“And shall I go back to the hall now? They will be wondering where I am, I think.”
“Yes. You must go right back, of course. Darling, your frock is charming! You do look too lovely to-night. Tell Dick about your job. He will be particularly interested.”
As Petra started to leave, Lewis reached for her hand. She gave it to him as if in contract. But such a contract! “I shall be on time Monday. Thanks again,” she said.
Their eyes were almost on a level, when they stood together like this, Lewis was so little taller. And Petra’s reticence, a two-edged sword—and for him now—was not merely on guard. It cut down between them, severing all understanding.
“I thought we were all right. There aren’t any loose ends that I know of....”
Lewis had come to his office half an hour ahead of his usual time on Monday morning in order to prepare his secretary for Petra’s appearance there, which would be due, if she kept her word, a few minutes later.
“Certainly there are no loose ends. But that is just the trouble. You are so conscientious that you won’t let the sun go down—no, you won’t let it rise, and that is the point—on loose ends. You sit up nights over the work. I simply had to get you an assistant and this seemed the opportunity. By the way, and it’s very much by the way, did you do what I said and forget the manuscript over the week-end, or did you keep it right by you?”
Miss Frazier did not bother to answer. It was a foolish question. How could she have done what he wanted! His book was going to press in another month. At least, she and the publishers intended that it should. Naturally, she had worked on it over Saturday andSunday, and she would continue to do that, if only Doctor Pryne kept his end up, until the thing was in print. But now she would not waste time in defending her industry, with this new girl due any minute.
“Who is she?” Miss Frazier asked. “Where did you find her?”
“It’s Petra Farwell. She needed a job so badly that I offered her this one without considering very much her qualifications.” He had to admit it. “She has no training but I believe she can typewrite a little. She has done some copying for her father. But whether she can spell or knows how to make out a check, or anything of the sort, I don’t know. I thought we’d put her in the reception office with the telephone and the patients. She has a nice clear voice and nice manners. That will relieve you of the part you like least. Isn’t it so?”
Petra Farwell! That was the girl, the daughter of the novelist Lowell Farwell, about whom they had been speaking here in the office only a few days ago. A young architect, a Mr. Richard Wilder, had made an appointment for the sole purpose of asking Doctor Pryne to psychoanalyze the novelist’s daughter, and he had taken fifteen minutes or more of Doctor Pryne’s time doing it. It was with some satisfaction Miss Frazier had already made a memorandum of the bill she was to send for that interview and obtained the doctor’s approval of it,—twenty-five dollars. Doctor Pryne had turned down the case, naturally, since hewas not a psychoanalyst, and really, anyway, had time for only serious work; but Miss Frazier remembered that he had accepted an invitation to tea at the Farwell home in the country. And this was the result!
Miss Farwell had not sounded a very attractive person. And why should she, the daughter of Lowell Farwell and the stepdaughter of a very rich woman, need a job so badly that Doctor Pryne had engaged her without consulting his secretary, or assuring himself of her qualifications?
But Miss Frazier pulled herself up at this point in her reflections. She had no business letting herself remember anything that had been said about Miss Farwell in a professional fifteen minutes here in the doctor’s sanctum. Her standard for herself was to approximate her employer’s professional attitude as closely as possible—one part of the mind for confidences given professionally, and the other, quite separated and even uncolored by that special knowledge, for the social contact. So at this moment she did not show by so much as a lifted eyebrow that she had any intimate knowledge whatever of Miss Farwell’s character.
“And I’ve promised her,” the doctor was saying, “that between times, when there’s nothing in particular to do for you, she can study shorthand and practice typing. Please order the best textbooks for that, will you, Miss Frazier, this morning,—and a machine. Rent or buy the machine, whichever is more economical. And she will have to have a table for it in the receptionoffice. You can get that while you are out at lunch.—After she gets going, she might take on some of the book. As I said, she has done copying for her father.”
The expression with which his secretary received this last remark, however, showed Lewis his stupid mistake. “I’m just talking through my hat,” he said quickly. “That is a hopeless idea, of course. But can you tell me how it is that you appear to be the only known human living who can make out my stuff, Miss Frazier?”
The girl averted her face. Her clear-cut, almost cameo profile kept its accustomed impersonal secretarial look, but her cheek was hot. Lewis saw the unaccustomed color and was annoyed with himself for his second stupidity in the minute.
She said, “It’s a sixth sense I have about your writing, I guess. It almost seems so, anyway. I am not so extraordinarily good about all illegible handwriting. But even the first day, yours was pretty clear to me. It surprises me myself.”
“Well, that is the best of luck for me,” Lewis murmured, and was grateful to hear a door opening and a step out in the reception office. “That must be Petra,” he exclaimed, and went out quickly.
He brought her in. But Miss Frazier, at the moment of Petra’s entrance, was blind to Petra’s bodily reality. It was rather the reflection of her on the doctor’s face that Miss Frazier saw and read as easily as she was accustomed to read his illegible script. “It has happened at last,” the thought sliced through her brain,clean, knifelike. And then, flowing through and over the wound, came the tides of her will, cooling the painful gash. “Nobody must guess that it matters.... It doesn’t matter.... It can’t matter....”
It was will, too, that jerked her attention from the doctor’s mirroring face, after that first second, to the girl herself. There she stood in a cool white frock with a violet-colored felt hat slouched Greta Garbo fashion over bright curls. She looked frightened. Why should she be frightened?
“Miss Frazier will initiate you,” the doctor’s voice was blurred and as far away as his face, washed over by the tides of Miss Frazier’s brave will. “You must ask her anything you need to know as it comes up, Petra. That is the simplest way, I suppose, to learn the ropes. And now I had better have a look at the mail.”—It was there, already sorted for him into piles on his desk, with Miss Frazier’s accustomed clarifying notes attached.
Miss Frazier took Petra, first, to the dressing room which now they must share. “This door goes into my private office,” she explained, “and this into the reception room, which will be in your charge. I’ll clear all my personal things out of the desk at once.”
