Death and Letters Read online

  “Not enough character?” She smiled again.

  “Plenty of character, not her kind.”

  He dialled the operator, got his home number, and spoke: “Clara? Hello. I’m up at The Maples, Cliffside you know, and they’ve been kind enough to invite me to stay for dinner. As it’s such a rotten night, I’ve taken them up on it… Back early, though, rain or not… Yes, I’m bringing the bags… Goodbye.”

  He replaced the telephone and got up. Susan said: “Your voice was quite different. Of course you’d be married.”

  “Why not?”

  “All the nicest are married, and it makes them a little dull.”

  “Isn’t Mr. Waterton nice? And will marrying you make him dull?”

  “He’s a little dull already.” She laughed. “It’s part of his charm. It’s the way I like him.”

  “You’re in love with that character,” said Gamadge, studying her. “Crazy about him.”

  “So I am. Mr. Gamadge, Sylvia never said anything about you or your wife—being her friends.”

  “Miss Coldfield, there are many pleasant things about you, and one of the things I find most encouraging is that you ask questions. Do you realize that you’re the only member of your family that asks questions?”

  “They’re afraid to—you scare them. Mr. Gamadge, do try to remember that they’re principally scared on my account.”

  “Your uncle Ames too?”

  “With Uncle Ames it’s family, all family. Oh, you should have been in the library when Agnes brought your card in; I was nervous too, of course, I thought you might turn out to be a detective with his hat on, and a cigar. But when Uncle read that card—he leaned over and hissed at us. ‘Man’s entirely respectable—he’s a writer. This makes it different. Be civil, now.’ All like that,” said Susan, laughing heartily.

  “I have my reward,” said Gamadge. “Sometimes I thought I never would have it, but here it comes. Does being a writer make it all right to come in by the back door and deceive the cook? By the way, I’m sorry about that. I wish you’d tell her sometime that it’s the only thing I do regret.”

  “I’ll tell her, but she still thinks you’re a nice gentleman. You know how they are—‘Some mistake; he was a nice gentleman.’ ”

  “Tell her I am a nice gentleman.”

  “She’ll soon know all about it. I’ll tell them all myself. How relieved they’ll be; they hated Sylvia being out of her head and shut up with that horrible nurse. Now I can tell them it all was a mistake—for once.”

  “Good. Look here—I hope this isn’t a dinner party? I wore old stout tweeds—afraid I might have to fight my way out of here, you know, maybe drop from a window.”

  “We won’t dress.”

  “Go ahead and put on whatever you were going to wear for that young man.”

  “He won’t dress either; he’s bringing—”

  A deep-toned bell pealed. Gamadge, pausing with his hand on the dressing-room door, watched her rush up the hall, swing the front door open, and throw her arms around the neck of a blond youth in a dripping raincoat. Behind him a slim girl in a hooded mackintosh called out: “Hey, let me in out of this rain,” and ducked past him.

  When Gamadge came out into the hall again he heard young voices and a shaking of ice in the drawing-room; he returned to the library by the side door, went back into the study, and found Ames there pouring cocktails carefully.

  “Come in,” said Ames, looking up at him. “My special brew, too good for untutored palates. I thought you might be willing to spare a frustrated man of letters a few minutes for a chat. Do sit down, Mr. Gamadge. You’ll find cigarettes there beside you, and these hors d’oeuvres look appetizing.”

  Gamadge sat down, took his glass, sipped from it, and leaned back in his shabby, high-backed old stuffed chair. He was astonished to find that it was a patent rocker, the first he had seen since his grandmother’s had been carted off to the village sale long ago.

  The little den was as shabby, comfortable and out of date. He and Ames sat before a narrow grate built for coal, in which briquettes smouldered and glowed cozily. There were dried grasses in fan-shaped vases on the chimney piece, and between them an ancient night-clock.

  “It doesn’t work,” said Ames, following Gamadge’s eyes to the white globe with its circle of hours. “Not much of an ornament, either, but I like to keep it there. Reminds me a little of myself.”

  Gamadge looked at him, smiling. Ames might once have been a chubby man, but the fat had gone and left a certain flabbiness in his face and figure. He went on: “The fringes, the fringes.”

