Somewhere in This House Page 8

  “Will has just hit me and knocked me down,” she said.

  She was unbelievably cool about it. Nothing was disarranged, her copper hair was still sleek, her hard tight body still carefully folded in long-fringed silk; only that little thread of bright red blood forming into a single drop at the point of her chin. The drop grew over-heavy, fell, and another one leisurely began to take its place.

  Will sat slumped in a chair by a window, his head sunk on his chest, staring at Vera from under his eyebrows; staring dispassionately at Vera, his under lip hanging a little, making him look stupid…but the look in his eyes wasn’t stupid.

  “He hit me on my mouth and knocked me down.” Vera explored with a finger. A drop of blood settled on it. She stared at the bright red cap it made on the end of her white slim finger. “He’s made me bleed.”

  It was a thoroughly uncomfortable situation. Valcour was intensely embarrassed. Its very placidity proscribed physical action. If they had only come upon the scene with Will, say, choking her, it would have been so simple. But there was Will, sitting quite quiet and staring, and there was his wife, bleeding from where he had struck her. Husband and wife—the ageless, immutable barrier raised by marriage between their private affairs, their lives, their quarrels, and the outside world. There was nothing one could do.

  Valcour looked at Dr. Harlan. Dr. Harlan wasn’t looking at Vera at all; he was looking at Will, and there was something funny in his look.

  “Wipe that blood off your face with a handkerchief, Vera,” Dr. Harlan said, without turning his head from Will.

  Valcour clung to his discreet if uncomfortable silence. He was trying to put his finger on Vera’s attitude. There was a lot of triumph in it, some secret victory, and he wondered over what. She had the air of a general who had successfully completed some affair in minor tactics and was reviewing the field before launching a main attack. He felt the absurdity of asking whether she wished to prefer charges of assault. He felt that she would brush them aside as being immaterial and insignificant in view of her major plan. It was intolerably foolish to stand there any longer and say nothing.

  “Is there anything you would like me to do, Mrs. Sturm?” he said.

  Vera’s attempt at a smile made her lip bleed more freely. She spat some blood onto the floor. “I’ll say there is,” she said.

  “Yes, Mrs. Sturm?”

  “You—and Fred, too—I’ll want you both as witnesses.” Her eyes were undeniably triumphant. They lingered absently on Will, touched Dr. Harlan, came to rest on Valcour. “I’m seeing a lawyer in the morning about getting a divorce.”

  A delicate, hacking cough drifted in from the hallway.

  “Vera, my dear.”

  Mr. Sturm was in the room, joining them silently but for the faintest rustle of black silk, apologizing with the slightest and most accurate of bows to Valcour for passing in front of him, walking with tranquil dignity across the floor, and taking his stand as a tall dark shadow beside Will’s chair.

  “Yes, Mr. Sturm.”

  The edge was already dulling on her sharp new triumph. It could not pierce the blanketing influence of a year.

  “I see that your lip is bleeding.” Mr. Sturm drew a voluminous handkerchief of sheer cambric from a pocket in his dressing gown. Vera grew harder and tighter as he walked softly toward her and delicately pressed white cambric against the blood. “Permit me, my dear child.”

  Something broke the spell. Perhaps it was the light touch of cloth against her skin. Vera snatched the handkerchief from Mr. Sturm’s hand and crumpled it into a ball. She slung it onto the floor.

  “That’s what your swell son did to me. See?” She thrust her face nearer to Mr. Sturm. “He hit me on my mouth and knocked me down.”

  “Control yourself, Vera, my dear. There is no necessity for shouting. We are all standing near you and can hear you perfectly.” Mr. Sturm looked quietly at his son. “Will, did you strike Vera?”

  “Of course not.”

  Mr. Sturm smiled thinly. “I only asked as a matter of formality,” he said, “for the benefit of Dr. Harlan and this other gentleman, whom I have not, as yet, had the pleasure of meeting. It is Mr. Valcour, is it not? My son said something about your being here, and being kind enough to interest yourself in attempting to clear up our little difficulty.”