When she had taken off her hat and powdered her face, Petra followed the secretary to the desk which was to be, miraculously, her very own, and they stood looking down on it together—both of them inarticulate and at a loss. “Perhaps the best way will be for you merelyto stick around and notice how I answer the telephone to-day,” Miss Frazier decided, after a minute of cogitation. “One of your jobs, when you have caught on, will be to take down the names and addresses of the new patients, and file them here in this card drawer. Do you see? Whether the doctor accepts them as patients or not, we want the names and addresses, and the date that they telephoned or came. That is the only recording you will do out here. The rest I attend to, and it all goes into the files in the inner office. The most difficult thing to learn will be which calls to pass on to the doctor, though. I don’t myself quite see how he thinks you are going to begin learning that....”
Meanwhile Doctor Pryne, with his door shut, stood looking down at his desk, but not touching the letters. He intended to take Petra out to lunch with him in a few hours and explain to her—although he could never do that really, since he didn’t understand it himself—how he had ever been so stupidly forgetful as to mention Teresa’s name to Clare, after Petra’s warning him not to. Petra would forgive him. She must, of course. And then she would finish about Teresa. Or perhaps Teresa Kerr was living in Boston and would be in at the office this very day to see Petra. Or perhaps Petra would take him to see Teresa. In any case, Lewis’ interest in Teresa had increased, almost unreasonably, since Petra had broken off telling him about her, Saturday afternoon.
Now, in another second, he must start in on the day’swork, beginning with the top letter on the right-hand pile—the pile Miss Frazier had markedimmediate. And when he did start in, he must put Petra out of his mind,—luncheon plans, interrupted confidences, and all. If he wasnotcapable of putting Petra clean out of his mind and keeping her there for hours at a stretch, then the situation he had got himself into would be absurd and impossible. But he had offered her the job of his own impulse, and the fact that she had accepted it in a totally different spirit from what he had expected, had nothing to do with her right to keep it. It was hers, of course, just as long as she wanted it, although her reason for wanting it had become a mystery to him. So, he must—in half a second—clear his consciousness of her there just a few feet beyond his closed door—clear it clean as a whistle.
But as he prepared to make the effort, the telephone buzzed at his elbow. Petra’s voice came to him, clear, clipped, but a trifle unsteady. “Mrs. Joseph Duffield is calling you from New York, Doctor. Shall I put her through?”
Lewis mentally congratulated his secretary. She had got Petra started already. That was fine. It was Miss Frazier who had decided, of course, that this call was one he would certainly want to take, and now she was showing Petra how to put it through to him. But he foresaw the time, soon, when Petra, if she really was going to save Miss Frazier and be of use to her, must be left to discriminate for herself, and that was goingto mean many mistakes. He frowned, rather, realizing that eventuality, as he said, “Yes, thanks. I’ll take it.”
Mrs. Duffield’s first words, however, put everything else in the world out of Lewis’ mind. His fingers gripped the bar of the instrument and he listened with a graying face. Yet, when his turn came to speak, his voice was full of confidence, even buoyant. “You have the very best man. Doctor Stephens is an authority. That gives Michael every human chance possible. You did just the right thing. Tell Michael I am catching the first express and will be there in a few hours. My dear, don’t cry....”
He set down the instrument with soft precision then, on the sounds of a woman’s sobs. The next instant he was out in his reception office, his hat jammed under one arm, thrusting his letters into the two pockets of his coat, and looking for Miss Frazier. Petra had no existence for him now. She had been wiped from his consciousness by the bitter news he had just received, without need of a struggle after all. Miss Frazier got up from the chair she had drawn close to Petra’s while she taught her the use of the telephone switchboard, ready for his demands.
“I’m catching the New York Express. Michael Duffield’s got infantile paralysis. He wants me. Stephens is on the case. That gives the kid every chance. I’ll call you up to-night if there’s anything to tell. Doctor Cotsworth will have to take the clinic to-morrow. Give him the dope on the Pettis case pretty carefully. It’s in thefile. Tell Doctor Hagar I’ll call him long distance at four this afternoon and to stay in for it. He’ll have to handle that Arlington business without me. Put the private patients off by telephone. But you’ll have to send a message to McCloud, of course. Give him an appointment for Saturday afternoon. The others will have to wait for appointments till we know when I’ll be back. But before you do anything get in touch with the hospital—” But he broke off. “This is nonsense. There isn’t time. Grab your hat, bring your book. We’ll finish in the taxi.”
He remembered the new assistant then and commanded, “Petra, get us a taxi and tell them it’s rush. Give her the number, Miss Frazier. I’ll get the elevator up.”
Miss Frazier followed the doctor out, not bothering about her hat, but her shorthand pad and her fountain pen were clutched in her hand, and she even had the presence of mind to snatch a pencil from Petra’s desk in case the pen ran dry. Petra got the promise from the taxi company that the car would be at the door in a minute and then went through to the doctor’s office to see whether they actually managed it. To her utter relief, a taxi drew up at the curb just as the doctor and Miss Frazier came out to it. Petra was exhilarated. So far, then, she was a success at this job. There had been no slip. She had been efficient.
Petra had worries enough—even anguish of a sort—to keep her from being radiantly happy over having ajob. Yet it was a dream come true. A year ago, why, even this spring, shewouldhave been radiantly happy. But then it needn’t have been a double job; she needn’t have lived at Green Doors and done the stepdaughter act evenings and holidays. She would have gone to stay with Teresa and they would really have lived. Such freedom, such self-respect, and happiness as would have been hers then! That was the way she had planned it, exhilarated by the very imagining. And now—how different—.
But suddenly Petra forgot brilliant might-have-beens, for her telephone was ringing! She flew. She slipped into her chair, knees under the desk, her spine very straight and businesslike, her eyes grave and listening.—“This is Doctor Pryne’s office.”—And whoever was at the other end of the wire must have known from the pure and winged quality of her voice that the person answering Doctor Pryne’s telephone was young, beautiful, and very much on the job.
