The Woman in Black, page 3
When she stopped I said, “Unless what, Dorothy?”
“I don’t know. I’m just talking, and why don’t I shut up?” She threw her cigarette into the fireplace and picked up her bag. “Think nothing of it, angel. It’s probably just the world’s slow stain.” She smiled at me, her face tranquil and serene again, her velvety-brown eyes pretending to be amused. “I didn’t come here to bleat. I came to ask you to dinner tonight. Ellery Seymour called up yesterday. Mr. Stubblefield was quite pleased about Theodore’s big idea and wouldn’t it be nice if we had a party for them? Cocktails at six and dinner. They’re bringing the liquor, the meat, and most of the guests.”
She shrugged.
“If Theodore’s going to launch a candidate, it gives him something to do besides write letters about the state of the nation. I just don’t like being ordered around. I’m not one of Mr. Stubblefield’s foremen and I don’t see how I’ve got in the position of their thinking I am. I like to make out my own guest list, and I like to give my own announcements to the press, if any. I don’t like it done for me. Ellery’s never acted like this before. However, I’ve been kindly allowed a few friends of my own. They’ve invited Susan and Bill Kent. I want you. And I think just for meanness I’m going to add that lovely little scandalmonger Freddie Mollinson. I’ll bet you anything he comes.”
I shook my head. Freddie Mollinson’s a pompous snob, among other things, and I knew as Dorothy did that while Mr. Stubblefield was a particular thorn in his side, he’d break his neck to come to dinner with him if he had the chance.
“In fact, I’ll call him right now.”
She went over to my desk. The telephone rang just as she started to pick it up. She said “Hello,” turned to hand it to me and stopped. “This is Mrs. Theodore Hallet speaking.” Her lips tightened a little. “Very well. Mrs. Lawrence Taylor. Cocktails but not dinner. Good-by.”
She stood for a moment before she turned back.
“Here we go,” she said coolly. “Mr. Stubblefield’s secretary adds another guest. Mrs. Lawrence Taylor, she says—whoever Mrs. Lawrence Taylor is. Don’t you think it’s about time I’m on the pay roll? Didn’t somebody say, ‘What meat does this our Caesar feed on that he has grown so great?’ Well, he’s not getting meat tonight. He can eat duck and like it, and take his beef back home with him.”
She went out into the hall. “You’re coming, I need you. Seven-thirty . . . long dress, so the cocktail guests will get the word and go on home.”
At the front door she stopped. “What are you doing now? Why don’t you come downtown and have lunch with me?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got a luncheon date. Freddie Mollinson’s going to be there too, I think.”
Dorothy smiled. “Give him my love. Don’t tell him I’m going to call him. I’ll get hold of him around five.”
I closed the door behind her and went back to the basement door. I could hear Lilac talking down there, but it was Sheila, my Irish setter, she was talking to. She heard me and came to the steps.
“She gone, Mis’ Grace. She took your old blue umbrella.”
I said, “All right,” and came back. I was a little relieved about that, but I was very much upset about Dorothy Hallet. I knew she was a complete realist and very wise in the ways of the world, and, if she was disturbed, there was reason for everybody else to be in a complete panic. She’s about the sanest person I know and the most level-headed. And of course Susan Kent was in a complete panic. Still, much as I trust Dorothy on a lot of levels, I couldn’t believe that Susan Kent’s problems, and Dorothy’s sense of responsibility for her or them, were the whole story.
On the other hand, I found it hard to believe anything as obvious as the general gossip—not coming entirely from Freddie Mollinson—that in Susan Kent, Dorothy had taken a viper to her bosom and the viper had got away with Ellery Seymour. I have never believed Dorothy’s interest in Ellery Seymour was more than friendly. It’s perfectly true that if Theodore Hallet, by some quaint fluke of practical politics, did manage to spearhead a popular move for Stubblefield for President—and I believe odder things have happened—it would put Ellery Seymour in a neat spot as Number One braintruster. But Dorothy could never imagine Susan Kent taking her own place as Ellery’s hostess and Washington mentor. She couldn’t be jealous on those grounds. I couldn’t see her taking Theodore’s efforts that seriously in the first place, any more than I could see her sitting quietly whetting claws and fangs to rend Susan Kent apart for any other reason visible to the naked eye. It didn’t make sense. Dorothy Hallet had everything, Susan Kent nothing that was comparable . . . nothing but youth, and, oddly enough, in Washington youth isn’t as important as it is in Timbuctoo, or Hollywood. Still, it’s what you haven’t got you want . . .
