The Book of Susan: A Novel. Dodd Lee Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ I ever made up out of my own head. And I just talked it right off to Artemis without any trouble. But I had hardly finished it, when – "

      What had happened next was the crash of glassware, followed by Bob's thick voice, bellowing: "C'm ba' here! Damned slut! Tell yeh t' c'm ba' an' – an' 'pol'gize!"

      Susan heard a strangling screech from Pearl, the jar of a heavy piece of furniture overturned. The child's first impulse was to run out into Birch Street and scream for help. She tells me her spine knew all at once that something terrible had happened – or was going to happen. Then, in an odd flash of hallucination, she saw Artemis poised the fleetingest second before her – beautiful, a little disdainful, divinely unafraid. So Susan gulped, dug her nails fiercely into her palms, and hurried back through the parlor into the kitchen, where she stumbled across the overturned table and fell, badly bruising her cheek.

      As she scrambled to her feet a door slammed to, above. Her father, in a grotesque crouching posture, was mounting the ladderlike stair. On the floor at the stair's foot lay the parchment head of Pearl's banjo, which he had cut from its frame. Susan distinctly caught the smudged pinks and blues of the nondescript flowers. She realized at once that her father was bound on no good errand. And Pearl was trapped. Susan called to her father, daringly, a little wildly. He slued round to her, leaning heavily on the stair rail, his face green-white, his lips held back by some evil reflex in a fixed, appalling grin.

      It was the face of a madman… He raised his right hand, slowly, and a tiny prismatic gleam darted from the blade of an opened razor – one of his precious set of six. He had evidently used it to destroy the banjo head, which he would never have done in his right mind. But now he made a shocking gesture with the blade, significant of other uses; then turned, crouching once more, to continue upward. Susan tried to cry out, tried to follow him, until the room slid from its moorings into a whirlpool of humming blackness..

      That is all Susan remembers for some time. It is just as well.

      VI

      What Susan next recalls is an intense blare of light, rousing her from her nothingness, like trumpets. Her immediate confused notion was that the gates of hell had been flung wide for her; and when a tall black figure presently cut across the merciless rays and towered before her, she thought it must be the devil. But the intense blare came from the head lights of my touring car, and the tall black devil was I. A greatly puzzled and compassionate devil I was too! Maltby Phar – that exquisite anarchist – was staying with me, and we had run down to the shore for dinner, hoping to mitigate the heat by the ride, and my new sensation of frustrate middle-age by broiled live lobsters. It was past eleven. I had just dropped Maltby at the house and had run my car round to the garage where Bob worked, meaning to leave it there overnight so Bob could begin patching at it the first thing in the morning. It had been bucking its way along on three cylinders or less all day.

      Bob's garage lay back from the street down a narrow alley. Judge, then, of my astonishment as I nosed my car up to its shut double doors! There, on the concrete incline before the doors, lay a small crumpled figure, half-curled, like an unearthed cut-worm, about a shining dinner pail. I brought the car to a sudden dead stop. The small figure partly uncrumpled, and a white, blinded little face lifted toward me. It was Bob's youngster! What was she up to, lying there on the ribbed concrete at this time of night? And in heaven's name – why the dinner pail? I jumped down to investigate.

      "You're Susan Blake, aren't you?"

      "Yes" – with a whispered gasp – "your Royal Highness."

      Susan says she doesn't know just why she addressed the devil in that way, unless she was trying to flatter him and so get round him.

      "I'm not so awfully bad," she went on, "if you don't count thinking things too much!"

      The right cheek of her otherwise delicately modeled child's face was a swollen lump of purple and green. I dropped down on one knee beside her.

      "Why, you poor little lady! You're hurt!"

      Instantly she sprang to her feet, wild-eyed.

      "No, no! It's not me – it's Pearl! Oh, quick – please! He had a razor!"

      "Razor? Who did?" I seized her hands. "I'm Mr. Hunt, dear. Your father often works on my car. Tell me what's wrong!"

      She was still half dazed. "I – I can't see why I'm down here – with papa's dinner pail. Pearl was upstairs, and I tried to stop him from going." Then she began to whimper like a whipped puppy. "It's all mixed. I'm scared."

      "Of course – of course you are; but it's going to be all right." I led her to the car and lifted her to the front seat. "Hold on a minute, Susan. I'll be back with you in less than no time!"

      I sounded my horn impatiently. After an interval, a slow-footed car washer inside the garage began trundling the doors back to admit me. I ran to him.

      No. Bob, he left at six, same as usual. He hadn't been round since… His kid, eh? Mebbe the heat had turned her queer. Nuff to addle most folks, the heat was..

      I saw that he knew nothing, and snapped him off with a sharp request to crank the car for me. As he did so, I jumped in beside Susan.

      "Where do you live, Susan? Oh, yes, of course – Birch Street. Bob told me that… Eh? You don't want to go home?"

      "Never, please. Never, never! I won't!" Proclaiming this, she flung Bob's dinner pail from her and it bounced and clattered down the asphalt. "It's too late," she added, in a frightened whisper: "I know it is!"

      Then she seized my arm – thereby almost wrecking us against a fire hydrant – and clung to me, sobbing. I was puzzled and – yes – alarmed. Bob was a bad customer. The child's bruised face.. something she had said about a razor – ? And instantly I made up my mind.

      "I'll take you to my house, Susan. Mrs. Parrot" – Mrs. Parrot was my housekeeper – "will fix you up for to-night. Then I'll go round and see Bob; see what's wrong." I felt her thin fingers dig into my arm convulsively. "Yes," I reassured her, taking a corner perilously at full speed, "that will be much better. You'll like Mrs. Parrot."

      Rather recklessly, I hoped this might prove to be true; for Mrs. Parrot was a little difficult at times..

      It was Maltby Phar who saw me coming up the steps with a limp child in my arms, and who opened the screen door for me. "Aha!" he exclaimed. "Done it this time, eh! Always knew you would, sooner or later. You're too damned absent-minded to drive a car. You – "

      "Nonsense!" I struck in. "Tell Mrs. Parrot to ring up Doctor Stevens. Then send her to me." And I continued on upstairs with Susan.

      When Mrs. Parrot came, Susan was lying with closed eyes in the middle of a great white embroidered coverlet, upon which her shoes had smeared greasy, permanent-looking stains.

      "Mercy," sighed Mrs. Parrot, "if you've killed the poor creature, nobody's sorrier than I am! But why couldn't you have laid her down on the floor? She wouldn't have known."

      In certain respects Mrs. Parrot was invaluable to me; but then and there I suspected that Mrs. Parrot would, in the not-too-distant future, have to go.

      Within five minutes Doctor Stevens arrived, and, after hurried explanations, Maltby and I left him in charge – and then made twenty-five an hour to Birch Street.

      However, Susan's intuitions had been correct. We found Bob's four-room house quite easily. It was the house with the crowd in front of it… We were an hour too late.

      "Cut СКАЧАТЬ