In our household that rule seems to be that no explanations shall ever be asked either in the darkness or by artificial light. . . . It being the supposition I infer that most things explain themselves by daylight. . . . Perfectly cordially I concede that they usually do. . . . But some nights are a great deal longer to wait through than others.
It wasn't, on this particular night, that anyone refused to explain. But that nobody even had time to think of explaining. The young Stranger was in a bad way. Not delirium tremens nor anything like that, but a fearful alcoholic disorganization of some sort. The men were running up and down stairs half the night. Their voices rang through the halls in short, sharp orders to each other. No one else spoke above a whisper. With silly comforts like talcum powder, and hot water bottles, and sweet chocolate, and new novels, I put the women to bed. Their comments if not explanatory were at least reasonably characteristic.
From a swirl of pink chiffon and my best blankets, with her ear cocked quite frankly toward a step on the stairs, her eyes like stars, her mouth all a-kiss, the Bride reported her own emotions in the matter.
"No,—no one, of course had ever believed for a moment," the Bride assured me, "that the Drunken Man was one of the guests. . . . And yet, when he didn't get off at any of the stops, and this house was so definitely announced as the 'end of the road'—why it did, of course, make one feel just a little bit nervous," flushed the Bride, perfectly irrelevantly, as the creak on the stairs drew nearer.
Ann Woltor registered only a very typical indifference.
"A great many different kinds of things," she affirmed, "were bound to happen in any time as long as a day. . . . One simply had to get used to them, that was all." She was unpacking her sombre black traveling bag as she spoke, and the first thing she took out from it was a man's gay, green- plaided golf cap. It looked strange with the rest of her things. All the rest of her things were black.
I thought I would never succeed in putting the May Girl to bed. With a sweet sort of stubbornness she resisted every effort. The first time I went back she was kneeling at her bedside to say her "forgotten prayers." The second time I went back she had just jumped up to "write a letter to her Grandfather." "Something about the sea," she affirmed, "had made her think of her grandfather." "It was a long time," she acknowledged, since she "had thought of her grandfather." "He was very old," she argued, "and she didn't want to delay any longer about writing." Slim and frank as a boy in her half- adjusted blanket-wrapper dishabille she smiled up at me through the amazing mop of gold hair with the gray streak floating like a cloud across the sunshine of her face. She was very nervous. She must have been nervous. It darkened her eyes to two blue sapphires. It quickened her breath like the breath of a young fawn running. "And would I please tell her—how to spell 'oceanic'?" she implored me. As though answering intuitively the unspoken question on my lips, she shrugged blame from her as some exotic songbird might have shrugged its first snow. "No—she didn't know who the young man was! Truly—as far as she knew—she had never—never seen the young man before!—o-c-e-a-n-i-c—was it?——"
The rain was not actually delivered until one o'clock in the morning. Just before dawn I heard the storm-bales rip. In sheets of silver and points of steel, with rage and roar, and a surf like a picture in a Sunday supplement, the weather broke loose!
Thank heaven the morning was so dark that no one appeared in the breakfast-room an instant before the appointed hour of nine.
George Keets, of course, appeared exactly at nine, very trim, very distingué, in a marvelously tailored gray flannel suit, and absolutely possessed to make his own coffee.