“Ordinarily you and I must not tell each other, or discuss, things that come up in Doctor Pryne’s work,—not in terms of personalities, anyway. But Michael, of course, is different. He isn’t a ‘case.’ It is almost as if a child of Doctor Pryne’s had infantile paralysis. Why, it isn’t even almost. It is just the same, really. That’s why I’ve told you about Michael. It would be inhuman for you not to know, when Doctor Pryne returns, whether the boy is lost or saved—how he is feeling about it.”
The two girls were talking in Miss Frazier’s private office at the end of Petra’s first day. Petra had her Greta Garbo hat jammed down over her bright curls, ready to drive out to Green Doors with Dick Wilder, whose car was waiting down on Marlboro Street. She had just looked down from Miss Frazier’s window and seen it.
“I am so grateful you did tell me,” she assured the secretary. “And I am going to ask something. Would you call me up at Meadowbrook to-night—reversed charges—if you hear anything from New York? It’s as if I knew Michael himself now—from your telling.”
Two years ago, Michael’s grandmother had been brought to Doctor Pryne’s clinic. This was what Miss Frazier had just told Petra. The old lady was insane and had to be placed in an asylum. Trailing along with the neighbors who had taken it upon themselves to bring the poor creature to the clinic was the boy, Michael, aged nine, who now, without his grandmother, was alone and would also become a charge of the State. But Doctor Pryne had taken Michael home with him that night.
“He brought him into the office the next morning,” Miss Frazier had told Petra. “He actually wanted to adopt the kid himself. He was a most interesting and lovable little fellow really; but what the doctor could have done with him if he had kept him I cannot imagine. He lives in an apartment hotel because he does not want to bother with a housekeeper. Adopting Michael would have meant a housekeeper, of course, and a real home. But that wasn’t what made Doctor Pryne give up theidea in the end. He would have created a home for that child, given up all his freedom to do it, I am sure, if Michael hadn’t been a Catholic. That made Doctor Pryne feel that he ought to have a Catholic upbringing. It would be the child’s best chance, Doctor Pryne was sure, for living down the frightful memories of his grandmother’s slowly developing insanity. Only continuity in the child’s religious life could carry him on over the break which had come so tragically in his family life. Little Michael had adored his old grandmother and she had been everything to him until her reason began to go. Then she had commenced beating him and imagining he had done things he had never thought of doing. It was horrible.
“Doctor Pryne kept Michael a month or more, trying to decide what to do with him. But he was always worried, wondering what he was up to in the hours between school and the end of work here, when they could be together. Then Doctor Pryne remembered his friend, Mrs. Duffield. She’s a Catholic, a widow with seven children, and a close friend of Doctor Pryne’s. She is extraordinarily beautiful-looking and that had something to do with the doctor’s choosing her. No, I mean it. It did! Michael was so sensitive to beauty and he had had so little of it! Doctor Pryne thinks he has genius. I can’t see myself that Michael’s drawings are remarkable but the doctor says they are. Anyway, when he remembered how beautiful she was, and that she was a Catholic, he took Michael right to New York and persuaded Mrs.Duffield to adopt him. She did it—over night, practically. He would be her eighth child and they are all boys, but she was delighted all the same, after she had had him there for an hour. Pretty lucky she has so much money and didn’t have to think about that! Doctor Pryne goes to New York to ‘play’ with them every few months. They all do wonderful things together,—music, riding in the park, even sea trips. When he comes back from New York he looks almost as if he’d had a year’s vacation. He’s devoted to the whole Duffield family, but Michael is the apple of his eye. It’s picturesque, isn’t it!”
Petra had thought about it, her eyes on Miss Frazier’s pale face. The day had been hot even for June and Miss Frazier had been typing for dear life. Petra had heard her machine going madly hour after hour, in here, through the closed door. That might account for the pallor, but Petra thought not.
“Itispicturesque,” she agreed thoughtfully. “I hope, for your sake as well as Doctor Pryne’s and Michael’s, that—that it turns out all right. I hadn’t been realizing—hadn’t taken in—how anxious you have been all day. I was thinking only of myself, I guess. I thought it was I, that I was to blame,—that you didn’t really like my being here. I am sorry now I was so blind and—and egotistical. It was Michael all the time that made you so silent!”
Miss Frazier had leaned back in her chair at this point and lifted her eyes to her new assistant’s. Before she looked away from that earnest young face, she knewthat she could never resent this girl. It was no longer a case of willing. She said to herself in surprise, “She is kind and strangely gentle. She’s a dear!”
Petra’s thought of Miss Frazier in that meeting of their glances had been as sure and swift as Miss Frazier’s of her. Dick Wilder, when Petra had returned to her party, Saturday night, to have the next dance with him, had said that Doctor Pryne’s secretary was ridiculously starchy and self-important. He had quite frightened Petra of her.—Well, he had been wrong. Miss Frazier was a simply grand person. Her grandness was there in the very curve of her eyelashes and the line of her nose.
Now Miss Frazier was promising: “Yes, when the doctor calls me to-night, I’ll call you. I have a hunch it will be good news, since they got Doctor Stephens onto it so promptly. He’s the last word on infantile paralysis.”
Impulsively Petra came nearer the desk. “Miss Frazier,” she said, “I have a friend I would love you to know. And she you. May I take you to see her some time? She is my best friend. We have been friends for years. She has studied to be a private secretary. I think you will like knowing each other.”
Petra in that moment had no thought of making a friend for herself of Miss Frazier. What had she to offer this clear-cut, high-salaried, dependable person! But Teresa had everything to give her. Teresa and Miss Frazier must know each other. That they would be friends seemed inevitable.
She’s kind and strangely gentle. She’s a dear....
She’s a simply grand person. Good enough to know Teresa....
Friendship is as independent of time as is Eternity. It may require years to arrive, or it may be there, how and why unknown, as if it had always existed, at the trembling of a leaf. Miss Frazier and Teresa were bound to be friends, sooner or later. But to her complete astonishment, as Petra hurried belatedly down to join Dick in his car, she realized that she and Miss Frazier were friends already.
