The Simple Way of Poison Read Free Page A

already known—why Lowell Nash hated Gilbert; and also, though perhaps it was a little harder, why Iris Nash was supposed to have felt very differently about him, once.
    The flakes of snow struck sharp and cold against my face as the bells jingled behind me. A man with a live turkey in one hand, a red kiddie car in the other and several things under his arms barged into me and said “Merry Christmas!” I picked up his bundles while another man picked up mine and said “Merry Christmas, lady!”, and we all shook the snow out of our eyes and hurried away with that worried preoccupied air that seizes all family men on Christmas Eve.

2
    My preoccupation as I turned into Beall Street was rather different. I don’t think I’m more of a busybody than most people, and if it hadn’t been for the heap of charred paper back in Gilbert St. Martin’s shop I doubt if I would have thought again of what he’d said. It isn’t that I dislike Gil; I don’t at all, really. It’s true he’s not the sort of man I’d go mad about. He’s too carefully done up for one thing, so that I find myself thinking I ought to be more careful about keeping the dogs out of the living room and wearing gloves when I’m in the garden. Or possibly it’s that indefinable malicious faculty he’s got for leaving a polite barb—better concealed at some times than at others—in virtually everything he says about women, or men either. But gossip, even apart from Gilbert St. Martin, is one thing; anonymous letters are quite another. They inject a psychopathic element into human relations that has pretty ghastly possibilities.
    Even at that, it wasn’t the letters actually that bothered me. After all, Iris Nash is old enough to know what it’s all about It was the fact that Gilbert St. Martin thought, or said he thought, that Lowell Nash had written them. Because there’s very little doubt that Lowell on occasion can be capable of almost anything, and none whatever that she hates her father’s second wife with all the bitter intensity that the Nashes as a family—except young Angus—have a positive flair for. The pity of it is that it might have been so different. If her father had told her, for instance, that he was going to marry again, I think her loyalty and devotion to him would have got the best of a sort of natural jealousy. But he didn’t. She came home from Bar Harbor one summer and there was Iris, newly mistress of the house in Beall Street. More than that, Iris was only thirty and quite astonishingly beautiful with her dark burnished-copper hair and grey-green eyes and white skin. Lowell was fifteen, and a little gawky and immature, and black as a darkey from the summer sun.
    I knew the hell she’d gone through during her parents’ divorce, too, when she’d decided to stay with her father and her brother Angus had gone with Marie Nash. She was twelve then, and I’d known her since she was four and my elder son three and they ran afoul of the law swiping a fine wreath of violets and lilies of the valley, after the captains and the kings had departed, from Senator McGilvray’s last caucus in the old cemetery up the hill in Rock Creek Park. That began my acquaintance with her parents too, and I’m quite sure the reason I never liked Marie Nash from the beginning was that she spanked Lowell and took away her liver-and-white spaniel puppy—not so much for taking the flowers as for saying she didn’t see what good they did the Senator. Equally I suspect the reason I’d always been fond of Randall Nash—a little, in spite of a lot of things—was that he stalked out of the house slamming the door and returned in half an hour with another liver-and-white spaniel and one of the finest funeral wreaths I’ve ever seen. Its skeleton still adorns Lowell’s bedroom in the house in Beall Street. The spaniel’s still there too—not that he adorns anything, but far from it. No fourteen-year-old spaniel is particularly beautiful, and