The Sundial (18 page)

“No mistake,” Mrs. Halloran said gently. “That is the maximum sum I am able to command on short notice. The president of the bank was easily as astonished as yourself, but he is accustomed to doing what I tell him. That check—which, I agree with you, is enormous—will be honored upon your presentation of it.”

“But
why?
”

“We are not going to need it,” Mrs. Halloran said. “Please try to understand, Captain—we are not going to need it any more.”

The captain sat down abruptly. “You
mean
this?” he demanded. “You are really going to sit there and nod at me and hand me more money than I ever dreamed of in all my life, just for nothing? Why, I’ve only been here three weeks—I couldn’t
steal
this much.” He waved his hands wildly. “This kind of money is something I never even
heard
of, they don’t make that much, it isn’t
real,
and you just sit there and
give
it to me—lady, maybe I was wrong about you not being crazy.”

Mrs. Halloran laughed again. “Maybe you were,” she said. “My own belief is that there will not be time for even you to spend it all.”

“It’ll take some spending, I admit,” the captain said, looking at the check again. “Now look, I’m not aiming to quarrel with someone who just handed me a lousy fortune, but I’m
not
crazy, and I got to figure there’s some string attached. Something’s going to happen to me.”

“Please believe that I am crazy, if you like, but not that I am dishonest.”

“I ought to grab this thing and get up and run and not stop running till I get to that bank and I make sure it’s true. But I don’t like not understanding what goes on, and I like to make sure that young Harry—Harry’s my real name,” he explained.

“Indeed? I shall continue to call you Captain.”

“Anyway, that young Harry doesn’t get left out in the cold. You really believe—now let me get this absolutely straight one last time—you really believe that you can give me this money because it’s not going to be any more good to you? Right now this check is worth exactly what it says but in a few weeks it’s not going to matter what money I have because I won’t be there and the bank won’t be there and the money won’t be there and there won’t be any place to spend it anyway?”

“Exactly as I would have put it,” Mrs. Halloran said.

“Then take it back,” said the captain. He rose and set the check down softly on Mrs. Halloran’s desk. “I never took odds like that in my life,” the captain said. “I know a lot about you by now, and if you’re ready to put that kind of money on the line, I figure Harry goes along with you. I stay.”

“Think carefully, Captain. We have so little time; you may not have another opportunity of changing your mind.”

“I don’t have to think,” the captain said. “I know when I’m beat.”

“Then you had best get right down to dinner. I will see that Julia is notified, and will join you shortly at the table.”

_____

After dinner Mrs. Halloran hesitated at the table for a minute, after the others were gone, to speak to Mrs. Willow. “I imagine that Julia is well on her way,” Mrs. Halloran said.

“I just hope she is,” Mrs. Willow said viciously. “Damn selfish unnatural child.”

“You will be more pleased with her, perhaps,” Mrs. Halloran said, “when I tell you that before she left she took the liberty of helping herself to the money on my dressing table.”

“How much?” said Mrs. Willow, and then: “I suppose you left it there accidentally?”

“Not at all. I hardly liked seeing Julia go off with no adequate financial resources.”

“How much?”

“I am embarrassed,” Mrs. Halloran said. “I feel like Aunt Norris. I could not put my hands onto more than about seventy dollars. Seventy-four dollars, to be exact, and eighty-nine cents. She took the silver, naturally.”

“Julia is not above carrying small change,” Mrs. Willow said.

“We will miss her,” Mrs. Halloran said vaguely, and continued on into the drawing room, and her shawl, and her evening walk with Essex.

_____

Julia, her suitcase on the ground beside her, stood in the warm dark evening by the main gates of the house. There was only a single light over the gates, and it showed more than anything else the elaborate scrolled H which centered each half of the gates; far away, beyond the long reaches of the drive, she could see an occasional dim flicker which must be the lights from the house, and she smiled. She felt almost pity for her mother and sister, trapped in the monumental lunatic asylum, and a growing excitement at the thought of being, tonight, in the city with the captain, with money and laughter and noise. She was pleased at having slipped soundlessly into Mrs. Halloran’s room, to take the money the careless old woman had left lying around, she was deeply amused at the thought of herself and the captain, wandering luxuriously—perhaps to the Orient, perhaps to Spain—while her mother and her sister waited cruelly in the big house for a magnificent destruction which never came about; she was even glad that she had said thank-you to Mrs. Halloran, since some day she might choose to come back here, furred and jewelled, to smile pityingly upon her older sister, grown weak and silly waiting for a new world.

