Evidence of Things Seen (4 page)

“Well, I suppose Miss Radford is glad now that she
was
a miser,” said Clara. “All the more left for her. I really must be going.”

But she had to wait and accept a bunch of outsize pansies; which Mrs. Simms, smiling, did not refuse a quarter for.

Clara went home by the road. Before she turned off the highway, however, she stopped to view Miss Radford's farm with a fresh, if not a pleasurable interest. It was twenty yards beyond the fork, but the two black dogs—Clara thought they must be Doberman pinschers with a hint of Great Dane—would not tolerate the sight of her even at that distance. They rushed to the nearest corner of the six-foot wire fence and barked violently, every tooth bared. Snarled, rather; with long and rasping intakes of breath. Clara tried to ignore them as she looked at the old house. Once, perhaps, it had been pleasant enough, shaded by big trees; but now it was ruined. The trees had been cleared away, all but one great maple, and a cindery-looking gravel path led up to a new, shiny front door. There was a new bay window on the left of this door, and there were plate-glass windows to the right. The house had been painted saffron yellow.

Depressing. Clara looked beyond at the road which wound uphill and at last vanished among trees. Far up the mountain it met the road that turned right to the Hunters'. Clara, thinking of them, felt better; but a feeling of unreality was growing on her, a sense that the sunny landscape in front of her might dissolve like a transparency in a play, and show her something she had never suspected the existence of behind the familiar and the known.
Things are not what they seem:
a cliché, but might it after all be true?

What was the use of research, if it only led to further doubt and uneasiness? But she would not give it up.

A
SMALL CAR
came into view from the direction of the Radford garage, skirted a driveway which had conveniently been left outside the fence, and approached the highway; Clara, as she turned up the road that led past the cottage, was hailed by its driver in a loud, friendly voice: “You Mrs. Gamadge? You Miss Radford's summer tenant?”

Clara stopped, faced him, and said yes, she was. He was a spruce young man, red-skinned and round-headed, with a small black mustache. He leaned out of his car window, his straw hat on the back of his head: “Want to ride up to the cottage?”

“No thanks, I need the walk.”

“Nothing wrong with your car, I hope? Need gas or tires? I run a garage in Avebury, and I could fix you up.” He winked, and then added reassuringly: “Miss Radford's my wife's aunt.”

“Thanks very much, I…”

The front door of the house opened. Miss Radford appeared first, spoke to the dogs, which stopped barking and began to wag their tails, nodded to Clara, and stood aside. A young woman came out and ran down the steps. When she had reached the gate, and it had snapped shut behind her, Miss Radford withdrew and closed her stout new oaken portal. The young woman paused, raked Clara with a sharp and none too amiable look, and then glanced haughtily at the driver of the car.

“Here's my wife, Mrs. Gamadge,” he shouted. “Introduce you.”

The young woman advanced, now smiling. Clara had an impression first of bright color, then of hollow pink cheeks, large protruding eyes, a thin red mouth, and a mass of yellow hair under a red hat.

“I'm Mrs. Groby,” she said. “Miss Radford's niece.”

“How do you do?” Clara shook hands. Mrs. Groby's dress was red and white, her bracelets red, her bag and sandals of the most vivid scarlet. She, also, had a loud, high voice.

“Aunt Alvira was telling me your friends couldn't come for two weeks,” she went on, her eyes passing rapidly from Clara's hair to her sport shoes, and back again.

“No, but—”

“It's a crime. You must be lonesome.”

“No, I like the cottage so much.”

“I haven't seen it since it was fixed. We live in Avebury, and we don't get out here very often, but anything we can do, you let us know. It must be terrible for you with no electricity. Hope you get ice?”

“Yes, every day. It's perfect, thank you.”

“Aunt Alvira is a kind of a recluse, but she wants you to be comfortable.”

“Everything's fine.”

Mr. Groby, at first somewhat quelled by the presence of his wife, now recovered his raffish air. He again leaned out of the car, a white oblong in his hand. “Have my card,” he urged. “In case of what I said. Fuel and equipment.”

