were like a flock of penned-up ducks quacking about an exciting secret millpond. There was a sudden burst of laughter. “Oh, no!” somebody said. “Oh, I can’t believe it, I really can’t!”
“But she can and she will and she’ll tell everybody else she sees,” Marjorie said bitterly. “It’s hideous, Grace—it’s evil. Tell Colonel Primrose, won’t you? And go see that poor woman. Just talk to her. You can’t believe how horrible it all is. Something’s got to happen. Ham Vair oughtn’t to be allowed to live, Grace. I swear I’ll . . . I’ll kill him myself, if something doesn’t happen.”
But I didn’t go see Mrs. Brent, and I didn’t tell Colonel Primrose he had to do something about it. I don’t know whether I was deterred by the idea that I’d cost him and Sergeant Buck too much already, or whether I unconsciously thought Marjorie was a special pleader for her husband’s chief client. There was no reason why the Seatons couldn’t call Colonel Primrose themselves . . . and if Rufus Brent couldn’t look out for himself, who in America could?
Even then, I’d probably have told Colonel Primrose about it, except that my younger son came home for a week, and as he thinks about the Colonel a little the way Sergeant Buck thinks about me, I hardly saw the man. And then, the Monday morning after my child had gone back to New Haven, such an extraordinary thing happened in my house that I forgot the Rufus Brents. Sergeant Phineas T. Buck paid me a personal and private call.
III
No doubt the day will come when either mutation of the species or atomic science applied to gadgetry will develop some kind of Geiger counter for use in the home. Having avoided Marjorie Seaton’s appeal to get mixed up in the Rufus Brent mess, I should have had some sort of instrument, that china-blue morning in May, to warn me that if I listened to Sergeant Buck I was going to be in it up to my shoulder-blades in nothing flat . . . and in reverse, which was the awful thing about it. I wouldn’t speak to Colonel Primrose or go to see Mrs. Rufus Brent, but I would be so flattered by a visit from Buck that I’d turn my own home into an underground headquarters for Hamilton Vair without batting an eyelash. Still, even if there’d been a Geiger counter there, I’d have assumed it was jumping because of the headlines in the paper I put down when I heard the Sergeant’s heavy footsteps coming, grimly dogged, up the stairs from my basement kitchen.
VAIR DEMANDS INVESTIGATION OF BRENTOOL CONTRACTS. SAYS TOOLMAKER USES ITC TO LINE OWN POCKETS.
And it had taken Vair’s apologist, Edson Field, a whole week to get around to reporting the dinner party he and Tom Seaton had been to.
“A shocking sidelight on the lengths that private interests will go to silence Congressional criticism can now be told,” he said in his column called Washington Business Is Your Business. “Rufus Brent, too sensitive to rising public indignation to threaten Mr. Vair openly, uses his astronomically-salaried Washington mouthpiece to do it for him.
“The threat to close down the Brentool Plant in Vair’s Congressional district, where Brent has a stranglehold on local industry, and force the entire population of the county into unemployment and starvation, unless Vair withdraws his charges, was carefully veiled, and will be, as usual, promptly denied. It is a deplorable but well-known fact that serious business in the Capital is frequently conducted at swank dinner parties as well as in bar lounges and at cocktail parties. It is the first time, however, that this column has ever been handed a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum to transmit to a member of the United States Congress along with his plate of green-turtle soup.
“The courageous young representative of’ the Ninth District has flatly refused to be coerced, bribed or intimidated. If the Brentool Plant in Taber City develops so-called labor troubles which force it to close down in the near future, do not be either surprised or misled. The fact that Rufus Brent’s handy man is prepared to starve an entire community in order to silence one man is a staggering blow worthy of Darker Ages than those we live in.”
It would teach Mr. Brent’s astronomically-salaried mouthpiece to keep it resolutely shut hereafter, I thought as I put the paper down. I was having lunch, if that’s what I could call the lettuce leaf, black coffee and melba toast I was stuck with to pay for the week of spoonbread, fried chicken and apple crisp that’s our staple diet when one of the kids is home. I was having it at my end of the long polished expanse of dining-room table. Lilac still has her standards, a dinner table is made to eat at, there I eat come hell or high water, and there I sat, in lonely dignity, wondering why Buck was coming to see me.
He came through the door, ducking the low bridge so he looked like a bull squared off to charge, and brought his massive hulk to a dead stop just inside—the Missouri grounded and as red of face. He was in his teal blue Sunday suit and what Lilac calls his Sunday laundry, a stiff white collar on a pale pink shirt, with a hand-painted necktie some woman must have given him, it was so debonair and so awful, his hair still damp and plastered over his bald spot, his lantern jaw the color of a tarnished hog kettle, his fish-grey eyes lighted with the affectionate warmth of half-thawed oysters. As he cleared his throat the lustres on the mantel set up a musical jingle like miniature elephant bells.
“We got a favor to ast you, ma’am.”
His voice comes out of one side of the fissure in his granite dead pan, so that it sounded as sinister as it in fact was . . . if the Geiger counter had only been there to tell me. But again I wouldn’t have heeded it, I was so pleased to have Sergeant Buck asking a favor of me. It not only looked as if he’d declared a truce in the cold war we conduct across the P Street parallel, it gave me a chance to make a payment on the just debt I’d so recently become aware I owed him.
“These personal friends of mine, they’re very high-class people, ma’am. Their little girl won a contest, and she’s coming to D.C. It’s my appreciation they want a respectable home she can stay a couple of days till she looks around permanent. I and the Colonel are taking the 4.00 P.M. plane out West on business, ma’am. What the Colonel said was, I was to ast you, ma’am, could you keep her for us till we get back?”
Beads of perspiration popped out on Sergeant Buck’s forehead and the tarnish went deeper brass, as he waited for my answer. The only thing that delayed it was the “respectable.” That Sergeant Buck thought my home was respectable, and to the extent of commiting the child of a high-class personal friend of his to it, was overwhelming.
“Why, of course, Sergeant,” I said. Nobody can say I’m not gracious to a sweating foe. “I’d love to have her. When’s she coming?”
The breath of relief he took must have strained even his iron ribcage. “Friday, it says here, ma’am.” He took a dog-eared letter out of his teal-blue pocket. “Virginia Dolan’s her name. Her daddy was with us in France.”
That startled me. It was the other war when Colonel Primrose and his Sergeant were in France. I’d figured the child was ten or twelve, and I’d been wondering who I’d get to climb the Monument with her if I took the day at the Zoo and maybe the Congressional Library. “How old is she, Sergeant Buck?”
“Eighteen, going on nineteen, ma’am.”
“Oh, well,” I said, the Zoo and Monument both happily dissolving in my mind. “She’s old enough to look after herself, then.”
That was a mistake.
“She’s a very high-class little lady, ma’am.” You could see he already regretted letting his Colonel high-pressure him into putting this tender shoot into my callous hands. “Her daddy says she ain’t never been out of Taber City more than once or twice. They’re very high-class people, ma’am.”
“We’ll do our best, Sergeant,” I said. “You tell Lilac. I’m sure everything’ll be all right.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” He started to back out of the room, and stopped. I’d picked up my coffee cup again, but I didn’t get it more than half-way to my lips, because something very odd indeed seemed to have happened to that battered, congealed stonework he’s facially equipped with. He was looking at my table, his dead pan sort of going to pieces in the oddest possible