A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
Title: Magnificent Obsession (1929)
Author: Lloyd C. Douglas
eBook No.: 0400631.txt
Edition: 1
Language: English
Character set encoding: Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted: August 2004
Date most recently updated: August 2004
This eBook was produced by: Don Lainson dlainson@sympatico.ca
Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.
This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html
To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au
Title: Magnificent Obsession (1929)
Author: Lloyd C. Douglas
Let not thy left hand know
what thy right hand doeth.
St. Matthew VI, 3
To
Betty and Virginia
I
It had lately become common chatter at Brightwood Hospital--better
known for three hundred miles around Detroit as Hudson's Clinic--
that the chief was all but dead on his feet. The whole place
buzzed with it.
All the way from the inquisitive solarium on the top floor to the
garrulous kitchen in the basement, little groups--convalescents in
wheeled chairs, nurses with tardy trays, lean internes on rubber
soles, grizzled orderlies trailing damp mops--met to whisper and
separated to disseminate the bad news. Doctor Hudson was on the
verge of a collapse.
On the verge? . . . Indeed! One lengthening story had it that on
Tuesday he had fainted during an operation--mighty ticklish piece
of business, too--which young Watson, assisting him, was obliged to
complete alone. And the worst of it was that he was back at it
again, next morning, carrying on as usual.
An idle tale like that, no matter with what solicitude of loyalty
it might be discussed at Brightwood, would deal the institution a
staggering wallop once it seeped through the big wrought-iron
gates. And the rumour was peculiarly difficult to throttle
because, unfortunately, it was true.
Obviously the hour had arrived for desperate measures.
Dr. Malcolm Pyle, shaggy and beetle-browed, next to the chief in
seniority, a specialist in abdominal surgery and admiringly spoken
of by his colleagues as the best belly man west of the Alleghenies,
growled briefly into the ear of blood-and-skin Jennings, a cynical,
middle-aged bachelor, who but for his skill as a bacteriologist
would have been dropped from the staff, many a time, for his
rasping banter and infuriating impudences.
Jennings quickly passed the word to internal-medicine Carter, who
presently met eye-ear-nose-and-throat McDermott in the hall and
relayed the message.
"Oh, yes, I'll come," said McDermott uneasily, "but I don't relish
the idea of a staff meeting without the chief. Looks like
treason."
"It's for his own good," explained Carter.
"Doubtless; but . . . he has always been such a straight shooter,
himself."
"You tell Aldrich and Watson. I'll see Gram and Harper. I hate it
as much as you do, Mac, but we can't let the chief ruin himself."
* * * * *
Seeing that to-morrow was Christmas, and this was Saturday well
past the luncheon hour, by the time Pyle had tardily joined them in
the superintendent's office each of the eight, having abandoned
whatever manifestation of dignified omniscience constituted his
bedside manner, was snappishly impatient to have done with this
unpleasant business and be off.
When at length he breezed in, not very convincingly attempting the
conciliatory smirk of the belated, Pyle found them glum and fidgety--
Carter savagely reducing to shavings what remained of a pencil,
Aldrich rattling the pages of his engagement book, McDermott
meticulously pecking at diminutive bits of lint on his coat sleeve,
Watson ostentatiously shaking his watch at his ear, Gram drumming
an exasperating tattoo on Nancy Ashford's desk, and the others
pacing about like hungry panthers.
"Well," said Pyle, seating them with a sweeping gesture, "you all
know what we're here for."
"Ab-so-lute-ly," drawled Jennings. "The old boy must be warned."
"At once!" snapped Gram.
"I'll say!" muttered McDermott.
"And you, Pyle, are the proper person to do it!" Anticipating a
tempestuous rejoinder, Jennings hastened to defend himself against
the impending din by noisily pounding out his pipe on the rim of
Mrs. Ashford's steel waste basket, a performance she watched with
sour interest.
"Where do you get that 'old boy' stuff, Jennings?" demanded Pyle,
projecting a fierce, myopic glare at his pestiferous crony. "He's
not much older than you are."
Watson tilted his chair back on its hind legs, cautiously turned
his red head in the direction of Carter, seated next him, and
slowly closed one eye. This was going to be good.
"Doctor Hudson was forty-six last May," quietly volunteered the
superintendent, without looking up.
"You ought to know," conceded Jennings drily.
She met his rough insinuation with level, unacknowledging eyes.
"May twenty-fifth," she added.
"Thanks so much. That point's settled, then. But, all the same,
he wasn't a day under a hundred and forty-six when he slumped out
of his operating room, this morning, haggard and shaky."
"It's getting spread about too," complained Carter.
"Take it up with him, Doctor Pyle," wheedled McDermott. "Tell him
we all think he needs a vacation--a long one!"
Pyle snorted contemptuously and aimed a bushy eye-brow at him.
"Humph! That's good! 'Tell him we all think,' eh? It's a mighty
careless, offhand damn that Hudson would give for what we all
think! Did you ever . . ." He pointed a bony finger at the
perspiring McDermott, ". . . did you ever feel moved to offer a few
comradely suggestions to Dr. Wayne Hudson, relative to the better
management of his personal affairs?"
McDermott rosily hadn't, and Pyle's dry voice crackled again.
"As I thought! That explains how, with so little display of
emotion, you can advise somebody else to do it. You see, my son,"--
he dropped his tone of raillery and became sincere--"we're dealing
here with an odd number. Nobody quite like him in the whole
world . . . full of funny crotchets. In a psychiatric clinic--which
this hospital is going to be, shortly, with the entire staff in
strait-jackets--some of Hudson's charming little idiosyncrasies
would be brutally referred to as clean-cut psychoses!"
The silence in Mrs. Ashford's office was tense. Pyle's regard for
the chief was known to be but little short of idolatry. What,
indeed, was he preparing to say? Did he actually believe that
Hudson was off the rails?
"Now, don't misunderstand!" he went on quickly, sensing their
amazement. "Hudson's entitled to all his whimsies. So far as I'm
concerned, he has earned the right to his flock of phantoms. He is
a genius, and whosoever loveth a genius is out of luck with his
devotion except he beareth all things, endureth all things,
suffereth long and is kind."
"Not like sounding brass," interpolated Jennings piously.
"Apropos of brass," growled Pyle, "but--no matter. . . . We all
know that the chief is the most important figure in the field of
brain surgery on this continent. But he did not come to that
distinction by accident. He has toiled like a slave in a mill.
His specialty is guaranteed to make a man moody; counts himself
lucky if he can hold down his mortality to fifty per cent. What
kind of a mentality would YOU have"--shifting his attention to
Jennings, who grinned, amiably--"if you lost half your cases?
They'd soon have you trussed in a big tub of hot water, feeding you
through the nose with a syringe!"
"You spoke of the chief's psychoses," interrupted McDermott,
approaching the dangerous word hesitatingly. "Do you mean that--
literally?"
Pyle pursed his lips and nodded slowly.
"Yes--literally! One of his notions--by far the most alarming of
his legion, in so far as the present dilemma is affected--has to do
with his curious attitude toward fear. He mustn't be afraid of
anything. He must live above fear--that is his phrase. You would
think, to hear his prattle, that he was a wealthy and neurotic old
lady trying to graduate from Theosophy into Bahaism. . . ."
"What's Bahaism?" inquired Jennings, with pretended naïveté.
"Hudson believes," continued Pyle, disdainful of the annoyance,
"that if a man harbours any sort of fear, no matter how benign and
apparently harmless, it percolates through all his thinking,
damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost. For years,
he has been so consistently living above fear--fear of slumping,
fear of the natural penalties of overwork, fear of the neural drain
of insomnia. . . . Haven't you heard him discoursing on the
delights of reading in bed to three o'clock? . . . fear of that
little aneurism he knows he's got--that he has driven himself at
full gallop with spurs on his boots and burrs under his saddle,
caroling about his freedom, until he's ready to drop. But whoever
cautions him will be warmly damned for his impertinence."
Pyle had temporarily run down, and discussion became general.
Carter risked suggesting that if the necessary interview with the
chief required a gift for impertinence, why not deputize Jennings?
Aldrich said it was no time for kidding. McDermott again nominated
Pyle. Gram shouted, "Of course!" They pushed back their chairs.
Pyle brought both big hands down on his knees with a resounding
slap, rose with a groan, and sourly promised he'd have a go at it.
"Attaboy!" commended Jennings paternally. "Watson will do your
stitches, afterwards. He has been getting some uncommonly nice
cosmetic values, lately, with his scars; eh, Watty?"
The disorder incident to adjournment spared Watson the chagrin of
listening to the threatened report of Jennings' eavesdropping, an
hour earlier, on the dulcet cooing of a recently discharged
patient, back to tender her gratitude. Emboldened by his rescue,
he dispassionately told Jennings to go to hell, much to the
latter's faunlike satisfaction, and the staff evaporated.
"Let's go and eat," said Pyle.
As they turned the corner in the corridor, Jennings slipped his
hand under Pyle's elbow and muttered, "You know damned well what
ails the chief, and so do I. It's the girl!"
"Joyce, you mean?"
"Who else?" Jennings buttoned his overcoat collar high about his
throat and thrust his shoulder against the big front door and an
eighty-mile gale. "Certainly, I mean Joyce. She's running wild,
and he's worrying his heart out and his head off!"
"Maybe so," Pyle picked his footing carefully on the snowy steps.
"But I don't believe it's very good cricket for us to analyze his
family affairs."
"Nonsense! We're quite past the time for indulging in any knightly
restraints. Hudson's in danger of shooting his reputation to bits.
Incidentally, it will give the whole clinic a black eye when the
news spreads. If the chief is off his feed because he's fretting
about his girl, then it's high time we talked candidly about her.
She's a silly little ass, if you ask my opinion!"
"Well, you won't be asked for your opinion. And it's no good
coming at it in that mood. She may be, as you say, a silly little
ass; but she's Hudson's deity!"
Jennings motioned him to climb into the coupé and fumbled in his
pockets for his keys.
"She wasn't behaving much like a deity--unless Bacchus, perhaps--
the last time I saw her."
"Where was that?"
"At the Tuileries, about a month ago, with a party of eight or ten
noisy roisterers, in the general custody of that good-for-nothing
young Merrick--you know, old Nick Merrick's carousing grandson.
Believe me, they were well oiled."
"Did you--did she recognize you?"
"Oh, quite so! Came fluttering over to our table to speak to me!"
"Humph! She MUST have been pickled! I thought she was getting on,
all right, at a girls' school in Washington. . . . Didn't know she
was home."
Jennings warmed his engine noisily, and threw in the clutch.
"Maybe she was sacked."
Pyle made some hopeless noises deep in his throat.
"Too bad about old Merrick. . . . Salt of the earth; finest of the
fine. He's had more than his share of trouble. Did you ever know
Clif?"
"No. He was dead. But I've heard of him. A bum, wasn't he?"
"That describes him; and this orphan of his seems to be headed in
the same direction."
"Orphan? I thought this boy's mother was living--Paris or
somewhere."
"Oh yes, she's living; but the boy's an orphan, for all that. Born
an orphan!" Pyle briefly reviewed the Merrick saga.
"Perhaps," suggested Jennings, as they rolled into the club garage,
"you might have a chat with old Merrick, if he's such a good sort,
and tell him his whelp is a contaminating influence to our girl."
"Pfff!" Pyle led the way to the elevator.
"Well, if that proposal's no good, why don't you go manfully to the
young lady herself and inform her that she's driving her eminent
parent crazy? Put it up to her as a matter of good sportsmanship."
"No," objected Pyle, hooking his glasses athwart his nose to
inspect the menu, "she would only air her indignation to her
father. And he likes people to mind their own business--as you've
discovered on two or three occasions. He keeps his own counsel
like a clam, and doesn't thank anybody for crashing into his
affairs, no matter how benevolent may be the motive. . . . It
would be quite useless, anyway. Joyce can't help the way she's
made. She is a biological throwback to her maternal grandfather.
You never knew him. He was just putting the finishing touches to
his career as a periodical sot when I arrived in this town, fresh
from school. Cummings was the best all 'round surgeon and the
hardest all 'round drinker in the state of Michigan for twenty
years; one of these three-days-soused and three-weeks-sober
drunkards. This girl evidently carries an over-plus of the old
chap's chromosomes."
"You mean she is a dipsomaniac?"
"Well--that's a nasty word. Let's just say she's erratic. Ever
since she was a little tot, she has been a storm centre. Sweetest
thing in the world when she wants to be. And then all hell breaks
loose and Hudson has to plead with the teachers to take her back.
Oh, she's given him an exciting life; no doubt of that! And lately
it's booze!"
"Hudson knows about that part of it, of course!"
"I presume so. How could he help it? She makes no secret of it.
At all events, she's no hypocrite."
Jennings sighed.
"Rather unfortunate she has this one embarrassing virtue; isn't it?
But, that being the case, I dare say she'll have to go to the devil
at her own speed. We must persuade Hudson, however, to clear out
and take a long leave of absence. He can take her along. Lay it
on with a heavy hand, Pyle. Be utterly ruthless! Tell him it
affects us all. That ought to fetch him. I never knew anybody
quite so sensitive to the welfare of other people. Save that card
for the last trick: tell him if he doesn't clear out, for a while,
he will do up the rest of us!"
* * * * *
For the first half hour of their conference, which was held in the
chief's office the following Tuesday, Pyle stubbornly held out for
a trip around the world, Joyce to accompany her father. Indeed,
the idea had seemed so good that he had armed himself with a
portfolio of attractive cruise literature. He had even made out an
intriguing itinerary--Hawaii, Tahiti, ukeleles--Pyle was a
confirmed land-lubber with a dangerously suppressed desire to lie
on his back, pleasantly jingled, under a trans-equatorial palm,
listening to the soft vowels of grown-up children unspoiled by
civilization--the Mediterranean countries, six months of hobnobbing
with brain specialists in Germany. The latter item had been
included as a particularly tempting bait. Hudson had often
declared he meant to do that some day.