  Gamadge raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

  “Of literature,” said Ames with a sigh. “That’s where I cling. Criticism of other people’s criticism, comments on commentaries, letters in contributors’ columns about this and that, little pieces—squibs—even parodies. All in good fun, you know, how could anybody object? More than willing to wound, but mortally afraid to strike.”

  Gamadge went on smiling.

  “I wouldn’t have rated mention in one of the Epistles, though,” continued Ames. “But Mr. Pope would have made mincemeat of me in a different context. Ah well, there’s more than one kind of immortality, but no great man would bother to transfix me nowadays.”

  All this was said with a kind of modest self-satisfaction. Gamadge had met the same kind of thing before, and had never been able to analyze it completely; it couldn’t be just a simple pride in having failed to meet the standards of the market-place. He said: “There’s decorative value in fringes; as a matter of fact I’m there myself.”

  “You? My dear Mr. Gamadge, you couldn’t write a thing without producing a work of creation. Excuse the jargon, there are words one has to use or go dumb.”

  “Well, thanks,” said Gamadge; “but I never aspired to anything higher than craftsmanship.” He put out an arm and picked the current number of The University Quarterly from a pile of magazines on the table near him. Opening it at the Garthwain article, he showed the page to Ames Coldfield. “There’s a certain comfort in obscurity, isn’t there?”

  Ames bent to look, laughed, and sat back again. “Incredible, isn’t it? Poor old codger, what a flight to take in his years of discretion! The initiative, the peril!”

  “And the emotion.”

  “And the emotion. And if we but knew it, the Unknown was a dumpy little tradesman’s wife, golden-haired and with those large blue eyes that pop at you. I have second sight in these matters. She may even have been the landlady’s daughter, and her parents stored up those Garthwain letters for future reference. And why did I use the word incredible?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gamadge, laughing. “There have been precedents.”

  “Life and Letters,” mused Ames. “Life and Letters—they are bracketed together for no bad reason. But I don’t think we write quite so many letters in these days.”

  Gamadge, idly turning pages, suggested: “I shouldn’t think the landlady’s daughter’s heirs would be so shy of disclosing themselves.”

  “Now my dear man!” protested Ames. “The respectable middle class! Do anything for money, but do it with decent subterfuge.”

  “Garthwain was no Bohemian,” said Gamadge, laying down the Quarterly and finishing his cocktail.

  “Well, he may have raided a country rectory or even a London terrace. Some degenerate descendant was hard up and couldn’t resist the money. They need money over there.”

  “How about the well-known secret drawer in the old desk that couldn’t be traced?”

  “Oh, it wouldn’t be fair to take that plot—that plot belongs exclusively to Henry James,” said Coldfield. “What a problem for him, by the way. H. James! Thou shouldst be living at this hour.”

  “But in no story of his would anybody have been allowed to sell letters.”

  “No, can’t you see the terrific struggle of consciences? How glad I am that the Garthwain letters weren’t sacrificed on the altar of common decency.” Ames ros
e to fill Gamadge’s glass.

  Gamadge said: “The struggle would be understandable enough, if not the surrender.”

  “Well, not for me.” Ames sat down again, his fresh cocktail in his hand.

  “And you a man of letters.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “What possible harm?” insisted Gamadge, smiling.

  “Mr. Gamadge, you shock me.”

  “The letters will certainly turn out to be interesting, to judge by the sample here; and all the Garthwains are dead, and the Garthwain connection wanted the money.”

  “You are simply taking the devil’s side in order to start a controversy. Well, I’m good at these little controversies—I often take part in them in the literary reviews. But in this one I should sternly take my stand on the side of the angels. I feel very strongly in these matters, I admit it cheerfully. But nobody, you understand,” said Ames archly, “is going to enjoy the Garthwain scandal more than I. I wish I knew how the sale was managed. My friend Salmon will be going over there this Summer, I should think he might find out something.”

