The Alders changed like everything else. Susie married and lived
in Baltimore, Anna married and lived in Washington. Pake went to
Pittsburgh. Rex married a widow with two children and settled in
Chicago. Buck was away from home a good deal. Mattie married a man who
did not make the family feel enthusiastic. The Alders continued full of
boarders, all in the care of Leslie, the youngest sister, whom I had
last seen as a shy girl.
For I had not visited the Alders for a dozen years, and in that time
had scarcely seen any of the family except Pake, jolly old Pake, a
prosperous bachelor, as much of a flirt as ever, even more of a flirt
than in his youth; a short, florid, jovial man, young-looking and
handsome, who made love to every new girl he met as naturally as he
breathed.
Then, one afternoon early in July, I encountered Rex on the platform
of a railroad station, just as we were about to take trains leaving in
opposite directions. He glowed over conditions at the Alders, averred
that Leslie ran the place as well as ever all four sisters together
had, that it was always full, that it was as delightful as ever.
Within a week I encountered Susie and her two tall girls in the waiting
room of Union Station. They were off to the Alders for the summer and
Susie invited me up over any Sunday I chose.
As with Rex, so also the time I had with Susie was too short for me to
ask a tenth of the questions I wanted to ask or for her to tell me a
tenth of what she had to tell.
The first Saturday I could get off early I ran up to the Alders. Buck
met me at Jonesville station, a little more bronzed than I had last
seen him, otherwise the same youthful-looking giant.
The house, of course, was the same tile-roofed brick house, big and
plain, neat under a new coat of bright lemon-yellow paint. The barns
were the same weathered gray, unpainted, ramshackle barns I remembered,
not a bit more decayed nor less dilapidated than a dozen years before.
The grove behind the barn was unaltered, not a tree gone as far as I
could judge, and all its big oaks, tulip-poplars and hickories rustling
delightfully. The outbuildings near the house were as of old and the
brook, just as of yore, not fifty feet from the front porch, rippled
across the lawn between its rows of alders. The ailanthus trees west of
the house and the locust tree by the well seemed exactly as formerly.
They were so big they did not show their growth. But the catalpa by
the bridge over the brook had taken on a new lease of life and was
flourishing, whereas the lombardy poplars across the brook were gone.
The chief change was in the maples. In my time they had been young
trees, with trunks too slender to support a hammock rope without
bending when anyone sat in the hammock. Now they were large trees,
shading the entire front yard from the brook to the porch with an
almost continuous canopy of green.
The place was full of boarders and their children, though the family
themselves took up a larger part of the house than of old. Susie was
there with her two girls, Anna with her two manly boys and Rex and
his wife and his two step-children. Leslie had grown into an entirely
adequate housekeeper and hostess and presided admirably. As of yore,
the homestead tinkled with banjo music and rang with laughter.
Mattie, of course, was not at the house, as she and her husband lived
a quarter of a mile down the road on the farm that had been Aunt
Cynthia’s. Everything and everybody was as I expected except that I
missed Pake.
“Where’s Pake?” I queried.
“Pake!” Susie exclaimed. “Didn’t you know Pake was in Rio de Janeiro?”
“No!” I answered; “why, I saw Pake on Washington’s birthday and he said
nothing about going abroad.”
“He went in March,” Susie rejoined; “late in March, I think. He likes
it down there.”
Somebody interrupted and we did not mention Pake again until after
supper. Then we were all out on the long front porch, grouped about
Susie. Buck and Tom Brundige and I, scattered among the ladies, had our
cigars drawing well. Rex, as always, was smoking one cigarette after
another. A V. M. I. cadet, a crony of one of Anna’s boys, was seated on
one rail of the rustic bridge over the brook, twanging a banjo at three
girls who sat on the other rail facing him. In the lulls of our talk
and of the banjo, the chuckle of the brook over its pebbles emphasized
the silence, into which broke the undertones of a pair of lovers,
swinging in a hammock off to the right. The stars twinkled through the
tree-tops, the cigar ends glowed red in the darkness, which was cloven
by shafts of lamplight from the windows and mitigated afar to the left
where, over the long black outline of the Blue Ridge a paling sky
prophesied moonrise.
Somebody had been expecting a letter and had been disappointed and was
mourning over it.
“I don’t understand about letters from Pake,” Susie remarked.
“Sometimes we don’t get any letters for weeks, and then we get two or
three, all at once. When we compare dates and postmarks we find that he
writes every Wednesday and Saturday and mails the letters the very day
they are written. How do you explain that, Billy?”
“I suppose,” I said, “that the letters come different ways, perhaps
some by Lisbon, some by London, others perhaps other ways. That might
explain it. What do you think, Tom?”
“I fancy,” said Brundige, “that you are probably right.”
