Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three] Page 6

  “Not to know him. I’ve seen him in town. They say he was a good man.”

  “Yes—good,” conceded John Wright’s neighbor grimly. “He didn’t drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him—.” She stopped, shivered a little. “Like a raw wind that gets to the bone.” Her eye fell upon the cage on the table before her, and she added, almost bitterly: “I should think she would’ve wanted a bird!”

  Suddenly she leaned forward, looking intently at the cage. “But what do you s’pose went wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know,” returned Mrs. Peters; “unless it got sick and died.”

  But after she said it she reached over and swung the broken door. Both women watched it as if somehow held by it.

  “You didn’t know—her?” Mrs. Hale asked, a gentler note in her voice.

  “Not till they brought her yesterday,” said the sheriff’s wife.

  “She—come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery. How—she—did—change.”

  That held her for a long time. Finally, as if struck with a happy thought and relieved to get back to everyday things, she exclaimed:

  “Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don’t you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind.”

  “Why, I think that’s a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale,” agreed the sheriff’s wife, as if she too were glad to come into the atmosphere of a simple kindness. “There couldn’t possibly be any objection to that, could there? Now, just what will I take? I wonder if her patches are in here—and her things.”

  They turned to the sewing basket.

  “Here’s some red,” said Mrs. Hale, bringing out a roll of cloth. Underneath that was a box. “Here, maybe her scissors are in here—and her things.” She held it up. “What a pretty box! I’ll warrant that was something she had a long time ago—when she was a girl.”

  She held it in her hand a moment; then, with a little sigh, opened it.

  Instantly her hand went to her nose.

  “Why—!”

  Mrs. Peters drew nearer—then turned away.

  “There’s something wrapped up in this piece of silk,” faltered Mrs. Hale.

  “This isn’t her scissors,” said Mrs. Peters, in a shrinking voice.

  Her hand not steady, Mrs. Hale raised the piece of silk. “Oh, Mrs. Peters!” she cried. “It’s—”

  Mrs. Peters bent closer.

  “It’s the bird,” she whispered.

  “But, Mrs. Peters!” cried Mrs. Hale. “Look at it! Its neck—look at its neck! It’s all—other side to.”

  She held the box away from her.

  The sheriff’s wife again bent closer.

  “Somebody wrung its neck,” said she, in a voice that was slow and deep.

  And then again the eyes of the two women met—this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror. Mrs. Peters looked from the dead bird to the broken door of the cage. Again their eyes met. And just then there was a sound at the outside door.

  Mrs. Hale slipped the box under the quilt pieces in the basket, and sank into the chair before it. Mrs. Peters stood holding to the table. The county attorney and the sheriff came in from outside.

  “Well, ladies,” said the county attorney, as one turning from serious things to little pleasantries, “have you decided whether she was going to quilt it or knot it?”

  “We think,” began the sheriff’s wife in a flurried voice, “that she was going to—knot it.”

  He was too preoccupied to notice the change that came in her voice on that last.

  “Well, that’s very interesting, I’m sure,” he said tolerantly. He caught sight of the bird-cage. “Has the bird flown?”

  “We think the cat got it,” said Mrs. Hale in a voice curiously even.

  He was walking up and down, as if thinking something out.

  “Is there a cat?” he asked absently.

  Mrs. Hale shot a look up at the sheriff’s wife.

  “Well, not now,” said Mrs. Peters. “They’re superstitious, you know; they leave.”

  She sank into her chair.

  The county attorney did not heed her. “No sign at all of any one having come in from the outside,” he said to Peters, in the manner of continuing an interrupted conversation. “Their own rope. Now let’s go upstairs again and go over it, piece by piece. It would have to have been some one who knew just the—”

  The stair door closed behind them and their voices were lost.

  The two women sat motionless, not looking at each other, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they spoke now it was as if they were afraid of what they were saying, but as if they could not help saying it.

  “She liked the bird,” said Martha Hale, low and slowly. “She was going to bury it in that pretty box.”

  “When I was a girl,” said Mrs. Peters, under her breath, “my kitten—there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes—before I could get there—” She covered her face an instant. “If they hadn’t held me back I would have”—she caught herself, looked upstairs where footsteps were heard, and finished weakly—“hurt him.”

  Then they sat without speaking or moving.

  “I wonder how it would seem,” Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her way over strange ground—“never to have had any children around?” Her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen had meant through all the years. “No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird,” she said after that—“a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too.” Her voice tightened.

  Mrs. Peters moved uneasily.

  “Of course we don’t know who killed the bird.”

  “I knew John Wright,” was Mrs. Hale’s answer.

  “It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale,” said the sheriff’s wife. “Killing a man while he slept—slipping a thing round his neck that choked the life out of him.”

  Mrs. Hale’s hand went out to the bird-cage.

  “His neck. Choked the life out of him.”

