It was a chill, gray morning, and the wind drove the waters of the lake in choppy little waves against the pebbled shore. Marshall Kendrick stared up from the narrow island beach at the shape of the Lost Lake House against the tossing trees and cloudy sky. He hated the place—hated it more in daylight, when it stood empty and stripped of the illusions that lit it to glamor at night. In daylight its jumble of architecture was plain, the faintly graceful original villa with square modern excrescences piled on at all corners, the rows of empty French windows hollowly reflecting the slate-gray weather. It needed the dark and the strings of sparkling lights and the people, the women’s silken frocks flitting up and down the paths like colored night-moths, to conjure its patented atmosphere.
The wind came down the lake again, and Marshall lowered his head against it, tucking his chin against his sweater, and bent again to his work on the beach. These lonely mornings, clearing seaweed and bits of driftwood from the pebbled shore and raking up the litter of paper and cigarette stubs around the ferry landing, were the part of his job that seemed to accord most with what he really thought of it. Out here, alone, chilled and bad-tempered, he was free to nurse the resentment that was partly against the Lake House and partly against himself.
There was a sound of footsteps at a little distance, and Maurice Vernon appeared around the curve of the shore from the direction of the ferry, walking toward him with a steady crunch of pebbles underfoot. Vernon was a stocky man, not tall, with a crisp-tailored gray suit squaring his thick shoulders, a flash of silk at tie and pocket-handkerchief the discreet proclamation of expensiveness about him. He had an unlit cigar in his mouth, and as he drew near to Marshall he gave a nod and tilted it up in his teeth like a salute. Marshall straightened up, wiping his wet hands on his trousers, his expression changing little.
“That was a good run last night,” said Maurice Vernon as he came to a halt. “Pitch dark all the way, and not even a twig scraping the boat. You’re doing good work, Marsh.”
He pushed some loosely folded bills into Marshall’s hand, a gesture at once confidential, yet unregarded and matter-of-fact with him. Marshall looked down at the pebbles underfoot, and fingered the bills in his half-closed hand before slowly sliding them into his pocket.
Vernon took the cigar from his mouth, spit casually, and then nodded up toward the Lake House, though not much could be seen in that direction from where they stood but the roof and the grove of trees that sheltered the rear gardens. “Expect another run next week,” he said. “Production’s running smooth, and demand is up. If it’s a moonlit night we’ll take it, same as before.” He nudged Marshall’s elbow while the boy’s hand was still in his pocket. “You’ll put yourself in the way to earn more of that. I never sneeze at a good clean run, no matter how routine.”
Marshall just barely smiled, briefly—he knew Vernon was used to his silences. It took all kinds to run the operation Maurice Vernon had going here, from the gliding white-coated waiters at the doors, to the tough, wary men who worked in the cellars and the boathouse, to a boy who could handle a boat and knew the shores and currents of Lost Lake well…and could keep his mouth shut.
“City’s giving itself apoplexy trying to get after us,” said Maurice Vernon almost with satisfaction, with a glance at the House and another at his cigar. “Perkins has got the board of aldermen to offer a hundred-dollar reward for information that leads to a bust. As it stands now they can’t prove a thing, so they’re welcome to all the suspicions they want. They couldn’t even try to prove it unless they patrol the whole lake, and the board would yowl their heads off at that kind of expense. We’ll be operating out of here till kingdom come.”
He turned on the heel of one polished shoe, pebbles crunching beneath it again. “Got to be going. But you’ll be ready again next week, Marsh, same place, same time. Plenty of grease on all the oarlocks.”
“Yes sir.”
Marshall stared after the receding figure of his employer, jaunty and solid and incongruous on the damp lake shore. Even now he could not bring himself to dislike Maurice Vernon outright, even when repulsed by such confidences as he had just heard. Perhaps it had been honest kindness that had led Vernon to help him at first—and then again perhaps it was just opportunism that was willing to see somebody else profit as long as Vernon did too. Either way the debt was there.
Marshall felt the crackle of the bills in his pocket as he leaned over to toss another wet, stringing clump of seaweed onto the half-heaped wheelbarrow. A tip like that meant food and shoes for the children and money to pay the week’s rent—it meant lessening of the anxious lines that were always in his mother’s forehead, though she never said a word of worry. It was more than his father had brought home in two months together for the past year.
