pieces of a cat—
though not her cat
—proved to be something else; a section of bloody fur, a piece of raw red flesh, and the hideous dismembered tail of a rat. The cat, having eaten all the rest, had left these three pieces on Miss Ewing’s porch in front of her back door, to chill her with horror (or perhaps as a mark of friendship and favour). And after that terrible and instructive sight Miss Ewing could not pet the cat or hold it on her lap or feel towards it as she had before. She continued to feed it, and the cat, accepting the change in her, came and went as it pleased.

Miss Ewing’s flat was in a row of identical two-story buildings a block from the railroad. It was dark in the daytime and larger than she needed. It would have been too large for her except that she had crammed into it most of the furniture that had once been scattered through a house on Fourth Street, leaving herself barely enough room to move around in. As an only child, Miss Ewing had inherited everything, including, for about fifteen years, the problem of supporting her parents, both of whom were now dead. In the front room there were two large, oval, tinted photographs under convex glass of her mother as a young woman and of her father before he took to drink.

Ordinarily, it was easy for her to get to the office of Holby and King, dust and arrange the two desks in the inner offices, and be at her typewriter when Austin King walked in. But for over a week now, she had found it harder and harder to get up in the morning. She heard the alarm clock go off and lay in bed unable to move, unable to lift her head from the pillow, exhausted by the effort of producing plays and parts of plays in which the characters changed roles with one another and spoke lines that were intended to make the
audience laugh (although the play was a tragedy), and the dead came back to life, and everything took place in a half-real, half-mythical kingdom against a backdrop of pastel sorrow. The cat figured frequently in Miss Ewing’s dreams. So did her mother. And so, in one disguise or another, did Nora Potter.

When Miss Ewing went to work for the firm of King and Holby she understood, without having to be told, that the big calf-bound books that lined the walls of the outer and inner offices were not to be taken down and read by her. She could copy deeds and abstracts to her heart’s content. She had the run of the filing cabinet. She could take dictation, and she could put in long-distance telephone calls and say (sometimes to Springfield, sometimes to Chicago), “Just a minute please, Mr. Holby calling …”

Miss Ewing knew as much about mortgages, wills, transfers, property rights, bills of sale, clearance papers, all the actual everyday functioning of a law office as the average attorney ever needs to know. With a little reading on the side, she might have been admitted to practice, along with Miss Lavinia Goodell, but instead she had chosen to dedicate her energies to the best interests of the firm of King and Holby, and later, the firm of Holby and King. She not only knew all their clients by name, but also where the income of these clients was derived from and among what relatives their property would be divided when the undertaker had made away with the mortal remains. She knew what Austin King thought of Mr. Holby and what Mr. Holby thought of Austin King. She knew who (in all probability) killed Elsie Schlesinger on the night of October 17th, 1894. The only thing Miss Ewing didn’t know was how to drive Nora Potter out of the office, how to send her weeping down the stairs.

She interrupted Nora’s reading whenever she had a free moment to do this in. She took delight in leaving the door into the hall open so that, although a cold draught blew
around her own ankles, it also blew around Nora’s. She found a black velvet bow and, holding it between her thumb and forefinger as if it were unclean, deposited it in the wastebasket. She spoke one day with a Southern accent and instead of appreciating the true nature of this pleasantry, Nora smiled at her and said, “Why Miss Ewing, you’re beginning to talk like a Southerner just from being around me.” Nora offered to stamp and seal envelopes when Miss Ewing’s desk was inundated with outgoing correspondence. Nora said, “Can’t I do some typing for you, Miss Ewing? I can only use two fingers but that won’t matter, will it?” Nora said, “Can’t I help you with that old filing?” Nora said, “If you’d like me to, Miss Ewing, I’ll …” Day after day Nora was kind and thoughtful and cheerful and pleasant and friendly in a way that no one (if you exclude the cat that Miss Ewing could no longer bear to touch) had ever been. And perhaps it was this as much as anything that made Miss Ewing wake up so tired in the morning.

