“No, I know. You can’t control charm. It’s simply got to be used. You’ve got to keep your hand in if you have it, and go through life attaching people to you that you don’t want. I don’t blame you. If you only hadn’t kissed me the night of the Mayfair dance. I suppose it was the champagne.”
George felt as if a band which had been playing for a long time in the distance had suddenly moved up and taken a station beneath his window. He had always been conscious that things like this were going on around him. Now that he thought of it, he had always been conscious that Margaret loved him, but the faint music of these emotions in his ear had seemed to bear no relation to actual life. They were phantoms that he had conjured up out of nothing; he had never imagined their actual incarnations. At his wish they should die inconsequently away.
“You can’t imagine what it’s been like,” Margaret continued after a minute. “Things you’ve just said and forgotten, I’ve put myself asleep night after night remembering—trying to squeeze something more out of them. After that night you took me to the Mayfair other men didn’t exist for me any more. And there were others, you know—lots of them. But I’d see you walking along somewhere about the lot, looking at the ground and smiling a little, as if something very amusing had just happened to you, the way you do. And I’d pass you and you’d look up and really smile: ’Hello, darling!’ ’Hello, darling’ and my heart would turn over. That would happen four times a day.”
George stood up and she, too, jumped up quickly.
“Oh, I’ve bored you,” she cried softly. “I might have known I’d bore you. You want to go home. Let’s see—is there anything else? Oh, yes; you might as well have those letters.”
Taking them out of a desk, she took them to a window and identified them by a rift of lamplight.
“They’re really beautiful letters. They’d do you credit. I suppose it was pretty stupid, as you say, but it might to teach you a lesson about—about signing things, or something.” She tore the letters small and threw them in the wastebasket: “Now go on,” she said.
“Why must I go now?”
For the third time in twenty-four hours sad and uncontrollable tears confronted him.
“Please go!” she cried angrily—“or stay if you like. I’m yours for the asking. You know it. You can have any woman you want in the world by just raising your hand. Would I amuse you?”
“Margaret——”
“Oh, go on then.” She sat down and turned her face away. “After all, you’ll begin to look silly in a minute. You wouldn’t like that, would you ? So get out.”
George stood there helpless, trying to put himself in her place and say something that wouldn’t be priggish, but nothing came.
He tried to force down his personal distress, his discomfort, his vague feeling of scorn, ignorant of the fact that she was watching him and understanding it all and loving the struggle in his face. Suddenly his own nerves gave way under the strain of the past twenty-four hours and he felt his eyes grow dim and his throat tighten. He shook his head helplessly. Then he turned away—still not knowing that she was watching him and loving him until she thought her heart would burst with it—and went out to the door.
IV
The car stopped before his house, dark save for small lights in the nursery and the lower hall. He heard the telephone ringing, but when he answered it, inside, there was no one on the line. For a few minutes he wandered about in the darkness, moving from chair to chair and going to the window to stare out into the opposite emptiness of the night.
It was strange to be alone, to feel alone. In his overwrought condition the fact was not unpleasant. As the trouble of last night had made Helen Avery infinitely remote, so his talk with Margaret had acted as a katharsis to his own personal misery. It would swing back upon him presently, he knew, but for a moment his mind was too tired to remember, to imagine or to care.
Half an hour passed. He saw Dolores issue from the kitchen, take the paper from the front steps and carry it back to the kitchen for a preliminary inspection. With a vague idea of packing his grip, he went upstairs. He opened the door of Kay’s room and found her lying down.
For a moment he didn’t speak, but moved around the bathroom between. Then he went into her room and switched on the lights.
“What’s the matter?” he asked casually. “Aren’t you feeling well?”
“I’ve been trying to get some sleep,” she said. “George, do you think that girl’s gone crazy?”
“What girl?”
“Margaret Donovan. I’ve never heard of anything so terrible in my life.”
For a moment he thought that there had been some new development.