Mrs. Groby snatched the card from his hand. “We ain't looking for business,” she said angrily, “this is social. I hope you'll drop in when you're down our way, Mrs. Gamadge; any time.”

“You must come and see me,” said Clara, “but I hope you'll telephone first, because I'm out practically all day.”

“You wouldn't care for us to stop in now, just to see how you're fixed?”

“I'd love it, but I have a man doing some work.”

“I'll be over some other day.”

Mrs. Groby climbed into the car, her husband turned it, and they drove off. Clara went up to the cottage, where Hawley was already at work on the doors.

“There ain't a thing the matter with that latch your help showed me,” he said. “Just shove the tongue in good, and it'll stay. All these doors is warped, warped half off their hinges. I seen Groby hail you; did he try to sell you on his black market?”

“I don't really know what you mean, Web.”

Mr. Hawley accepted this mild rebuke in good part, and went on planing. Clara had a bathe in the pool, wrote letters, and had lunch. After lunch she busied herself about the cottage until it was time to take her walking stick and start her climb up the Ladder to Mountain Ridge Farm.

The Ladder trail was a steep and winding track, washed into ruts and mudholes by the spring rains. The stream that fed the waterfall and pool ran beside it on the right, then on the left; Clara had to be careful in crossing the old log bridge, hardly more than a trestle now. The Ladder smelled of last year's leaves, this year's mint and pine, damp earth and running water. Halfway up, in a kind of little clearing, there was a flat rock beside the trail; Clara liked to sit here and have a cigarette before she went on—past the tall grass and crumbling foundations of a vanished farm—to more open country whence she could see the Hunters' ridge in the distance.

There was a well-kept road along the ridge, where Hunters had owned property for a hundred and eighty years, and farmed it until the end of the other war; but the present Phineas Hunter, like Mrs. Simms, had given up farming for profit. He had always used Mountain Ridge Farm as a country place, but had not often come there until 1939; after that he and his wife had spent at least a month in the old house every summer. This year they had come up from New York in June, and proposed to stay until October.

The long, low farmhouse had been cleverly remodeled many years before, its front left intact, its new rooms built out to the blue of Berkshire range and the pale tracery of further ranges beyond. Within doors it had been made comfortable, even luxurious, without being spoiled; it was now the Hunters' second home.

Clara walked along the ridge road, her eyes on the view, until she passed the Hunter barn and outbuildings on the right, and approached the flagged path on the left. She went up to a white doorway, and plied a knocker that been polished to a soft brightness more like gold than brass. There was no bell; Hunter said that he liked to hear a knocking at the door.

Fanny Hunter came to the door herself. Slim, beautiful, with the complexion and bright, soft hair of a child, she looked no older than her guest. She was in fact thirty, but she had the kind of blondness that does not fade. At the end of her life her hair would be brilliant silver instead of brilliant gold.

She threw up her arms. “Clara—Alonzo has gone to the war!”

“Oh dear, how hard.”

“Of course we'll manage, and Phin is such an angel, he never complains. But it is so funny to have fat old Annie, our farmer's wife, you know, bringing in tea and waiting at table. There simply aren't any young women to be had.”

“I know.”

Mrs. Hunter took Clara's arm. “Are you tired? It's such a climb.”

“I'm not a bit tired.”

“Then let's go in and see Phin; he's pining for you.”

They went along the hall to Hunter's study at the back of the house. It had a screened porch overhanging the wooded mountainside, but today he was working indoors, beside his north window. The study, designed by himself, was ceiled and paneled in native woods, with carvings of oak leaves, acorns and pine cones. The curtains and upholstery were in green silk, and engravings of eighteenth-century personages hung on the rough-plastered walls. Hunter was something of an authority on that period, but in his writing he kept to its byways; he said he had not the learning to approach the great shrines by the traveled roads.