When a car pulled up beside her she was startled for a minute, and then, looking more closely, annoyed. Mrs. Halloran had not been above a petty revenge: the car was old and shabby, and the driver looked like a ruffian.

“You the party going to the city?” he asked, leaning forward over the steering wheel to peer at her.

“I’m going to the city, yes. Did Mrs. Halloran send for you?”

“Right. Pick up a lady at the gates, nine o’clock.”

“There’s a gentleman coming, too.”

“Not now, there ain’t.” The driver laughed richly. “No gentleman coming
this
trip, lessen you mean
me.
”

“You are mistaken. I am waiting for a gentleman who is going to the city with me.”

“Not the way
I
hear it. Mrs. Halloran, she says to me on the telephone, you go at nine o’clock tonight to the main gates, you get a lady there, take her to the city. She will be going quite alone, Mrs. Halloran she says, quite
quite
alone.”

“I am sure that Mrs. Halloran could not have said anything of the sort. We are going back to the house, right now, and make sure about this. And when Mrs. Halloran hears—”

“‘We are going back to the house right now and make sure about this,’” he said in a high false voice. And then, “How?”

“Why . . .” Julia turned; the gates behind her were locked. One of the gardeners had met her at the gates, unlocked them for her, and seen her out, and she had supposed vaguely that the man was still around, prepared to unlock the gates again for the captain. When she called, however, and shook at the gates, there was silence, and no movement, beyond the faint reflection of the one light onto the scrolled H on either half of the gates.

“Whyn’t you climb over?” said the driver, and snickered.

“I want you to take me directly into the village to a telephone. She can’t treat me like this.”

“Well, now, I guess I couldn’t rightly do
that.
Mrs. Halloran,
she
said take you to the city.”

“But
I
say—”

“Now,
you
know Mrs. Halloran,” he said, in a horrid wheedling voice, “what you think happens to
me
if she says take you to the city and then I turn around and take you somewheres else? Dearie,” he said, “it’s the city or nothing, see? And it’s going to rain, and the way
I
see it, if you was really to ask
my
opinion, either you get in the car with me and we go along to the city like she said, or
I
go home and you stay right here until Mrs. Halloran makes up her mind you should go somewheres else. And
if
you stay here,” he went on, still in that disagreeable, almost triumphant voice, “and it’s going to rain, and you’re going to get wet, it’ll be a mighty long time before morning when someone comes along to open these here gates. So now why don’t you be a nice reasonable girl and come get in the car with me?”

Julia, who did not often cry, was only prevented now by a black determination to hide from this creature, and so from Mrs. Halloran, that she was frightened, and bewildered, and lonely. “I’ll go to the city,” she said. “I can telephone Mrs. Halloran from the hotel, anyway, and when I do,” she said, putting her hand on the doorhandle of the car, “do not suppose that I am going to praise the way you have behaved. I intend to tell her everything you have said.”

“What’d
I
say?” he demanded, whining. “All I said was I got to do what Mrs. Halloran
tells
me. Where’d I get if I didn’t do what Mrs. Halloran tells me? Now you get in like a good girl and we let bygones be bygones.”

There was only one place in the car for Julia to sit, and that was in front next to the driver. The back of the car, seatless, seemed to be filled with old bottles and pieces of chain, which rattled and clanked disturbingly as the car began a slow crawl away from the main gates of the house.

“Better tell you right off,” the driver said, “this is going to cost you twelve dollars.” He had clearly started to say “ten” and then changed his mind, and the sharp break in the word seemed to amuse him, as though he had no need for dissimulation. “Twelve,” he repeated enjoyably. “Don’t go into the city this time of night for
nothing,
you know.”

“Mrs. Halloran will pay you.”

The man sneaked a sideways look at her. “Mrs. Halloran, she said something funny about that. She said she had left money for you, and you would pick it up and be the one paying me.”