  “We don’t know who killed him,” whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. “We don’t know.”

  Mrs. Hale had not moved. “If there had been years and years of—nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still—after the bird was still.”

  It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.

  “I know what stillness is,” she said, in a queer, monotonous voice. “When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died—after he was two years old—and me with no other then—”

  Mrs. Hale stirred.

  “How soon do you suppose they’ll be through looking for the evidence?”

  “I know what stillness is,” repeated Mrs. Peters, in just that same way. Then she too pulled back. “The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale,” she said in her tight little way.

  “I wish you’d seen Minnie Foster,” was the answer, “when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the choir and sang.”

  The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was suddenly more than she could bear.

  “Oh, I wish I’d come over here once in a while!” she cried. “That was a crime! That was a crime! Who’s going to punish that?”

  “We mustn’t take on,” said Mrs. Peters, with a frightened look toward the stairs.

  “I might ’a’ known she needed help! I tell you, it’s queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it’s all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren’t—why do you and I understand? Why do we know—what we know this minute?”

  She dashed her hand across her eyes. Then, seeing the jar of fruit on the table, she
reached for it and choked out:

  “If I was you I wouldn’t tell her her fruit was gone! Tell her it ain’t. Tell her it’s all right—all of it. Here—take this in to prove it to her! She—she may never know whether it was broke or not.”

  She turned away.

  Mrs. Peters reached out for the bottle of fruit as if she were glad to take it—as if touching a familiar thing, having something to do, could keep her from something else. She got up, looked about for something to wrap the fruit in, took a petticoat from the pile of clothes she had brought from the front room, and nervously started winding that round the bottle.

  “My!” she began, in a high, false voice, “it’s a good thing the men couldn’t hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a—dead canary.” She hurried over that. “As if that could have anything to do with—with—My, wouldn’t they laugh?”

  Footsteps were heard on the stairs.

  “Maybe they would,” muttered Mrs. Hale—“maybe they wouldn’t.”

  “No, Peters,” said the county attorney incisively; “it’s all perfectly clear, except the reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing—something to show. Something to make a story about. A thing that would connect up with this clumsy way of doing it.”

  In a covert way Mrs. Hale looked at Mrs. Peters. Mrs. Peters was looking at her. Quickly they looked away from each other. The outer door opened and Mr. Hale came in.

  “I’ve got the team round now,” he said. “Pretty cold out there.”

  “I’m going to stay here awhile by myself,” the county attorney suddenly announced. “You can send Frank out for me, can’t you?” he asked the sheriff. “I want to go over everything. I’m not satisfied we can’t do better.”

  Again, for one brief moment, the two women’s eyes found one another.

  The sheriff came up to the table.

  “Did you want to see what Mrs. Peters was going to take in?”

  The county attorney picked up the apron. He laughed.

  “Oh, I guess they’re not very dangerous things the ladies have picked out.”

  Mrs. Hale’s hand was on the sewing basket in which the box was concealed. She felt that she ought to take her hand off the basket. She did not seem able to. He picked up one of the quilt blocks which she had piled on to cover the box. Her eyes felt like fire. She had a feeling that if he took up the basket she would snatch it from him.

  But he did not take it up. With another little laugh, he turned away, saying:

  “No; Mrs. Peters doesn’t need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff’s wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters?”

  Mrs. Peters was standing beside the table. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at her; but she could not see her face. Mrs. Peters had turned away. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.

  “Not—just that way,” she said.

  “Married to the law!” chuckled Mrs. Peters’ husband. He moved toward the door into the front room, and said to the county attorney:

  “I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows.”

  “Oh—windows,” said the county attorney scoffingly.

  “We’ll be right out, Mr. Hale,” said the sheriff to the farmer, who was still waiting by the door.

  Hale went to look after the horses. The sheriff followed the county attorney into the other room. Again—for one final moment—the two women were alone in that kitchen.

  Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it rested. At first she could not see her eyes, for the sheriff’s wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion nor flinching. Then Martha Hale’s eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman—that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through that hour.

  For a moment Mrs. Peters did not move. And then she did it. With a rush forward, she threw back the quilt pieces, got the box, tried to put it in her hand-bag. It was too big. Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out. But there she broke—she could not touch the bird. She stood there helpless, foolish.

  There was the sound of a knob turning in the inner door. Martha Hale snatched the box from the sheriff’s wife, and got it in the pocket of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back into the kitchen.

  “Well, Henry,” said the county attorney facetiously, “at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what is it you call it, ladies?”

  Mrs. Hale’s hand was against the pocket of her coat.

  “We call it—knot it, Mr. Henderson.”

  END – Thanks to Susan Glaspell for this story!