The chief listened preoccupiedly; tried to seem grateful; tried to
seem interested; but as Pyle rumbled on with his sales-talk the big
man grew restless, refilled his fountain-pen, rearranged his papers
in neater piles, had much difficulty hunting a match-box. Then he
shook his head, smiling.
No, much as he appreciated Pyle's friendly concern, he wasn't going
around the world; not just now. Of course he had been sticking at
it too steadily. Lately he had had it on his mind to build a
little shack in some out of the way place, not too far off, and put
in there from Friday afternoon to Tuesday morning, at least in
decent weather, tramp, fish, botanize, read light novels, sleep,
live the simple life. He would begin plans on such a place at
once. Spring would be along soon.
"And--meantime?" persisted Pyle, gnawing at the tip of his uptilted
little goatee.
Hudson rose, slammed a drawer shut with a bang, swung a leg over
the corner of his desk, folded his arms tightly, and faced his
counsellor with a mysterious grin.
"Meantime? . . . Pyle, I hope this won't knock you cold. I'm
going down to Philadelphia, week after next, to marry my daughter's
school friend, Miss Helen Brent."
Pyle's eyes and mouth comically registered such stunned amazement
that the Hudson grin widened.
"And then the three of us will be spending a couple of months in
Europe. I've arranged with Leighton to come over from the
university and take care of such head cases as Watson can't handle.
Watson's a good man; bright future. Oddly enough, I was on the
point of asking you in to talk this over when you said you wished
to see me."
Pyle bit off the end of a fresh cigar and mumbled felicitations,
not yet sufficiently recovered to pretend enthusiasm.
"Doubtless you think me a fool, Pyle."
Hudson took a turn up and down the room, giving his colleague an
opportunity to deny it if he wished. Pyle puffed meditatively.
"Seventeen years a widower," mused Hudson, half to himself. He
paused at the far corner to straighten a disordered shelf of books.
"A man accumulates a lot of habits in seventeen years." He
returned to his desk-chair. "Sounds like the wedding of January
and June, eh?"
Had Jennings been in Pyle's place, his eyes would have twinkled as
he replied, "JANUARY! What! You? January? Nonsense, Chief! Not
a day over October, at the farthest!"
Pyle smiled wanly, and shifted his cigar to the other corner of his
mouth.
"I came by this valuable new friendship early last year when Miss
Brent was made Junior advisor to my Joyce."
Something of sympathetic comradeship in Pyle's reviving interest,
now that he was partially coming to, encouraged Hudson to toss
aside what remained of his reticence and tell it all.
To begin with--Miss Brent was an orphan; parents reputable
Virginians; most interesting French background on her mother's
side; same kind of blood that the guillotine spilt in 1789. . . ."
Quite pronouncedly Gallic, she is--at least in appearance."
Jennings, had he been there, would have been audacious enough to
suggest, slyly chuckling, "Oh--in that case we should amend June to
JULY!" Then he would have watched the chief's face intently.
But Pyle, who had no traffic with psychoanalysis, attached no
significance whatever to the fact that the young lady's probable
temperament was somewhat on the chief's mind.
"About Thanksgiving," Hudson was saying, "Miss Brent, after a brief
encounter with influenza, left the school and spent a few days at
home. No sooner was she gone than Joyce slipped out, one night;
attended a party, down in the city; defied some house rules as to
hours; flicked all her classes next day; stormed until the shingles
rattled when they rebuked her; and, in short, contrived to get
herself suspended, notwithstanding that her record--thanks to Miss
Brent's influence--had been quite above reproach ever since she
matriculated, a year ago last September."
The story went forward rather jerkily. Hudson was not given to
confiding his perplexities to anybody. Pyle discreetly remained
silent.
"Well--she came home and plunged immediately into a series of
hectic affairs; out every night; in bed most of the day; nervous,
testy, unreasonable. I can't tell you, Pyle, how thoroughly it did
me in. . . . She's all I have you know.
"At my wit's end, I suggested that she invite Miss Brent up to
visit us through the holidays. Twice before had she been our guest
for a few days, and I had seen something of her on my occasional
visits to Washington. Believe me when I tell you that this
charming girl was no more than across our threshold last week, than
Joyce was another creature, poised, gracious, lovable--a lady!"
He paused to take his bearings before going further; impelled to
explain how the swift movement of events, that first evening at
dinner, amply accounted for his decision to ask Helen to marry him;
reluctant, even in the interest of plausibility and self-defence,
to give words to the memory of that occasion. It had all been so
natural; so unimpeachably right; so precisely as it ought to be!
He had remarked--perhaps a bit more ardently than he intended, for
his heart was full--how happy it had made him--and Joyce--that she
had come. "I don't see how we can ever let you go!" he had said;
to which Joyce had added impetuously, "Why need she ever go? She's
happier here than anywhere else; aren't you, darling?"
Pyle recrossed his legs and cleared his throat to remind the chief
that he was still present.
"As a matter of fact, Miss Brent is certain to be happier with us
than she was at home. Since childhood, she has lived with an
uncle, her father's elder brother, an irascible, penurious, not
very successful old lawyer. There are no women in the family. And
I have reason to suspect that her cousin, Montgomery Brent, is a
bit of a rake, though she has idealized him out of all proportion;
calls him 'Brother Monty,' thinks him vastly misunderstood by his
father and everybody else . . . that kind of a girl, Pyle . . .
espouses the cause of homeless cats, under dogs, misunderstood
cousins, my flighty, wilful Joyce . . . and now--thank God--she has
promised to join forces with ME! I think she's making something of
a mission of it, Pyle. I was quite willing to wait until she had
finished school in June; had some serious misgivings, indeed, about
that; but she dismissed the thought lightly. If I needed her, I
needed her NOW, she said. . . . I hope to God it works out!"
Pyle said he believed it would; moved to the edge of his chair;
looked at his watch; asked if this was a secret.
Hudson stroked his jaw, his eyes averted.
"I don't object to their knowing. . . . Let's consider it
sufficient, for the present, that I'm going to Europe with my
daughter." He mopped his broad forehead vigorously. "The rest of
it they can learn in due time. Report to Aldrich and Carter and
the others that I'm off on a vacation."
"Any special word for Mrs. Ashford, Chief?" Pyle paused with his
hand on the door-knob.
Hudson thrust his hands deeply into his trouser pockets and walked
to the window, staring out. "I'll tell her myself, Pyle," he
answered, without turning.
* * * * *
Doctor Hudson named his isolated retreat Flintridge. It was quite
remote from the beaten trail of travel. A mere acre had been tamed
to serve the cottage for which his hasty sketches, before leaving,
were elaborated and executed in his absence by his loyal friend,
Fred Ferguson, the best architect in town.
It was an inhospitable bit of country, thereabouts. Sheer cliffs,
descending abruptly to the black water (a long flight of wooden
steps led to the little boat-house and adjacent wharf) had
discouraged such colonization as had long since developed the
western shore, two miles distant. Deformed pines clawed the rocks,
sighing of their thirst in summer, shrieking of nakedness in
winter.
Almost from the first, Flintridge never knew certainly, for there
was no telephone, when its master would appear for a week-end. It
anticipated, made forecasts, baked ineffable angel food cakes,
caught vast quantities of minnows for bait, and held itself in
instant readiness to welcome the big man with the ruddy face (just
a shade too ruddy, any heart diagnostician could have told him),
silver-white hair, grey eyes with deep crows-feet, and expressive
hands eloquent of highly developed dexterity.
When and if he came, it would be on Saturday, late afternoon. Once
only had he brought Joyce and Helen--strangers, passing them,
presumed they were both his daughters--but that was merely
temporizing with his promise to seek a retreat. And he now needed
days off, if ever; for his young wife's gregarious disposition and
charming hospitality had multiplied his social obligations in the
city.
How easily she had adjusted herself to his moods! How proud he was
of her, not quite so much for her exotic beauty, as because of her
exquisiteness of personal taste and the tact with which she met the
rather exacting problems of fitting neatly and quickly into his
circle of mature acquaintances. It delighted him that she chose
the right word, wore the right costume, intuitively knew how to
manage a dinner-party without seeming concerned as to what
misadventures might have occurred in the kitchen. Yes; the affair
was "working out"--how often he used that phrase!--immeasurably
better than he had dared hope.
Even the women liked her! They had accepted her on approval at
first; but when it became evident that she had no intention of
taking on airs because their grizzled spouses fluttered about her
with the broad compliments privileged to fifty addressing twenty-
five, they admitted she was a dear.
But, however pleasant it was for Hudson to note his wife's growing
popularity, certified to by the increasing volume of their social
activities, his new duties contributed little to the reinvigoration
of that fatigued aorta which had worried Pyle.
"The chief's in better fettle--think?" said Jennings.
"Temporarily," conceded Pyle. "But you don't mend an aneurism with
late dinners, three a week. I'm afraid he'll crash, one of these
days."
Not infrequently some visiting colleague--for Brightwood now not
only attracted patients from afar but had become a mecca for the
ambitious in the field of brain surgery--would be driven out into
the country to rusticate for a day or two. They seemed singularly
alike, these brain-tinkers from otherwhere; moody, abstracted men,
in their late forties and early fifties, most of them; seldom
smiling, ungifted with small talk, not unusually inclined to be
somewhat gruff. Hudson preferred to hold conferences with them at
the lake, for their conversation would be tiresomely technical.
And anyhow, men who trafficked daily with Death could not be
expected to enliven a house party.
A devoted pair of middle-aged twins served as caretakers at
Flintridge. What time Perry Ruggles, of the stiff knee, hairy
throat, and Airedale disposition, was not tinkering the boat engine
with greasy wrenches or trolling in and out of season for bass, he
was teaching little patches of apathetic soil to take a maternal
interest in iris and petunias. On Saturdays about five o'clock, he
would put on his other coat and limp down to the gate that admitted
from the narrow ridge road; and, having opened it, would flick
little stones off the driveway with his good foot.
Martha, his buxom sister, wrought ingenious quilts, concealed from
the taciturn Perry the vandalisms of an impertinent, bottle-fed
fawn; was silly over a pair of tame pheasants whose capacity for
requiting her affection was as feeble as her need was great;
scratched her plump arms gathering early berries in anticipation of
some high moment when her pie would be approved with a slow wink,
of which the learned guest, profoundly discoursing of surgical
mysteries to his celebrated host, would be entirely unaware.
On Saturdays, about four-thirty, having again made sure she had
laid out the doctor's pyjamas on the bed, and turning the vase of
roses on his chiffonier a little more to the advantage of the
tallest, Martha would take her stand before the window in the sun-
parlour, her knuckles pressed hard against her pretty teeth,
devoutly praying for a swirl of yellow dust and a flash of
glittering nickel at the bend of the ridge road, visible through an
open lane of dwarf spruce.
At the sound of gravel crunching under heavy tires, she would dash
to the door and fling it open, always hoping--and hating herself
for it--that the doctor had come alone or, if not alone,
accompanied by another man. She had been uneasy, abashed, and
awkward in the presence of young Mrs. Hudson, whose beauty had
stirred remembrance of a certain pre-Christmas shopping excursion
when she was nine. . . . There had been a French doll, so
beautiful it had made Martha's little throat ache with longing.
Her wistful eyes had gushed sudden tears, and she had put out a
hand, tentatively.
"No, dear," her mother had cautioned. "You may look at her, but
you mustn't touch."
* * * * *
On the broad mantel in the "gun room" (there had been a bit of
chaffing about the "gun room," seeing there was only one gun in it
among all the miscellaneous instruments of sport--golf clubs,
fishing tackle, and the like) an impressive row of silver cups
testified that Wayne Hudson was no less expert at play than with
the more important implements of surgery.
It was a frequent remark of his intimates that Hudson possessed an
almost uncanny capacity for projecting the sensitiveness of his
cognitive fingers to the very tips of whatever tools he chose to
manipulate. There were nerves in his niblick, in his casting-rod,
in his scalpel.
"A lucky devil!" bystanders used to remark when he had successfully
made a long putt up-grade on a sporty green.
"An uncommonly good guesser!" his confrères agreed occasionally,
when some quite daring prognosis--probably defining the exact
location of a brain tumour on such cryptic evidence as the arc of
an eyebrow, the twitch of a lip, the posture of a hand in repose,
or the interjection of an unbecoming phrase into casual
conversation--was verified.
Among the trophies on the mantel--whose inscriptions always amazed
a visiting colleague, marvelling at his distinguished host's
diversity of proficiencies--there was a tarnished triple-handled
aquatic prize won by Doctor Hudson when, in the early days of his
internship, he had taken a First in a mile swim.
"Still swim?"
"Regularly."
"Enjoy it?"
"Well--it's good for me."
"Keeps your weight down?"
"Perhaps. But, in any event, it's good for me."
Some time in the course of his visit, the visitor would rag his
athletic host upon the excess of his prudence; for the most
conspicuous article of furniture in the "gun room" was an elaborate
but not very decorative inhalator of the super-type used by life-
savers at busy wharves and crowded beaches, equipped with nickelled
oxygen tanks and a complication of mechanical mysteries.
"What's that thing?"
Hudson would tell him, briefly, brusquely.
"What do YOU want with it?"
"Oh, somebody might fall in. The water's deep out here."
It was clear enough to the guest, if he ventured to press his
queries, that Doctor Hudson did not enjoy any talk about aquatics.