Cynthia Allen was sitting at her dressing table giving her make-up its final touches for dinner and the evening and chatting in the direction of her husband, who was over on the window seat skimming theTranscript. The real reading would come later, after dinner, with the radio for accompaniment. But in spite of Harry’s being directly in the open window, and silent while Cynthia was vocal, it was she, not he, who knew that a car had turned in at their driveway, and ran, lipstick in hand, to kneel beside him and see who it was. For Cynthia, like most adults, if they told the truth about it, felt that every sound of a car’s brakes, every ring of a bell, every knock, might be a possible harbinger of Destiny.
In the present instance, however, there was no grinding of brakes where the Allens’ driveway met the highway, for Lewis’ glittering, long-bodied roadster was very nearly silent in all its ways. What Cynthia had heard was merely the spurt of gravel between her gates. “If only Lewis would live up to his car!” she oftensighed to herself. “If he would have an important-looking office and good-looking tailored clothes!” But she supposed that the car was a tool in his work and that was why he allowed himself always the latest and most expensive model.
“It’s Lewis,” she told Harry, who had not so much as turned his head. Harry’s apparent indifference did not deceive his wife, however, nor irritate her. She imagined him every bit as sensitive as herself to the possibilities attending the unexpected; putting off the moment of knowing merely prolonged his agreeable suspense. “But Lewis is a thoughtless beast,” she said aloud. “He might have called up. Nellie will be frantic.”
Then she pushed up the screen and leaned over the sill. Her brother had seen her and stopped under the window.
“Go right around to the kitchen,” she whispered down, her hands funneling her lips. “Tell Nellie that I didn’t invite you or dream you were coming, that you’re not company, and she’s not to do the least bit of fussing for you. I wouldn’t go near her on a bet, myself, but you, with your wide experience, may know how to handle a maddened woman.”
Before Lewis had started on, she leaned from the window again and called down in her natural voice, “Harry says we’re delighted you’ve come.”
A minute later her eyes met her husband’s in the mirror of her dressing table. Her own were worried andHarry was curious about it. She answered his silent question.
“Harry! I don’t like it. I don’t like it a bit. I’m—deeply troubled.”
“My dear! You blessed idiot! I thought it was merely your idea of being funny. What has happened to your sense of humor? If Nellie doesn’t like it, she can lump it. What’s it to us! She isn’t such a hot cook, anyway. Besides—”
But Cynthia was laughing. “Blessed idiot yourself!” she crowed, but went on quickly serious again. “It isn’t Nellie; it’s Lewis I mind! See here! This is Thursday, isn’t it? Lewis was here over the week-end and now he’s back again. Twice in one week. Why, do you suppose?”
But Harry had no idea. Certainly it was unprecedented. And Cynthia went on. “Well, I’ll tell you. Lewis has come to see his new stenographer. Being with her all day in town—having Petra right there in his office from nine to four every single day in the week—isn’t enough. He has to come shooting twenty miles out to Green Doors to spend the evening with her. He’s a lost soul, I tell you.”
“But this isn’t Green Doors! This is my house. He has come to see me and the kids—perhaps even you. If he wanted to be with Petra Farwell, he could take her out to dinner in town or to the Country Club. Just the two of ’em. No need to go all around Robin Hood’s barn to get at her. But even if Petra lived here and hehad come to see her—what of it? What’s the matter with Petra? Why shouldn’t Lewis be left to choose his own girl? Why need you fasten such an expression onto a perfectly good face over it?”
Cynthia looked deeply into her mirror, curious to see what the expression was. She answered amiably, “Lewis must choose for himself, of course. But I have a right to my concern, haven’t I? He isn’t seriously in love with Petra. He couldn’t be. It’s merely her youth and beauty.... I’m sure of it.... Mere physical attraction!”
Harry got up and started for the door. He had business with the cocktails and also he must welcome his brother-in-law. But he turned back, for a minute. “Mere youth and beauty? Mere physical attraction?You might as well say ‘mere dynamite’ and have done with it,” he said seriously. “You and your meres! You’re an idiot.... We are happily married. Ten years happy. Who are you to be babbling like some old maid of ‘mere physical attraction.’ Mere lightning—and you know it! Look here! If they are really that way about each other—well, let’s hope they’ll be happy.”
“Harry, you can’t make me mad. I know you’re an idealist.”
“Am I? Perhaps. But I’m not a sentimentalist.”
“Do you think I am?”
“When you say ‘mere physical attraction’ you are. A woman who has been a lover herself for ten years! It’s mawkish and insincere.”
“But you and I are intellectually congenial, Harry!”
“We weren’t when we married. We’ve developed along the same lines since, that’s all. But it was passion that melted us up and made our mental and spiritual amalgamation a reality. We only thought we were congenial, those early days, because we wanted each other so desperately.”
“Even if you’re right,” Cynthia said quickly, “it mightn’t turn out with Lewis and Petra as it has with us. I don’t see how it could. She’s so shallow.”
“Of course nobody knows how it will turn out ever. But if they’re drawn to each other by mere—mere—what was it you said they were drawn by? I don’t remember—but what you meant was mere cosmic forces—I guess you’ll have to let that attraction take its course, and remain a mere sister who hasn’t a thing to say. Sorry, darling. But you annoy me, rather.” He kissed her, all the same, as if that was what he had come back for.
Cynthia had guessed right. Lewis was really headed for Green Doors, intending only to dine with the Allens en route. He told Cynthia and Harry about his summons to New York and gave them a dramatic account of the latest methods in the treatment of infantile paralysis, but he was careful to wait until the children were safely out of earshot. Little Michael Duffield was going to get well and the probability was that he would suffer no permanent disability from his terrible experience. The other Duffield children had been packed offto the shore in charge of tutors and with a trained nurse to watch for symptoms. They had gone off in two large cars and were living in an isolated cottage to meet all the requirements of quarantine. But Mrs. Duffield herself was staying with her adopted boy and would not join the others until he was well enough to be taken with her, unless one of her own children developed the disease.
“There is almost no limit to what modern science can do, with wealth to back it up,” Cynthia commented.