  Gamadge had the sensation of being fed too much too fast, and he was choking on it. The Quarterly had been at his elbow, the landlady’s daughter had been dangled in front of him like a stock figure of farce on wires, and now here was Salmon, his own suspect, being rammed down his throat. But after all: he himself had a copy of the Quarterly, and the landlady’s daughter was a logical guess—Garthwain would never write any but literary letters to anybody—and Gamadge himself had introduced the subject of the discovery. As for Salmon, he came into the conversation honestly enough—he was suspect precisely because he was a bookish friend of the Coldfields’.

  Ames Coldfield was in himself an enigma. From what Gamadge had heard of him and from what could be gathered about him on short acquaintance he seemed a thoroughly selfish and a far from benevolent man; and Gamadge thought he would probably be able to get a lot of fun out of an extra ten thousand dollars. And there must be a kind of hypocrisy about him too, a false kindness, or Sylvia Coldfield would never have confided in him. But Susan had said that with him it was “family, all family,” and perhaps family was the passion of his life.

  But if he had betrayed it—what kind of fix would Ames Coldfield have been in, if he had been found out as the trafficker in the letters to Serene?

  He was chattering on: “Dear old Salmon, such a delightful fellow—he often picks up a bargain in books for me over there. Knows all the fellows in the trade, and half the collectors. I think he knows Locker. Did you know the letters were sold to Locker? Oh, yes indeed. Fellow I know on the staff of Futurity told me. Saw him when I was last in town. I seldom get to town these days, hate the crowds, hate the trains, and haven’t my own car.” He smiled at Gamadge, the cocktails were working in him. “As titular head of the family—only titular, the real head is the man that pays the bills, and Ira does that—I have as you see my own room; a room of my own.” He laughed. “But not my own car. Well, I did get to town, and this fellow told me.”

  “Stupid of me not to take more interest,” said Gamadge. “I ought to have dug that up myself.”

  “Yes, you really ought—it’s in a way your business, isn’t it—this kind of letter thing.”

  “Except that the Garthwain letters are authentic,” said Gamadge.

  “Poor Glendon,” said Ames, putting his head back against the cushion of his chair and shutting his eyes. “I wish he’d lived to enjoy all this. How he would have enjoyed it. He must just have missed it, or he’d have mentioned it to me—the article, you know. Just missed it. I don’t think the current issue of the Quarterly had been in the house long before he died. Wasted on Wall Street, Mr. Gamadge; a most intelligent man.”

  Gamadge mumbled something.

  “Which brings us back to the problem of my sister-in-law.” Ames suddenly opened his eyes and fastened them on Gamadge. “You mustn’t be too hard on me, Mr. Gamadge. You really mustn’t. You don’t know how knocked over I was when she came in here and sprung that theory of hers on me. Really I was frightened.”

  “It was frightening.”

  “I mean I was frightened by her. I went into the kitchen hall to telephone to Smyth, and I confess that I hooked the baize door. I thought she had gone entirely off her head. Smyth was as shocked as I was; he’s an old family friend, known us all our lives. Knew there was no record of any mental abnormality in the family, or in Georgette’s—as far back as the records go, and they go pretty far. When he suggested a nurse for the present, I actually felt that it would be the kindest course to follow.”

  Gamadge said: “I still think your course was clear. The telephone call should have been to her psychiatrist, Dalgren.”

  “But we thought Dalgren had failed; how could we have confidence in Dalgren? And I really wish,” said Ames pettishly, “that my sister-in-law had come to her senses at once, and that the whole thing had not ended on that note of rescue and escape. It makes us out—well, I’m glad you are having an opportunity to see us as we are.”

  “You must remember,” said Gamadge, “that your sister-in-law’s suggestion was offered to you in a spirit of kindness.”

  “Nor must you forget that if she had been herself the suggestion would never have been made.”

  Gamadge lighted a cigarette without replying; he was aware that Ames Coldfield’s eyes were upon him, and raised his own, to meet a blank, fixed look; it was so consciously empty of all comprehension as to resemble the stare of idiocy. After a moment the pale eyes were turned away.

  He knows, or he guesses, thought Gamadge, and said: “I confess my mind is irrevocably fixed on Mrs. Glendon Coldfield’s desperate plight, and her lonely struggle to communicate.”