The guest found himself wondering why. Perry Ruggles could have
explained, had he been disposed. There had once been a very
anxious hour at Flintridge, down on the narrow pier. Not even
Martha knew. The next time he had come out, Doctor Hudson had
brought the inhalator, and had explained its use to the terrified
Perry who thereafter stood in dread of the thing. It became a grim
spectre that haunted his life. Some day, he suspected, he would be
obliged to experiment with it. The responsibility constituted a
steady, remorseless threat that tortured him and kept him awake
nights. Some sharp, man-to-man candour had been handed to the
surgeon, that afternoon, by his uncouth caretaker. It had been a
long time since anybody had called Wayne Hudson a fool to his face.
He accepted the degree with dignity.
"Perhaps I am, Perry," he replied soberly. "You probably wouldn't
know. But, however that may be, the thing you're to keep in mind
is that this top valve controls the oxygen; and if you have
occasion to use it, don't get excited and forget."
* * * * *
Not a few men of importance to the surgical world resident in
widely-spaced cities, recalled having had brief and somewhat
disquieting conversations about swimming, while guests at
Flintridge, when, one Sunday morning in early August, they read the
front-page dispatch which reported that Doctor Wayne Hudson, widely
known brain surgeon of Detroit, had drowned, the late afternoon
before, near his summer place on Lake Saginack.
At their breakfast table in Seattle, Doctor Herman Bliss read the
shocking headlines to his wife, and when she had commented
sympathetically, he added:
"Not only very sad, my dear, but very strange!"
Pressed for explanation, he reviewed for her the incidents of a
visit he had paid to his friend at the lake cottage, and the heavy
constraint which had fallen upon their conversation when he had
made some inquiries about his host's enjoyment of the water.
"Do you suppose," conjectured Mrs. Bliss, "that there could have
lurked in his mind some vague mirage of the fate that waited for
him?"
Her husband pursed his lips and shook his head. "I don't take much
stock in such theories," he declared, almost too vehemently to be
convincing.
"But you told me once that Doctor Hudson was 'prescient'!"
"Only a form of speech, Grace. Nobody is prescient. However,
Hudson was extraordinarily sentient; psychic to an uncommon
degree."
"But why did he persist in swimming," inquired Mrs. Bliss, "if he
was afraid of it?"
"For that very reason, unquestionably. I never knew a man so
impatient of normal people's timidities, or more passionately eager
to make himself independent of fear. Doubtless this was the one
thing that gave him anxiety, and he was resolved to master it."
"But--by the same logic," objected Mrs. Bliss, "he might have
jumped off a precipice, if he found himself afraid of that."
"Not quite the same thing! Here was something he had been able
to do with ease, skill and safety. Now, for some reason, he
had suddenly become afraid of it. An experience of cramp,
perhaps. . . . Might happen again. The fear filtered through
his thinking. . . . Had prided himself on living in complete
mental liberty. . . . Knew now that he was housing a dread! So
long as he gave that phobia the hospitality of his mind, he would
be, by that much, no longer his own man; so he decided to go to the
mat with his antagonist. I fancy that explains."
The newspaper account further detailed that by a singular
coincidence the inhalator which Doctor Hudson owned, and kept at
his cottage, was in use on the other side of the little lake at the
exact moment of his own tragic need of it.
A few hundred yards off shore, near his grandfather's estate,
"Windymere," young Robert Merrick, alone in his sailboat, had been
knocked unconscious by a jibbing boom and pushed into the water.
"Must have been drunk," indignantly commented Doctor Bliss.
"Things like that don't often happen to sober people."
Excited bathers, informed that there was an inhalator at the Hudson
cottage, had rushed a speed-boat across for it, and after an hour's
heroic exertion, were successful in restoring the young man to
partial consciousness. It was said that he would undoubtedly
recover.
"Unquestionably! He would!" growled Bliss.
It was believed, said the dispatch, that had the inhalator been
immediately available and promptly applied, Doctor Hudson's life
might have been saved. The caretaker, Perry Ruggles, observing the
evident distress of his employer, had rowed quickly to the spot,
dived for him, dragged his limp body into the boat. Desperately,
Ruggles had set forth with his unconscious passenger towards the
Windymere beach, and had rowed until his strength failed. Small
craft, attracted by his signals, hurried to him; found him huddled
over the lifeless body of Doctor Hudson, weeping hysterically,
while the little boat drifted in the middle of the lake.
"Never saw such dog-like devotion as old Perry's. I suppose he
went in after him, clothes and all; bad leg too."
Robert Merrick, the paper continued to explain, was the only son of
the late Clifford Merrick and Mrs. Maxine Merrick, now resident in
Paris. He had only that day returned from an extended visit with
his mother, having gone abroad immediately after finishing at the
State University in the mid-year senior class. He was further
identified as the grandson of Nicholas J. Merrick, retired founder
and large stockholder of the Axion Motor Corporation, with whom he
made his home at Windymere.
"Hope this youngster will be able to realize how valuable a person
he is," said Doctor Bliss, putting down the paper, "now that he has
had his life handed back to him at such a price!"
There was still another coincidence connected with this event. The
village physician, suspecting that Merrick's head injury might be
in need of more skilful examination than he could give it, had sent
him in a swift ambulance to Brightwood Hospital. At that moment he
did not know that the man who had made Brightwood famous for its
brain surgery would be unable to see his young patient.
"What do you suppose the boy said," speculated Mrs. Bliss, "when he
learned what it had cost to save his life?"
"Well," reflected the doctor glumly, "from my own observation of
the type of young cub whose father is dead, whose mother lives in
Paris, whose doting grandfather is a retired millionaire, and who
gets himself bumped off his boat by a boom in broad daylight, I
should suppose he just scratched a match on the head of his bed and
mumbled, 'Whadda yuh know about that!'"
II
Slowly and carefully--for he was still limp from his battle with
pneumonia, resultant from the prolonged use of a lung-motor in the
inexperienced hands of excited people--two nurses had trundled
young Merrick up to the well-appointed solarium.
"It won't hurt him a bit," Doctor Watson had said, "and there is at
least the suspicion of a breeze upstairs."
Parking his chair in an alcove somewhat sequestered from the
general assembly of convalescents, most of them white-turbaned like
himself, his uncommunicative attendants had pattered quickly away
as if relieved to be off to more pleasant undertakings.
Their scamper added to his perplexity. Yesterday he had tried to
explain the prevailing taciturnity of the people who waited on him:
it was the weather. The muggy, mid-August humidity accounted for
it. If doctors were brief and brusque, nurses crisp and remote,
it was because the patients were fretful . . . everybody out of
sorts . . . naturally.
But, even so, something more serious than a low barometer ailed
this hospital. Its moodiness was too thick to be interpreted by a
murky yellow sky, the abominable rasp of cicadas in the dusty
maples, or the enervating heat. Brightwood was in trouble; nor
could Bobby shake off the feeling that he, himself, was somehow at
the bottom of it; else why this conspiracy of mute glumness in
their attitude toward him? My God! . . . He might as well have
been some penniless bum, fished out of the gutter, and patched up
for sheer humanity's sake. . . . Didn't they know who he was? . . .
Why, his grandfather could buy up the whole works and never miss
it!
It wasn't that they'd neglected him, he was bound to admit.
Somebody had been always hovering over him. . . . God! . . . What
a ghastly experience he had been through! . . . That fog . . .
drifting in greyish-white, balloon-like billows across the road--
impenetrable, acrid, suffocating--a damp, chilling, clinging cloud
that pressed painfully against his chest, swathed his arms, clogged
his feet. . . . That trip back from Elsewhere! . . . Would he
ever live long enough to forget? It made him shudder to remember
it! . . . That unutterable fatigue!
Sometimes it had been more than he could bear. After he had
plodded, staggering, groping his way for a few shaky steps, the
Thing would rush him, with a roar like heavy surf, and hurl him
incredible distances back toward oblivion. Then the violence of
the storm would subside, followed by an ominous silence. . . . Was
he really dead, this time? . . . Suddenly, the Thing would swoop
him up again and pitch him deeper into the stifling fog. . . .
After years and years of that--he had grown old and stiff and sore
with his hopeless struggle--the situation had begun to clear. Now
and again there were ragged rents in the fabric of the fog through
which certain landmarks might be fleetingly recognized, as steeples
and spires come up, faintly, on an acid-touched plate. These hazy
perceptions were, at first, exclusively olfactory. He had read,
somewhere, that the nose was more integrally a part of the brain
than the other sense organs. Perhaps the smelling faculty (he had
taken more than a casual interest in physiology) was the oldest of
all the perceptive organs; earliest to evolve. But no; that would
be feeling . . . feeling first, then smelling. . . . It had amazed
and amused him that part of his mind seemed to be trudging
alongside, analyzing the predicament of the rest of his mind,
wading through the fog.
Now there had come a much wider gap in the drifting cloud, and
through it breezed a combination of identifiable odours; strong
scents crushed hard against his face; smell of good wool, and,
buried in the wool, iodoform, cigarette smoke, chlorides of this-
that-and-the-other, anæsthetics, antiseptics, laboratory smells,
hospital smells.
A weight shifted about on his chest. It was warm. It throbbed.
It pressed firmly, rested briefly, moved a little space, paused
again, listened; went back to spots it had visited before;
listened, more intently.
Then the weight had lifted and the medley of smells vanished.
Through the next rift in the fog, voices were speaking from a
vast distance; one of them calm, assured; the other bitter,
unfriendly. . . . That had been the beginning of his perplexity.
"I believe he's going to pull through!"
"Doubtless--and it's a damned shame!"
After that, there had been a complicated jumble of voices--one
of them a woman's--before the fog closed in on him again.
Occasionally, the cloud would tear apart, and he would take up his
load . . . he seemed to be carrying some enormous weight . . . and
plod on woodenly. He would have yawned, but deep breathing had
gone out. They weren't doing it any more . . . quite too painful.
One breathed in short, dry, hot gasps . . . glad to have them at
the price. . . . Tom Masterson had confirmed that fact. . . .
Tom--doubtless this was part of his delirium--Tom had sat by the
bed; and, queried about the new style of breathing, remarked,
"That's the way we're all doing it. . . . Not nearly so good as the
old way, of course, but better than none."
Another smothering billow of fog had engulfed him; but the Thing
wasn't in it. He didn't mind now, so long as the Thing was gone.
He opened his eyes and glimpsed a square of blue sky through a real
window. The curtain fluttered. A motor churned in a court
somewhere below; gears rasped, gravel scrunched. Ice tinkled in a
glass, near at hand. A starched nurse, eyes intent on her watch,
fumbled for his forearm. The sharp tip of a thermometer dug
cruelly into the roots of his tongue. That was what ailed it,
then--all this awkward gouging while he had been unconscious.
He had become aware of the steady drone of an electric fan, the
metallic whir of a lawn-mower in parched grass; had dully explored
his cracked lips with a clumsy tongue; had regarded with apathy the
nurse who bent over him; and, after a few hoarse croaks, had
contrived to ask where he was. She told him. Sluggishly, he
surmised that his presence at Brightwood indicated there was
something wrong with his head. There was; it ached abominably, and
was bandaged. He felt of it gingerly, and inquired.
"A hard bump. But you are doing very nicely. Drink this, please!"
And then he had slept some more. A dim light was burning when he
awoke. Everything was very quiet; so he decided to go to sleep
again. Another day came . . . two or three of them, maybe . . . he
couldn't remember.
A young, red-headed doctor, in a white coat, had appeared and asked
some questions of the nurse. He seemed a friendly person . . . but
young. Doctor Hudson was the big man at this place. If there was
something the matter with his head, he wanted Hudson.
"I say," he had called, stiffly turning his eyes toward the doctor,
"why doesn't Doctor Hudson look in? He knows me. I've been at his
house. Does he know I'm here?"
"I'm Doctor Watson, Mr. Merrick. I'm looking after you. Doctor
Hudson is not in the city. . . ."
After Doctor Watson had left the room, he had beckoned the nurse to
the bedside. Had Miss Hudson called? . . . No; but that was
because he wasn't seeing visitors yet . . . that is, not many. . . .
Yes, his grandfather had been in . . . and a Mr. Masterson. . . .
The accident? . . . Oh yes, they would tell him all about that,
a little later. . . . What he needed now was sleep; lots and lots
of it; no worry or excitement. . . . What we wanted now to make us
well was sleep. . . . Then we could have visitors, and the
visitors would tell us everything we wanted to know. . . . That
kind of silly baby-talk! . . . Hell's bells!
This morning however he had grown impatient. These people were
carrying their stupid silence strike too far! Obviously he had
been in some sort of a scrape. Very well. . . . It was not the
first time. There would be some way to settle it. There always
had been. Was he not accustomed to paying for smashed fenders,
broken china, splintered furniture, outraged feelings, and
interrupted business? If anybody had a grievance, let him make a
bill of it, and he would draw a cheque! It wasn't any of this
hospital's business, anyway! Or . . . was it? . . . What could he
have done to their damned hospital? . . . Run into it?
"Tell me this much, won't you, Miss . . . ?"
"Bates."
". . . Miss Bates; just how did I get this whack on my head? . . .
And I won't ask you any more questions."
"There was a mast or something flew around and knocked you off a
boat."
"Thanks."
A mast had knocked him off a boat! He grinned; tried to remember.
Well--that was that; but how did the hospital get in it?
* * * * *
At noon, his nurse had been relieved for an hour by a no less
important factotum that Mrs. Ashford herself, superintendent of the
hospital.
She sat by the window with a trifle of needlework in her hands,
apparently intent upon it; but quite aware of her patient's mood
and expectant of an outburst.
