A Variety of Weapons. Rufus King
and where pressing peaks were flattening into profile against the night sky. She wondered what further outrages Bill had in mind for the telephone call at eleven.
He had probably forgotten to tell her that after he married her next Friday he would divorce her on Saturday. The man was certainly a ball of romance. Just an old-fashioned nosegay fragrant with the tender touch. No, not fragrant. Reeking.
Someone knocked, and Ann said, “Come in.”
A man carried her bags directly into the bedroom and then left. A cheerful-looking middle-aged woman closed the door after he had gone and said, “I’m Danning, Miss Ledrick. I’ll get your bath ready and then put out your things.”
Ann thanked her and looked again at the scene below, drawn back to it by something that puzzled her. She realized that, more clearly in the thickening dusk, thin luminous circlets were growing visible about the tree trunks which lined such stretches of the roadway to the airfield which she could see.
“Danning, what is that?”
“What, miss?”
“Those phosphorescent circles on the trees?”
“They’re bands of luminous paint, Miss Ledrick. We have to observe the black-outs even here, you know.”
“But aren’t they visible from the air?”
“No, the leaves and branches mask them.”
Danning suddenly stood still in the bedroom doorway while her smile flattened, leaving her lips drawn. Then Ann noticed it too: a thin, high note prolonged into a tremolo suggestive of sharp agony. It sifted faintly through the hall door and struck Ann unpleasantly with an impact of shock.
She said, “The ocelots?”
“Oh no, Miss Ledrick. That’s Mr. Marlow. The music room is just below us, and he always likes to play the organ when it takes him. He plays it very loud.”
“When what takes him?”
“Pain.”
CHAPTER III
Ann inspected herself in panel mirrors as the elevator carried her down. The full-skirted bengaline rag with its leaf-splashed blouse looked pretty good. Monkey trick, if you wish, but in no sense tin cup.
Marlow’s organ playing had stopped, and even before it had stopped the initial soul-in-agony effect had calmed down into a fretful Bach. She hoped the week would not be overlaid with a querulous neuroticism. Danning had been fulsome. Mr. Marlow’s “pain,” she said, was not so much of the body as it was of memory, a dark memory which overshadowed his mind.
There were physiological aspects too: a heart condition, neuritis, and an anemia which during the past couple of months had become pernicious. Ann added all these up together and was confident that when she met Marlow she would come face to face with a palsied wraith.
The lounge, when Ann stood in its doorway, struck her as Hollywood size and splendidly done, in the sense that its furnishings were impressive but were happily lacking in any unlived-in or museum-like rigor mortis. The man who stood up from a chair near the fireplace and walked toward her carried an immediate sense of welcoming friendliness.
He was not nearly so gaunt as Ann had expected from Danning’s catalogue of ailments. Certainly he was opaque. He bore his age well, and there was a simplicity and general kindliness about him which made Ann instantly forget that the hand which he offered controlled one of the great fortunes of the country.
“Good evening, Miss Ledrick. I am Justin Marlow. Come over and meet my cousin Estelle.” He went on as he led Ann toward the hearth: “You’ll find that her bombazine exterior really shelters the soul of a femme fatale. For the past ten or fifteen years Estelle has been posing as the mystery woman of Paris, but nobody would take her seriously. People put up with her solely because of her chef, who was a cordon bleu and who had the distinction of committing suicide, as we’ve heard, when the black market ran short of mushrooms.”
A woman rose from a sofa and smiled agreeably and said, “Miss Ledrick, Justin is a complete liar. My role in Paris was that of a Cassandra. I told the benighted fossils exactly what they were heading for. They preferred to consider me mad and would have locked me up a hundred times if they hadn’t thought me so filthily rich. The instant that gendarme look would come into their eyes I’d just put on another emerald. Do you like sidecars?”
“Very much, Miss Marlow.”
“So sensible. I’m as American as they come, but this national fetish for dry martinis convinces me that the country is still in the thrall of barbarianism.”
Ann sat on the sofa beside Estelle Marlow and tried to readjust the portrait she had formed of the woman with its reality. The exterior was not the bombazine one which Justin Marlow had advertised, but the effect was close: a variety of velvet purples over plumpness and a serene apple of a face under a cap of softly graying hair most simply arranged. The hands were dimpled and beautifully shaped. As a girl, Ann thought, she must have been a beauty of the milk-and-honey type.
Washburn served cocktails and canapés while a drugging amiability in the general conversation began to make Ann feel hypnotically at home. She caught herself considering that she had known these two pleasant people always and that this room was one with which she had been familiar not for a brief moment but for many years.
This sensation was so strong that Ann thought: There’s something funny about this. Isn’t it a little overdone? I’m a photographer brought up here to do some ocelots and yet all this warmth, this instantaneous acceptance into intimacy. Ann felt it genuine enough, but there it was. Perhaps they both were parched for a stranger. That could be. Living as they did. But if she could be flown in, why couldn’t friends be? Why isolation, with the obvious effect of turning her presence into an oasis?
It was during Ann’s second cocktail when Washburn came in and said to Marlow: “The field has just telephoned that Mr. Ludwig Appleby has landed in a chartered plane, sir. Shall I give instructions that he be driven to the house?”
It became simpler later for Ann to dissect the reaction which Washburn’s statement caused. At the moment her impression was of a thunderbolt in miniature cracking the serenity of a clear sky, in miniature because both Justin and Estelle Marlow instantly recovered their poise.
But there had been that moment during which Marlow’s emaciated and sensitive face had frozen into an expression of intense hatred, while Estelle Marlow’s kind eyes had contracted and her lips had thinned, fashioning the homely apple look of her features into something close to virulence.
The moment flashed and was gone, and Marlow said quietly, “Yes, Washburn, do. Mr. Appleby will join us at dinner, and if we can persuade him to stay over please place him in the rooms next to mine.”
“Very good, sir.”
Washburn left, and the conversation resumed its casual course; that is, so far as Estelle was concerned. Justin said little, and though outwardly calm and attentively agreeable Ann saw that his thin, veined hands were gripping rather than resting on the arms of his chair.
Estelle, who was on France, continued placidly listing the destruction of her continental possessions. The chateau at Noilly which she had leased to a European embassy had been deserted by the ambassador, and of course when the Germans had occupied it its treasures were either stolen or destroyed. Fortunately her flat in Paris had failed to bemuse them, and as for money, they had let her keep one half of such sums as she had received through Justin’s influence from the States.
“As for my jewels,” Estelle said complacently, “I was rather clever about them. You see, my dear, they put me down as a harmless eccentric whom it paid them to pamper while they used me as a mint. They’re terribly practical, you know. Have you ever met one?”
“Not while in action, Miss Marlow. Possibly some of our local brood.”
“Oh, those. Well, they thought my ocelots just another lunatic foible and were completely indifferent to my taking them