“I had a letter from Pake to-day,” Susie went on. “I had not heard from
him for a month. He says he don’t like his business quarters. He has an
expensive office and he says it is dark and hot and stuffy and he is
going to change just as soon as he can find something to suit him. He
says he is looking round. But he says he is most comfortably located
otherwise. He is boarding, as he expresses it, ‘up on Santa Teresa’;
what does that mean, Billy?”
“Big, long hill,” I replied. “Four hundred feet high. Splendid view
over the city and harbor. Fine air all night. Lots of places to board
up there, and all good. How’s that now, Tom?”
“All correct,” Brundige corroborated me.
“I should think,” Rex put in, “that Pake would get into trouble down
there.”
“What sort of trouble?” Anna demanded. “Pake never gets into trouble
anywhere. What sort of trouble do you mean?”
Rex lit another cigarette.
“Oh,” he said, “I meant that down there those Dago Portuguese won’t
stand any nonsense. They’re a revengeful lot, by what I hear. Pake
might cut somebody out with a girl and get a knife stuck in him.”
“You’re teasing!” cried Anna, indignantly. “You’re always up to some
teasing! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
And Susie rebuked him:
“You oughtn’t to suggest such awful things, Rex.”
“But I wasn’t suggesting anything awful,” Rex persisted, “and I wasn’t
teasing. I only meant Pake would be likely to cause some heartburnings
down there. Pake’s bound to be the same old Pake. He can’t change all
of a sudden. He’s certain to have half a dozen girls thinking they have
him on a string before he was there a week. Before he was there a month
he had more than one girl on a string. Somebody’s bound to be jealous.
Those Dagoes are a hot-blooded lot.”
“Pooh!” Buck cut in, “Pake don’t know enough Portuguese to flirt
with any natives and all the Americans and English down there will
understand flirting.”
“What’s the matter with some Dago being in love with an English girl or
an American girl?” Rex persevered; “Pake might cut one out with a girl
that speaks English.”
I saw that both Susie, who was naturally nervous, and Anna, who had
been inseparable from Pake all through their childhood, were wrought
up. I tried to intervene.
“Nonsense,” I said, “Pake might cut out any number of gallants and
never get into any trouble. Rio is as peaceable as Baltimore. To begin
with, he can’t flirt with any Brazilian girls, for no Brazilian girl is
ever permitted to talk to a young man. Anybody going along the streets
can see the fashionable Brazilians making love according to their
custom. Toward sunset, when the heat is less fierce, the girls, all
dressed up, lean out of the windows of the second floor drawing rooms.
Their lovers stand on the other side of the street and look at them. A
young man will stand that way two hours or more every afternoon for a
year before he asks her father for a girl. That’s the fashion. How is
it now, Tom?”
“Same way now.” Brundige corroborated me. “Lots of flirtation among
the foreign set, though. But no danger of daggers or revenge. Rio is
as peaceable as Washington. I never heard of any case of revenge or of
jealousy leading to bloodshed. Never heard of a supposed case, except
once.”
His tone told us all there was a story coming. He was sitting next to
Susie and we all hitched our chairs nearer.
“What was that, Tom?” Buck asked.
The women all looked towards Brundige. Rex lit another cigarette. The
rest of us lit fresh cigars.
“It was a fellow named Orodoff Guimaraes,” Brundige began. “Guimaraes,
in Portuguese, is like Smith in English, only more so. It seems
as if half the Fluminenses, as they call the people of Rio, are
named Guimaraes. This Orodoff Guimaraes was a cousin and namesake
of a wealthy and respected wine-merchant and rather traded on the
relationship and identity of the name. He was one of those dandies who
swarm in all South American cities, young men with little or no income,
a great sense of their own importance, a taste for expensive pleasures,
a love of ease and comfort, ungovernable passions, and an insane
devotion to the latest fashion in clothes.
“Most of such idlers have no income and are too proud to have any
business. This Orodoff Guimaraes was better off in both respects. He
inherited a small property in real estate, and he made some money in
life insurance. He had a desk in a third floor office in a building he
owned, 49A Rua de Alfandega, one of the principal business streets of
the old down-town part of Rio. He rented the first and second floors
of the building at good rentals, and he rented desk-room on the third
floor; all the back office and all the front office except his own
small desk.
“He used to spend the most of his mornings at that desk, idling. He
sometimes had business that took him out, sometimes he pretended he
had. But mostly he just sat at his desk, reading papers, smoking
cigarettes or doing nothing at all. It was a pleasant place to do
nothing in, a big room, nearly thirty feet wide, more than thirty feet
long, with a high ceiling and three tall French windows down to the
floor, all three always open. They faced south, so that they needed no
awnings and they let in no glare and plenty of breeze. The office was
light, but not too light, cool and airy, an ideal loafing place.
“When he was not loafing in his office Guimaraes was always making love
to some girl or going through the motions of making love. No girl would
have him, for no girl’s father would let her marry him; he was not well
enough off to marry, though he managed to dress well as a bachelor.