Bobby studied her face and decided in its favour. It was a
conclusion to which patients at Brightwood customarily arrived with
even more promptness, but he was in no state of mind to lose his
heart impetuously to anyone in this establishment where he was
being treated with such contemptuous indifference.
He found himself guessing her age. Everybody indulged in such
speculations on first sight of Nancy Ashford. Her maternal
attitude toward the staff, the nurses, the patients, was premised
solely upon her white hair. The fact that she had come by it in
her early twenties, at the time of her husband's fatal illness, in
no way discounted the matronly authority it gave her as the general
counsellor at Brightwood. Notwithstanding her quite youthful face
and slim, athletic figure, many people who outranked her in years
called her mother--a perfect specimen of the type that instantly
invites confidences. She had become a repository for a wider
diversity of confessions than come to the ear of the average
priest.
Doctor Hudson's tragic death had been a deeper sorrow to her than
anybody connected with Brightwood was ever going to know certainly--
whatever might be guessed; and the business of bearing it with
precisely the right outward expression of regret was the most
serious problem she had ever faced.
For fifteen years Mrs. Ashford had grown more and more
indispensable to Doctor Hudson. Entering his experimental hospital
as an operating nurse, shortly after the death of her husband--a
promising young surgeon and a protégé of the brain specialist--she
had quickly and quietly transferred many an administrative
responsibility from her chief's shoulders to her own, almost
without his realizing how deftly she had eased him of an increasing
volume of wearisome details. The time came when her decisions
represented the opinions of Doctor Hudson, and went unquestioned.
Nobody was jealous of her influence over him, or of her calm
authority over the institution. Improvident young internes sought
her counsel in their troublesome business affairs. Nurses told her
their love stories. Patients laid their hearts bare to her;
confided everything from minor domestic perplexities to major
crimes; wrote to her after they had gone home; not infrequently
proposed marriage to her; deluged her with Christmas gifts.
"Isn't she sweet?" the women patients would say. She was not. The
word was silly, applied to her. She was understanding, tactful,
and, above all, strong; with the face of a young woman, the mind of
a man, and the white hair of a matron.
There were some other things about Mrs. Ashford which, had young
Merrick known, might have changed his attitude toward her that
morning, as she sat jabbing her needle into the bit of tapestry and
waiting for him to blow up.
Doctor Hudson had taken her for granted. He had grown accustomed
to confiding every difficulty to her, and only rarely was he
disposed to debate any of her opinions. There was no phase of his
professional life to which she was a stranger. Even some of the
strictly private enterprises to which he gave himself with stealthy
concern--thinking them effectively concealed--she had discovered,
either by chance or shrewd guess; and from that knowledge she had
long since deduced at least a vague and troublesome idea of the
motive back of them. He would have been amazed--perhaps somewhat
annoyed--had he known that Nancy Ashford almost knew the one
important secret of his life.
How deeply she cared for him, and the nature of that affection, the
surgeon suspected, but resolutely refused to recognize. Anything
like a mutual admission of their actual dependence upon and
attraction for each other would, he felt, lead to unhappy
complications. He could not marry her. Joyce would have
disapproved.
"A nurse? . . . Why, Daddy! . . . You wouldn't! . . . You
mustn't!"
On the morning that he told Nancy he was to be married the next
Tuesday to Joyce's college friend, she had said quickly, "A very
sensible thing to do. She will make you happy. I am so glad for
you."
"I had hoped you might think that," he replied, obviously relieved.
Luckily for both, they were not facing each other. He was tugging
on his rubber gloves, in the little laboratory adjacent to his
operating-room, and she was buttoning his long white coat down the
back. He pretended not to notice how long it was taking her.
"All right, back there?" he sang out, with attempted casualness,
glancing over his shoulder.
"Quite all right now," she had answered, in a tone that matched his
for lightness; but--it was not quite all right. . . . Nothing
would ever be quite all right again.
Bobby had felt his heart warming toward the lady of indeterminate
age who busied herself with the needle, evidently unaware of the
tumult of his mind. He decided to disturb her peace. He would ask
a few questions which he had been at some pains to compose. They
sounded a bit bookish, as if memorized. . . . It was clear enough,
he said, that he had been in some kind of a mess. He was forever
getting into messes. That appeared to be his occupation. It was
customary with him, he recited, with what sounded more like silly
bravado than he had intended, to be in a bad scrape and not know
the full particulars until the next morning. What was this one
about? Had anybody else been hurt? He could not recall. If there
were damages, he would gladly pay.
It had turned out to be a surly speech, as it progressed; mostly
because Mrs. Ashford did not look up from her work, or seem
properly attentive to the petulant complaint. Mistaking her effort
at self-control for but another exhibition of the indifference
under which he had fretted, Bobby grew irascible. In the very
middle of a spluttery sentence however he broke off suddenly and
regarded her with perplexity. As she raised her eyes to meet his,
he saw that they were brimming with tears. Her lips trembled.
"What have I done?" he demanded huskily. "It's something very
terrible. I can see that in your face. You've simply got to tell
me. I can't stand this anxiety any longer!"
Mrs. Ashford put down her work on the table, came to the bedside,
and taking one of Bobby's hands in both of her own said, "My
friend, something has occurred here that makes us all very, very
unhappy. It happened about the time that you came here. We are
not recovered from it. But it was not your fault, and the damages
cannot be settled. You need give yourself no further concern about
it."
Not a bit satisfied, but assured by Mrs. Ashford's tone that their
discussion was at least temporarily a closed incident, Bobby made
no further effort to press his inquiries. He murmured his regrets
that there had been any trouble and sank into his pillows,
disquieted, but--whatever was the matter it was no concern of his.
That was good. That was ever so much better than he had feared.
It had been a very welcome diversion, an hour later, when Doctor
Watson had suggested the solarium. In the rumbling elevator, Bobby
had made a feeble effort to be jocular. It was impossible that the
grief which had seemed to distress the matronly Mrs. Ashford would
be equally experienced by so young and pretty a girl as the slender
blonde who stood at his elbow, silently awaiting their arrival at
the top floor.
"I'll bet you a box of candy against a pleasant smile," he said,
grimly, "that we do less talking in our hospital than any place
else on earth."
Instantly he realized it was the wrong thing to have said to her.
She did not challenge his statement. It was not that she was
offended. It was rather as if she had not heard him. She was in
trouble. She was in the same kind of trouble that affected
everybody else in this hospital. It plunged him again into the
gloom from which he had partly extricated himself through the not
very reassuring statements of Mrs. Ashford.
Squelched to a shamed silence by the girl's rebuff, he gazed
steadily ahead, conscious of flushed cheeks, as they wheeled him
into the alcove, adjusted his pillows, half-lowered the blind,
moved the screen closer to isolate him from the others and, without
a word or a smile, hurried away.
He must have been there an hour or more before he learned what he
thought he had wanted to know.
In the course of that hour, failing of scraping together enough
remembered facts to be of any service in the solution of his
problem, he had gone wool-gathering in all directions.
Perhaps it was his sense of utter desolation and loneliness that
had set him going over the path of his singularly bitter childhood.
* * * * *
Bobby Merrick had grown up about as independent of the normal
restraints imposed upon children as could have been possible in
civilized society.
When he was a little lad, his father, Clif Merrick, had been too
much occupied with business--what time he was not yacht racing,
deer hunting, or on other journeys not quite so clearly explained--
to pay any attention to the sensitive child beyond an occasional
pat on the head as he passed him on the stairs in tow of a
governess; or a brief and clumsy tussle in imitation of paternal
playfulness. The big man was always half drunk when he made these
rough overtures of comradeship. The boy dreaded seeing his father
approach, of a late afternoon, with a flushed face, suggesting a
good romp together.
On such occasions, if she was present, Bobby's neurotic mother
usually intervened.
"You're much too rough with him, Clif," she would expostulate.
"He's only a little boy. You hurt him! Stop it, I tell you!"
"Nonsense!" his father would reply, glancing toward the governess
for approval, "you don't know anything about boys. Does she,
Bobby?"
In all truth, she didn't; but the lad would be distressed over the
episode, hardly knowing what answer was expected of him.
Once--how vividly he remembered this!--his mother, upon being
sarcastically scorned in his presence for the way she was "bringing
up a soft little mollycoddle, with his hands full of dolls and
dishes" (true enough), had shocked him by screaming, in a shrill
falsetto, "Leave him alone; damn you! I won't have you bullying
him any more when you're drunk! You touch him again and I'll call
the police!"
The police! For his father! Bobby remembered that it had made him
ill--nauseated. The governess had had to carry him upstairs, where
he was awfully sick. He even remembered what it was he had eaten--
currant pudding. He had never cared much for currants thereafter.
Clif Merrick so steadily ragged the child, after that, about his
girlish toys and trinkets, that Bobby himself revolted against the
soft programme the women had made for him and gratefully approved
when his father suggested boxing lessons. Strangely enough, he
found himself happy with the new sport. Eager to test the value of
the instruction he was receiving, he occasionally slipped away from
the big house about time for school to be out in the afternoon,
attired in an immaculate black velvet suit with white lace cuffs,
and waited at the corner for somebody to yell "Sissy!" When he
returned home he would be very dirty and greatly in need of repair,
but grinning from ear to ear.
When he was twelve, Bobby's father had died suddenly of pneumonia
brought on by exposure while duck hunting in nasty weather. Young
as he was, the boy realized that his mother's bereavement was
accepted by her with a calm fortitude out of all proportion to her
weakness for indulging in self-pity.
One of her remarks, upon their return from the cemetery that bleak
afternoon, was chiselled indelibly upon her son's mind. None of
the epitaphs he had regarded with childish curiosity, as they drove
slowly along the narrow, winding roads, was carved deeper.
Sometimes, when he thought of it, he winced; sometimes he grinned.
"Well," she said, handing Colleen her furs, "that's THAT!"
"Yes, ma'am," dutifully replied Colleen, accustomed to occasional
outbursts of caste-forgetful confidences vouchsafed by her
mistress, "it certainly is!"
And then, apparently dissatisfied with her rejoinder, which had
taken an almost too casual view of the matter for one who
entertained so wholesome a respect for death, Colleen added,
sepulchrally, "It must have been very hard, ma'am, to leave him out
there."
Upon which followed the memorable elegy spoken by his mother.
"Well; I'LL KNOW NOW WHERE HE IS!"
Sometimes, when, as a collegian, Bobby was at that exact state of
intoxication where the tragic in a man's experience becomes
distorted into broad, screaming farce, and even sacred memories
make wry faces and put out their tongues in scorn of everything
decent, he would recall his mother's elegiac comment, laugh
uproariously, and pound his knee. "What a corking epitaph!" he had
shouted once, and had instantly cursed himself for a drunken fool.
* * * * *
Bobby could not remember precisely when he had become conscious
that his father and mother despised each other. It must have been
while he was still a mere baby. By the time he was eight, they had
stopped quarrelling, their mutual contempt too ponderous for so
frail a vehicle as speech. Unquestionably she had suffered much;
but it was no use trying to champion her cause. She was entitled
to her son's pity, and had it. He would have been glad enough to
have respected her, too, had that been possible.
Petulant, selfish, suspicious--Maxine Merrick was no end difficult.
Her only proficiency was her skill as a pianist; and aware that it
was the sole endowment she was in a position to transmit, she had
begun to teach the child piano technique almost before he knew the
letters on his building-blocks.
A restless soul, she was; temperamentally cursed with "floating
anxiety"; pretty, after a fashion . . . a transparent blonde . . .
always attracting attention at the opera where she quite took one's
breath away with her beauty at thirty yards; given to fits of
melancholy, for which there was plenty of excuse, God knew;
dissatisfied with her own personality which she constantly
endeavoured to improve, either by tinkering with her face and
figure, or by taking her dishevelled mind to quack psychiatrists
and will doctors for adjustments. She was on the sucker list of
all the advertising mountebanks in town; talked seriously about
palmistry; had paid a considerable sum for a horoscope which
related her affairs somehow with the movements of Arcturus;
frequently had her fortune told.
She vibrated between institutions for the care of the body and the
cure of the soul. Having spent a busy season of assiduous devotion
to the business of being plucked, picked, dyed, frescoed, and
massaged; sitting long and painful hours in the studios of beauty
experts, Maxine would suddenly experience an unaccountable surge of
disgust, and make off hurriedly to some sanitarium de luxe where,
in seclusion almost conventional, she lived on unsalted
insipidities, and listened of evenings in the lounge to mellifluous
harangues on personality expression . . . nerves in order . . . the
will to live . . . life at its utmost; followed by less sidereal
comments by the chief of staff concerning the importance of
internal purity--not of the conscience, which was out of his field,
as the piracy of his bills attested--but of the colon, to which he
referred with a bland candour somewhat disconcerting to the newer
arrivals, still serving their novitiate in the by no means
unexacting vocation of hypochondria.
During these spells of improving her health and personality, Maxine
would lose many pounds and add as many new words to her
pathological vocabulary. It suited her mood, during such retreats,
to become as disdainful of her appearance as a Thibetan lama.
One day, for no apparent reason other than caprice, there would be
a flurry of trunks and boxes, tickets and taxis, and a swift return
home, to the utter consternation of yogis who had been fattening on
her patronage, and the indignant amazement of pallid charlatans
whose income would be alarmingly depleted by the sudden
demobilization of her crusade for the Perpetual Light. It would be
generally rumoured among the patients that Mrs. Merrick was a
brilliant social leader . . . "simply required, my dear, to stop and
rest for a few weeks, now and then, if you know what I mean" . . .
which was nonsense; for Clif Merrick never took her anywhere, and
she could have numbered her friends on her fingers.