“Oh.” The car picked up speed reluctantly, shaking itself as though ready to balk and throw its riders, but the big man held it down firmly and after a moment they went more evenly along the road. Julia intended that there should be no further conversation between herself and the unattractive driver, but he spoke chattily, raising his big voice without effort over the clatter of the motor, “What you going to the city for?”

“Because I choose to,” Julia said childishly. She turned pointedly as though she were going to look out of the window, although there was no window on her side at all, and the wind came disagreeably in on to her face; she could feel the first stinging raindrops. She turned her jacket collar up and hunched her shoulders around her ears, in a feeble defense against the rain on one side and the conversation on the other. “Going to take the money I get from you,” the big man said placidly—he smelled musty, Julia thought, and foul—“and buy me some chickens. Got a little place for them out back of my house. I live in the village, of course.” He waited for some comment from Julia, and then went on, “Going to sell the eggs, maybe bring ’em up to the big house, sell ’em to old lady Halloran.” They were moving steadily upward, and Julia remembered the soft lines of hills visible from the windows of the big house; not long ago, while she was in her room packing, she had seen the hills from her window and told herself joyfully that beyond them lay the city; “Tonight I will be there myself,” she had thought, hugging herself ecstatically.

Peering through the rain, Julia thought she could distinguish a cleft in the line of the hills and although she did not want to speak she finally asked, “Is that where we’re going? Through that sort of pass?”

“That’s right,” said the driver. “City’s on the other side. Funny thing about that pass,” he continued affably, “always full of fog. Down here, rain or hot or sunshine, but up there it’s always fog. Something to do with the hills.”

“Is it far?”

“Another five miles, maybe. Then another seven, eight, miles to the city. They call it Fog Pass,” he added, as one explaining something uniquely reasonable. When Julia was silent again he went on. “Caught a rabbit up there once. It got so mixed up in the fog it didn’t even see me coming. Stood right there on the road watching me like it didn’t know what I was. Ran smack over it with the car.”

Julia turned slightly and let the wind drive the rain against her face. “Funny thing about rabbits,” he said. “Most people think they’re lucky.
That
one wasn’t lucky,” and he laughed. He had clearly reached a subject very dear to his heart, because he went on contentedly, “Killed some kittens once, my old lady had a cat always having kittens and this time I told her I’d get rid of the things for her. Cut off their heads with my pocket knife.”

Julia, thinking: I will go to the biggest lightest hotel and telephone my mother, was silent.

“Got rid of some puppies by pouring kerosene on them and lighting—”

“Please don’t,” Julia said violently, and he laughed.

“Didn’t know
you
’d be bothered,” he said. “Folks do things like that all the time. Why, I knew an old man once lived up in these hills about a mile and
he
used to catch rats and—”

“Please,” Julia said.

“I could tell you things I saw in the army,” he said. “
Everybody
knows about
them,
pretty funny, too, sometimes. You just touchy or something?”

“I don’t like to hear about it,” Julia said.

“Well, if you don’t have to
watch,
I wouldn’t guess you’d mind.” He seemed to be puzzled. “Why,” he said, “my old lady was right there when I cut up them kittens. She didn’t mind.”

“How much further is it to the pass?”

“Mile or so. You’re anxious to get to the city, I guess?”

“I certainly am.”

“What you going there
for?
”

“I have an appointment,” Julia said wantonly.

“Who with?”

“A friend.”

“That so? What about that feller you thought was coming with you? The one Mrs. Halloran told me not to take? Where’s
he
come in?”

“Look,” Julia said, turning to look at him, “I’m sick and tired of answering your questions and listening to your dirty talk. You just leave me alone.”

“Did I touch you?” he asked, indignant. “I’ll leave you alone all right, dearie, Mrs. Halloran she didn’t say nothing to me about
not
leaving you alone, I wouldn’t touch you with a ten foot pole. Or maybe,” he went on slyly, “you was asking? Because I got no
reason
to be coming back tonight. I kind of like the city.” He thought, grinning to himself. “Oh, it wouldn’t
cost
you any more,” he assured her. “I might even buy you a beer or maybe two.” Turning her back to him coldly, Julia put her face into the rain from the window. “Once I get that twenty bucks from you—” he said.