Gamadge's own writing had long since brought him into Hunter's orbit, a little matter of a disputed letter from—as Hunter put it—one of Pope's dunces to another; the two had met at long intervals, then Gamadge had dined with the Hunters, and after he married the two couples had dined together at least once a year. Clara was a great favorite with both the Hunters. She had until now looked upon them as delightful but casual friends; but in the week since her arrival at the cottage she had come to feel as if she had known them intimately all her life.

Now, as Hunter rose from behind his big working-table, she thought again that he was one of the most charming men she had ever met in her life. He was in his middle forties, dark-haired and with dark blue eyes; always rather tanned from outdoor sport—he rode, swam, sailed, golfed, and played a certain amount of tennis—he had not only escaped a scholar's stoop, but had preserved a naturally good figure and an excellent digestion. His best feature was his mouth, a fine bow which seemed always to curve upward; perhaps because he had had the good fortune to be able to make his hobby his profession. Certainly it alone would never have supported him and his wife, or even have fed them in the style to which they were accustomed. Fanny, whom he adored, was just the wife for him; he did not much care for literary society, and valued Gamadge for the latter's companionable quality.

“Well, my dear child,” he said, coming around the table, “what do you hear from your good husband?”

“He may be coming home soon, Mr. Hunter.”

“Good. Whatever he's doing, it must be pretty thrilling, by Jove. They're going to fit me in somewhere next fall, they tell me, and I hope they'll give me something more exciting than draft board, and less exciting than air wardenship; both of which jobs I shall be glad to exchange for one demanding mental activity. But I confess that I shall miss my nice white hat.”

Fanny said: “He's patient, poor darling, about not having a good library to sit in any more.”

“My dear, I have many good libraries to sit in, though I do prefer the Bodleian. The trouble is that when I'm at the farm I cannot decently work trips to large libraries into the war effort. Just now I'm stuck for a reference. I wish Gamadge were here; I'm sure he knows all about Pope.”

“I don't think he does,” said Clara. “He always says that Pope is a great romantic poet, but I know that at school they said that was wrong.”

Hunter declared that Pope was a great romantic poet, and everything else great besides. “Are we having tea here, Fanny, or in the other room?”

“I think the other room will be easier for Mrs. Colley.”

Hunter, with a low groan, followed his wife and Clara into the yellow drawing room which ran from the study to the front of the house. It was long and low, and had been beautifully done up with yellow satin and brocade. There was an old French landscape over the mantel, and an old French carpet covered the floor. “To the devil with kitchen furniture in the parlor,” Hunter was wont to say. “This house is our ‘seat,' and it's tight as a drum. The Chippendale fares better here than it would in the steam heat in town.”

“But we shall need steam heat or something here, darling,” objected Fanny, “if we stay so long.”

Hunter patted her shoulder. “We shall contrive something.”

“Well, I'm glad we are staying. So many people are, this year, and they let me work in the Stratfield hospital without taking any nursing courses.”

“My dearest child,” said Hunter, “one does not need training of any kind in order to carry cocoa and lemonade to sick persons. You are more qualified to do that than Mrs. Colley is, I believe.”

Fanny shushed him as Mrs. Colley, the farmer's wife, staggered in with the great silver tea tray. She then brought a tray of bread-and-butter and cakes, and retired to a chorus of thanks from her employers.

“And yet, do you know, Clara,” said Hunter, while Fanny poured the tea, “it's really very restful, the sense that one must now stay put. All our lives we have been waiting to do the next thing; now we must think twice before we demand our trunks and bags. Are you going to be happy, alone in your cottage until Dick and his wife turn up?”

“Oh, yes. I'm sketching, you know, the most awful daubs, but I love to.”

“You have only to say the word, one word; Fanny has your room ready for you, and Maggie will be a blessing to us as things go.”

“I certainly shan't settle down on you with Alonzo gone!”

“
I
couldn't stay there alone,” said Fanny, handing her her tea.

“My dear, that corner of the world is as safe a corner as there is today, and as lovely a one,” said Hunter.

“You and Fanny being here make it right for me,” said Clara. “You're surely coming to dinner with me on Saturday night? You won't mind missing the Avebury fireworks and town band?”