On these excursions in quest of youth, beauty, sweetness and light,
his mother never took Bobby along. He remained at home in the
custody of grafting servants and an endless procession of young
governesses, none of whom ever stayed longer than a few weeks. The
prettier ones were the quickest to go . . . sometimes on an hour's
notice. He had put on quite a scene when Miss Newman had left
without so much as saying good-bye to him, and had been slapped by
his father for the racket he was making.
Shortly after Maxine had been assured that henceforth she would
know exactly where Clif was, the big house on Piedmont Square was
sold, and Bobby was taken to Europe where his mother rapidly
improved in health and spirits. He was placed in a school for rich
waifs at Versailles, where he fraternized with youngsters who had
become an embarrassing liability to divorced parents. On brief
vacations he joined "Maxine"--as he obediently called her--in
Paris, scowling his distaste when, in the presence of her new
friends, she chattered baby talk to him, to which he made sour
replies in a voice that frequently skidded off the treble clef.
She had filled her spacious apartment with wigged and bangled old
harridans, who swapped dull prattle about their aristocratic
relatives for caviare and champagne and was inordinately vain of
her ménage, which Bobby impudently insisted would better be called
her menagerie.
There were lonely summers at Brighton and Deauville, lonely
Christmases at Cannes; private schools and sycophantic tutors;
trains and hotels; brief, dry, hard friendships with over-
sophisticated, unwanted boys like himself, envious of their
mothers' Pekingeses, and not infrequently dizzy with pilferings
from the decanter on the sideboard.
At seventeen, he had been sent back, alone, to enter a high-toned
prep school in Connecticut where, for previous lack of a balanced
intellectual ration and experience of steady discipline, he
survived only until Thanksgiving. Headmaster Bowers saw him off on
the train and returned to lead the chapel exercises. Ineffable
calm sat on his brow, and his voice was vibrant with unfeigned
gratitude as he announced, "We will stand and sing the Doxology."
Through the influence of old Nicholas, Bobby was then accepted,
provisionally, in another preparatory school, a Military Academy
not quite so close to salt water. . . . "It's just a ritzy reform
school," he wrote on his first day, to his perplexed grandparent,
who replied, in substance, that, if that were so, it was quite the
place for him. To his instructors there, he gave more bother than
any other six, but contrived to stay on. Through these days, he
renewed his abandoned taste for boxing, under a preceptor who
cuffed him about, shamefully, until he discovered that the boy was
game and thereafter took an interest in him. It was Mr. Bowman's
boast, when Bobby finished with them, that albeit he was a bit
frail in algebra, he could lick his weight in wildcats.
* * * * *
It was at the State University, however, that Bobby had struck his
stride. Neither a loafer nor a dunce, he easily ran circles around
the average student in such classes as stirred his curiosity.
Zoology? . . . He ate it up! Physiology . . . psychology . . .
chemistry . . . he was constantly amazing his friends by his ardent
boning, especially in chemistry, in the face of his utter
indifference to scholastic credit in the courses he disliked.
His David-and-Jonathan friendship with Tom Masterson had been good
for him; better for him than for Tom, a likeable youngster with an
insatiable ambition to be a short-story writer.
They had found each other as rushees at a luncheon for freshmen in
the Delta Omega house, and decided on the spot to room together.
Young Masterson, however eager to emancipate himself from the
restraints of a rather severely disciplined household, was
something of an idealist, and opened up a new world to Bobby who,
listening at first because he liked Tom, and later because he liked
what Tom said, learned from his youthful tutor a love for the
classics which, in the original, he had despised.
But Masterson, not having been brought up on cocktails, was not
much advantaged by the tardy instruction he received in exchange
for his Greek and Roman mythology. Once he started--no matter what
the hour, place, or circumstance--Tom could be depended upon to
continue drinking until he was unconscious. Bobby, approximately
sober, would get him home, somehow, and put him to bed with all the
solicitude of a mother. Apparently it never occurred to him that
he was jeopardizing his chum's future.
"Poor old Tommy!" he would say, unlacing his shoes. "I'm afraid
you'll just never learn to drink like a gentleman!"
Nor was the Merrick influence much of a blessing upon the Delta
Omega house into which he and Tom moved as sophomores. Had he been
less lovable, he might have been less dangerous. His charming
irresistibility was fatal to the good resolutions of many a chap
who honestly wanted to stay sober and do his work. Even the
seniors--by custom disdainful of juvenile society--once they were
in debt to him for lavish hospitality which was at first
reluctantly accepted, found themselves careening over the road in
Bobby's big touring-car, late Friday afternoons, en route to his
grandfather's home on Lake Saginack.
And the indulgent old man, believing they would all have a better
time if they had the house to themselves--and eager to be out of
the racket--would be driven in to the city to find sanctuary at the
Columbia Club. The neighbourhood used to protest, but old Nicholas
always reminded them--when they complained of drunken demons, for
whose conduct he was presumably responsible, driving recklessly
with open mufflers and raucous sirens, at all hours of the night--
that boys would be boys. When they smashed something, he paid for
it.
Not infrequently Bobby's week-end guests went back to Ann Arbor on
Monday morning without a nickel; wearing their very socks by
permission of their host, who owned them after an all-day poker
game on Sunday. How often they promised themselves, "Never again!"
but it was hard to stand out against Bobby's insidious smile.
Moreover, the food and service at old Nicholas' country palace was
a tempting diversion from the near-starvation of fraternity fare
and the discomforts of a crowded house where nothing ever received
anxious thought and respect but the impending payments on the
mortgage.
* * * * *
For some time, Bobby had been conscious of a dull rumble of
conversation, just beyond the screen. It began to annoy him. Some
stupid ass was airing his home-brewed philosophy.
"All this here talk about Providence . . . Providence; bah--I
say! . . . Take this very case, for instance! . . . Here is a
noted man who has made himself so useful that people came to him
for thousands of miles for help that nobody could give them but
him! . . . Look at me, for instance! . . ."
Bobby scowled, and muttered, "Yeah! . . . Look at you! . . . It's
bad enough to have to listen to you!"
"Look at ME! I came here clear from Ioway; and lucky enough I got
here when I did. . . . Last operation he ever performed, they tell
me! . . . And they might have saved his life too if that pulmotor
thing, or whatever it was, hadn't been in use on that drunken young
What's-his-name with the rich granddaddy! What right had he to be
alive, anyhow . . . now I ask you?"
It may have been Bobby's sudden pallor that attracted the attention
of the nurse who sat at the little desk by the door. She quickly
crossed the room and asked if there was anything he wanted. Bobby
swallowed with a dry throat, attempted a grateful smile, and
replied weakly, "Perhaps I should go back . . . feel better in
bed . . . not very strong yet. Tell them, will you?"
His exit from the solarium was effected with such promptness that
the patients observed it. Who was this youngster? Questions were
asked and answered. The man who had discoursed of the unseemly
ways of Providence was deeply contrite. . . . Wished he'd known,
he said.
Bobby's nurse stepped out into the corridor, after putting him to
bed, and an interne passing by remarked, "So he knows all about
it."
"Well, he had to find out sometime, didn't he?"
"Yes--but he's a pretty good scout. . . . And it was a rotten way
to dish it up to him!"
"You should worry," snapped Miss Bates.
* * * * *
For hours, Bobby Merrick lay with his eyes closed, motionless, but
not asleep. At first, he was hotly indignant. What right had
these saps from Ioway, or wherever, to pass judgment on what kind
of people had a right to live? How could anybody be so small-
minded as to hold it against him that his life had been saved, even
if it could be shown that Doctor Hudson might have been rescued if
the oxygen machine had been available? It wasn't his fault. He
hadn't borrowed the damned thing! He hadn't asked to have his life
saved at that price, or at all!
And then his resentment over this monstrous injustice gave way to
steady thinking. Perhaps, after all, he was under a certain
obligation to this dead man. Very good; he would show his
appreciation of what it had cost to save his life. He fell to
wondering whether Doctor Hudson had left his young wife and Joyce
properly provided for. Joyce was extravagant. He knew what it
must require to keep her going. He had had her in tow,
occasionally, himself.
"See if Mrs. Ashford is free to come here for a moment," commanded
Bobby. The nurse nodded stiffly, left the room, and, in a few
minutes, Mrs. Ashford stood by the bedside.
Assuming what he believed to be a mature, conventional, business
tone--the tone of large capital about to indulge itself in a brief
seizure of magnanimity--he inquired, without preamble, "What sort
of an estate did Doctor Hudson leave?"
"I do not know," she replied; and after a pause added crisply,
"Why?"
The dry crackle of that "why?" irritated him. She had given him
reason to believe that she was sympathetic. Surely she might know
he was not asking this question out of sheer curiosity.
"You seem to infer that it is none of my business," he retorted.
Nancy Ashford coloured slightly.
"Well," she snapped, "is it?"
Bobby's face felt hot. He was at a serious disadvantage, and she
was not helping him; not making the slightest attempt to understand
him.
"You might at least credit me with an honest wish to do something
about all this, if I can," he expostulated angrily.
"I am sorry if I offended you,"--with forced composure--"You were
thinking of giving some money to the family?"
"If they need it--yes."
"Whose money?"
Bobby raised up on one elbow and scowled.
"Whose money? Why, my own, of course!"
"Some you earned, maybe?"
For a moment, he was speechless with exasperation over the studied
insolence of her query. Sinking back upon the pillow, he motioned
to her to leave him. Instead, she took her stand at the foot of
his bed, and, hands on hips, militantly began an address
distinguished for its lack of polite ambiguity.
"You invited this," she said thickly. "You called me in here to
get some information about the Hudsons, and I'm going to tell you!
And then you can pay them off . . . with your grandfather's money!
Do you know what killed Doctor Hudson? . . . Worry! They said it
was overwork that weakened his heart. I know better! The only
thing that counted in his life, besides his profession, was Joyce.
He saw her going to the dogs. Part of that was your fault! You've
had a reputation for ruining all your friends!"
Bobby Merrick lay stunned under the attack, his eyes wide with
amazement at the woman's audacity.
"The poor chap tried to pull himself together." Her voice wavered
a little, but she went on with resolution. "Built that little
house at the lake, went swimming when he wasn't able; knew he
wasn't able; had provided a lung-motor for emergencies; and then,
at the moment when he has to have it--YOU'RE using it! YOU--of all
people! And now you casually suggest settling the bill with
money!"
Something in his look--it was the look of a hurt animal--checked
Nancy's passionate diatribe.
"Please forgive me," she muttered agitatedly. "But, as I say, you
invited it. You wanted to know, I have told you."
Bobby swallowed awkwardly, and rubbed his brow with the rough
sleeve of his cotton smock.
"Well," he muttered hoarsely, "you've told me. If you've said
everything you have to say, I won't keep you."
She started toward the door, paused, turned about, walked slowly to
the window and stood looking out, her left elbow cupped in her
right hand, the slim fingers of the other tapping her shoulder,
agitatedly, at first; then meditatively. Bobby watched the slowing
tempo of her fingers, cleared his throat nervously, and decided to
meet her half way.
"That was really all I had to offer; wasn't it? . . . just money?"
She returned slowly to the bedside, drew up a chair, sat down, and
rested her plump arms upon the white counterpane close to his
pillow.
"You have something very valuable besides money; but you'll never
use it." Her tone was judicial, prophetic. "It's in you, all
right, but it will never come out. Nobody will ever know that you
had it. The money will always be blocking the way. . . . You were
much disturbed to-day, because you overheard an impolite
insinuation that your life wasn't worth saving at the price of
Doctor Hudson's. Naturally, you resented that. Your indignation
does you credit. . . . However--crude as that man was, what he
said was true, wasn't it? . . . You admitted it was true when you
decided to put up a cash difference. But you can't justify
yourself that way. It might make things more comfortable for the
Hudson family; but it wouldn't help you to live with yourself
again."
She had taken his hand in hers, maternally. Disengaging his eyes,
she stared upward absorbedly, and murmured, as if quite alone,
"He'd never do it, of course. . . . Couldn't! . . . Wouldn't! . . .
Too much money. . . . It would be too hard . . . take too
long . . . but God! . . . WHAT A CHANCE!"
Bobby stirred uneasily.
"I'm afraid I don't get you . . . if--if you're talking about me."
"Oh, yes, you do!" She nodded her head, slowly, emphatically.
"You know what I mean . . . and you wish you were up to it . . .
but--" pulling herself together resolutely, "you're not; so we
won't talk about it any more. . . . Is there something I can get
for you before I go?"
Bobby raised a detaining hand, and their fingers interlaced.
"I think I know now what you're hinting. But it's quite
impossible, as you say. It's worse than impossible. It's
ridiculous! Doctor Hudson was famous! Nobody can ever replace
him! . . . Oh, I say, Mrs. Ashford; that's quite too bad! I
didn't mean to say the wrong thing, you know!"
For Nancy's eyes had suddenly tightened as if wincing under sharp
pain, and her white head bent lower and lower in a dejection
strangely out of keeping with her aggressive personality. He
ventured to touch her hair in a clumsy, boyish caress, murmuring
again that he was sorry.
"That's all right, boy," she said thickly, regarding him with weary
eyes, suddenly grown old. "You needn't worry about ME! . . . I'LL
carry on! . . . My little problem is quite simple compared to
yours."
She straightened up, patted his hand, and smiled.
Bobby raised on one elbow.
"You're a good sport, Mrs. Ashford!"
"Thanks! . . . You like people to be good sports; don't you? . . .
So do I. I'd rather be a good sport than worth millions! . . . I
expect you're a pretty good sport too; aren't you, Bobby?"
