The Simple Way of Poison by Leslie Ford Read Free Book Online

nostalgia I always have for long lost Christmases when the tinsel was brighter silver, when there were reindeer feet in the snow on the roof and soot on the hearth, when the cotton angel at the topmost tip was as far away as the stars and a hallowed breathtaking mystery stole out of the dark and fragrant branches until the child’s heart almost broke for the strange loveliness. Nostalgia, I suppose, for lost innocence, when love and death and joy and pain were unknown far-off things, their poignancy yet undreamed.
    Outside a car drove slowly by with men and women in it singing carols in the clear frosty air. I turned off the lights and looked out the window. Down the block across the street I could see a corner of the yellow brick house where Colonel John Primrose lives with Sergeant Buck. A Colonel John Primrose attached to Washington’s staff built the house, a John Primrose has lived in it ever since. I don’t know whether each of them has had his Sergeant Buck, but I know they have all been bachelors—which the present Colonel has assured me is possible to figure out in a perfectly respectable way. I suspect strongly they’ve all had the same cook, a white kinky-headed Negro, unbelievably old and incredibly good at terrapin and beaten biscuits and syllabub, pottering about with his herbs and his brews. All service, I thought, ranks the same with God… and who shall say that Sergeant Buck, trying to preserve all that from the desecrating hand of a woman in the house, isn’t as much a handmaid of tradition and art as— for instance—the Rockefellers in Williamsburg?
    In spite of Sergeant Buck it was comforting to see that house down there, and know that Colonel Primrose was in it if I should ever need him. The idea brought me back to the Nashes, and Lowell, and the anonymous letters burned in the pewter basin in Gilbert St. Martin’s shoppe. I looked at the telephone. In fact, I went into the hall and picked it up to call him. Then I remembered that he and Randall Nash had known each other a very long time, and that his loyalties would be with. Randall. There was no use in letting him know that Iris’s loyalties—so somebody thought—were getting mixed up. Heaven knows that if scenes like the one I’d witnessed there that afternoon were frequent, I for one couldn’t blame her… and yet I knew, as well as I know anything at all, and in spite of those letters, that no loyalties of hers could be questioned. But Colonel Primrose didn’t have that summer night to look back on, and he wouldn’t understand.
    Or so I thought, not remembering that I have a genius for being discreet at the wrong time.
    I turned out the light on my dressing table between the two windows overlooking the garden, and put up the shades. For a moment I stood there motionless. I had never noticed before what a clear view I had through the three high arches of the Nashes’ Palladian window. Perhaps the white space of our two gardens, I thought, made their house loom darker and more prominently clear in the night. Then I remembered the cherry tree that had been there until the September storm, and realized that that was what had divided us before. There was nothing between us now except the flat gardens and an eight-foot brick wall.
    As I looked across there it was exactly as if my window was at the apex of a recumbent isosceles triangle with the Nash staircase forming its two sides. I could see down the longish stairs to the entrance hall on the one hand, and from the landing up the short stairs to the second floor on the other. And then, almost as if some master puppet player was showing me how neatly it all worked, two figures came out of where the living room door would be into the brightly lighted lower hall.
    I recognized them even before I’d considered the ethics, if any, of my position. Iris was one, the other was Gilbert St. Martin. He had her hand in his, and I saw him raise it to his lips and keep it there a long moment. Then,