But Lewis met this with silence. He had just been through a twenty-four-hour agonizing suspense, when all that science had to give, and all that wealth could buy, and even all that love could plead, had waited on—a Mystery. And the Mystery, over and over, during those dread hours, had been named by Mrs. Duffield, “God’s Will.” Lewis’ face was strained and his eyes still heavy from watching.
The Allens were a little embarrassed by the way Lewis had taken the business; but they were touched as well. They knew how peculiarly devoted to this little Michael he was. Cynthia was glad, indeed, that she herself had not known that the boy was so ill all these past days, and Lewis with him. That would have worried her for her brother’s sake infinitely more than this Petra business was worrying her. Petra fears, in fact, had dwindled, in the face of all that Lewis had just told them, into mere goblin phantoms.
But even so she remarked, “It’s funny, but do youknow, I don’t believe Clare knows you’ve been away any more than we did. Petra couldn’t have told them. And what’s still more inexplicable, Petra has gotten home late every evening and hardly has time to dress for dinner. Clare rather implied that you were overworking her, keeping her such unconscionable hours! And all the time you haven’t been there at all!”
Lewis’ eyelids just flickered but he gave no other sign. He had told Miss Frazier by telephone this morning that he would take an afternoon train and be at the office at the usual time to-morrow morning. But Mrs. Duffield had persuaded him to fly instead, and that swift and luxurious way of travel had brought him to Boston late this afternoon. He had dropped around at the office and found Miss Frazier still there. She had sent Petra home early, she said, because of the heat; and the other afternoons she had let Petra catch the three-forty express for Meadowbrook, thinking there was so little need for two of them with the doctor away.—What was the mystery? Why need Petra be so devious, Lewis asked himself. But he was glad he had been warned. Very glad. He might so easily have betrayed her to-night, later, at Green Doors.
It was dark when Lewis drove up the Green Doors road and recognized Dick’s car standing before the door. He was taken to the library, after having sent in his name and been left waiting a minute or two in the hall. The maid who had admitted him had seemed none too sure that any one was at home. He realized the reasonfor her caution when he saw what his visit was interrupting. Lowell Farwell was reading aloud from his own manuscript. Clare was picturesquely erect in a corner of the divan, working on a brilliant square of needlepoint. Dick lounged and smoked a briar pipe beside her, looking rather romantic, young and very handsome. The author himself sat facing them, his hands full of canary-colored scratch paper.—Lewis was, had he known it, the sole person who would have been allowed to interrupt the reading.
He was welcomed warmly. Clare’s inward smile indeed was as brilliant, as warm, as that on her lips and in her eyes. So soon! She had given Doctor Pryne two or three weeks before he would allow himself to return—and here he was back within the week! Doctor Lewis Pryne! The inaccessible! The unobtainable! It was more than gratifying. It was—exciting and delightful....
“Too bad Petra isn’t at home,” she said at once. “She won’t like missing you. But she said there was extra work to-night and she would have supper somewhere with Miss Frazier and then get back to it. I thought you must be there in person, cracking the slave whip, Doctor. Awfully nice to have you here instead!”
This time, because he was prepared, Lewis did not so much as blink. “No, it wasn’t necessary for me to stay. But I am interrupting. You shouldn’t have been ‘at home.’”
Lowell Farwell was putting away the manuscript.“Nothing of the kind,” he exclaimed. “I can read to Clare any time. Dick came to play with Petra and I did the ancient mariner turn with him; sohewon’t mind my stopping. It isn’t every day I get a chance to talk with a genuine psychologist. If I hadn’t gone in for writing, Doctor Pryne, I should be in your field. Do you, by the way, read Dostoevsky? The Russians know a thing or two. They aren’t afraid of turning to the findings of morbid psychology for suggestion, at least, in their studies of human character....”
It was sometime after ten when Petra let herself softly in at the front door. The library door had been left open after Lewis’ interruption of the reading and she heard voices. Dick’s. Her father’s. If Lewis had happened to speak as she crossed the hall, she would never have gone on and in. She would have stolen away to bed and sent a maid to tell Clare she was at home. It was too late to retreat when she saw Lewis. Her face hardened as she came forward. So Clare had won. They had not known at the office—she and Miss Frazier—that Doctor Pryne had even returned, and yet here he was the first hour he was back, sitting beside her stepmother, helping her wind up a ball of yarn. But it was stupid to be so surprised. Hadn’t she known ever since Saturday evening that Clare had Doctor Pryne in tow! If it were not so, he would never have betrayed Petra’s confidences to her as he had done.
Clare entranced every one, of course,—except Petra herself. But Saturday afternoon, when Doctor Prynehad walked with Petra across to the guest-house piazza and sat there, listening to the bobolink, and Petra had been moved to be herself with him, and even to talk about Teresa, she had thought that Doctor Pryne would be the one exception to the general rule. He would be her friend—Petra’s—not Clare’s.He would see through Clare.He belonged to herself and Teresa. That meeting, long ago in the Cambridge apartment, had made him belong. Or rather they had been deceived—and thought so. Where had the idea come from, anyway? Teresa had been as illusioned as Petra herself. And when he held her chair for her at Clare’s tea table—and even more, while she sat silent beside him, and could not make herself eat or drink because it was so wonderful that he had come at last—Petra hadknownthat he understood her and was close to her in some indefinable but real way. She had known but she had known a lie. It was an illusion brought away out of childhood; and she had been enticed from her secret fastness by it, the fastness where she hid from Clare and all of the life here at Green Doors.
Doctor Pryne was holding a chair for her at this minute as he had held the chair under the elm. The same look was on his face. If she did not watch out, she would be betrayed by it into sincerity again, into being simply herself.
“Darling! You should have called up from the station. I’d have sent a car for you. I suppose you came in a taxi. I didn’t hear it. I was beginning to worry, really.Here’s Elise with punch. You’re just in time, Elise. We are famished. Petra, you do look tired. Pass them to Miss Farwell first, Elise. Darling, you don’t look tired, you lookexhausted.”