He relaxed on his pillow and studied the ceiling.
"Your--what you were talking about--would be a sort of sporting
proposition; wouldn't it?"
"Quite!"
"Years and years!"
"For life! . . . There would be no discharge in that war!" She
extended her hand, as one man to another.
"I'm going now. . . . Sure you're not angry with me any more?"
He shook his head, with tightly closed eyes, and gripped her hand.
The emotional tension of the past half hour was taking advantage of
his physical weakness. Hot tears seeped through his lashes, and
trickled down his temples.
Nancy withdrew her hand, stood for a moment silently regarding him,
her knuckles pressed hard against her lips; then turned away and
quietly closed the door behind her.
III
"You say he's different," pursued Joyce interestedly. "How do you
mean--different? Sober, perhaps?"
Masterson chuckled.
"Don't be a fool!" she growled. "You know very well what I meant."
He returned his empty glass to the silver tray on the table,
settled himself comfortably into the cushions of the garden swing,
and so frankly considered the slender shapeliness of the girl in
the wicker chair that she shifted her position uneasily.
"Yes," he replied, reverting tardily to her question, "he's all of
sober, and then some. He's owlish . . . morose . . . prowls the
night like Hamlet . . . has an idea that people resent his having
been saved from drowning."
"How absurd! Did he tell you that?"
"As much as."
She thumbed the pages of the novel that lay in her lap and frowned.
"Well--and what is he proposing to do about it? . . . Sulk?"
Young Masterson indicated by a slow shake of the head, eyes half
closed, that the problem was too vast for him, and meditatively
tapped the end of a fresh cigarette on the arm of the swing.
"You'll discover for yourself that Bobby is greatly altered since
his accident. I can't quite make him out. Yesterday, when I saw
him at Windymere, I expected to find him in better spirits. He is
almost well now; has been walking about on the grounds for days.
But he seems thoroughly preoccupied. I suggested it might improve
his disposition if we threw together a little cocktail, and he
said, 'You know where the makings are: help yourself.' I shook up
enough for both of us, but he wouldn't join me; and when I ragged
him about it, he replied, from about ten miles off, that he'd
'another plan in mind.'
"'Something that doesn't include gin, evidently,' I suggested; and
he nodded cryptically.
"'Something like that,' he replied. You know about how little he
discloses through that poker face of his, when he decides to be
incomunicado."
"So--you dared him to tell you, I suppose."
"No; I just kidded him a little, but he didn't take it very nicely.
Just sat--and posed for 'The Thinker.' 'What's the big idea?' I
said. 'Gone over to Andy Volstead?'"
"What did he say?" demanded Joyce, as the pause lengthened.
"He said, 'Hell, no!' and then mumbled, down in his throat, that
he'd gone over to Nancy Ashford."
"And who's Nancy Ashford?" she inquired, sharply, flushing with
annoyance over her disclosure.
"You ought to know," smugly enjoying her vexation. "She is the
superintendent of Brightwood Hospital."
"Oh--you mean MRS. Ashford. I hadn't thought of her as Nancy.
They must have become quite well acquainted. Why, she's an old
lady."
"Well--so much the better; wouldn't you say?"
She met his banter with a grimace.
"You spend too much of your time thinking up story plots, Tommy.
It's affecting your mind."
"Maybe so," agreed Masterson dryly. He stretched his long arms
over the back of the swing and regarded her with an inquisitive
smile. "Your own story grows more exciting every minute. What
else do you want to know about Bobby?"
Joyce offered him the concession of a crooked smile.
"Did he say whether he was coming in soon?"
"Nary a word on that. However, he may not feel himself quite up to
it yet. . . . Rather awkward situation, you'll admit."
She nodded, and there was a moment's silence.
"You have Bobby and me all wrong, Tom. We were together pretty
steadily . . . in December . . . before Helen came. . . ."
Masterson broke in with an unpleasant chuckle.
"I'm surprised that you remember anything about December," he
teased. "My own recollection of it is very pale."
"Yes; I'll admit it was rather dreadful. Especially the evening we
celebrated your birthday. That must have been a mighty rough night
on the sea. Incidentally, I have not seen Bobby since. When he
finished at the university in February, he sailed for France to
visit his mother, without a line to me that he was going. I had
two short letters from him later. Then he turns up at home; next
day this dreadful thing happens to us."
She hesitated before going on.
"So--now you know exactly how thick we are. Does it sound--
romantic like?"
"Of course, you're bound to keep it in mind," observed Masterson
soberly, "that Bobby feels quite terribly about the--the thing that
occurred out there at the lake. Never having met Helen, he is a
bit shy about meeting her now. He may fear she would be slightly
prejudiced against him, under the circumstances."
"I'm afraid she is," agreed Joyce reluctantly. "Entirely natural
that she would be."
"How is Helen, by the way?"
"Oh, she's steady--the darling! Want to see her? I'll tell her
you're here."
She rose, handing Masterson her book.
"Helen has been entertaining a queer little lady for the past hour
or more, but I think she is free now. The caller was one of
father's patients, I presume. So many people have been here lately
. . . all sorts . . . people we had never heard of who come with
tearful gratitude to tell us what father had been to them. Really,
it has kept us quite stirred up. I wish they wouldn't. . . . And
letters? . . . To-day there was a long one from a man in Maine
hinting that father had saved his life, somehow, years ago. He
didn't state the particulars. . . . Seemed rather secretive, as if
there were some big mystery behind it; as if there were something
he wanted to tell, but couldn't. Very queer. . . . I'll go and
call Helen."
* * * * *
She turned toward the big white house with the green shutters, and
Masterson's eyes appraisingly followed her graceful movements as
she crossed the lawn. . . . Some girl! . . . He set the swing
gently in motion and inhaled deeply from his cigarette. . . . A
thoroughbred! So, she was Bobby's, then? What the devil did Bobby
mean--trying to keep this a secret from him? Well, if she
considered herself Bobby's property--and obviously she did--Bobby's
pal must be loyal. However, a man could look at her, couldn't
he? . . . And wish she belonged to him? . . . A compliment, in
a way . . . perhaps . . . debatable question, probably. . . . But
seriously, why shouldn't an artist in creative writing have as much
licence to admire beauty for its own lovely sake as a painter--no
matter whose girl she thought she was? What a type! Not many
blondes like that left in this dyed and painted world. . . .
Original colours, these. . . . Pale gold and milk white; with the
slinky-footed gait of some wild woods thing. . . . Some girl! But
what made her think Bobby was interested in her? Or--was he? If
so, he had kept his sentiments carefully concealed. . . .
Joyce's reappearance through the shrubbery, accompanied by her step-
mother, interrupted Masterson's day-dreaming. The two offered a
striking contrast. Mrs. Hudson was Latin in every feature and
curve, in the glossy blackness of her shingled hair, the arch of
her brows, the utter lack of self-consciousness in her posture and
carriage. Joyce was perfect Saxon; slightly the taller. Leading
the way, she seemed the older.
He strolled to meet them. Helen waved her hand, upon sight of him.
She had adopted the rôle of being years his senior, much to his
amusement. They had often made a little game of it--he, cast for
the part of a spoiled nine-year-old, which he carried off with
amazing skill; she, the exasperated but polite mother, endeavouring
to keep her whelp in hand without making too much of a scene. They
had done it, quite spontaneously, at the Byrnes, one evening.
Laura Byrne, upon her own testimony, "had about passed out,"
Senator Byrne had said the skit was worth a fortune in vaudeville
"big time". They had thought it not half bad, themselves.
The conventional uniform of the bereft had only accentuated her
youth. It called attention to her girlish vitality, deepened her
dimples, whitened her throat; as a severe frame on a bright etching
will heighten its colours; emphasize its values.
She extended a small hand and smiled. Her recent experience had
left traces. She was pale and a bit remote, her appearance
suggesting convalescence from a serious illness.
The smile fluttered momentarily and was gone; but it was
essentially the same smile that one waited for, plotted for, tried
to recapture in memory, analyzed without success. Once Masterson
had attempted to persuade one of his women in a story to smile like
that; but she couldn't learn it. He had written, of "Gloria"--
"It was more than a smile. It was a little sonata, in three
movements. It arrived first in her eyes, which gradually grew
wider and bluer. Almost imperceptibly, but very disturbingly, the
patrician brows lifted, ever so little, as if they asked
permission. That was the adagio movement.
"Then, suddenly, the sonata played upon her lips, as when an
organist seeks with one hand a lower bank of keys for the melody.
They parted to disclose the smallest, straightest, whitest of
teeth. That was the scherzo movement.
"Instantly, however, as if the lips had become alarmed at their own
audacity, they closed, demurely. But the smile lingered in her
eyes--in the outer corners of her eyes--long after her pretty mouth
had done with it; and that was the largo movement. Largo
dolcemente.
"And the beholder? What of him? Ah--but his pulse ran on into
throbbing, pounding strotto!"
Masterson knew the description was silly. He had added, rather
helplessly:
"--a vastly disquieting smile; a smile to be smiled with
discretion, preferably among strong-minded, elderly men--relatives,
if at all convenient to have relatives at hand."
Helen Hudson smiled. To-day it was a sonatina. The movements were
adagio, andante, lento; but it was no less stirring for its
chastened mood.
* * * * *
"It seems a long time since we saw you, Tom," she said, in her
husky contralto, motioning him to a place beside her in the swing.
Joyce had remained standing.
"Tommy," said she, "I had promised Ned Brownlow I would go for a
ride with him. He's out front now, waiting for me. . . . Mind if
I go?"
"Depart in Peace!" Masterson held up two fingers, pontifically.
"I am in excellent hands."
Joyce's slim fingers trailed caressingly across her stepmother's
shoulders as she moved away. "I'll not be long, dear," she said.
"Have you been getting out, at all?" inquired Masterson, with
comradely solicitude.
Helen shook her head.
"Too busy! Callers come here at all hours; people one can't very
well refuse to see; patients of Doctor Hudson's and others he
appears to have befriended in one way or another. I presume you
recall the quite unusual number of floral remembrances. . . ."
"I never saw so many!"
"Well, Tom, those flowers came at the direction of people from many
places; from persons whose relation to us was very difficult to
establish. Fully a score were unidentifiable by anyone at
Brightwood. And these callers I am receiving daily are mostly
unknown to us. They come to inquire if there is anything they can
do for Joyce and me. Yesterday a queer old Italian turned up and
tried to present me with a thousand dollars. That's just a sample.
Their stories are quite different, what there is of them--for they
are strangely reticent--but one fact is common to all . . .
sometime, somewhere, Doctor Hudson had helped them meet a crisis--
usually involving money loaned; though not always money; sometimes
just advice, and the aid of his influence."
"He surely had a big heart!" said Masterson.
"Yes, certainly; but there's more to it than that. Lots of men
have big hearts, and are generous with their money. This is a
different matter. His dealings with these people were something
other. They all act as if they belonged with him to some eccentric
secret society. They come here eager to do something, anything,
for me, because they want to express their gratitude; but when you
pin them down and invite them to tell you by what process they got
into our family's debt, they stammer and dodge. It's very strange.
"Since two o'clock, I've been listening to a story that perplexes
me more than any of the others; probably because I prodded a little
deeper into the mystery. An old lady I didn't know existed came to
tell me what a wonderful man Doctor Hudson was, and could she be of
any aid to me? . . . I'd like to talk it over with someone. Would
it bore you?"
"Tell me--please!"
"Well--it all began, said Mrs. Wickes, with an operation on her
husband. Doctor Hudson had warned them it was hopeless. The
family was left destitute. She says there was no bill sent from
the hospital; that Doctor Hudson found a good position for the
older boy and sent the girl, who had some talent for drawing, to an
art school. . . . She pointed to that lovely marine over the
mantel in our living-room, and said, 'That's hers. She gave it
to him. It was exhibited by the Architectural League in New
York.' . . . Doctor Hudson had stood between them and disaster, she
said, until they were able to look out for themselves; and when, a
couple years later, she went to his office with a small payment on
the debt they owed him, he refused to accept it; said, at first,
that he had had enough joy out of it, and didn't want to be repaid
any farther. She quite insisted; and he said, 'Did you ever tell
anybody about our little transaction?' 'No,' she replied. 'You
told me not to--and I didn't.' 'Then,' he declared stoutly, 'I
CAN'T take it back!'
"Of course, she was dissatisfied to leave it that way--she has all
the instincts of a lady--but when she pressed him to take the money
he explained, 'Had I considered this a loan, I could accept its
repayment. I did not so regard it, when I invested it in your
family. You have all been much more successful and prosperous than
I thought you were going to be. So--since I believed I was giving
it to you outright, I CAN'T take it back now because, in the
meantime, I HAVE USED IT ALL UP, MYSELF!"
"Pardon me," said Masterson, "I don't believe I quite understand.
What was that last thing he said to her?"
Helen nodded, mysteriously, and repeated the inexplicable phrase.
"You may well inquire," she went on. "I asked Mrs. Wickes what
that meant, and she grew restless. 'I can't say that I rightly
know,' she stammered.
"'But you have a suspicion!' I said.
"At that she hurriedly changed the subject by taking a bulky purse
from her handbag. She pressed me to take the money. It had been
invested, she said, and now she wished to restore it to us.
"I said to her, 'If Doctor Hudson refused to accept it, so shall I.
You had best reinvest it. Put it back where it was, if it yielded
a good rate.'
"'Oh, I can't do that,' she replied. 'They're quite done with it,
you know.'
"Well, after that, I gave it up! She was over my head!"
"Perhaps she's a bit cracked," hazarded Masterson.
Helen was thoughtful.
