People Like That: A Novel

by Kate Langley Bosher

CHAPTER XVIII

Mrs. Mundy cannot find Etta Blake. She went this morning to the house just opposite the box-factory, but no one is living there. A "For Rent" sign is on it. After trying, without success, to find from the families who live in the neighborhood where the people who once occupied the house have gone, she went to the agent, but from him also she could learn nothing.

"They were named Banch. A man and his wife and three children lived in the house, but where they've moved nobody could tell me, or give me a thing to go on. They went away between sun-up and sun-down and no one knows where." Mrs. Mundy, who had come to my sitting-room to make report, before taking off her coat and hat, sat down in a chair near the desk at which I had been writing, and smoothed the fingers of her gloves with careful precision. She was disappointed and distressed that she had so little to tell me.

"I couldn't find a soul who'd ever heard of a girl named Etta Blake. Poor people are generally sociable and know everybody in the neighborhood, but didn't anybody know her. Mr. Parke, the agent, said the man paid his rent regular and he was sorry to lose him as a tenant, but he didn't know where he'd gone. If his wife took boarders he didn't know anything about it. The girl might have rented a room—" Mrs. Mundy hesitated, looked at me uncertainly. "Shall I ask Mr. Crimm to—to help me find her? If she's in town he'd soon know where."

Something in her voice sent the blood to my face. "You mean—oh no, you cannot, do not mean—"

"I don't know. It's usually the end. The only one they have to come to when a man like Mr. Thorne's brother makes a girl lose her head about him. After he tires of her, or when he's afraid there may be trouble, there's apt to be a row and he quits. When he's gone the girl generally ends—down there." Mrs. Mundy's hand made movement over her shoulder. "Respectable people don't want to have anything to do with girls like that, and it's hard for them to get work. After a while they give up and go to what's the only place some of them have to go to. Would you mind if I ask Mr. Crimm?"

I shook my head. "No, I would not mind."

Going over to a window, I opened it, and as the sunshine fell upon my face it seemed impossible that such things as Mrs. Mundy feared were true. But I knew now they were true, and shiveringly I twisted my hands within my arms as if to warm my heart, which was cold with a nameless something it was difficult to define. On one side of me the little, elfish creature with her frightened eyes and short, curly hair seemed standing; on the other, the girl to whom Harrie was engaged. I could not help them. Could not help Selwyn. Could help no one! If David Guard—at thought of him the clutch at my throat lessened. David Guard could help them. He had promised to come whenever I sent for him, and to him I could talk as to no one else on earth.

"I will see Mr. Crimm to-night. It won't be new to him—the finding of a girl who's disappeared. He's found too many. I'll be careful what I tell him, and Mr. Thorne needn't worry." Mrs. Mundy got up. "Didn't you say he was coming this afternoon?"

"He is coming to-night. I am going out this afternoon."

Mrs. Mundy walked slowly to the door. She would have enjoyed talking longer, but I could not talk. A sense of involvement with things that frightened and repelled, with things of which I had hitherto been irresponsibly ignorant, was bewildering me and I wanted to be alone. I knew I was a coward, but there was no special need of her knowing it.

I had been honest in thinking I wanted to know all sorts of people, to see myself, and women like me, from the viewpoint of those denied my opportunities, but it had not occurred to me as a possibility of Scarborough Square that I should come in contact with any of the women of Lillie Pierce's world. People like that had hardly seemed the human beings other people were. And now—

"Tell Mr. Crimm whatever you think best." My back was to Mrs. Mundy. "The girl is in trouble. You must see her. Bring her here if you cannot go to her, and try and learn her side of the story. It's an old one, perhaps, but it isn't fair that—"

"She should be shoved into hell and the lid shut down to keep her in, and the man let alone to go where he pleases. It isn't fair, but it's the world's way, and always will be lessen women learn some things they ought to know. They wouldn't stand for some of the things that go on if they understood them, but they don't understand. They've been tongue-tied and hand-tied so long, they haven't taken in yet they've got to do their own untying."

"It's a pretty lonely job—and a pretty hard one." I turned from the window. Kitty's automobile had stopped in front of the house. I was to go in it to call on Mrs. and Miss Swink. Kitty had insisted that I use it.