Clare was justified in the observation. Petra’s face was shadowed by obvious weariness, and Lewis thought that her long, sun-burned fingers held the stem of her goblet of punch with a counterfeit steadiness. Sheer will was keeping her steady—and hard. He was certain of it.
Lewis himself did not sit down again. He said that he must go. It would be midnight as it was when he got to his rooms, and work would be piled sky-high to-morrow after his absence. But he did not say this. They were not to know that he had been away and not seen his office for several days, since Petra had not told them. And if the child was fearful that he had already explained that he had never kept her working over hours, he would relieve her mind at once. But how?
He said, as casually as he could, “No need to be on time to-morrow, Petra. Mrs. Farwell thinks I’m a slave driver and it will be true unless we call a halt. After this, your hours are to be from nine till four, as we first agreed, and an hour out for lunch.”
Petra was quick to understand. So theyhadtold him! He knew about her lies! But he had not given her away and was not doing so now. That was strange. Why? And it seemed almost as if he were promising her, indirectly, that he had no intention of giving her away at all. At the same time, he was laying a command on her: shemust not use this particular excuse ever again to gain her private ends, whatever they were. Oh, yes, Petra thought she understood, and humiliation drowned what might have been gratitude.
As for Lewis, he had never known that young eyes could hold such dumb, repressed misery as he saw in those that Petra slowly raised to his own, when she returned his formal “good night” with one more formal. But he had only meant to reassure her. Did she think he was taunting or judging? It was intolerable that she should have any such idea. It was intolerable that he should have wounded her and that he could not explain himself to her to-night, before she slept. But could he explain himself to her to-morrow? Could he explain himself to himself, if it came to that? Did he know why he was not appalled by this girl’s deceit and why he was not angry with her for having put him in an unfair position by her lies? If he had only been self-disciplined enough, sensible enough, to have waited until morning to see Petra! Now the night was going to be much longer than it would have been had he never come out here at all. And he had thought to have shortened it by coming!
Lowell Farwell accompanied Lewis out to the street door, insisting again, as they crossed the spaces of the great hall, that he would never know all about morbid psychology until he had made a thorough study of the Russian novelist, Dostoevsky,—and, possibly, a few other even more modern writers of psychological novels.For your novelist knew intuitively what your psychologist only came at through experiment, and he knew it first.
“Yes, read the great novelists,” Farwell advised Lewis, with an almost passionate insistence. “Read Thomas Mann. Read Hardy. And above all read Dostoevsky. Then you might even read some Americans. There are one—or two—you know—”
Lewis got away quickly without admitting the fact that he knew his Dostoevsky practically by heart. Somehow, he hoped he would never have to hear Farwell patronizing that master or comparing his novels to his own, even by implication. Lewis wanted not to detest Petra’s father.
Miss Frazier put a list of Friday’s appointments on Petra’s desk. “This is going to be a crowded day,” she said. “Here they are. The doctor won’t be able to see anybody who’s not down here, unless it is something very special, and you’ll have to decide that. Of course, they’ll all say it is very special. You’ll have to judge in spite of what they say. If you get puzzled, just tell them to telephone again later, or, if it’s somebody calling, keep them until I come out and you can ask me about it. But I think you won’t have to do either of those things. I think you’ll be perfectly able to decide anything that comes up for yourself, Petra.”
“But Janet!” They were Petra and Janet to each other—had been since the second day. “You’re throwing me in and telling me to swim. Suppose I make a mistake?”
“Well, that will be just too bad!” But Janet belied the slangy irony of the words by a quizzical accompanying smile. “It’s the way I myself began,” she said. “And after all, you have had several days now of answeringtelephones and talking to people here, with me right beside you. I never had any such start. Don’t worry. Just dive in. You’ll be all right. I know it.” The doctor’s buzzer had sounded and she had to hurry away to the inner sanctum.
Petra, who had only just arrived at the office, was a little late. Dick Wilder had slept last night at the Allens’ and offered to drive her into town this morning. He had, however, overslept and been late in coming for her. But that had seemed a feeble explanation when Petra offered it to Janet a minute ago and she hoped now that Doctor Pryne need not know of it. Janet, she felt sure, would not mention it unless he asked. As his door was soundproof, the chances were he did not know whether she had come late or early. He himself had been in there since eight. But she decided to depend only on the trains after this. They were never late. She wanted, with all her soul, to be as scrupulous and perfect as humanly possible in this job.
She went into the dressing room, put her hat on the shelf, powdered her face and held her wrists for a few seconds under the cold-water faucet. The papers had promised a day of record-breaking heat for June, and now, only a little after nine, the thermometer in the dressing-room window, here in the shade, registered eighty-five. Petra was not like Clare—and Shelley—elated and toned up by heat. Hot city days frightened her a little and filled her with an anticipation of some unknown but dreaded eventuality. But now that she hada real and an important job, she must be superior to this idiosyncrasy, must keep her mind clear for action and deny the childish mood.
It was not yet time for the telephone to begin its morning bombardment and she would have leisure for a little study. Getting her shorthand textbook out of its drawer, she drew pencil and paper toward her and prepared for strenuous work. Janet had been “an angel” (Petra’s expression) and constituted herself Petra’s shorthand teacher. She said that there was no reason whatever why Petra, at the end of a year’s work here, shouldn’t be prepared to take dictation from anybody, typewrite rapidly, and have a profession at her finger tips. But during this year of learning, Petra was determined to be worth every dollar that Doctor Pryne paid her. He was not her friend—he never could be now—and it must be a strictly business exchange between them and an honest one.... If you really use your brain, really concentrate, heat—even city heat—is nothing. The human brain, and the will back of it,cut through discomfort like a knife. Well, perhaps that was all that Clare meant, when she always said that hot days exhilarated her. Overcoming the wretchedness of stifling heat, being superior to it, was the exhilaration. Indeed, Petra found herself exhilarated at this moment. It was exhilarating to concentrate on these word-symbols, master them, and be of some account in the world!
