The Circular Staircase | Page 4

Halsey required less personal supervision, and as they both got their
mother's fortune that winter, my responsibility became purely moral.
Halsey bought a car, of course, and I learned how to tie over my bonnet
a gray baize veil, and, after a time, never to stop to look at the dogs one
has run down. People are apt to be so unpleasant about their dogs.
The additions to my education made me a properly equipped maiden
aunt, and by spring I was quite tractable. So when Halsey suggested
camping in the Adirondacks and Gertrude wanted Bar Harbor, we
compromised on a good country house with links near, within motor
distance of town and telephone distance of the doctor. That was how
we went to Sunnyside.
We went out to inspect the property, and it seemed to deserve its name.
Its cheerful appearance gave no indication whatever of anything out of
the ordinary. Only one thing seemed unusual to me: the housekeeper,
who had been left in charge, had moved from the house to the
gardener's lodge, a few days before. As the lodge was far enough away
from the house, it seemed to me that either fire or thieves could
complete their work of destruction undisturbed. The property was an
extensive one: the house on the top of a hill, which sloped away in
great stretches of green lawn and clipped hedges, to the road; and
across the valley, perhaps a couple of miles away, was the Greenwood
Club House. Gertrude and Halsey were infatuated.

"Why, it's everything you want," Halsey said "View, air, good water
and good roads. As for the house, it's big enough for a hospital, if it has
a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne back," which was ridiculous: it
was pure Elizabethan.
Of course we took the place; it was not my idea of comfort, being much
too large and sufficiently isolated to make the servant question serious.
But I give myself credit for this: whatever has happened since, I never
blamed Halsey and Gertrude for taking me there. And another thing: if
the series of catastrophes there did nothing else, it taught me one
thing--that somehow, somewhere, from perhaps a half-civilized
ancestor who wore a sheepskin garment and trailed his food or his prey,
I have in me the instinct of the chase. Were I a man I should be a
trapper of criminals, trailing them as relentlessly as no doubt my
sheepskin ancestor did his wild boar. But being an unmarried woman,
with the handicap of my sex, my first acquaintance with crime will
probably be my last. Indeed, it came near enough to being my last
acquaintance with anything.
The property was owned by Paul Armstrong, the president of the
Traders' Bank, who at the time we took the house was in the west with
his wife and daughter, and a Doctor Walker, the Armstrong family
physician. Halsey knew Louise Armstrong,--had been rather attentive
to her the winter before, but as Halsey was always attentive to
somebody, I had not thought of it seriously, although she was a
charming girl. I knew of Mr. Armstrong only through his connection
with the bank, where the children's money was largely invested, and
through an ugly story about the son, Arnold Armstrong, who was
reported to have forged his father's name, for a considerable amount, to
some bank paper. However, the story had had no interest for me.
I cleared Halsey and Gertrude away to a house party, and moved out to
Sunnyside the first of May. The roads were bad, but the trees were in
leaf, and there were still tulips in the borders around the house. The
arbutus was fragrant in the woods under the dead leaves, and on the
way from the station, a short mile, while the car stuck in the mud, I
found a bank showered with tiny forget-me-nots. The birds--don't ask

me what kind; they all look alike to me, unless they have a hall mark of
some bright color-- the birds were chirping in the hedges, and
everything breathed of peace. Liddy, who was born and bred on a brick
pavement, got a little bit down-spirited when the crickets began to chirp,
or scrape their legs together, or whatever it is they do, at twilight.
The first night passed quietly enough. I have always been grateful for
that one night's peace; it shows what the country might be, under
favorable circumstances. Never after that night did I put my head on
my pillow with any assurance how long it would be there; or on my
shoulders, for that matter.
On the following morning Liddy and Mrs. Ralston, my own
housekeeper, had a difference of opinion, and Mrs. Ralston left on the
eleven train. Just after luncheon, Burke, the butler,