The stark irony bit him yet again—his father, fired from position after position, never able to hold down a job more than a few weeks because of drunkenness; and last night his son had witnessed crates of enough illegal liquor to float the Baltic smuggled out in the dark into rowboats and across the lake to supply the city’s speakeasies.
Marshall had thought he knew what it meant to be afraid. When he was ten years old a fierce slavering dog had rushed at him out of an alley, to be turned aside only at the last minute by a yell and a stone flung by a teamster in the street; and for a long time that heart-stopping moment had been the benchmark of fear in his mind. But it was not until that last gray autumn, walking the streets of the city with his hands in his coat pockets and a growing knowledge that the few pennies in the bottom of the old tea-canister at home would only last so long, that he knew a subtler, creeping fear that was worse.
Marshall had left school at fifteen—for almost three years he had scrounged odd jobs of all descriptions, earning nickels and dimes and scattered dollars to help keep food on the table and a roof over the head of four little brothers and sisters. It had always been a struggle to make ends meet, but they had never been really close to the edge of destitution—at least not close enough that Marshall had to think about it. Then came a stretch when business was bad in the city, and he could find no work anywhere. Slowly, the supply of coins in the tea canister dwindled. The rent was due…the weather was growing colder. Days of tramping the streets, of closed doors and shaken heads and the pinch of want beginning to be felt at home…and Marshall was afraid, though he kept his hands clenched tight in his coat pockets and his firm young jaw set so no one would ever suspect his lips wanted to tremble. And then he had chanced to hear that the Lost Lake House was hiring help.
It was unofficially heard, for everyone knew that the Lost Lake House only hired people who could keep their mouths shut. They didn’t exactly use an employment office. Marshall knew this, but there had not been a decent meal in the Kendrick house for three days, and he pushed the thought to the back of his mind.
He went down to Maurice Vernon’s offices on the slightly seedier side of the city—an odd bare place where no work ever seemed to be done, but which was the front for several vague enterprises. He pushed open the frosted glass door to the outer office, a dim, hollow little room with a good deal of dust in the corners, and applied to a simultaneously sharp-looking and bored-looking man at the desk, in the quietly tense voice that was all anyone in Maurice Vernon’s employ would ever know of Marshall Kendrick.
The man gave him a look—seemingly trying to read something in his face—and then shook his head. He was likely not accustomed to hire people off the street, whose fitness for potentially shady work he had no way of gauging at first glance. The tacitly underhand nature of the place was evident in the very bareness of the office, and had Marshall found himself there at any other time, he would have been the first to back out. But the memory of the peaked, big-eyed little faces and spindly arms and legs at home rose up before him, and drove him to desperation.
“I want to see the manager,” he said.
The man at the desk looked up with a half-scornful expression. “What?”
“The manager of the Lost Lake House. Let me talk to him.”
“No. Come on, kid, beat it. I told you there’s nothing doing.”
“You can let me talk to him for just a minute.”
“He’s busy. Beat it, will you?”
“I’m going to see him first,” said Marshall through his teeth, and made for the door of an inner office behind the desk. The man flung down his pencil angrily and dragged himself up out of his chair to try and stop him, but the scuffle only lasted a few seconds before the office door opened and Bill Harolday, the manager of the Lake House, appeared in the doorway frowning.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Wants a job,” said the man from the desk, disgusted.
Bill Harolday’s glance crossed with his subordinate’s, and it was evident their reasoning was the same. He shook his head. “Sorry. Can’t help you.”
He would have turned back into his office, but this time Marshall would not be turned away. “Mister, I’ve got to have a job. They said you were hiring. My father’s out of work—my mother’s got four other kids to feed. I’ll do any kind of work; I’ll wash dishes; I’ll clean out trash cans. You said you wanted help and I’m willing, so why not?”
His voice almost cracked and he caught himself up short—he could not lose control that far. Bill Harolday was still shaking his head—”Sorry, kid, but I’ve told you—”
But Maurice Vernon had heard him. He was there in the inner office and overheard, and he came out with his ever-present unlit cigar in his hand and looked Marshall over. “Never mind, Bill,” he said to the manager, and to Marshall, “What’s your name?”
“Marshall Kendrick.”
“Need a job, do you? How old are you?”
“Almost eighteen.”
Maurice Vernon nodded appraisingly. “Well, you look sturdy enough,” he said. “Willing to do most any kind of work?”
The answer checked for only half a second on Marshall’s lips—for in this office, he sensed it was a question he might not be prepared to give the correct answer. But he did not wait long. “Yes sir.”