I dressed quickly, putting on my best garments, but as I got into the car something of the old protest at having to do what I did not want to do, to go where I did not want to go, came over me, and I was conscious of childish irritability. I did not care to know the Swinks. Eternity wouldn't be long enough, and certainly time wasn't to waste on people like that, and yet because Selwyn had asked me to call I was doing it. All men are alike. When they don't know how to do a thing that's got to be done, they tell a woman to do it. It was not my business to tell this Swink person and her daughter that they should be careful concerning matrimonial alliances. I would agree with them that such intimation on my part was presumptuous and I had no intention of making it. What I was going to do I did not know, but it was necessary to see them, talk with them before any suggestions could be made to Selwyn as to a tactful handling of an embarrassing situation; and in obedience to this primary requisite I was calling.

In their private parlor at the Melbourne, pompously furnished, and bare of all things that make a room reflective of personality, Mrs. Swink and her daughter were awaiting me on my arrival, and the moment I met the former all the perversity of which I am possessed rose up within me, and for the latter I was conscious of sympathy, based on nothing save intuitive antipathy to her mother. Inwardly I warned myself to behave, but I wasn't sure I was going to do it.

"Oh, how do you do!" Mrs. Swink, a fat, florid, frizzy person, waddled toward me with out-stretched and bejeweled hands, and took mine in hers. "Mr. Thorne told us you would certainly call, and we've been waiting for you ever since he told us. Charmed to meet you! This is my daughter Madeleine. Where's Madeleine?" She turned her short, red neck, bound with velvet, and looked behind her. "Oh, here she is! Madeleine, this is Miss Wreath. You know all about Miss Wreath, who's gone to such a queer place to live. Harrie told us." Two sharp little eyes sunk in nests of embracing flesh winked confidentially at first me and then her daughter. "Yes, indeed, we know all about you. Sit down. Madeleine, push a chair up for Miss Wreath."

"Heath, mother!" The girl called Madeleine turned her pretty, dissatisfied face toward her mother and then looked at me. "She never gets names right. She just hits at them and says the first thing that comes to her mind." Pulling a large chair close to a table, on which was a vase of American Beauty roses, she waited for me to take it, then went over to the window and sat beside it.

"Well, everybody's got a mental weakness." Upright in a blue-brocaded chair, elbows on its gilt arms, mother Swink surveyed me with scrutinizing calculation, and as she appraised I appraised also. Full-bosomed of body and short of leg, she looked close kin to a frog in her tight-fitting purple gown with its iridescent trimmings, and low-cut neck; and from her silver-buckled slippers to the crimped and russet-colored transformation on her head, which had slipped somewhat to one side, my eyes went up and then went down, and I knew if Harrie ever married her daughter his punishment would begin on earth.

"Yes, indeed, everybody's got a mental weakness, and I'm thankful mine's no worse than forgetting names. I ought to remember yours, though. It makes you think of funerals and weddings and things like that. I love names which—"

"Her name is Heath, mother! Not Wreath."

"Oh yes—of course! This certainly is a beautiful day. If El Paso hadn't been so far away we'd have brought one of our cars with us, but I don't see any sense spending all that money when you can hire cars so cheap by the hour. Madeleine don't like to ride in hired cars. I like any kind of car."

So far I had had no opportunity of doing more than bend my head, a chance to speak not having been permitted me, but, at her mother's pause for breath, the girl at the window looked down upon the street and then turned her face toward me. "That's a pretty car you came in. Can you drive it yourself?"

"I have no car. That's Kitty's—I mean Mrs. McBryde's. That reminds me. I have a message from her. She could not call this afternoon, but she asks me to say she hopes you can both come in Thursday afternoon and have tea with her. She is always at home on Thursdays and—"

"Yes, indeed; we'll be glad to come." Mrs. Swink took up Kitty's card, which had been sent up with mine, and looked at it through her lorgnette, suspended around her neck by a chain studded with amethysts, large and small. "We'll come with pleasure. Won't we, Madeleine? Shall we write and tell her?"

"Of course not, mother. Didn't you just hear Miss Heath say it was her regular 'at home' day? You don't write notes for things like that." Miss Swink's eyes again turned in my direction. "I'm much obliged, but I don't think I can come. I've an engagement for Thursday."