But at this moment of full content—for it was content—Petra’s telephone surprisingly buzzed. Her voice—sheheard it herself, answering—had an elated ring. But the voice that sounded in reply was no strange voice from the outside. It was Doctor Pryne himself, speaking to her from behind his closed door only a few yards away. He was asking her to have lunch with him at one-thirty at the Copley.
“I’m sorry. I’m lunching with Dick Wilder. I’m afraid I can’t.”
That is all she said and it was uttered with polite deliberateness. But her hand, putting down the telephone, was shaking. And this surprising phenomenon had hardly impressed itself on Petra’s attention before she was aware of the thunderous circulation of her blood.... What had so startled her body! Her employer’s voice, it seemed. But the invitation and her having to refuse it had meant very little to her conscious thinking self. Did the body have a life of its own, then,—fears and delights, even thoughts of its own? It seemed so. But she had first learned it on Saturday afternoon, when Doctor Pryne had lighted her cigarette for her. As he held the match, her body had given her this same surprise then. It had been Doctor Pryne then and it was Doctor Pryne again now. He had more significance to her, it seemed, than she herself knew. But her body knew.... It was instinct of some sort, she supposed. She was remembering one astonishing experience she had had of an animal’s instinct. It occurred the summer she had been sent to camp where there was riding. She and a few others had lost their way on thecountry roads and had been caught by the dark. Petra was riding ahead, loving the dark and the adventure, when suddenly her horse stopped and she felt him bristling under her. She felt his fear but stubbornly tried to urge him on. Whatever he was afraid of, they must get away from it. She was as frightened as the horse, but her desire was to plunge on and out of the situation—whatever it was. But a wiser and older girl, coming along, dismounted, walked cautiously a few yards ahead and found that a bridge was down over a deep gorge. Petra’s horse could not have seen it. Had the sound of the rushing water proclaimed no bridge above it to his sensitive ears?... But what bridge was down now? Why was her blood thundering like this and her mind at a standstill?
It passed almost as suddenly as it had come. The thundering blood sank back to the unknown and unconscious rhythms of its usual courses. But as this was Petra’s second experience only of the alert separate mind of the body, she was left strangely shaken by it. It took some effort to return her attention to the shorthand textbook, and she was glad when the telephone finally began ringing in earnest and she could put aside her self-imposed and solitary work.
For a while everything went smoothly. Petra really seemed to have an instinct for discriminating between the important and unimportant and it is certain that her magnetic young voice won instant confidence from the unseen inquirers; they felt that she would remembertheir requests and do her best in getting Doctor Pryne’s attention for them the first minute possible. She wrote everything down in a tidy, self-conscious hand and filed what should be filed, all the while feeling effectual and important. If the few patients waiting their turns in the little room looked at her more than at the magazines and books they pretended to be reading, she was unaware of it.
The door into the outer hall was standing wide open in the interest of all the draft possible; and so since Petra’s shoulder was turned that way, and the latest comer wore rubber-soled sneakers, she was not aware of him until he came around her desk and stood over her. The little desk, as he stood before her, leaning on it, suddenly became spindly, a mere chip, he was so large and dynamic. He was looking at Petra in surprise that she was not Janet. So she read his expression. She noticed, even in her first startled glance up at him, how blue the eyes were in his bronzed face and how the black brows over them met in a straight line across his high, straight nose. She had never seen eyes of so intense and deep a blue, she thought. They were rather like her own, had she realized it, for it was a strange coincidence, but the girl at the desk and the man bending over it might have been brother and sister. Their coloring, their physiques and their vitality were all in the same key.
The surprise in the man’s face was perhaps more like anger than surprise, after all. A sort of tortured anger, Petra thought. The intense blue of his eyes burned downat her with angry questioning. But his fine, clean-cut lips were set in a defiant line as if he meant never to speak. The thought flashed through Petra’s mind that he might be an insane patient of Doctor Pryne’s who had broken loose from confinement and was seeking out the man who had consigned him to the asylum, to shoot him. But instantly she knew it wasn’t so; the fire in the intense blue eyes was fire of intelligence burning to an expression almost as articulate as speech.
“Do you want to see Doctor Pryne?” she asked. “I am sorry but—”
She got no farther. He had reached a swift hand and snatching a letter from the top of the pile the postman had only a minute ago deposited there, turned it over and, picking up a pencil, wrote on its back, “I am dumb. Neil McCloud. No appointment. Only want to see Pryne for a minute. Will wait till he can work me in.”
Dumb! This vital creature, radiating power and strength! Petra held out her hand for the pencil. But he did not give it to her. He wrote again, the strokes of his script swift and angry, “I’m not deaf. Speak!”
“Sit down,” she said. She could not talk to him while he towered like that. It was like standing under an avalanche of physical and mental force. There was a chair close to her desk. He took it. She felt that he might mind having the other patients, who had appointments, hear him being refused one, and so she leaned toward him and explained the situation almost in a whisper. Doctor Pryne had been out of town and asa consequence was extraordinarily busy to-day. He couldn’t possibly see people without appointments, even for a minute. But next week—She took up the appointment book. The minute McCloud had written his name Petra had placed him, for on Janet’s advice she had studied and learned the names of the regular patients by heart during her first day here. She fluttered the pages of her book and came to McCloud. He had an appointment for Saturday afternoon, to-morrow. That was odd. Janet had said that Doctor Pryne kept his weekends absolutely free for his writing. But here it was in Janet’s hand—McCloud, four o’clock, June 28.
She hesitated over it. Ought she to suggest that Mr. McCloud wait for Janet’s next appearance from the inner office? This was the first time to-day that Petra had felt so uncertain of her ground. But then she decided, “No. I’m in. I must swim. That is what both Doctor Pryne and Janet expect of me. McCloud’ll have to wait for his appointment like everybody else.”—She looked across at him. Blue eyes met blue eyes, his tormented and angry, hers cool but sorry. “I’m sorry—” she began, but again he snatched at the pencil. “OK,” he almost tore it into the envelope. And then he added, underlining it, “Don’t tell him I called. I’d rather you didn’t. Back Saturday.”