  “And how,” asked Ames with sudden brightness, “did she ever do it? Those proxies? Did Miss Beal not look into them carefully before they were mailed? Well, it was kind of you to rescue her. And I hope Cook won’t get a look at you through the slide at dinner—the gravy might get into the mayonnaise.”

  CHAPTER TENSerene

  MR. AND MRS. IRA COLDFIELD came in from the library; Ira had put on a lounge coat, and Georgette was in dark-red and black silk, with a high neck and long sleeves. They made a handsome, prosperous-looking couple, without a care in the world.

  “Got something left for us there, Ames?” asked Ira. He smiled at Gamadge. “Don’t know where he gets his stuff, it’s better than mine.”

  Ames was busy pouring from the big glass shaker. “And when I mix,” he said, “I always expect company. Here you are, Georgy. Here you both are.”

  Georgette put a cigarette into her long ivory holder and Gamadge lighted it. She said to nobody in particular: “I see Jimmie dragged little Smyth in with him. Why in the world?”

  “Well, after all, Georgy,” murmured Ames, “it used to be a regular thing.”

  “It’s the old man ought to be here,” said Ira crossly. “We could do without the children.”

  “Doctor Smyth’s grandchildren,” Ames explained to Gamadge. “They always had the run of the house,” he added. “Why not now? Because you’re cross at Grandpapa? That’s not at all fair.”

  “It’s not at all true, either,” said Georgette. “As you know.”

  “The boy didn’t come,” said Ira, who was getting through his cocktail in gulps. He held out his glass. “Thanks, old man.”

  “I never did care for the Smyth boy,” said Georgette. “So rough.”

  “We can’t have everything,” laughed Ames. “He has the brains of the family. He’d better not go in for private practice—his bedside manner wouldn’t soothe the patients, I’m sure.”

  “What’s that old proverb or whatever it is,” asked Ira, “about medical students and doctors? I myself always enjoyed talking to that boy.”

  “Well, we can’t have all the neighbors underfoot now,” said Georgette. “We have other things to do.”

  Gamadge said: “I think I’ve met a friend of yours, Mrs. Coldfield; of yo
u all. Met him at a couple of auctions, but no more than a word or so. He mightn’t remember me—he was busy.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Georgette carelessly.

  “William Venner, the Purchaser.”

  Ira said: “He isn’t going to purchase anything here, and so I told him.”

  “No indeed,” said Georgette, with a glance at Gamadge. “Not even that malachite table with brass legs in the drawing-room. I hope you saw that period piece, Mr. Gamadge? And the art nouveau floor-lamp with the Tiffany glass shade?”

  “I was too busy admiring the gilt and glass tie-backs,” said Gamadge.

  “Oh, they’re all right—they go back to Grandmother Coldfield,” said Georgette. “But Bill Venner could have them if he wanted them, and all the rest of her stuff in the attic, to the last moth-eaten Paisley shawl.”

  “Moth-eaten?” Ira looked startled. “Keep calm, dearest,” said Georgette. “I’m speaking metaphorically. And I’m afraid Bill Venner wouldn’t have the later bric-à-brac as a gift.”

  “Nobody’s going to give him a thing,” said Ira. “I won’t have the carpets pulled out from under my feet.”

  “These Coldfields, Mr. Gamadge,” said Georgette. “When they can’t stand the sight of a thing any longer, do you know what they do with it? They put it away.”

  “People sometimes regret throwing things away,” said Ames.

  “Time enough to get rid of stuff when Susie’s married,” said Ira. “She ought to have her pick first.”

  “She’ll pick enough to put in one suitcase,” said Georgette, “the smallest suitcase in her set. And whatever she does take will come out of the attic.” She held out her glass to Ames to be refilled. “I must say, though, the old dresses up there are rather fun. You get your hoarding instincts from her, Ira, of course. Grandmother Coldfield,” she turned to Gamadge, “was so much in love with herself that she even got to worshipping her own possessions. She never threw clothes away. Trunks of them.”

  “Well, Georgy,” said Ames, handing back the full glass to her, “as you said yourself, the things are amusing. I must say I get considerable pleasure out of all that bunched satin and velvet, and the thousand frills.”