The husband laughed with gratitude. ‘Glad to get rid of the damned thing. Wheel her out!’
Mr. Whetmore directed two brawny workmen into the room. He was almost breathless with anticipation. ‘The most amazing thing. This morning I was lost, beaten, dejected — but a miracle happened.’ The tombstone was loaded on to a small coaster truck.
‘Just an hour ago, I heard, by chance, of a Mr. White who had just died of pneumonia. A Mr. White, mind you, who spells his name with an I instead of a Y. I have just contacted his wife, and she is delighted that the stone is all prepared. And Mr. White not cold more than sixty minutes, and spelling his name with an I, just think of it. Oh, I’m so happy!’
The tombstone, on its truck, rolled from the room, while Mr. Whetmore and the Oklahoma man laughed, shook hands, and Leota watched with suspicion as the commotion came to an end. ‘Well, that’s now all over,’ grinned her husband as he closed the door on Mr. Whetmore, and began throwing the canned flowers into the sink and dropping the tin cans into a waste-basket.
In the dark, he climbed into bed again, oblivious to her deep and solemn silence. She said not a word for a long while, but just lay there, alone-feeling. She felt him adjust the blankets with a sigh. ‘Now we can sleep. The damn old thing’s took away. It’s only ten-thirty. Plenty of time for sleep.’ How he enjoyed spoiling her fun.
Leota was about to speak when a rapping came from down below again. ‘There! There!’ she cried, triumphantly, holding her husband. ‘There it is again, the noises, like I said. Hear them!’
Her husband knotted his fists and clenched his teeth. ‘How many times must I explain. Do I have to kick you in the head to make you understand, woman! Let me alone. There’s nothing — ‘
‘Listen, listen, oh, listen,’ she begged in a whisper.
They listened in the square darkness.
A rapping on a door came from downstairs.
A door opened. Muffled and distant and faint, a woman’s voice said, sadly, ‘Oh, it’s you, Mr. Whetmore.’
And deep down in the darkness underneath the suddenly shivering bed of Leota and her Oklahoma husband, Mr. Whetmore’s voice replied: ‘Good evening again, Mrs. White. Here. I brought the stone.’
The Smiling People
IT was the sensation of silence that was the most notable aspect of the house. As Mr. Greppin came through the front door the oiled silence of the door opening and swinging close behind him was like an opening and shutting dream, a thing accomplished on rubber pads, bathed in lubricant, slow and unmaterialistic. The double carpet in the hall, which he himself had so recently laid, gave off no sound from his movements. And when the wind shook the house late of nights there was not a rattle of eave or tremor of loose sash.
He had, himself, checked the storm windows. The screen doors were securely hooked with bright new, firm hooks, and the furnace did not knock but sent a silent whisper of warm wind up the throats of the heating system that sighed ever so quietly, moving the cuffs of his trousers as he stood, now, warming himself from the bitter afternoon.
Weighing the silence with the remarkable instruments of pitch and balance in his small ears, he nodded with satisfaction that the silence was so unified and finished. Because there had been nights when rats had walked between wall-layers and it had taken baited traps and poisoned food before the walls were mute. Even the grandfather clock had been stilled, its brass pendulum hung frozen and gleaming in its long cedar, glass-fronted coffin.
They were waiting for him in the dining-room.
He listened. They made no sound. Good. Excellent, in fact. They had learned, then, to be silent. You had to teach people, but it was worth while — there was not a stir of knife or fork from the dining-table. He worked off his thick grey gloves, hung up his cold armour of overcoat and stood there with an expression of urgency and indecisiveness. . . thinking of what had to be done.
Mr. Greppin proceeded with familiar certainty and economy of motion into the dining-room, where the four individuals seated at the waiting table did not move or speak a word. The only sound was the merest allowable pad of his shoes on the deep carpet.
His eyes, as usual, instinctively fastened upon the lady heading the table. Passing, he waved a finger near her cheek. She did not blink.
Aunt Rose sat firmly at the head of the table, and if a mote of dust floated lightly down out of the ceiling spaces, did her eye trace its orbit? Did the eye revolve in its shellacked socket, with glassy cold precision? And if the dust mote happened upon the shell of her wet eye did the eye batten? Did the muscles clinch, the lashes close?