“All right,” said Vernon, “you’re hired,” and he turned to the manager and began talking about something else.
Marshall started work at the Lost Lake House as a groundskeeper, helping to keep the beaches clean, clip lawns and shrubberies and clear away the litter left on the terraces and paths by each night’s revels. When they found he knew something about boats he was allowed to help with maintenance of the boathouse at the back of the island and its fleet of half a dozen nondescript rowboats. And gradually, over time, he was pulled into the nocturnal operations of the Lost Lake House, which housed not only the rumored speakeasy, but an active distillery in its cellars. Marshall, who had fished from the shores of Lost Lake for years and rowed most of it in a friend’s boat, became useful in the new method of smuggling the bootleg liquor Maurice Vernon was putting into practice about that time—taking it out by boat to rendezvous on the lonely far side of the lake, now that all regular trips of the island ferry were watched. Vernon had taken a fancy to him, in his careless way, and generous tips in addition to Marshall’s regular wages were always forthcoming after a successful midnight ‘run.’
He was an expert now at muffling oarlocks—at guiding a boat along in the black shadows of overhanging trees without even a faint ripple from the dark water—at helping to transfer cargo in the dark without a word and without missing a hold. He had been made privy to the secret of the specially built boathouse with the trap-door in its flooring, the tunnels that led from there to the Lake House cellars. They regarded him as trustworthy—a fine compliment, that; he must have given the impression of being without scruples. Or perhaps Maurice Vernon sensed something of the stiff obligation that bound him. He would not have talked so freely of hundred-dollar rewards if he had not taken it for granted that Marshall was as safe as any one of them.
And down on the shore of a rough lake in the gray blustering morning, Marshall worked vengefully—hating his job, hating himself for the short-sightedness that had gotten him into it. He dragged up a piece of wet driftwood and flung it into the wheelbarrow with cold work-scraped hands. The job meant security, and it also meant living with a festering conscience. Week by week he was helping to break the law, despite a bitter disgust for the racket that fattened the purses of profiteers like Vernon and filled the pockets of the sharp, crooked men under him who brewed and ran and sold the stuff. And yet it fed his family. His mother never knew that half the money he gave her came from tips shoved carelessly into his hand by Maurice Vernon on occasions like these—she only knew his job paid well. The nighttime absences were easily explained; even on ordinary nights now the head groundskeeper and the waiters often wanted him around late, to stoke fires or carry supplies into the kitchens.
He earned it, anyway. If there was such a thing as profiting honestly from crime, he did that.
Marshall finished his work on the beach, and took the wheelbarrow to the upper side of the island and dumped it into the trash bins there—the driftwood went to feed the fires of the underground distillery. Then he walked back along the shore toward the ferry, his hands in his pockets and his cap pulled low over his eyes against the wind. He looked up at the House again, and there was a touch of some other, lonelier feeling besides bitterness in the gray eyes beneath the brim of the cap. Sometimes he thought he hated the thoughtless crowd that danced and laughed and flirted the nights away on top of it all. Other times he almost envied their thoughtlessness…envied that they never had to think about hard things. But that was only when he was very tired.
What did they come there for, he wondered? He saw the Lost Lake House in daylight; he knew there was nothing to it but the intoxicated shine of Vernon’s electric lights and gin. Did they find something there that they really liked, or were they merely part of the façade, putting on a reckless show for each other and for the quiet, unseeing wooded shores of the midnight lake?
From the shadows under the trees at the edge of the lawns, through the brilliantly-lit windows that poured their light out on the grass between, he had watched the pageant played out, the players all alike, no matter how daring and unique they thought themselves. Only here and there, from time to time, a wide-eyed neophyte—a tentatively eager schoolgirl, looking at the dance with eyes that saw fairyland. These ones never lasted long—they either shied away, and could be counted lucky, or else they were gradually drawn into the whirl of recklessness and insincerity until they were indistinguishable from any of the others.
It was this sight, for reasons Marshall did not know, that hurt him most. Perhaps because they were like the girls he might have known once, when they were younger—bending inky-fingered over a copybook at school, skipping home along the sidewalks on summer evenings; casting curious, friendly glances at a boy they did not know—and never would know, for all that was far behind him now. Like something he might have known, but going, gone, swept away into the whirl of the Lost Lake House while he stood outside in the dark, tarnished by his own foolish choice, and seeing no other future.