Halfway to the door he swung around and came back to Petra. She handed him the pencil. He wrote—but this time in small, scrupulously clear characters—“You’re a damned beautiful girl.” She had read it easilyupside down as he wrote but he was gone before the color flamed in her face.
A few minutes later, when Janet came out of the inner sanctum, trailing a patient, and went over to Petra’s desk, Petra showed her the envelope; but she had erased McCloud’s last remark. The secretary frowned. It worried her, for some reason or other. That was obvious. After a minute of brooding over it, she whispered, “I’m sorry you let him go, Petra. The doctor would have made a point of seeing Mr. McCloud. It must be something very special he wanted, really special, I mean. But you couldn’t know.... I think we’d better do what he asks and not say anything about it now to the doctor. It would bother him. I’m sorry I wasn’t here. He must have hated explaining to you about his speech. He’s morbidly sensitive about it. It was hard enough the first time he came and wrote it all down for me—but to have to do it all over again—”
So it was as bad as that! Janet’s expression even more than the words she said told Petra how serious a blunder she had made in sending McCloud away. It was so serious, in fact, that Janet wanted to protect Doctor Pryne from knowing that it had happened at all. But as to the man’s embarrassment, Petra was skeptical, remembering the sentence she had read upside down!
“But look here, Petra, don’t let this one first mistake discourage you,” Janet murmured quickly, as the doctor’s buzzer summoned her to bring in the next patient. “Go on swimming. Don’t get self-mistrustful. It’s likeriding. After a spill you must get right up and mount again, or you’re queered. Better luck next time.”
At lunch Dick Wilder found Petra more bafflingly uncommunicative than usual, even, and she ate almost nothing of the very expensive and knowing meal he had ordered for her. What use was it for him to chatter on about Green Doors—and incidentally, of course, Clare—with some one who murmured back mere Yeses and Noes! The only consolation that Dick got from that luncheon hour was the overt admiration he saw in surrounding faces for his companion. These men and women had no way of knowing that his companion was as completely uninteresting as she was completely beautiful. They probably thought him much to be envied, extraordinarily lucky.
“Look here,” he said rather desperately, when he opened the door of his car to let her out in front of her office building, “let me drive you out to-night, Petra. It will be beastly going in the train in this heat.”
“Clare is giving that big dinner party to-night,” Petra reminded him. “She won’t have a minute for you. Some other night.”
But Dick persisted. He was ready to take his chances. When they got to Green Doors he would go in with Petra for a few minutes and stay talking. Clare might be around somewhere. They could exchange one word at least, one look. It would be little Sophia’s bedtime. He might be invited up to the nursery to join with little Sophia’s nurse in her role of enchanted chorusto the nightly repeated scene—the cherub’s supper hour. But he said nothing of his real designs to Petra. He merely exclaimed, “What has Clare to do with it? You’re a funny girl! It’s you I’m asking. I’ll be down here at the door at four.”
Janet’s door, the doctor’s door, the door into the public hall were all wide open when Petra got back. Janet heard her come in and sang out from the dressing room, “I’m just off for lunch, Petra. Won’t be gone twenty minutes. Too hot to eat.” Then, as Petra came up behind her, she turned from the mirror where she had been adjusting her hat and her voice changed. “You poor child! What is the matter?”
“Nothing. What should be?” Petra put away her hat and got out her compact. But Janet would not accept the nonchalant denial. “I know what’s wrong. That McCloud business. But cheer up. For months after I began this job I averaged about half a dozen mistakes a week. Nobody’s infallible. And anyway, I’ve reconsidered it. There is no real reason why that young man should consider himself an exception and come around without appointments. He did the same thing last week. And Doctor Pryne saw him and was over an hour late in leaving the office as a consequence. To-day he would probably have gone without his lunch. It’s really rather cheeky. To-day may make him see it. I myself wouldn’t have dared send him off, because I know how the doctor feels, but you didn’t know, and he only got whathe deserves. So cheer up. You’re in charge now till I return. The doctor won’t be back before half-past two, probably.”
But Petra was not much comforted. Her confidence in her own adequacy had been so high only so few hours ago! And ever since the McCloud incident she had felt dashed. But how was she to know who was important, of the people who came to the office or called on the telephone, as long as they remained merely names to her in her appointment book and in the bare files in her desk. Janet, of course, knew the intimate details of all the cases. She took their “histories” down in shorthand, and even some of the conferences later, and filed them in the big steel cases in the inner office. If Petra, now, had known something of Mr. McCloud’s “history,” she might have known what to do with him this morning. But Janet, in initiating her into the work, had told her absolutely nothing of the personalities she would so soon be dealing with. Her information had confined itself strictly to names and ages. It was too great a handicap!
Besides, Petra was interested on her own account in this McCloud now. Very much so! Any one would be.... His tormented impatient look.... The way his very black brows met in a straight line over his straight high nose. She had never seen brows like that. It gave a look of dominance, of strength.... His hands were the hands of a workman, stained with oil or grease, and the fingernails were cut very short where theywere not broken. Yet strangely, those hands were as expressive and impatient as his face.... And the upside-down sentence—well—that was a touch of mere deviltry. His eyes had mocked, as he pushed the envelope toward her—and was gone!
The heat in the reception office was stifling. Holding your wrists under water really didn’t help, except for the minute you were doing it. As for getting out the shorthand textbook in this lull between the morning and afternoon appointments, Petra simply couldn’t. She was smothered, dismayed by the heat. It was really a kind of drowning, this airlessness. Janet had looked so cool and superior to it. She had said, “It’s torrid, isn’t it!” but she hadn’t minded it really. She had created the effect, even as she mentioned it, of brushing mere physical discomfort from her clear, cool self as if it were a fly.
There was, however, a slight breeze coming through from Doctor Pryne’s big windows. A paper on his desk rustled intermittently. It might blow off. Petra decided to go in there and put a book or an inkwell, some solid object, on it. But when she had secured the object—a package of Luckies, as it happened—she turned away from the desk to the steel filing case across the room and stood looking at it curiously. She could read the letters on the faces of the boxes from where she stood.