I went over to my desk. There was a brochure there that some brokerage firm had sent me, on the faulty assumption that I had or would have, at some indefinitely stated time, a lot of loose money to invest. I pulled it out of the pigeonhole I’d stuck it in, not wanting to dump it in the wastebasket, as it was the most super-elegant slick paper job that had come in my mail since the beginning of the war. It was a sort of Harbinger of a New Return to Normalcy, with a difference. It was called “The Saga of a Great American.” The great American was Enoch B. Stubblefield, and the Saga was the story of Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises. Up to the middle of the brochure, that is. The last half was called “Vision for the Future,” and that was where the catch was. If you sat tight and held on to your money and were very good, while Mr. Stubblefield and his various Assistant Executives were getting ready the dawning of a new world, you would be privileged to come in on one of the better of the lower floors for a quick ride upward to prosperity. As I turned the pages, as far as I could see there was nothing that Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises weren’t going to make better and cheaper . . . and always, of course, higher wages, hospitals and swimming pools for the workers and much higher dividends for the investors. It wasn’t an invitation to buy. It was merely a statement of what sat just around this new corner for the wise, patient and shrewd.
As I am none of the three, I turned back to the beginning and looked at the camera portrait of Mr. Stubblefield. It was a reproduction of the full-face pose you’ve seen a thousand times in newspapers and magazines the last ten years, except that his thick gray hair had been freshly cut, which gave the face more room for the vast confidence and paternal geniality that sat upon it. It was really impressive. If Mr. Stubblefield had been small and wizened, he might never have got past being the owner-manager of the run-down bakery in Omaha that was pictured on Page Four. As it was, all anybody had to do was look at him to see that here was a man of power, to whom the Vision of the Future was simply a matter of pressing a button under the right-hand corner of his desk.
Underneath the picture, and sufficiently underneath to show that Mr. Stubblefield had nothing to do with the writing of it, was a quotation from Milton Minor’s “New Industrialists for Old.” “It is not fanciful,” I read, “to say that here we have the Atomic Principle personalized and directed with humanitarian force to produce for us, in our time, the Golden Age of Western Industrial Civilization.”
On the page facing him, with a piece of tissue inserted, possibly to protect Ellery B. Seymour from the radioactivity of the Atomic Principle, was a picture of the Chief Assistant Executive of Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises. Again there was a quotation from Milton Minor.
“In recognition of the profound debt Industry owes the Technician, and as an indication of the high level of personal loyalty upon which he operates, Enoch B. Stubblefield early made Ellery B. Seymour, inventor of the original process for Stubblefield Plastics, his Number One aide. E. B. S. the Scientist-Dreamer, E. B. S. the Organizing Genius and Man of Action . . . the fact that these two men have the same initials is symbolic of their essential unity. It was the origin of the device that is the trade-mark of Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises, the head of Janus, the Roman god who looked two ways at once—into the Past to preserve the best of our Old Way of Life . . . into the Future to create new opportunities and new things for a better, more abundant New Way of Life.”
So said Milton Minor, author of “New Industrialists for Old.”
It seemed to me, looking at the picture of the Scientist-Dreamer, that Mr. Seymour had a slightly sardonic twinkle in his eye. Perhaps it was only an attempt to look as genial for the camera as the other E. B. S. At forty-five Ellery Seymour looked younger in the photograph, thin-faced, typically New England. As I knew him he was an intelligent, pleasant man, a solid citizen of the earth. He couldn’t have helped thinking Milton minor’s high-flown prose a little funny, though I’d never heard him say so, and of course I’d never heard him indicate in any way that there might even be something slightly absurd about the Genius Organizer and Man of Action. That look on his face in the photograph could be Ellery Seymour forbearing to kid his own show, I supposed. Or, of course, it could be that a couple of millions, which is what Stubblefield is supposed to have made for him, is as good a blinder as is known to man.