"Yes; she would be cracked, and we could let it go at that, and
smile over it, if she was the only one of her species."
"You mean that you've entertained some more like her?"
She nodded.
"Yesterday, a quite well-known merchant called on me. You would
recognize his name. His affair with Doctor Hudson dated ten years
back. He wanted to pay me a pretty large sum of money which he
said was interest on a loan. I thought it odd that he was coming
forward with it after so long a time, and he confessed that Doctor
Hudson had refused it. So did I, of course.
"My curiosity had the better of me, and I pressed him to tell me
about it. He said that about ten years ago he was on the rim of
failure. He had started in business for himself; had over-reached;
and, as if he was not having enough anxiety, his wife passed
through a lengthy and expensive illness. He had built a beautiful
home. It was more than half paid for. He decided to let it go at
a cruel sacrifice to get cash to put into his tottering business.
He listed the house with a real estate concern. It was worth
thirty-five thousand dollars. He was offering it for twenty
thousand. There was a temporary depression of real estate values.
Well--next day, he said, Doctor Hudson came to see him.
"'I understand you're selling your home for twenty thousand
dollars. Why are you doing that? It's worth twice that much.'
"The young merchant explained that he must have money immediately,
or his business would fail.
"'I'll lend you twenty thousand,' said Doctor Hudson. 'I haven't
it, but I can get it. Pay me the principal of this loan when you
are prospering again. I shall not expect any interest, because I
have use for it, myself; and you are not to tell anyone, while I
live, that we have transacted this business.'"
"What an odd deal," commented Masterson.
"Wait until you hear the rest of it," said Helen quietly. "Within
three years, my caller said, he had returned the money, and was
insistent upon paying interest on the loan. Doctor Hudson refused
to take it. And what do you think he said when he declined to
accept the money?"
"Give up!"
"He said, 'I can't take it, you see; for I'VE USED IT ALL UP
MYSELF!' Now--that's five distinct times I've heard that phrase,
in the past week! What do you make of it?"
"Queer!" said Masterson. "Couldn't have had something to do with
his income tax, could it? You know . . . so much allowed for
gifts, charity, and the like."
"Tommy, don't be foolish!"
"Well--have you a theory?"
"Not the faintest glimmer of one." Then, animatedly, "Did you ever
hear the story of Doctor Hudson's early life?"
"No; does it offer a clue to these queer performances of his?"
"Not at all . . . at least, it offers no clue to me. Perhaps . . .
to a psychologist, which I am not. . . . But, I think I'd like to
tell you. . . . It's no secret.
"You see, Wayne's parents were very poor. They lived on a farm
upstate somewhere. He had to look out for himself, early. As
a boy he had wanted to be a surgeon. He came to Detroit, at
fifteen, to enter high school, and worked in the home of a Doctor
Cummings . . ."
"And married his daughter! I knew that much."
"You're going too fast. . . . In the Cummings home, Wayne Hudson
was errand boy, hostler, accountant, and, on occasion, nurse, cook,
private secretary, and rescue squad."
"Rescue? How's that?"
Helen hesitated.
"This Doctor Cummings was a very capable man, with a large
practice; but unfortunately he drank too much . . . periodically.
At intervals of anywhere from three weeks to two months, he would
disappear for days. It was Wayne's duty to track him down, clean
him up, bring him home, and meantime invent excuses for his absence
and serve as a shock-absorber between the doctor and all his
interests--the hospitals, the patients, the family."
"Not a very pleasant occupation for a high school boy."
"No," agreed Helen, "but calculated to mature him early. And it
was not by any means a thankless task. Doctor Cummings was of
course deeply appreciative and in his repentant moments assured him
of his lasting gratitude. He sent Wayne to college later, and
guaranteed his medical training with a life insurance policy,
which, strangely enough, became accessible exactly when he had most
need of it, for Doctor Cummings died when Wayne was a senior in
college."
"Perhaps that helps to explain Doctor Hudson's marriage while he
was still a medic," commented Masterson. "Doubtless the girl was
fond of him. He felt under heavy obligations to the family. That
. . . and the propinquity . . . so he married her."
"Not quite that," corrected Helen. "He was very fond of her; had
given up everything to be in Arizona with her until she died. For
more than four years, she was his chief concern. Naturally, he
couldn't give proper attention to his work. He told me he had days
of depression, while in the medical school, fearing he had mistaken
his vocation, after all. His studies were hard, and he had much
difficulty keeping up with them."
"One would hardly think that Doctor Hudson had ever found his
studies difficult."
"He continued to find them so, for fully a year after his wife's
death. Then, something happened! No; I do not know what it was.
He did not tell me, and I did not insist; but something happened!
One day he became conscious of a new attitude towards his books,
his profession. He worked whole nights in the hospital laboratory,
without fatigue. Then, soon after, through an odd circumstance, he
was obliged to do a difficult operation at three o'clock one
morning on an emergency case--a head injury. It attracted much
attention. From then on he specialized in brain surgery. You know
how well he succeeded."
Masterson closed one eye, and considered her thoughtfully.
"I can see," he said, measuring his words, "that it's somehow in
the back of your head that this rather remarkable change in
him . . . this quite sudden step-up from depression . . . sense of
failure . . . halfway notion to quit medicine and sell bonds or
something . . . into prompt recognition and success . . . I think
you suspect that it's all tied around this--this funny business of
his charities? Am I right?"
She nodded.
"Mostly however because here are two mysteries about him. I
suppose I have tried to relate them . . . unconsciously, perhaps.
They may have no association, at all. . . . Maybe he would have
told me all about it, had he lived. . . . But--we've talked enough
about mysteries, Tommy. Let's go and look at the asters."
Masterson followed her through the garden, admiring her childish
enthusiasm over the autumn flowers. It was as if she caressed
them. He knew she expected him to go now, and toyed with his keys.
"Don't stay in too closely," he admonished. "These people will
wear you out."
"I'm taking a few days off . . . going up into the country to-
morrow, to see Martha, our caretaker's sister. She's not very
well . . . dreadfully broken up, you know; and I haven't seen her
since it all happened."
"Might I drive you up? I should like to!"
"Thanks; but I shall want my car while I am there."
"We might tow it!"
"Oh--do you really want to go up there so badly as that? I'll tell
you what you may do; drive Joyce up to Flintridge, Sunday
afternoon. Probably I'll be lonesome by that time."
They strolled together to the gate.
"How fine it is that you and Joyce still have each other!"
"Yes; isn't it?"
He stepped into his car, waved a hand, and disappeared around the
corner. Slowly Helen retraced her steps to the garden, sauntered
along the narrow path, stooped to cup her pink palms around a
garish dahlia. How fine it was that she and Joyce still had each
other. . . . Or had they?
IV
As old Nicholas arose from the table that Saturday night, he said,
no more to his tall grandson than to himself, "I am glad I could
live until now!"
The past eight years had been dreadfully unhappy for him. It was
not that there had been fresh reasons for unhappiness, but leisure
to realize how much of life's solider satisfactions he had missed.
From his 'teens until his retirement from the business he had
organized, Merrick's consuming passion had been concerned with the
development of a great industry; an enterprise singularly difficult
in that it lacked the natural guidance of established precedents.
There were rules to be made for it, but none to be followed. It
was a business without an ancestry.
Men who dealt with any product in the field of ceramics had
thousands of years of good tradition back of them. Weavers,
tanners, jewellers, masons; builders of houses, ships, cathedrals;
growers of grain, fruit, cattle--these people could plot their
economic curve and determine future policies by past experience.
It was not so of motors.
The rise of that industry had been meteoric, dramatic! A
prosperous young bicycle factory turned its attention to the
experimental manufacture of a horseless carriage, as a tentative
sideline. Young Merrick's stockholders were frankly sceptical of
the venture in the face of public hilarity over the noisy,
undependable, cumbersome, dangerous gasoline buggy.
And then--one day--the power-driven vehicle was suddenly an
accepted fact. But the distance between the fox-statured eohippus
and the draft horse was no wider than that of the evil-smelling
little rattle-trap of an automobile, when Nicholas Merrick first
made its acquaintance, and the strong, swift, silent, streamline
motor-car which eventually developed.
Its evolution involved hazards as foolhardy as investments at Monte
Carlo. A bewildering succession of revolutionizing inventions made
the business over, again and again, while investors wrung their
hands and shrieked discordant counsel into the ears of apprehensive
directors. Costly machinery, installed yesterday, would be
scrapped to-day to be replaced by costlier to-morrow. Those were
days when the man who bore the final responsibility for such a
chaotic enterprise found that twenty-four hours' devotion to
business was demanded by this unprecedented industry, plunging
impetuously over an uncharted course, narrowly skirting ruin every
few weeks, and turning sharp corners every day.
Responsive to general clamour, prophetic of great fortunes to be
made, innumerable companies hastily entered the motor-mart where
competition became merciless, unscrupulous. Disaster was
inevitable for all but a few of the keenest, the bravest, the
luckiest. Merrick experienced all the anxiety of a pioneer leading
a long wagon-train of scared emigrants across a trackless desert
without a compass. For fully thirty years, but little of his time
or thought had been deflected from his exacting responsibility.
When, therefore, at seventy-two, he wearily dismounted from the
tiger he had ridden--an event which called for a brilliant
complimentary banquet at the Chamber of Commerce in the suburban
town of Axion--he was a very tired old man with a fortune estimated
at twenty millions, a high blood pressure, and a large stock of
disquieting memories.
Clif. . . . God!--what a tragedy! . . . Clif's mother--a timid,
brown thrush of a woman--had died when the boy was twelve.
Nicholas had scarcely missed her. They had built the big shops,
that year. He saw little of the boy. Occasionally there would be
a brief and stormy session--Nicholas violently hortatory, Clifford
calmly insolent--but nothing ever came of it beyond estrangement.
Nobody could say he had not done his utmost to surround his son
with opportunities. Surely if money could have done it, Clif had a
chance. Nicholas had always silenced his own misgivings with that
reply.
"God knows I've spent enough on him! . . . I can't nurse him,
myself!"
But now that enforced idleness had brought opportunity for serious
reflection, Nicholas milled it all over, elbows on knees, empty
hands dangling. The old alibi was no good. Nor was there any
reasonable expectation of better things to be expressed by the new
generation. Bobby was a lovable youngster, to be sure. Nicholas
rejoiced in his steady wit, his winning smile, his unfailing
consideration of his grandfather's moods, but he gave no promise of
success. Beyond the fact that he played the piano like a
professional artist, possessed an unusual capacity for making and
retaining friendships, and had contrived to finish his college
course, Bobby held out no encouragement that he would ever do
anything worth a thought. He would drive and drink, gamble and
golf, hunt and fish, marry some dizzy, dissipated, scarlet-lipped
little flapper and tire of her; he would summer in Canada, winter
in Cannes, clip his coupons, confer with his tailor, subsidize the
symphony orchestra, appear on the stationery of a few charities and
on the platform when the Republican candidate for President came to
town; and, ultimately, be pushed into a crypt in the big, echoing,
gothic mausoleum alongside Clifford, the waster.
Oh, there had been an occasional ray of hope; a mere
phosphorescence; just enough to make the darkness a little more
dense when the flash was over.
On the last day of his grandson's senior year . . . it was a mid-
year class, with ceremonies deferred until commencement . . .
Nicholas had driven over to the little city of the State
University, lunching with his old-time friend the head of the
Department of Chemistry. He had straightened and beamed when
Professor Garland said, "I don't know whether you're aware of it,
Merrick, but that wild young cub of yours has the making of a
chemist."
"Honest? Speak to him about it; won't you, Garland? It would mean
more--coming from you!"
Garland had made a lengthy rite of mixing his tea and hot water
before replying, "Chemistry's hard work, old chap! Your boy knows
he doesn't have to work!"
And when Nicholas' face fell, Garland added, consolingly, "You
can't blame him. Why should he put on a rubber apron and puddle in
nasty stews and noxious stinks when he can get some joy out of
life."
* * * * *
To-night a great weight had been lifted from old Nicholas. He had
not been prepared for the news of his good fortune, and though his
spirit sang, his sagging shoulders testified to the gravity of the
load he had now thrown off. He laid a brown, parchment-coloured
hand affectionately on Bobby's arm, and together they sauntered
from the dining-room into the spacious library. This was the old
man's sanctuary. The walls were covered, literally from walnut-
beamed ceiling to Chinese rug, with cases filled with unexcelled
and unexplored classic literature. The mental pabulum on which
Nicholas fed, these days, consisted for the most part of mystery
stories strangely alike in plot and technique. It was not that
Nicholas had no mind for better reading. It was only that he was
tired of thinking.
They strolled into the library, and the weary old fellow sank with
a sigh into the depths of his favourite chair. A gaudy-jacketed
detective story lay, face downward, on the table. Bobby took it
up, read its title aloud, and grinned.
"Light, Grandpère?"
He offered a flame at the tip of the old man's cigar.
"Exciting yarn?"
Nicholas puffed energetically for a moment, like a leaky bellows,
and replied, "The inspector is just questioning the cook, Bobby,
and she says she knows the shot was fired at exactly eleven-ten,
because that is the time she always puts out the cat."
"You should be pretty well acquainted with the kitchen habits of
that cook, by this time, Grandpère. It's the same one, isn't it,
in all these stories?"
"By no means, sir," protested Nicholas. "The last cook was a man!"