  “I won’t be put off—I won’t be slapped down.” Vera’s voice was a shout. “He’s a dirty, nasty little liar, and I’ll swear before a judge and jury that he hit me on my mouth and knocked me down bleeding, and I’ll get me a divorce if I have to drag the case through every court and state in the country.” The hard, tight folds of silk were loosening up beneath her short, excited breathing.

  “Divorce?”

  Mr. Sturm raised his eyebrows and held them there. He stared with calculating calmness at Vera.

  “I said divorce.”

  “Oh, but my dear Vera”—his voice was very quiet, the smoothest, softest sort of a muted whisper—“the Sturms do not believe in divorce.”

  The eyebrows, the muted tones, the thin, chill, inimical undercurrents radiating unseen—all were getting in their deadly work. Vera got as far as a single: “Well—”

  “I am sure that we can think up some other way out of this little unpleasantness, my dear.”

  “Yes, Mr. Sturm.”

  “And so, if you gentlemen will pardon us for a while?”

  It was a definite, no matter how courteous, dismissal. Valcour bowed and left the room. Dr. Harlan followed and joined him in the hall.

  And this time it was the elder Mr. Sturm who closed the door.

  CHAPTER XV

  They drifted aimlessly down the shadowed hall toward the maid’s room.

  “It’s a disagreeable mess,” Dr. Harlan said. “Disgusting. I’ll be glad when we can clear out of it. Do you believe it?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Valcour dragged himself back from obscure and confusing thoughts. “Believe what, Doctor?”

  “That Will didn’t hit her.”

  “Oh, yes. I was fairly sure he hadn’t. Apart from the fact that his whole character and breeding would preclude it, there was that blood on the bedpost where she had struck her lip and cut it. He might kill her, yes, but never strike her.”

  “Well, he might have slung her off and made her hit the bedpost.”

  “I doubt it very much. I don’t believe he’d touch her. I imagine Mrs. Sturm simply lashed herself into a fury. Perhaps she struck out at him and he dodged her. She may have slipped, cut her lip, fallen. I don’t think we’ll ever know the exact details of that scene. They don’t matter. It’s their possible consequences that worry me.”

  “Being dragged into the divorce proceedings?”

  “Heavens, no! There won’t be any divorce, certainly not on those grounds and in this state.”

  They had reached the door of the maid’s room. It was the darkest portion of the long dark hall, and shadows were thick about them.

  “You may think I’m crazy, Doctor”—Valcour had stopped and was standing quite close to Dr. Harlan—“but I’ve a presentiment, or whatever psychic label you care to tack onto it, that the consequences of that little episode will simply mean that Mrs. Sturm has signed her own death warrant.”

  Dr. Harlan took out a package of cigarettes. He offered them to Valcour, who refused. His singularly powerful fingers trembled as he struck a match and lighted a cigarette. “I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said.

  “I’m glad that you don’t, Doctor.” Valcour hesitated for a moment before adding, “I think it might be advisable if neither of us was to sleep very much tonight. Personally, I do not believe that I will go to sleep at all. When daylight comes things will be different. We can”—he waved his hand helplessly—“make saner plans.”

  He went into the maid’s room, and Dr. Harlan followed. They stood close to the b
ed, looking down at Alice Tribeau. Her breathing was fairly normal and her face was a good color.

  “Country stock,” Dr. Harlan said. “Good stock. She’ll come through this and never know a thing happened to her. She could even be up and about her work in the morning without its harming her. There’s health for you, Valcour.”

  Valcour smiled gently. “Health and the innocent bystander—perhaps.”

  “There isn’t any doubt, surely?”

  “I’ve been given a call-down once tonight for being sententious, but there is always doubt. Nothing is certain. The performance of some machinery approaches certainty, but nothing is ever certain in the past or problematic performances of human beings. Will our talking disturb her?”

  “Nothing will disturb her until the opiate wears off.”