“Fifty thousand dollars!” she cried indignantly. “Why, I wouldn’t give it to her even if it was true. She ought to be sent to jail.”
“Oh, it’s not so terrible as that,” he said. “She has a brother who’s a pretty bad egg and it was his idea.”
“She’s capable of anything,” Kay said solemnly. “And you’re just a fool if you don’t see it. I’ve never liked her. She has dirty hair.”
“Well, what of it ?” he demanded impatiently, and added: “Where’s Arthur Busch?”
“He went home right after lunch. Or rather I sent him home.”
“You decided you were not in love with him ?”
She looked up almost in surprise. “In love with him? Oh, you mean this morning. I was just mad at you; you ought to have known that. I was a little sorry for him last night, but I guess it was the highballs.”
“Well, what did you mean when you——” He broke off. Wherever he turned he found a muddle, and he resolutely determined not to think.
“My heavens!” exclaimed Kay. “Fifty thousand dollars!”
“Oh, drop it. She tore up the letters she wrote them herself—and everything’s all right.”
“George.”
“Yes.”
“Of course Douglas will fire her right away.”
“Of course he won’t. He won’t know anything about it.”
“You mean to say you’re not going to let her go? After this?”
He jumped up. “Do you suppose she thought that?” he cried.
“Thought what?”
“That I’d have them let her go?”
“You certainly ought to.”
He looked hastily through the phone book for her name.
“Oxford——” he called.
After an unusually long time the switchboard operator answered: “Bourbon Apartments.”
“Miss Margaret Donovan, please.”
“Why——” The operator’s voice broke off. “If you’ll just wait a minute, please.” He held the line; the minute passed, then another. Then the operator’s voice: “I couldn’t talk to you then. Miss Donovan has had an accident. She’s shot herself. When you called they were taking her through the lobby to St. Catherine’s Hospital.”
“Is she—is it serious?” George demanded frantically.
“They thought so at first, but now they think she’ll be all right. They’re going to probe for the bullet.”
“Thank you.”
He got up and turned to Kay.
“She’s tried to kill herself,” he said in a strained voice. “I’ll have to go around to the hospital. I was pretty clumsy this afternoon and I think I’m partly responsible for this.”
“George,” said Kay suddenly.
“What?”
“Don’t you think it’s sort of unwise to get mixed up in this ? People might say——”
“I don’t give a damn what they say,” he answered roughly.
He went to his room and automatically began to prepare for going out. Catching sight of his face in the mirror, he closed his eyes with a sudden exclamation of distaste, and abandoned the intention of brushing his hair.
“George.” Kay called from the next room, “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Jules Rennard called up. Something about barracuda fishing. Don’t you think it would be fun to get up a party? Men and girls both.”
“Somehow the idea doesn’t appeal to me. The whole idea of barracuda fishing——”
The phone rang below and he started. Dolores was answering it.
It was a lady who had already called twice today.
“Is Mr. Hannaford in?”
“No,” said Dolores promptly. She stuck out her tongue and hung up the phone just as George Hannaford came downstairs: She helped him into his coat, standing as close as she could to him, opened the door and followed a little way out on the porch.
“Meester Hannaford,” she said suddenly, “that Miss Avery she call up five-six times today, I tell her you out and say nothing to missus.”
“What?” He stared at her, wondering how much she knew about his affairs.
“She call up just now and I say you out.”
“All right,” he said absently.
“Meester Hannaford.”
“Yes, Dolores.”
“I deedn’t hurt myself thees morning when I fell off the porch.”
“That’s fine. Good night, Dolores.”
“Good night, Meester Hannaford.”
George smiled at her, faintly, fleetingly, tearing a veil from between them, unconsciously promising her a possible admission to the thousand delights and wonders that only he knew and could command. Then he went to his waiting car and Dolores, sitting down on the stoop, rubbed her hands together in a gesture that might have expressed either ecstasy or strangulation, and watched the rising of the thin, pale California moon.
Published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine (3 March 1928).