Or again, I thought, it could be that, from where he sat he saw Enoch B. Stubblefield and his achievements in a world of reality, not his press in a world of fantasy. I suppose they really are equally fabulous.
It was curious, however, and quite apart from either Stubblefield or Seymour. It was curious about Milton Minor. I’d known him for some time. Until he accidentally wrote a bestseller, he’d been an upright and comparatively sober member of the working press. Having a lot of money suddenly when nobody else did, he bought a big house in Georgetown, and found out, like better men before and since, that the lightning of inspiration seldom strikes twice on the same typewriter. As he was known to have been renting the house for $750 a month for the last years, it seemed strange to some for him to turn out the kind of panegyric that is “New Industrialists for Old.” I knew, however, that he’d bought an expensive wife when he bought the expensive house, and an expensive divorce later with the house thrown in. But it was hard to excuse his turning in an honest pen for the gold-plush nib he must use to write his present gaudy nonsense with. He’d used a bottle of vitriol in the old days. Now, from the sound of it, it was a vat of soft and rosy-tinted soap. I didn’t wonder that he seldom came to Washington any more.
I put the book back in its pigeonhole and had started to pay some bills, when the phone rang at my elbow. I picked it up and said “Hello.” It was a woman who answered.
“Is Mrs. Theodore Hallet there?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She’s gone.”
“Is this Mrs. Latham?”
I said “Yes.” It was a pleasant, well-modulated voice, so pleasant and well-modulated that I had a funny sense of theatre, as if it were part of a play and the curtain must be going up in front of either one or the other of us for the usual opening scene of a polite comedy of manners.
“This is Mrs. Lawrence Taylor,” the voice went on. “Mr. Stubblefield’s secretary told me I could get Mrs. Hallet at your house. I just wanted to check up on this afternoon—to find out if I was really invited. I hate to appear places without having ever seen or spoken to my hostess.”
Her laugh was a warm and throaty sound that made the footlights practically at my feet.
“Perhaps you can help me out,” she said. “I called her house, but Mr. Stubblefield’s secretary said she was at yours.”
“She was here, but she’s left,” I said. “I do know she said a Mrs. Lawrence Taylor was coming. She got the call from Mr. Stubblefield’s office while she was here.”
“Oh, well, then. Thank you so much. I’m rather shy about barging in places where I don’t know people. I’m a stranger in Washington. Thank you, Mrs. Latham. Good-by.”
I said good-by and put the phone down. Mrs. Lawrence Taylor needn’t have told me she was a stranger in Washington. She must be a stranger to the whole modern world to be so punctilious as all that. I even found myself looking forward to meeting a woman who belonged to a school I thought was buried at noon the day the cocktail party was born at five.
4
I was lunching out Sixteenth Street. As I went up the steps I was still a little dizzy from the events of the morning. It didn’t seem possible that anybody to whom Enoch B. Stubblefield had meant nothing at nine o’clock in the morning could find herself at half-past one in the vortex of one of the whirlpools of confusion and panic that seemed to swirl around him. And I knew I hadn’t heard the last of him, because, as I’d told Dorothy Hallet, Freddie Mollinson was going to be at lunch. It was merely a matter of timing that was in question . . . whether it would be with the sherry before lunch, or with the jellied madrilene, or the soft crabs and watercress salad, or the Strawberries Tzarina, that Freddie would pull the Stubblefield thorn from his still bleeding side. It was a sharp thorn, still festering. As Freddie has little to think about but protocol, ancestry and the wretched plight of the beleaguered minority that lives off inherited capital, any slight, real or imagined, assumes large proportions. And I have no doubt Dorothy Hallet was quite rude the day he phoned her and said, “Darling, you may bring this fellow Stubblefield and his—or is it your?—performing seal for dinner tonight. Or do they still need more time to rent a black tie?”
I wasn’t aware that I was late, nor did I have any premonition of what I was walking into when I gave the maid my umbrella and went unhurriedly into the living room. Of all the extraordinary and incredible scenes I’ve ever thought I’d never see in my restricted universe, the one going on there was the least imaginable. I’d never seen the dark-haired sunburned man there who’d apparently just finished saying something that had everybody in a state of near shock. Only Freddie Mollinson seemed to have drawn himself together sufficiently to reply.
