“These are my bags,” she said. She walked out to the Rolls-Royce and got into the back seat.
Victor lighted a cigarette and smoked it halfway down. Then he carried her bags out to the car and started home to Salisbury Hall along a back road.
“You’re going the wrong way,” Miss Brownlee called. “Don’t you even know the way?”
“I’m not going the usual way,” Victor said patiently, “but a few years ago they built a factory down the road, and the traffic is heavy around closing time. It’s quicker this way. But I expect that you’ll find a good many changes in the neighborhood. How long has it been, Miss Brownlee, since you’ve seen Salisbury Hall?” There was no answer to his question, and, thinking that she might not have heard him, he asked again, “How long has it been, Miss Brownlee, since you’ve seen Salisbury Hall?”
They made the rest of the trip in silence. When they got to the house, Victor unloaded her bags and stood them by the door. Miss Brownlee counted them aloud. Then she opened her purse and handed Victor a quarter. “Why, thank you!” Victor said. “Thank you very much!” He went down into the garden to walk off his anger. He decided not to tell Theresa about this meeting. Finally, he went upstairs. Theresa was at work on one of the needlepoint stools. The room they used for a parlor was cluttered with half-repaired needlepoint. She embraced Victor tenderly, as she always did when they had been separated for a day. Victor had dressed when a maid knocked on the door. “Mrs. Brownlee wants to see you, both of you,” she said. “She’s in the office. At once.”
Theresa clung to Victor’s arm as they went downstairs. The office, a cluttered and dirty room beside the elevator, was brightly lighted. Mrs. Brownlee, in grande tenue, sat at her husband’s desk. “You’re the straw that broke the camel’s back?both of you,” she said harshly when they came in. “Shut the door. I don’t want everybody to hear me. Little Hester has come home for the first time in fifteen years, and the first thing she gets off the train, you have to insult her. For nine years, you’ve had the privilege of living in this beautiful house?a wonder of the world?and how do you repay me? Oh, it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back! Prescott’s told me often enough that you weren’t any good, either of you, and Hester feels the same way, and gradually I’m beginning to see it myself.”
The harried and garishly painted old lady wielded over the Mackenzies the power of angels. Her silver dress glittered like St. Michael’s raiment, and thunder and lightning, death and destruction, were in her right hand. “Everybody’s been warning me about you for years,” she said. “And you may not mean to do wrong?you may just be unlucky?but one of the first things Hester noticed is that half the needlepoint is missing. You’re always repairing the chair that I want to sit down in. And you, Victor?you told me that you fixed the tennis court, and, of course, I don’t know about that because I can’t play tennis, but when I asked the Beardons over to play tennis last week, they told me that the court wasn’t fit to play on, and you can imagine how embarrassed I was, and those people you drove out of the garden last night turned out to be the children of a very dear friend of the late Mr. Brownlee’s. And you’re two weeks behind with your rent.”
“I’ll send you the rent,” Victor said. “We will go.”
Theresa had not taken her arm out of his during the interview, and they left the office together. It was raining, and Ernest was putting out pails in the Venetian Salon, where the domed ceiling had sprung a leak. “Could you help me with some suitcases?” Victor asked. The old butler must have overheard the interview, because he didn’t answer.
There was in the Mackenzies’ rooms an accumulation of sentimental possessions?photographs, pieces of silver, and so forth. Theresa hastily began to gather these up. Victor went down to the basement and got their bags. They packed hurriedly?they did not even stop to smoke a cigarette?but it took them most of the evening. When they had finished, Theresa stripped the bed and put the soiled towels into a hamper, and Victor carried the bags down. He wrote a postcard to Violet’s school, saying that his address was no longer Salisbury Hall. He waited for Theresa by the front door. “Oh, my darling, where will we go?” she murmured when she met him there. She waited in the rain for him to bring their car around, and they drove away, and God knows where they did go after that.
GOD KNOWS where they went after that, but for our purposes they next appeared, years later, at a resort on the coast of Maine called Horsetail Beach. Victor had some kind of job in New York, and they had driven to Maine for his vacation. Violet was not with them. She had married and was living in San Francisco. She had a baby. She did not write to her parents, and Victor knew that she thought of him with bitter resentment, although he did not know why. The waywardness of their only child troubled Victor and Theresa, but they could seldom bring themselves to discuss it. Helen Jackson, their hostess at Horsetail Beach, was a spirited young woman with four children. She was divorced. Her house was tracked with sand, and most of the furniture was broken. The Mackenzies arrived there on a stormy evening when the north wind blew straight through the walls of the house. Their hostess was out to dinner, and as soon as they arrived, the cook put on her hat and coat and went off to the movies, leaving them in charge of the children. They carried their bags upstairs, stepping over several wet bathing suits, put the four children to bed, and settled themselves in a cold guest room.
In the morning, their hostess asked them if they minded if she drove into Camden to get her hair washed. She was giving a cocktail party for the Mackenzies that afternoon, although it was the cook’s day off. She promised to be back by noon, and when she had not returned by one, Theresa cooked lunch. At three, their hostess telephoned from Camden to say that she had just left the hairdresser’s and would Theresa mind getting a head start with the canapes? Theresa made the canapes. Then she swept the sand out of the living room and picked up the wet bathing suits. Helen Jackson finally returned from Camden, and the guests began to arrive at five. It was cold and stormy. Victor shivered in his white silk suit. Most of the guests were young, and they refused cocktails and drank ginger ale, gathered around the piano, and sang. It was not the Mackenzies’ idea of a good party. Helen Jackson tried unsuccessfully to draw them into the circle of hearty, if meaningless, smiles, salutations, and handshakes upon which that party, like every other, was rigged. The guests all left at half past six, and the Mackenzies and their hostess made a supper of leftover canapes. “Would you mind dreadfully taking the children to the movies?” Helen Jackson asked Victor. “I promised them they could go to the movies if they were good about the party, and they’ve been perfect angels, and I hate to disappoint them, and I’m dead myself.”