"If it's with Harrie, he won't mind waiting awhile." With unconcealed eagerness Mrs. Swink twisted herself in her tight and too-embracing chair, for the moment forgetting, seemingly, that I was a hearing person. "You can't afford to miss a chance like that. You'll meet the best people. Harrie can stay to dinner. I'll get tickets for the theatre."

"He won't come to dinner. I asked him. Says he's sick." The girl's lips curled slightly. "He's always sick when—"

"Madeleine!" The sudden change in Mrs. Swink's voice was beyond belief, and with a shrug of her shoulders the girl again looked out of the window. I was making discoveries with unexpected rapidity, discoveries that were filling me with speculation and promising conclusions that were at variance with Selwyn's, and for a moment the uncomfortable silence, following the sharp ejaculation, was unbroken by me in the realization of my unwilling participation in a bit of family revelation, and also by inability to think of anything to say.

"I hope you can come." My tone was but feebly urging. "Everybody has such a good time at Kitty's. I hope, too, you are going to like our city." I looked from mother to daughter as I uttered the usual formulas for strangers. "This is not your first visit?"

"Oh no—we've been here several times before. We like it very much. It's so distinguay and all that." Mrs. Swink's hands went to her head and she patted her transformation, but failed to straighten it. "I was born in Alabama, and Mr. Swink in Missouri, and Madeleine in Texas, so we feel kin to all Southerners and at home anywhere in the South; but I like this city best of any in it. Some day, I reckon, we'll live here." Her voice was significant and again she looked at her daughter, but her daughter did not look at her.

"We think it a very nice city, but I suppose I'd love any place in which I had to live. That is, I'd try to. You have old friends here, I believe, and of course you'll make new ones." My voice was even less affirmative than interrogatory. I hardly knew what I was saying. I was thinking of something else.

"Yes, indeed. That's what we expect to do. We don't know a great many people here. Mrs. Hadden Cressy and I are old friends, but we don't see much of each other. I suppose you know the Cressys?"

"I know of them very well. They are among our most valuable people.
I have often wanted to know Mr. and Mrs. Cressy. Their son, Tom, I
used to see often as a boy, but of late I rarely come across him.
What's become of him? He was one of the nicest boys I ever knew."

Mrs. Swink's hands made expressive gesture, but the girl at the window gave no sign of hearing me. In her face, however, I saw color creep, saw also that she bit her lips.

"Nobody knows what he does with himself." Mrs. Swink sighed. "After all the money his father spent on his education, and after everybody took him up, he dropped out of society and stuck at his business as if he didn't have a cent in the world. He hasn't any ambition. He could go with the most fashionable people in town, if his parents can't, but he won't do it. He must be a great disappointment to his parents."

With a slow movement of her shoulders, Miss Swink turned and looked at her mother, in her eyes that which made me sit up. What the look implied I was unable altogether to understand, but I could venture a guess at it, and on the venture I spoke:

"He's the pride of their life, I've been told. Any parents would be proud of such a son—that is, if they were the kind of parents a son could be proud of. I'd like to see Tom. I used to be very fond of him when he was a boy. He lived just back of us and he and Kitty were great friends as children. I'm afraid he's forgotten me, however."

"No, he hasn't—" Miss Swink stopped as abruptly as she began, but the color that had crept into her face at mention of Tom Cressy's name now crimsoned it, and again she turned her head away. In her eyes, however, I had caught the gratitude flashed to me, and quickly I decided I must see her alone, talk to her alone; and so absorbed was I in wondering how I could do it that only vaguely did I hear Mrs. Swink, who was telling me of various engagements already made, of the difficulty of getting in what had to be gotten in between being manicured and marcelled and massaged and chiropodized and tailored and dress-makered, and had she not been so interested in the telling she would have discovered I was not at all interested in the hearing. She did not discover.

When for the third time I saw Miss Swink glance at the watch upon her wrist, and then out of the window, I knew she was waiting for some one to pass. It wasn't Harrie. There was no necessity for furtive watching for Harrie to pass, The latter's plaint of sickness was evidently not convincing to the girl. I looked at the clock on the mantel. I had been in the room twenty-seven minutes, but I didn't agree with Selwyn that Miss Swink was in love with his brother. Her engagement to him was due, I imagined, not so much to her literalness as to her mother's management. An unholy desire to demonstrate that the latter was not of a scientific kind possessed me, and quickly my mind worked.