“—don’t have any funds invested in rubber plantations,” he was saying coldly. “Well, my dear sir, I have a considerable part of my capital invested in rubber. I had special opportunities I took advantage of when I was in the Foreign Service in the Dutch East Indies. If this fellow Stubblefield goes into the synthetic market and drives down the price of natural rubber, what’s going to happen to people like myself, who’ve already suffered severely during the Jap occupation and are just beginning to hope for the market to return? May I ask you that, sir?”
The dark sunburned man grinned.
“Sure. What happened to whale oil, and coal-oil lamps? My job’s chemical engineering, Mollinson, and you can’t expect me to cry about your bank balance when some guy’s smart enough to make a cheaper and better synthetic. It’s guys like you that almost made us lose the war. You all said Germany didn’t have rubber. You forgot Germany had a thundering synthetic program under way. We coulda lost the war easy, Mr. Mollinson—read the Baruch Report. I’ll bet you kicked like hell about rationed gasoline. Well, it wasn’t the gas we were trying to save, it was the rubber in your tires. If Stubblefield—and that means Ellery Seymour—thinks he’s got something in synthetics, I’m all for him. It’s sure to come. Sooner or later.”
He grinned at Freddie again.
“I wouldn’t want to be rude, Mollinson,” he said. “But if you had to go to work, I can’t say it would matter a damn to me. I’m like Ellery Seymour. I’m not a gentleman. I’m just a guy that has to toil for a living, me and a hundred million other dopes who’d like the best tires cheapest. And you talk about Bllery Seymour and this Mrs. Hallet, whoever she is, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. I know Seymour, knew him at M. I. T., and I knew his wife. They were married his junior year. He quit because they were having a baby and he had to get out and work. He did all right and even did some stuff on his own, and then the slump hit him. He had rougher going than anybody else I know.”
He hesitated, looking around at us.
“And I think I’ll tell you some more, since you’ve been panning him so much. His wife turned on the gas and took the little girl with her. There was another on the way. She knew Ellery was tops, and got the idea that without them he’d get somewhere in spite of the slump. I happen to know—I ran into him that night and went out to the hole they were living in. We found them. That’s one reason I don’t admire to stand here listening to you people giving him the razz. I’m glad to see him in the chips, myself.—So, if you don’t mind, let’s sign off Seymour, and this Mrs. Hallet, and the Kents, whoever they are, and let’s leave Mr. Stubblefield out of it too. Surely there’s enough in the world to talk about without dragging them in.”
That was what he thought, of course. The result was a conversational Yukon before the ice breaks in the spring. And it ruined Freddie’s thorn. He didn’t have a chance to tell how he’d invited Dorothy to bring Mr. Stubblefield and Mr. Seymour to dinner, since Mrs. Stubblefield was not in town, and how Dorothy had said thanks but she’d rather take them to a saloon on Wisconsin Avenue, if he didn’t mind. I was sorry, in a way, because I always love to hear his grand finale.
“—I didn’t in the least mind, I may say. I was delighted, in fact, except that I’d invited several friends in who were curious to see this . . . this elephantine figment of the popular imagination.”
The Hallets’ house is the one up Massachusetts Avenue perched on all that’s left of the triangle between the Bridge and the road going down into Rock Creek Park on the right. It extends back along the road, and behind there’s a long wooded terrace, landscaped like the hanging gardens of Babylon, sloping steeply down into the Park, which accounts for the stray rosebushes and petunias any motorist can pick up down there after a whacking good rain.
There was just a warm woolly drizzle at seven-fifteen when I left my car below Waterside Drive and went the rest of the way on foot. I didn’t, at first, see the woman in black who was standing at the end of the path leading to the attractively redecorated stables occupied by Susan and Bill Kent at an overall of three hundred a month, with Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises paying two hundred of it. When I did see her, I was so startled I didn’t miss the mud puddle just ahead of me. She was like something out of a Scandinavian fairy tale—a forlorn tragic figure with a black scarf over her head and sad, unhappy eyes. She just stood there in the rain, looking back at me. As I started to speak to her, Haste, the Hallets’ chauffeur who was pinch-hitting as doorman, came out under the green-and-white awning.
