Charles Williams - Hell Hath No Fury

“I love you, too, Harry.”

“You do?”

“Yes. It’s kind of funny. I’ve known you only about a month, but I can’t seem to remember what it was like when I wasn’t in love with you. I guess I ought to die of shame for telling you, but you’ll never know how much I was hoping you’d kiss me that night when you brought Spunky home.”

“You’re a crazy kid,” I said. “And wonderful.”

We were silent again, and after a while she asked softly, “What are you thinking about?”

“I was just wondering how we happened to come to this place. I think I knew right from the minute we left Harshaw’s that I was going to ask you if you’d marry me, and I just drove out here without even thinking about it. And I was remembering something he said when you were out of the room.”

“What was that, Harry?”

“It’s a little funny now. He said he’d fire me if I didn’t treat you right. On the job, he meant. You know he’s pretty crazy about you, too. He said you were the finest girl he’d ever seen.”

“Don’t say that, Harry!” She tightened up suddenly in my arms, and I could hear the beginnings of panic in her voice. “Don’t say anything. Just hold me.”

I held her, but it wasn’t any good. I could feel her going to pieces. And then she was crying, not silently as she had before but with a shaken hopelessness that tore me up. There wasn’t anything I could do until she quietened. It was an awful feeling.

It was a long time. When she was still at last I took out my handkerchief and mopped away the tears, and then I got hold of her arm and led her back to the car. We got in and I lighted a cigarette and held it for her while she puffed at it.

“All right,” I said, “start at the beginning. We’ve got all night, and we’re not going to leave here till you tell me. Something’s hurting you, and it’s gone far enough. So let’s have it.”

“All right, I’ll tell you, Harry,” she said dully. “I can’t stand it any more. I’ve got to tell you. And I’ll have to tell him, too. That’s the awful part of it. After the way he’s treated me, how can I tell—Harry, how can I?”

“Tell who?” I asked.

“Mr. Harshaw.” Her voice began to tighten up again. “I’ve been stealing from him, Harry. I’ve stolen nearly two thousand dollars from him.” It caught up with her again.

It’s fine, I thought. It’s wonderful. Harshaw should write a book about his faith in the human race. His wife’s a tramp, I’ve been helping her with it, and now this. And then I knew it didn’t fit. Two of us were guilty, but Gloria didn’t belong in the crowd.

There was nothing to do until she recovered, and then I said gently, “All right, baby. You just tell me what it is. We’ll straighten it out. There are two of us now.” I lighted her another cigarette and pulled her back to where she could rest her head against my arm.

“I’m sorry, Harry. But I think I’m all right now. I don’t think I can make you understand why I did it, because you’re not the kind of coward I was, but I’ll tell you the best I can. It’s been going on for nearly a year now. I keep paying the money back, but I can’t catch up with it because of the interest—“

She’s unique, I thought. She tells me she’s a thief, but still she’s paying interest on the money she stole.

“I won’t try to tell you what it’s like,” she went on quietly, with that hopelessness in her voice. “Just trying to keep going, I mean, trying to keep the books straight, paying back a few dollars here and a few there, and then having to write out another fake note to cover one that has to be paid. It all comes to over fifteen hundred dollars, and the interest on it takes up nearly half of what I can pay back out of my salary each month. And then there’s always more. Something new. Another twenty or thirty or fifty dollars. But I guess I’d better tell you where it all went, where it goes—“

“That I already know, honey,” I said. “What I want to find out before I go to talk to him is why.”

She shook her head with frantic entreaty. “No, Harry. No! Don’t you see that’s one reason I haven’t told you before? I mean, for fear of what you’d do. He might hurt you, or you might get into trouble over it.”

“You can tell me, baby.” I said. “And don’t worry about it. We’ll just have a little talk. It’s just possible I speak his language a little better than you do.”

She hesitated a minute and then she said unhappily, “All right. But there isn’t anything we can do. Except to go and tell him. Mr. Harshaw, I mean. Once I can get up the courage to do that... but I might as well start at the beginning. It’s about a girl, or a woman rather, who came hereabout this time last year. Her name was Irene Davey. She was a teacher. She’d been hired to teach high-school maths—algebra and plane geometry, I think—and to coach the girls’ basketball team. School didn’t start until September, of course, but she came along late in August to find a place to live. I met her on the tennis court one day just after she came.

“She was several years older than I was—I guess she was twenty-six or twenty-eight—but she was very good at sports. She was crazy about all kinds of games. She could always beat me at tennis without even trying, and kept asking me about places to swim around here. I understood she had been on the swimming team in college, and had won a number of diving competitions. She seemed to take a great liking to me right from the first. She called me a couple of times and asked me to go to the show with her. I introduced her to a few boys I knew, but she didn’t seem to be much interested in them.”

She stopped, and then she said, “This is a lot of explanation, Harry, but I have to tell you all of this before you’ll understand what happened. It was awful. But I didn’t know—“

No, I thought, she probably didn’t. I was beginning to have an odd feeling about it, a kind of premonition. What I was remembering was the scene that Sunday morning when they had me trapped up there in that old barn.

15

She went on. “Anyway, Miss Davey came by the house one Saturday afternoon when I was home alone and wanted to go swimming. I told her I didn’t like the idea of swimming in the river because it had snags in it and there might be snakes, but she seemed so anxious to try it I finally gave in. I put my bathing suit on, with slacks over it, left a note telling my sister where I’d gone, and we started down here. We went in her car. I thought about this place because I remembered there was a pool just below the bridge.

“When we got here it was still early in the afternoon and the sun was awfully hot. We took off the clothes we had on over our swim-suits, but she didn’t seem to be nearly as eager to swim as she had been. She wanted to talk. We sat in the car and smoked a cigarette, almost in this same spot we’re in now, and she told me how much she appreciated my being so nice to her and that she liked me very much. It was a little embarrassing, but I just thought she was lonely and eager to make friends here and I didn’t want to be too stand-offish and rude and hurt her feelings. But then she started telling me I was very pretty, and how I looked in a bathing suit—“

She broke off then. I could feel her shudder slightly. “It’s awfully hard to tell you this, Harry,” she said hesitantly.

“It’s all right, honey,” I said. “You can skip most of it if you want to. There’s nothing new about it, and I can guess the rest.”

“I’m glad you understand,” she said. “I—I guess I was awfully naive. I was just uncomfortable and wanted to get out of the car because some of the things she was saying were so personal. And then— It was horrible. She was trying to kiss me. I was so absolutely frozen with terror I couldn’t do anything at first, and then I tried to get out. She was talking to me and trying to hold me back, and I began to fight at her. She was terribly strong. I was crying by this time and trying to get the door open and push her away all at the same time when suddenly she stopped and looked around the other way, out of the window on her side. There was a man standing there in the road. I didn’t know him then, but it was Mr. Sutton.