  “Well, then, I don’t think there is anything further we can do tonight. When she wakes up in the morning I’ll question her, if you think she’s in proper condition, and then maybe we’ll get some place. Do you mind my being a bit melodramatic?”

  Dr. Harlan did not smile. “No,” he said. “What?”

  “I’m going to suggest that you spend the rest of the night in that chair over there. It looks pretty comfortable, and there are only about five or six hours left till daylight. Just fix yourself in that chair and go to sleep, after you have bolted this door.”

  “You want me to bolt myself in?”

  “Yes, Doctor, so that you can rest undisturbed. I’ll know that Alice Tribeau will be safe with you in here with her, and if I need you I’ll call to you.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “There’s a lounge at the end of the hall right at the door to Mrs. Sturm’s room. I think I’ll sit the rest of the night out on that lounge.”

  “But couldn’t we take turns?”

  “There’s no need, Doctor. If I get helplessly sleepy I’ll call you. But I shan’t. You’ve been duck hunting here, of course?”

  “Often.”

  “Well, you know how it is: often you sit for hours before a duck comes along, and often no duck comes at all. But just the expectancy of one’s coming keeps you awake and interested. You couldn’t go to sleep duck hunting no matter how tired you were. That’s what I’ll be doing tonight—duck hunting.”

  “Well, if you think so.” Dr. Harlan eyed the chair. It was a large chair, a comfortable-looking chair. “You’ll be around when Vera comes out from that pleasant little conference, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Better bring her along to me for a minute so that I can dress her lip.”

  “All right, Doctor. I’ll be on the lookout for her, and I’ll stay with her until she’s safely locked in her room for the night. And when she is I’ll be sitting right outside her door.” Valcour walked to the door. He stared at the bolt, fingered it. “Bolts are good things,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to open them from the outside.” He stepped into the hall. “I’ll be along with Mrs. Sturm as soon as she’s out.”

  Valcour pulled the door shut after him. He walked slowly to the other end of the hall and sat down on the lounge. It was backed up against a window, a window with square black panes flecked in changing patterns by the thick and tireless flakes of snow, white jailers in their infinite multitude, making of the house a prison. He heard a slight noise down the hall. Will’s door was opening and Vera was coming out alone. The door was closed behind her and she leaned against its panels. She touched a finger to her cut and swelling lip. She started walking listlessly toward him along the dim and silent hall.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Valcour stood up. He walked a few steps to meet her.

  “Dr. Harlan would like to dress that cut on your lip,” he said.

  “Oh, would he?”

  Vera’s voice was very artificial and curiously harsh. Her enunciation verged on the unintelligible. Her underlip had swollen considerably and she moved it as little as possible when she spoke.

  “He is in the maid’s room, Mrs. Sturm. Would you care to go there with me?”

  Her vitality was noticeably drained. The assurance had gone completely from her walk. She took his arm as they went toward the maid’s room, and she took it, he felt, because she really needed its support. His feeling of perverse sympathy for her increased enormously. The very foundation of his moral outlook was built on the conviction that there were two sides to every question. At present he was seeing her side very clearly—her twisted, thwarted, pitiably rapacious side.

  He thought of her as a strong, a tough, a vigorous plant transplanted into a hybridized milieu of specimen blooms that for all their sensitized breeding, their comparatively slender delicacy, were shading her inexorably from the sun, were wilting her politely and dispassionately. Certainly, he assured himself, it was her own fault, but it was Will’s fault, too. After all, as she had said, Will hadn’t been a minor when he married her. He had been thirty, in his right mind, and she hadn’t forced him to do it at the point of a gun. Valcour smiled as he remembered Vera’s tag to the statement: that she hadn’t had to.

  “Dr. Harlan.” He knocked on the door of the maid’s room.

  Dr. Harlan opened the door. “Come in, Vera,” he said. “I want to take a look at that lip.”

  “It surprises me you should think about it, Fred.”

  The heavy sarcasm was made almost slab-like by the uncanny artificiality of her voice.