Bobby was restless to be by himself and eager to divert his
grandfather to his novel so that he might escape. The emotional
strain of the past hour had been decidedly wearing. The confidence
he had extended to the old man represented many days of serious
thought; and nights too when he had paced his room for hours
considering his tentative decision from every possible angle of
objection. Now that he had resolved upon his course, it was only
fair that he should inform his grandfather. He had done so. He
had made a conscious effort to avoid a dramatic moment. He hated
scenes; he had been brought up on them. But old Nicholas had
passed through quite too much despair and anxiety not to be raised
to an exalted mood by the young fellow's calm announcement of a
programme committing him to a task at once expensively sacrificial
and, as to duration, interminable.
For a moment, after Bobby had flung out the words, the old man had
sat stupified and incredulous. He had put down his fork. His jaw
sagged and his chin chopped up and down as in a shaking palsy. The
deep wrinkles about his mouth had joined the wrinkles about his
eyes, in a series of half-circles, as he peered across the table.
He dug his gnarled old fingers into the snowy cloth, rested his
weight on his elbows and demanded, in a rasping treble, "How's
that, Robert? I don't believe I caught what you just said! Say
that again!"
Bobby had said it again, slowly, calmly, convincingly. Old
Nicholas' seamed face twitched, and he rubbed the corners of his
cavernous eyes with the back of his mottled hand.
"You are a brave boy!" he said, his voice breaking.
Then, ashamed of his weakness, he violently cleared his throat,
straightened his back, and declared with dignity, "I congratulate
you, sir! I cannot remember when any member of my tribe has made a
decision of greater moment than yours! May God--bless you!" The
benediction was spoken with a quaver. . . . It was almost too much
for both of them.
For an hour thereafter, Bobby had outlined his future plans with a
breadth of scope and clarity of detail certifying to the vast
amount of time and thought he had spent on them, the old man
following every word with eager nods of his leonine head, and
occasional hard bangings of his fist upon the table to emphasize
his approval. "Yes, sir," he would shout, tumultuously, "you can
do it! You will do it! You have it in you! I always thought you
had!" His mood was reminiscent of the good old days when it
required a deal of table-pounding to convince the directors that a
radical and immediate change of policy was necessary to meet new
conditions, no matter what it cost.
Now that the first tidal wave of enthusiasm had broken and surfed,
Bobby wanted the subject temporarily dismissed. He had lived with
his problem--eaten it, dreamed it, walked the floor with it, gone
to the mat with it, cajoled it, cursed it, for a month; and, having
now brought it to something like a climax, he was ready to see it
tabled.
Sensing his grandson's restlessness as he stood toying with a paper-
weight, Nicholas deliberately located his place in the book,
meticulously polished his glasses, and smiled a very obvious adieu.
"Think I'll step out for a little stroll, if you are to be reading,
Grandpère," said Bobby.
Nicholas nodded several times; puffed noisily, contentedly, buried
himself in his story.
Immediately Bobby's back was turned, however, he put down the book
and stared after the receding figure, his old eyes wide with a new
interest to which he had not yet become accustomed. Bobby looked
back, as he passed through the doorway, and grinned. Nicholas
caught up his book, frowned heavily over some abstruse passage he
had just come upon, and puffed mightily on his long cigar.
* * * * *
Changing his pumps for tennis shoes and his dinner coat for a light
sweater, Bobby let himself out through the carriage door, upon the
driveway. There was a half moon in an unclouded sky and a few
fireflies. He trudged aimlessly on the drive, left it for the
grass, wandered along the narrow path by the rose arbor, found
himself near the huge twin pillars of the gate, strolled out upon
the highway. It was not a busy thoroughfare, but a narrow,
gravelled motor-road serving chiefly the widely-spaced country
estates fronting on the western shore of the lake. It was very
quiet to-night. Hands in pockets, head tilted forward in moody
meditation, he strode along indifferent to his random journey, his
eyes becoming accommodated to the gloom.
He was glad he had told his grandfather. To-morrow he would drive
down to Brightwood and tell Nancy Ashford. It was like having
strong anchors to windward that these two people should share his
secret. He hoped Nancy Ashford would be content to say, "Very
proper! Much as I expected!" and let it go at that. He wasn't
much of a success in moments crammed with sentimentality. It was
all right in the case of Grandpère, of course. He was an old man,
and a bit mellow. But he hoped Nancy would be sensible.
Bobby had walked a mile. A hundred yards ahead of him, at a sharp
bend of the road, a pair of glaring headlights tilted at a
precarious angle indicated that a car had listed heavily to
starboard. . . . In the ditch, he surmised. He heard the sudden
churning of the motor, as power was violently applied to impotent
wheels. "Green driver," he reflected. Again the roar of the
straining motor proclaimed that somebody was making a bad matter no
better. "Fool!" he muttered; and quickened his steps.
Evidently the driver had sighted him, and, unsure of his
intentions, was making a final effort at extrication before he
reached the car; for, as he came within a few feet of it, the
engine fairly bellowed with exasperation and the big coupé
shuddered. There was a young woman at the wheel.
"My God, sister," shouted Bobby, when the racket had subsided,
"don't do that any more!"
Sister accepted the admonition with wide eyes into which Bobby now
gazed interestedly at close range. She smiled, and he reconsidered
his earlier opinion of her. She was probably unaccustomed to
driving in soft gravel; unacquainted with its treacheries; might be
a most excellent driver almost anywhere else.
"Is it really down very deep?" she inquired, with anxiety.
There was a curious huskiness in her voice that gave it an
intimate, just-between-us, confidential timbre.
Bobby walked to the rear and looked.
"Very!" he declared. "To the hub. Your differential is flat on
the ground."
Her face was perplexed. "I don't know what that is," she admitted,
"but I'm sure it shouldn't be."
"No," said Bobby paternally, "they do better when they're up off
the road."
She sighed, and dabbed at a warm neck with a trifle of lace.
"It's my fault, I suppose," ruefully, "I was driving rather fast;
and at that sharp turn a car came whopping toward me with the sort
of lights they use on aviation fields. I turned out, slipped
off . . ."
"And here you are!" finished Bobby. "Lucky you didn't upset. You
might have been badly hurt."
She searched his shadowed face, slightly stirred by the note of
concern for her safety . . . might be safer without it. What she
saw caused her no anxiety.
"Well, at least we have no broken bones to worry about. All I have
to do now is to get this car back on the road. Anything to
suggest? I'm awfully helpless about such things. Not meaning,"
she added quickly, "that I'm in the habit of ditching my car."
"I'm sure you're not," said Bobby encouragingly. "This gravel is
very slippery."
"What do you think I'd better do?" she asked, in a tone that quite
relinquished all further responsibility into his hands.
It was as if she had leaned her slight weight against him. For the
past half hour, he had been thinking himself the loneliest, most
utterly detached person on earth. His important resolution had
quite cut him off from his habitual round of interests, but had not
yet keyed him on to any new ones. Nobody had ever been so
desperately in need of friendship.
He rested an elbow on the ledge of the open window and became
whimsically didactic.
"In cases like this, when the local power-plant has proved
insufficient, it is customary to seek aid. One calls in the
neighbours. They, having suspected all along that their services
might be required, have gone early to bed, and must be pounded out
with loud noises and the offer of a king's ransom. Having bathed,
shaved, dressed and breakfasted, they come, growling, with a
snorting tractor . . ."
"And when they are all ready to pull, the tow-line breaks, and they
must drive the tractor to town for another."
"Something like that," agreed Bobby.
"Your advice seems clear," she said, matching his mood. "First,
one goes for the neighbours." She tallied the item on her fingers.
"But which one?"
"Which one of the neighbours?" Bobby countered with a chuckle. "Or
which one of us? . . . I'll go, of course, gladly. But," he added
commandingly, "you're coming along! I won't have you out here
alone in a stalled car!"
It was spoken spontaneously. Doubtless it meant nothing more than
an unintentionally peremptory way of saying he considered it unsafe
for her to be left by herself on this unfrequented road. But the
fervent phrasing of it, the implied possessorship he had put into
his "I won't have you out here alone" brought her a queer
sensation. Nobody had ever used precisely that tone with her
before. She felt . . . well . . . as if she were being absorbed
. . . ever so little . . . just the tiniest mite of her; like the
first almost invisible trickle of fine sand pouring through the
needle-slim neck of an hourglass; nothing to be alarmed about,
surely. She could easily enough reverse the glass, whenever she
wished. For the moment, it was not unpleasant to let it run; just
for the novelty of it. It wouldn't be much. She would see to
that. In a half hour, she and this delightful chap, with a clean-
cut profile that might have graced a Grecian coin, would go their
ways. If it pleased him to issue orders, she would humour him by
coming to attention and clicking her heels.
Bobby opened the door and offered his hand. She took it without
hesitation and stepped out upon the road.
"Should I have locked the gears?" she asked,
"No," drawled Bobby, "it'll be here when we come back." They both
laughed.
Leaving the highway, they entered a thickly-hedged narrow lane, cut
through a dense tract of tall firs.
"I hope you know where we're going," she said, as Bobby strode
forward.
"Can't say that I do," he confessed. "I never was in here before;
but I think it must be the private road to the Foster estate.
Doubtless we will find one of the farmers' cottages presently."
The girl trudged along beside him, taking two steps to his one on
high heels not meant for hiking in country lanes. A sheep scuttled
out of the left hedge and dashed frantically across the road, a few
feet ahead of them. Instinctively she caught at Bobby's sleeve.
"Oh--but that startled me!"
"Here! Take my hand!"
It was a small hand that she gave him, and he held it as if he were
leading a little child. Absurd as he was bound to admit it, his
attitude toward her was proprietary; and, incautious as she knew it
to be, her response to it was spontaneous. She had a sensation
that just the smallest imaginable emanation of herself was being
quietly assimilated by the strong fingers of this dominating boy.
Mentally, Bobby tightened his grip; physically, he led her as one
would a younger sister.
"We might encounter all sorts of adventures," she suggested.
"Suppose we ran into a nest of--of counterfeiters!"
"There aren't any counterfeiters, any more," scoffed Bobby.
"They're all bootlegging. . . . More profits and less risk."
"Oh--how I hate it!" she cried, passionately. "What a vulgar,
beastly thing it's come to be! It never concerned me, one way or
the other, until lately. But now . . . it's destroying my best
friend!"
Bobby was annoyed at his sudden stab of jealousy. But what right
had he to be jealous?
"I have good reason to hate it too," he rejoined bitterly; adding,
with a growl, "but I believe I've got it licked!"
"Oh, I hope so!" she exclaimed, with a quick intake of breath. "It
would be such a pity . . ."
Her sentence hung suspended, and for some time neither spoke.
"That's the first time anybody ever said to me that it would be--a
pity."
So--the time had come now to reverse the glass. She would do it at
once . . . presently . . . but not abruptly. . . . How did one up-
end an hour-glass gradually, imperceptibly, she wondered. Perhaps
the proper technique would occur to her. . . . Meantime . . . the
silence was lengthening; and silence, at this juncture, was
disturbing.
"You knew it--without being told, didn't you?"
"I'm not sure that I did. It wouldn't have mattered much to
anybody."
"How silly! . . . No one concerned whether you fling yourself
away?"
"That did sound melodramatic, didn't it? . . . as if I wanted to
play Orphan Annie."
"You've been rather--down, haven't you?" Careful! . . .
careful! . . . The glass couldn't be up-ended by any such process
as this!
"Horribly! . . . But--I'm not now!"
"That's good! . . . Fresh grip?"
Neither of them knew just why there was a momentary tightening of
their hand-clasp. Naturally, the word suggested it. The sudden
pressure of his fingers about her hand was but an affirmative;
perhaps an acknowledgment of her encouragement. And her quick
response was a mere friendly note of confidence to a fellow human,
who had been down and was now on the way up. But each was aware--
and intuitively conscious that the other was aware--of a compact; a
curiously indefinable sense of belonging. . . . She released her
hand, a moment later, and instantly realized it was the wrong thing
to have done. . . . The withdrawal only seemed to be a retreat
after an avowal. . . . More than that, it hadn't come about
nearly so casually as it should. Her fingers had slipped slowly
out of his hand, detained ever so slightly by his lingering
pressure. . . . So, she had turned the glass, had she? . . .
"Oh, I see a light!" she cried. "In a window!"
With droll predictions of the manner of welcome they might receive,
they quickened their steps, and presently knocked at the door. A
farmer opened it and stood framed in the glow of an acetylene lamp
suspended from the ceiling. Two small children hugged a leg
apiece, registering curiosity.
After a brief parley, the man retreated for his cap, joined the
pair outside, told them he would be along soon, and went for his
tractor.
Bobby made no attempt to resume the conversation interrupted by the
sighting of the cottage. He took his new friend's small hand,
however, as they turned to retrace their steps, and tucked it under
his arm. She gave it without shyness.
"You'll be going back to college, I expect," he hazarded.
"No, not this year. . . . And you?"
"Oh, I'm through," said Bobby, maturely. "Beginning my
professional course in a few days."
"Law--maybe?"
"Is that what you would pick for me?"
She laughed.
"I think I should know a bit more about you before I selected your
profession."
"Well . . . if you were a man . . ."
"I should go in for surgery."
"Any special kind?"
"Yes," she replied, with quick decision, "I would be a brain
surgeon."
"That's odd!"
"Why?"
Her question went unanswered. The noisy tractor was overtaking
them. They were near the highway, and conversation gave way to the
business at hand.
After much manoeuvring into position, the farmer was ready. Bobby
took the wheel of the coupé, its owner waiting at a discreet
distance until the car should be tugged back upon the road. It was
simply done, but the emergency driver of the coupé stammered
something about the possibility that the steering apparatus might
be in need of inspection. Sometimes a strain like this affected
the steering gear, he said. He was not pressed for specific
explanations. Perhaps, he suggested, it would be best to run down
to the village and make sure everything was safe. He would gladly
go with her if she wished. . . . It was quite