No.
Aunt Rose’s hand lay on the table like cutlery, rare and fine and old; tarnished. Her bosom was hidden in a salad of fluffy linen. The breasts had not been exhumed for years; either for love or child-sucking. They were mummies wrapped in cerements and put away for all time.
Beneath the table her stick legs in high button shoes went up into a sexless pipe of dress. You felt that the legs terminated at the skirt line and from there on she was a department store dummy, all wax and nothingness.
You felt that her husband, years ago, must have handled her in just such a way as one handled window mannequins, and she responded with the same chill waxen movements, with as much enthusiasm and response as a mannequin; and the husband, beaten off with no blows and no words, had turned over under the bedding and lain trembling with a feeding passion for many nights and then, finally, silently, taken to evening walks and little places across town, beyond the ravine, where a pink curtained window glowed with fresher electricity and a young lady answered when he tapped the bell.
So here was Aunt Rose, staring straight at Mr. Greppin, and — he choked out a laugh and clapped hands derisively shut — there were the first hints of a dust moustache gathering across her upper lip!
‘Good evening, Aunt Rose,’ he said, bowing. ‘Good evening, Uncle Dimity,’ he said, graciously. ‘No, not a word,’ he held up his hand. ‘Not a word from any of you.’ He bowed again. ‘Ah, good evening, cousin Lila, and you, cousin Lester.’
Lila sat upon the left, her hair like golden shavings from a tube of lathed brass. Lester, opposite her, told all directions with his hair. They were both young, he fourteen, she sixteen. Uncle Dimity, their father (but ‘father’ was a nasty word!) sat next to Lila, placed in this secondary niche long long ago because Aunt Rose said the window draught might get his neck if he sat at the head of the table. Ah, Aunt Rose!
Mr. Greppin drew the chair under his tight-clothed little rump and put a casual elbow to the linen.
‘I’ve something to say,’ he said. ‘It’s very important. This has gone on for weeks now. It can’t go any further. I’m in love. Oh, but I told you that long ago. On the day I made you all smile. Remember?’
The eyes of the four seated people did not blink, the hands did not move.
Greppin became introspective. The day he had made them smile. Two weeks ago it was. He had come home, walked in, looked at them and said, ‘I’m to be married!’
They had all whirled with expressions as if someone had just smashed the window.
‘You’re to be what!’ cried Aunt Rose.
‘To Alice Jane Bellerd!’ he had said, stiffening somewhat.
‘Congratulations,’ said Uncle Dimity. ‘I guess,’ he added, looking at his wife. He cleared his throat. ‘But isn’t it a little early, son?’ He looked at his wife again. ‘Yes. Yes, I think it is a little early. I wouldn’t advise it yet, not just yet, no.’
‘The house is in a terrible way,’ said Aunt Rose. ‘We won’t have it fixed for a year yet.’
‘That’s what you said last year and the year before,’ said Mr. Greppin. ‘And anyway,’ he said, bluntly, ‘this is my house.’
Aunt Rose’s jaw had clamped at that. ‘After all these years, for us to be bodily thrown out, why I — ‘
‘You won’t be thrown out, don’t be idiotic!’ said Greppin, furiously.
‘Now, Rose — ‘ said Uncle Dimity in a pale tone.
Aunt Rose dropped her hands. ‘After all I’ve done — ‘
In that instant Greppin had known they would have to go, all of them. First he would make them silent, then he would make them smile, then, later, he would move them out like luggage. He couldn’t bring Alice Jane into a house full of grims such as these, where Aunt Rose followed wherever you went even when she wasn’t following you, and the children performed indignities upon you at a glance from their maternal parent, and the father, no better than a third child, carefully rearranged his advice to you on being a bachelor. Greppin stared at them. It was their fault that his loving and living was all wrong. If he did something about them — then his warm, luminous dreams of soft bodies glowing with an anxious perspiration of love might become tangible and near. Then he would have the house for himself and — and Alice Jane. Yes, Alice Jane.
Aunt, Uncle and cousins would have to go. Quickly. If he told them to go, as