  Cozy Mystery Three: The Trees of Pride

  I. The Tale of the Peacock Trees

  Squire Vane was an elderly schoolboy of English education and Irish extraction. His English education, at one of the great public schools, had preserved his intellect perfectly and permanently at the stage of boyhood. But his Irish extraction subconsciously upset in him the proper solemnity of an old boy, and sometimes gave him back the brighter outlook of a naughty boy. He had a bodily impatience which played tricks upon him almost against his will, and had already rendered him rather too radiant a failure in civil and diplomatic service. Thus it is true that compromise is the key of British policy, especially as effecting an impartiality among the religions of India; but Vane’s attempt to meet the Moslem halfway by kicking off one boot at the gates of the mosque, was felt not so much to indicate true impartiality as something that could only be called an aggressive indifference. Again, it is true that an English aristocrat can hardly enter fully into the feelings of either party in a quarrel between a Russian Jew and an Orthodox procession carrying relics; but Vane’s idea that the procession might carry the Jew as well, himself a venerable and historic relic, was misunderstood on both sides. In short, he was a man who particularly prided himself on having no nonsense about him; with the result that he was always doing nonsensical things. He seemed to be standing on his head merely to prove that he was hard-headed.

  He had just finished a hearty breakfast, in the society of his daughter, at a table under a tree in his garden by the Cornish coast. For, having a glorious circulation, he insisted on as many outdoor meals as possible, though spring had barely touched the woods and warmed the seas round that southern extremity of England. His daughter Barbara, a good-looking girl with heavy red hair and a face as grave as one of the garden statues, still sat almost motionless as a statue when her father rose. A fine tall figure in light clothes, with his white hair and moustache flying backwards rather fiercely from a face that was good-humoured enough, for he carried his very wide Panama hat in his hand, he strode across the terraced garden, down some stone steps flanked with old ornamental urns to a more woodland path fringed with little trees, and so down a zigzag road which descended the craggy Cliff to the shore, where he was to meet a guest arriving by boat. A yacht was already in the blue bay, and he could see a boat pulling toward the little paved pier.

  And yet in that short walk between the green turf and the yellow sands he was destined to find, his hard-headedness provoked into a not unfamiliar phase which the world was inclined to call hot-headedness. The fact was that the Cornish peasantry, who composed his tenantry and domestic establishment, were far from being people with no nonsense about them. There was, alas! a great deal of nonsense about them; with ghosts, witches, and traditions as old as Merlin, they seemed to surround him with a fairy ring of nonsense. But the magic circle had one centre: there was one point in which the curving conversation of the rust
ics always returned. It was a point that always pricked the Squire to exasperation, and even in this short walk he seemed to strike it everywhere. He paused before descending the steps from the lawn to speak to the gardener about potting some foreign shrubs, and the gardener seemed to be gloomily gratified, in every line of his leathery brown visage, at the chance of indicating that he had formed a low opinion of foreign shrubs.

  “We wish you’d get rid of what you’ve got here, sir,” he observed, digging doggedly. “Nothing’ll grow right with them here.”

  “Shrubs!” said the Squire, laughing. “You don’t call the peacock trees shrubs, do you? Fine tall trees—you ought to be proud of them.”

  “Ill weeds grow apace,” observed the gardener. “Weeds can grow as houses when somebody plants them.” Then he added: “Him that sowed tares in the Bible, Squire.”

  “Oh, blast your—” began the Squire, and then replaced the more apt and alliterative word “Bible” by the general word “superstition.” He was himself a robust rationalist, but he went to church to set his tenants an example. Of what, it would have puzzled him to say.

  A little way along the lower path by the trees he encountered a woodcutter, one Martin, who was more explicit, having more of a grievance. His daughter was at that time seriously ill with a fever recently common on that coast, and the Squire, who was a kind-hearted gentleman, would normally have made allowances for low spirits and loss of temper. But he came near to losing his own again when the peasant persisted in connecting his tragedy with the traditional monomania about the foreign trees.

  “If she were well enough I’d move her,” said the woodcutter, “as we can’t move them, I suppose. I’d just like to get my chopper into them and feel ’em come crashing down.”

  “One would think they were dragons,” said Vane.

  “And that’s about what they look like,” replied Martin. “Look at ’em!”

  The woodman was naturally a rougher and even wilder figure than the gardener. His face also was brown, and looked like an antique parchment, and it was framed in an outlandish arrangement of raven beard and whiskers, which was really a fashion fifty years ago, but might have been five thousand years old or older. Phoenicians, one felt, trading on those strange shores in the morning of the world, might have combed or curled or braided their blue-black hair into some such quaint patterns. For this patch of population was as much a corner of Cornwall as Cornwall is a corner of England; a tragic and unique race, small and interrelated like a Celtic clan. The clan was older than the Vane family, though that was old as county families go. For in many such parts of England it is the aristocrats who are the latest arrivals. It was the sort of racial type that is supposed to be passing, and perhaps has already passed.