So girl after girl whom he made love to married some one else, or got
engaged to some one else. Three of them got engaged, but never got
married. Their bridegrooms died before the wedding day.
“In each case Guimaraes made friends with his rival, got quite chummy
with him, and induced him to rent a desk in his office. In each case
the rival was killed by falling out of one of the French windows of
the office, forty odd feet to the pavement of the Rue de Alfandega.
In each case it was an accident. In each case Orodoff Guimaraes was
out of his office when the accident happened. But while no one could
say a word against Guimaraes, after the third accident no Fluminense
who had been exposed in any way to Orodoff Guimaraes’ real or apparent
rivalry for any girl could be induced to rent desk room in his office.
The deaths could not be imputed to him, but the coincidence of the
rivalry, the friendship, the renting of a desk and the fall from the
window, in three different cases, was more than even the slow-thinking
fashionable Fluminenses could stand. It got on their nerves. If he
hadn’t committed three murders out of revenge, it seemed as if he had.
Of course, he couldn’t have hypnotized the victims when he was half a
mile away and made them throw themselves out of the window or caused
them to walk out of the window, but somehow everybody felt as if that
was just about what he had done.
“And each case was spooky, too. In each case the victim’s desk was
close to one of the windows; in each case Orodoff Guimaraes was out,
but there were two other men, renters of desk-room, at desks further
back in the office; in each case the other men, seated at their desks
twenty feet and more away, had been talking across the room to the
victim; in each case the other men, different men each time, had turned
round to look at something on their desks, had heard no sound, no
movement, no cry, but when they looked round again found themselves
alone in the room, and, going to the window, saw the victim crushed on
the pavement below.”
He stopped.
“Why don’t they have a railing or a balustrade across the open window?”
Rex inquired.
“Custom,” Brundige rejoined. “Custom rules everything down there;
custom rules everything all over South America. In Rio all upstairs
offices have French windows down to the floor. It’s a hot climate and
no window has a rail or even a bar across it. To have unobstructed
windows is the custom.”
“Fool custom!” said Buck.
Just then Leslie came out and joined us. She had been attending to her
household duties, or giving orders about breakfast, or entertaining a
boarder or something like that.
After she was settled next to Rex she said:
“I had a letter from Pake this morning. He says there are some fine
girls down there in Rio. Says he has had no end of fun with them. He
must have been in a good humor when he wrote that letter. It’s a long
letter and very funny. He tells how he pretended to make love to a
girl, just to annoy a fool of a dude who was always making eyes at her,
how at first the dude was mad, how he saw the joke and behaved real
sensibly. Pake says they got to be real good friends. He tells it all
very well. I’ll read it to you to-morrow.”
Leslie was bubbling with merriment, as unconscious as possible and very
girlish. But about the rest of us the atmosphere seemed to tingle. I
could feel, as it were, the spiritual tension. Buck asked, thickly:
“Did he tell you the fellow’s name?”
“No,” said Leslie cheerfully. “He never mentioned his name. But he says
they are real good friends.”
Just then the banjo party on the little bridge stood up. We heard
cheerful greetings and recognized Mattie’s voice. She had strolled over
on foot, her home being a very short distance down the road.
She came up on the porch, a big, solid matronly young woman. I caught
a glimpse of her plump face as the lamplight through the open doorway
struck on her, her brown eyes smiling merrily.
Buck sat down on the porch floor, his feet on the steps, his back
against a pillar. Mattie took his chair. She also took charge and
control of the conversation.
“Alf drove to Hagerstown right after supper,” she said. “He ought to be
back soon. I told him I was coming over here and he’ll come right here
when he comes out.”
This was in answer to my query.
“I had a letter from Pake this morning,” she went on. “He says he’s
got a new office that suits him perfectly. He says he didn’t need as
much room as he had, so he’s taken desk room only in the office of a
friend of his, some kind of Brazilian name, I couldn’t spell and can’t
pronounce it. He says it’s a dandy place on the third floor, big, high
room, plenty of floor space to move about in and nice fellows at the
other desks. It’s bright and cool and airy, three big French windows
open down to the floor.”
Then, quite suddenly, as she paused, I felt the Alders enveloped in an
atmosphere of tragedy and gloom. The Hibbards excelled in self-control;
not one of them uttered a sound. There was a long silence. I could hear
the ripple of the brook. The first rays of the late moon, just clearing
the top of the Blue Ridge, struck through the maples.
Anna spoke first:
“Have you that letter with you, Mattie?”
“Yes,” Mattie replied cheerfully. “I brought it along.”
“Give it to me,” Anna said; “Billy and I will try to make out that
name.”
“Billy can do it, I’ll bet,” spoke Mattie brightly.
Anna, the letter in her hand, stood up.
“Come on, Billy,” she said.