Time Will Darken It (40 page)

“The office is very busy just now,” Austin said, “but I guess we can manage somehow. We don’t want you to get down sick. How much time do you plan to take off? A week? Two weeks?”

“I’m afraid it would have to be longer,” Miss Ewing said. “I know this is a hard time for you, and I don’t like to do it, Mr. King, but Dr. Seymour thinks I ought to give up my job entirely.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Austin said, neither his voice nor his expression conveying an adequate amount of regret. It takes time to accept a catastrophe, and in the face of the first intimation that the golden age of Miss Ewing had come to an end he was almost cheerful.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you,” she said. “I thought maybe I could keep on a while longer anyway, but I haven’t been sleeping at all well and——”

“It’s not a question of money, is it? Because if it’s a question of money, I’d be glad to speak to Mr. Holby about a raise for you. I’m sure it could be arranged.”

“No,” Miss Ewing said. “It isn’t that. You and Mr. Holby have always been generous with me. More than generous. It’s just that I’m getting along in years and I don’t seem to be able to stand the work I used to. My mind is tired, and it makes me so nervous when things don’t go just right—when I make mistakes.”

Austin searched his conscience for some mild reprimand, some abrupt or impatient gesture that might have hurt Miss Ewing’s feelings.

“I’ll never forget how good your father was to me when I first came to work here. I was just a girl and I didn’t know anything about law or office work. He used to get impatient and lose his temper and shout at other people, but with me he was always so considerate. He was more like a friend than an employer.”

Austin nodded sympathetically. What she said was not strictly true and Miss Ewing must know that it was not true. His father had often lost his temper at Miss Ewing. Her high-handed manner with people that she considered unimportant and her old-maid ways had annoyed Judge King so that he had, a number of times, been on the point of firing her. He couldn’t fire her because she was indispensable to the firm, and what they had between them was more like marriage than like friendship. But there is always a kind of truth in those fictions which people create in order to describe something too complicated and too subtle to fit into any conventional pattern.

“He was a wonderful man,” Miss Ewing said. “There’ll never be anybody like him.”

Austin’s glance strayed to the papers on his desk, and then returned to Miss Ewing. “When would you want to leave?” he asked.

“As soon as possible.”

“I’m afraid there are a good many things that Mr. Holby and I don’t know about. We’ve leaned so heavily upon your experience and knowledge of the firm. If you could stay on a few weeks, say until the new girl is broken in.”

“Oh I expect to do that,” she said eagerly. “The way things are now, I’m the only one who——”

She stopped talking and looked at him with such a strange pleading in her eyes that, half in fright, he started to get up out of his chair.

“Mr. King, I’m not the person you think I am. You shouldn’t have trusted me. I’ve done things I never thought I’d do. Something so …”

What was left of her ordinary self-composure gave way entirely and she began to cry and to tell him that she had done terrible things, so terrible that he’d have to put her in jail for it. From her hysterical confession he could make only one incredible fact—Miss Ewing had stolen money from the firm. How much he couldn’t discover, but apparently it had been going on for over a year. First, small sums from the cash box. Then she had forged his and Mr. Holby’s signatures and in that way withdrawn considerable sums from the bank, which her knowledge of book-keeping had enabled her to conceal.

“If you had come to me and told me that you needed money,” Austin said.

“I didn’t need it. I don’t know why I took it. At first I just wanted to see if I could, as a kind of game, I guess. And when I found out how easy it was to deceive you and Mr. Holby, I went on doing it. If Judge King had been alive I wouldn’t have dared. He’d have guessed somehow, and he’d have done something terrible to me. But you kept coming in, day after day, always the same, always trusting me, and I couldn’t stand it any more. I just had to tell you and get it over with before I went crazy. You don’t know what it’s like,
Mr. King, to have something gnawing at your conscience day and night. No peace of mind, no rest, until finally you think everybody knows and is just waiting to catch you at it. Anything, even going to jail, is better than the worry you go through in your own mind. I hope you never know. But that’s what you have to do with someone like me—call the police and have them take me away.…”

She broke into a fresh storm of weeping, and Austin got up from his chair and went around the desk and put his hands on her thin shoulders to comfort her.

“Please don’t!” she exclaimed, shaking herself free. “I don’t deserve kindness, and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand anything more.”

Austin left her weeping in the chair that was reserved for people who came to inquire into their rights under the Law, and went out into the outer office and called a cab. When it came, Miss Ewing put her hat and coat on, and took one last wild hopeless look at her cluttered desk. Austin helped her down the stairs and told the Mathein boy who was driving his father’s hack to take her home. Then he went back into his office, closed the door, and called Dr. Seymour.