In her hurry to get as much work as possible done and out of the way before one-thirty, she made mistakes. She filed papers away in the wrong folders, she found sentences in her shorthand notebook that she could not decipher, she left a whole clause out of a contract that Austin King had given her to copy. When he pointed this out to her, she flushed, mumbled excuses, and retired to the outer office to copy the whole thing over. This time, she inserted the carbon paper the wrong way so that one of the carbon copies had the same words on the back, inverted, and the other was a clean white page. As it drew nearer and nearer to one-thirty, Miss Ewing’s eyes kept turning to the clock. Her hands were clammy and moist, and she had to wipe them continually. She was short with the wrong people and patient with people whose reasons for climbing the stairs were dubious. But when one-thirty came, and Nora walked in, there was an abrupt change. Composed, patronizing, ironical, Miss Ewing looked
up from her typewriter and said, “Good afternoon, Miss Potter. What is it to be today—Blackstone or Sir James Maine?”

5

The bed creaked in the room across the hall and then a voice answered, “Yes, Alice, what is it?”

“Are you awake?”

“Well, I’m talking to you. I suppose I’m awake. What is it?”

“I thought I heard something.”

“In Mother’s room?”

“No, downstairs. It sounded like somebody walking around down there. Did you lock the back door?”

“Yes. Go to sleep.”

In the summer night such marauders as are about—the night insects, the rabbit nibbling clover on the lawn, the slug sucking the iris blade—all go about their work of destruction in a single-minded silence. Sleep is disturbed not by noises but by the moonlight on the bedroom floor. But in the late fall and early winter, especially before the snow comes, there is a time of terror when field mice, rats, and squirrels, driven indoors by the cold, make ratching-scratching sounds inside the walls; the stairs creak; some part of the house settles a thousandth of an inch (the effect of a dead man’s curse or a witch in the neighbourhood); and people whose dreams are too active wake and hear sounds that (so the pounding in their left side tells them) have been made by a prowler.

“If it
is
somebody,” Alice Beach said, “they probably won’t come upstairs where we are. They’ll probably just take the silver and leave. That’s what I’d do if I were a burglar.”

“Oh, Alice, you’re so silly. There isn’t anybody downstairs.” They both held their breath and listened, with their hearts
constricted by fear, the pulse in their foreheads beating against the pillow.

“Sh—sh——”

“Very well,” Lucy said. “I’m going downstairs and find out what it is. Otherwise you’ll keep me awake all night.”

“Oh, Lucy, please!
Please
don’t! It isn’t safe!”

“Fiddlesticks!”

The light went on in the room across the hall and Alice got up out of bed also, put her dressing-gown on, and followed Lucy to the head of the stairs. The light at the foot of the stairs went on, then the light in the parlour, in the dining-room, the kitchen, the laundry. With every light in every room of the whole downstairs turned on, Lucy Beach opened the door to the basement and stood at the head of the cobwebbed stair, waiting. The cause of their disturbance was not there.

It is never easy to live under the same roof with someone in love. Even when the secret is known to all and can be openly joked about, there is something in the atmosphere that promotes restlessness. If the family is divided into those who know and those who don’t know and mustn’t under any circumstances find out, then instead of restlessness there is a continual strain, the lamps do not give off their usual amount of light, the drinking water tastes queer, the cream turns sour with no provocation. The conspirators avoid each other’s eyes, take exhausting precautions against one another, and read double meanings into remarks that under normal circumstances they would not even hear. The person they are doing their best to protect keeps giving the secret away. Now on one pretext, now on another the cat is continually let out of the bag and it is then up to those who know about this animal to rush immediately and corner it before the fatal damage is done.

“You see?” Lucy said, and closed and locked the cellar door. Turning out lights as they went, they found themselves,
at last, in the front hall. Lucy opened the door of the coat closet, where a man could have been hiding among the raincoats and umbrellas. “Now if you’re satisfied,” she said, “we can go back to bed.”

6

“I know you’re busy, Mr. King,” Miss Ewing said, “but Mr. Holby has someone in his office and I thought—if you could give me a minute, that is. I—if you don’t mind, I’ll close the door.”

Austin had given her a great many minutes without her feeling any need to ask apologetically for them, and her manner now was so hesitant, so deeply troubled that he motioned her to a chair. Miss Ewing sat and twisted her handkerchief and at last said, “I haven’t been feeling well lately. The doctor tells me I ought to take a rest.”