  “Now, now, now.” Dr. Harlan mimicked her tone in an equally weighty effort at what might have been meant to pass as professional humor.

  Vera failed to smile, and Valcour felt curiously unlike smiling ever again. Dr. Harlan fished a surgeon’s needle and some thread from his handbag.

  “Come over here by this light, Vera.” He tilted a lamp shade so that the light fell squarely on Vera’s face. He examined the cut critically. “This won’t need any stitches,” he said. “It’s nothing; nothing at all.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Oh, of course it’s painful, Vera, but I’ll put a salve on that will help it.” He busied himself again with the handbag that held his instruments and medicines. They amounted in their variety to a miniature traveling pharmacy. “Here,” he said, “that will do the trick.” He unscrewed the lid from a small flat jar, dipped his finger into a salve, and applied it gently onto the swollen lip.

  He handed her the jar. “Smear some of this on every time you think about it.”

  “I want some coffee,” she said.

  Dr. Harlan snorted. “You won’t be able to drink it. Just try putting something hot against that lip!”

  “I want some cold coffee. There’s ice in the icebox. I smelled coffee when I came out into the hall.”

  “I’ll fix some for you, Mrs. Sturm.”

  “All right, Mr. Valcour. I’ll go down with you. We’ll drink it in the kitchen.”

  Vera walked out of the room. Valcour, with a slight shrug to Dr. Harlan, followed her and closed the door. He heard its bolt shot home. Vera was waiting for him in the hall. She took his arm again. They walked slowly, and slowly descended the curving stairs.

  “I wish you would try to recall, Mrs. Sturm, whether you heard any sound or movement when you came in from the kitchen tonight, just before you found Alice Tribeau at the foot of the stairs. You see, she didn’t fall at the foot of the stairs. She fell here, under this archway. I’m wondering whether you didn’t hear somebody carrying her to where you found her.”

  Vera glanced indifferently at the spot he indicated. She turned deadening eyes upon him and kept them there. “That silly, stupid business,” she said, marking each syllable faintly in her stilted effort to enunciate. “Can’t we please give it a rest?”

  Valcour felt literally contrite. He realized that the shooting had become to her the irritating gnawing of a little gnat in the face of voracious and rather terrible other things that were consuming
her.

  “Why, certainly, Mrs. Sturm,” he said.

  “I said you were a gentleman,” she said. “It did not jar so much this second time.

  “The coffee is liable to keep you awake, Mrs. Sturm. How about some lemonade? I’ll fix some for you if you like.”

  They stepped down into the kitchen. Vera went to the room’s four lights and switched each one on. The result was none too brilliant. Each bulb remained at a moderate glow.

  “Trouble must be starting along the power line,” he said. “I suppose you’ve lamps in the house—candles or something?”

  “I ordered some candles yesterday, but they didn’t send them.” It had ceased to be a lie and was established in her mind as a fact.

  Valcour forced his tone to cheerfulness. “Oh, well, we’ll all be asleep soon anyway,” he said. “Which is it to be—cold coffee or lemonade?”

  “I want some cold coffee without any cream. I know it will keep me awake.”

  Valcour examined the coffee pot on the stove. It was still half full. “You don’t want to go to sleep tonight, Mrs. Sturm?”

  “No, I don’t. I want to lie down because I’m tired and my lip hurts me where Will hit me and knocked me down. But I want to keep my eyes open and stay awake.”

  He busied himself with extracting cubes of ice and rinsing them off in a small glass pitcher. “If you should feel like sleeping, Mrs. Sturm,” he said carefully, “I’ll be spending the balance of the night right outside your door. There’s a lounge at that end of the hall. I’ll just take a cushion and some sort of a cover and lie down there.”

  “There’s a good bed in the guest room, Mr. Valcour.” The suggestion was offered halfheartedly.

  “Oh, I’d prefer the lounge, Mrs. Sturm.”

  He let it go at that, and the decision seemed to please her.

  “Just as you wish, Mr. Valcour.”