_ V
The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated--it was twenty full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a garage had been one of the "all modern conveniences" so fervidly painted in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass and a stubbly hedge--beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner of the "development," and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue streak of the Sound.
Oliver's key clicked in the lock--this was fortunately one of the times when four-year-old Jane Ellen, who went about after sunset in a continual, piteous fear of "black men wif masks," had omitted to put the chain on the door before being carried mutinously to bed. Oliver switched on the hall light and picked up a letter and a folded note from the card tray.
"Ted, Ollie and Dickie will share that little bijou, the sleeping porch, unless Ted prefers the third-story bathtub," the note read. "Breakfast at convenience for those that can get it themselves--otherwise at nine. And DON'T wake Dickie up.
"MOTHER."
Oliver passed it to Ted, who read it, grinned, and saluted, nearly knocking over the hatrack.
"For
God's sake!" said Oliver in a piercing whisper, "Jane Ellen will think that's Indians!"
Both listened frantically for a moment, holding their breath. But there was no sound from upstairs except an occasional soft rumbling. Oliver had often wondered what would happen if the whole sleeping family chanced to breathe in and out in unison some unlucky night. He could see the papery walls blown apart like scraps of cardboard--Aunt Elsie falling, falling with her bed from her little bird-house under the eaves, giving vent to one deaf, terrified "Hey--what's that?" as she sank like Lucifer cast from Heaven inexorably down into the laundry stove, her little tight, white curls standing up on end....
Ted had removed his shoes and was making for the stairs with the exaggerated caution of a burglar in a film.
"'Night!" called Oliver softly.
"G' night! Where's my bed--next the wall? Good--then I won't step on Dickie. And if you fall over me when you come in, I'll bay like a bloodhound!"
"I'll look out. Be up in a minute myself. Going to write a letter."
"So I'd already deduced, Craig Kennedy, my friend. Well, give her my love!"
He smiled like a bad little boy and disappeared round the corner. A stair creaked--they were the kind of stairs that always creaked like old women's bones, when you tried to go up them quietly. There was the sound of something soft stubbing against something hard and a muffled "
Sonofa--"
"What's matter?"
"Oh, nothing. Blame near broke my toe on Jane Ellen's doll's porcelain head. 'S all right. 'Night."
"'Night." Then in an admonitory sotto-voce, "Remember, if you wake Dickie, you've got to tell him stories till he goes to sleep again, or he'll wake up everybody else!"
"If he wakes, I'll garotte him. 'Night."
"'Night." _