In his excitement, while he was talking over the telephone, there was a certain hardness—the hardness of triumph. All these years Miss Ewing had rubbed his nose in the fact that he was not the man his father was. And how the mighty were fallen! But he said “She’s put in many years of faithful service, and if she’s sick—she’d never have behaved this way otherwise—naturally we’ll take care of her”; and so preserved that inner image, the icon that no one, kind or unkind, is ever willing to change.

7

“Why my darling!” Martha King exclaimed as she lifted Ab onto her lap. “My precious angel! Nobody can ever take your place, not even for one solitary second!”

Ab’s tears were stopped by the quick comfort of softness and her mother’s “There, there …” When she sat up she was smiling.

“Where will the baby sleep? Will the baby sleep in my room?”

“If you’d like it to,” Martha said. With her hand she brushed Ab’s bangs back from her high forehead, and then bending down, kissed the soft place where the bones had long since grown together.

When Ab left her to go and play, Martha got up from her chair and went over to the window seat and the pile of mending. Rachel had failed to show up, that morning, and Martha King was weighed down by a premonition. The tangle of socks, the shirt collar that needed turning, remained untouched. For over an hour she sat with her forehead against the window, looking out on the driveway and the house next door, on the kitchen pump and the mulberry tree now stripped of both leaves and fruit.

What she thought of, sitting there all that time, she could not have told later. She saw a leaf dropping, people passing on the sidewalk, the grey overcast Saturday. But all this was out of any time sequence and often part of a long chain of ideas and images that seemed to have no connection with each other and that led nowhere. There is a country where women go when they are pregnant, a country with no king and no parliament. The inhabitants do nothing but wait, and
the present does not exist on any calendar; only the future, which may or may not come. Yet something is accomplished there, even so, and that inescapable tax which in the outside world is collected once every lunar cycle, in blood, is forgiven and remains in the hands of the taxpayer.

The castle in which all are confined is surrounded by a moat fed by underground springs. There are no incoming and outgoing heralds, no splendour falls on the castle walls. The windows are narrow slits looking out through stone upon a landscape of the palest colours. The view from the highest turret is always the same, except that sometimes there is no view at all.

The inhabitants of the castle are often seized with cramps and vomiting. They are extravagantly hungry one moment and without appetite the next. Consistency is not required of them. Eccentric wool-gatherers, in summer they huddle each one beside an ornamental stove that is always lit and there for her alone. In winter they put their arms through the slits in the stone walls and feel the warm rain. Emotions are drowsy, remembered, and vague. Bitterness, hatred, and fear are watered and tended and turned so that they can grow evenly, and then are forgotten before they have a chance to flower. Intending becomes pretending. The children’s voices that are heard occasionally are not the voices of children who will grow up and marry and beget more children, but those of Cain and Abel quarrelling over the possession of a tricycle or a rubber ball.

Now and then someone tries to escape from the country but this is difficult. There is bound to be trouble at the frontier. The roads, although policed, are not safe after dark. People are robbed of the calcium in their bones, and of their life’s savings in dreams. The featureless landscape turns out to be littered with dirty things, maggots crawling, disgusting amoeba that move and have hairy appendages, or the bloated body of a dead deer.

A sound outside made Martha King turn in time to see Mr. Porterfield wheeling his bicycle up the brick driveway. As she opened the kitchen door, her eyes travelled to the note in his right hand.

The Reverend Mr. Porterfield was a slight, neatly dressed Negro of uncertain age. His hands and face were grave, his manner (neither obsequious nor race-proud nor quick to see insult where no insult is intended) a model for white people to follow in dealing with black. Every Sunday evening from the platform of the African Methodist Episcopal Church he justified the ways of God to his congregation, and when they were in trouble, they came to him for help.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without her,” Martha said, after she had finished reading Rachel’s note. “Is she all right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“She didn’t say where she was going or what her plans were?”

“Well, no,” he said carefully. “She requested me to deliver the message to you and I said I would. But where she was going, she didn’t exactly say.”

“I see,” Martha said. “Won’t you come inside? It’s very cold out today.”

“Thank you, ma’am, but I have to be getting on downtown.”

As he righted his bicycle, Martha said, “Did she take the children with her?”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Porterfield said. “Yes, she took the children.”

“Well, if you hear anything from her …”

“Be glad to. If I hear anything, I’ll certainly inform you of it.… Good day, ma’am, and remember me to Mr. King.”

He knows and he won’t tell me, Martha King thought as she watched him wheel his bicycle down the driveway. She
started back into the house and then hesitated. Her eyes took in the icebox and the accumulation of things destined for the barn loft, as if somewhere—behind the mildewed print of the U.S.S.
Maine
, perhaps, or in the box of tarnished evening slippers—was hidden the disturbing reason for Rachel’s conduct, why she trusted Mr. Porterfield and not Martha King.

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