Petra was pulling out the drawer marked in small black letters Mc. She pulled it slowly, as one might open a door onto an unknown landscape. She herself thought of Alice. “It might be the rabbit hole and here am I on the verge of tumbling down it.” Indeed, she felt herself a second Alice and as if this deep drawer held a wonderland into which she was about to escape from the stifling hot afternoon of the upper world. Could she have known what it held for her, how different her hesitation in going on pulling out the drawer would have been, how much faster her heart would have beat!
She ran her fingers over the tops of the stiff white cards and came to those marked at the upper right-hand corners, “Neil McCloud.” There were dozens of them in McCloud’s own handwriting—the handwriting, at least, of that one last sentence of his which she had read upside down. Petra lifted them out, removing first the metal clip that held them together. Leaving the Mc drawer open, she leaned against other closed drawers and started to read.
Neil McCloud. Age twenty-six. Irish-American. Catholic. No known insanity in family.
It read as if it had been written in answer to questions put to him by Doctor Pryne. Ordinarily the patient would have answered vocally, and Janet, or Doctor Pryne, taken it all down; but in this case, since McCloud could not speak, the answers were written by the patient himself. It seemed that the small, scrupulous script of the upside-down sentence was his ordinary writing when he was not furious....
Petra turned the card over and read on: “Oldest of five. Father a garage proprietor in Springfield, Mass. I graduated from High School tenth in class of ninety. My mother wanted me to go to college but I wouldn’t. Went to work for my father as a stop-gap. Wanted to get with airplanes. Father paid me a skilled mechanic’s wages because I was by that time a skilled mechanic,—grew up with the engines, so to speak. Machinery interested me more than books. Except aeronautics books. Read all of those the library had and bought all I could find. I got in with the fellow who runs the Ocean Road Airport. Spent all my spare time there. Took flying lessons by moonlight. Bought a second-hand plane on savings and credit and began taking people up for hire. Father against it. Wouldn’t let me live at home unless I worked for him.... One day my kid brother turned up at the field. He was the baby. Eleven years old. I knew the folks had forbidden him to go up with me. All the kids were forbidden. But he had hooked a rideout, skipped school, and said he would tell father when he got home, and take his licking. He hated lickings as much as anybody, but it would be worth it to fly. I agreed with him it would. He was captain of his grade football team, a great little kid. After my mother, I guess he meant more to me than anybody living. Anyway, I took him up. We had a grand ride, all afternoon, over four States. Then, making the landing in the field, the propeller broke and we hit the ground wrong. The kid was killed. Broken neck. He died in my arms without the sacraments. I never saw my mother again. They wouldn’t let me into the house. Dad wouldn’t. I don’t think mother ever knew I came. She died that fall. She had been poorly ever since Stephen was born, the kid—that was killed.
“Came to Boston. Got job. Chauffeur for Malcolm Dayton, banker. Eloped with his daughter. We were married by a justice of the peace but Edyth suspected I mightn’t feel really married unless a priest blessed us. She looked up the priest of our parish and I went to him. No, hadn’t gone to the Funeral Mass for the kid even, and never to confession since the smash. The priest made me ashamed but agreed to get the dispensations. He talked to Edyth and assured himself she was old enough to know her own mind and really wanted to be my wife. She is ten years older than me. So I confessed and was taken back and received communion, and we were married again in the rectory before the housekeeper and janitor. Edyth was to take instruction. Icould have lived alone outside the Church all right, but couldn’t have rested easy with my wife outside it. So I was glad Edyth insisted, I guess. Remembered my mother too well! Couldn’t imagine the mother of my children not a Catholic!
“Dayton went crazy when we told him. He wrote that he would buy a divorce for Edyth any time she asked him to, but until then to keep away from him. We had a baby the first year. A boy. I got a job selling the new Ajax cars. I thought we were pretty well off, but Edyth didn’t. We had a nice apartment and a maid. My mother never had a maid. Edyth’s friends stuck to her. They were fine. Some of them I liked a lot. But she was never really mine. Somehow she was her father’s girl. The baby was born at the Lying-In. The day they were coming home, I had to give a driving lesson in Arlington, but a girl friend of Edyth’s was bringing them and would help the nurse and the maid fix them up comfortably. But I came home and found nobody but the nurse. Called the hospital and they told me that Dayton had come for his daughter and grandson. Called the house. Got Dayton himself. Sorry—can’t remember a word he said. But I knew that Edyth and the baby were with him and weren’t coming home. And the next day he sent a lawyer around who told me that the old man had had me watched and that they had a clear case for a divorce. They had one framed, all right—but no use going into that. I had not been unfaithful. No, I toldyou, I can’t remember a single word he said on the ’phone.
“No—I didn’t say a word to the nurse who had stood staring at me while I ’phoned. Found I couldn’t. But I thought it was because I was crying. The baby and his mother not coming home, you know. Thought it was tears in my throat. I thought so then, I mean. I walked out of the apartment, got into the car, drove all night. At dawn I was back in Boston. I don’t remember where I drove or anything about it.
“Yes, I stopped for gasoline once or twice during the night. I held up my fingers to show how many gallons and didn’t say a word. But I didn’t realize it was because I couldn’t speak until I got back to the apartment in the morning. The nurse had slept there and was waiting for her money. Yes, my throat closes up whenever I try to speak. It’s like tears—or a sob. Don’t like to try any more. No, haven’t been to Mass since the Sunday before Edyth and the boy were coming home from the hospital. No—don’t want to see a priest. I’ve lost my faith, I think. No, my family know nothing about me. They won’t, either.
“The Ajax people kept me on as a mechanic. It’s charity, really. They’re as hard hit as all the rest by the depression. They really can’t afford a mechanic who can’t talk to the people who drive in. The boss sent me to you. I make thirty a week. Can pay you ten. Ten a week goes to the smashed plane debt. If you don’t cureme quickly, I’ll disappear. The boss is risking his own job, keeping me on. Yes, the boy is fine. When I saw him at the hospital he looked like my kid brother. The kid would have been his uncle.”
There the history proper ended and Janet’s typing began. It was a report of the physical condition of the patient. Doctor Pryne had, apparently, passed McCloud on to various specialists. Petra skipped all this. It was technical and dull but as much as she took in appeared to rate McCloud’s physical condition as excellent. All the remaining cards in the pile, a dozen or more, written on both sides, in Doctor Pryne’s illegible hand, might as well have been inscribed in Chinese for all Petra could read of them. They appeared to record the experiments in treatment Doctor Pryne had tried on the case, and would have been fascinating, Petra thought, if only she could have read three consecutive words.
But one sentence was clear,—and underlined: “Must find out what Malcolm Dayton said to him on the telephone.”
As she read this, Petra heard some one breathe.... She had not noticed the step in the reception office nor in this room, but she heard the breath, soft as it was. She looked up from the card she was studying and saw Janet. It was the secretary’s sharply indrawn breath that had so startled Petra. But when she woke to the expression on her new friend’s face, her very blood ran cold. This was not Janet, the intelligent, the kind, the clever Janet. What had happened to her? What was the matter?
“Petra Farwell! What are you doing with those files?”
“Reading about McCloud. I wanted to learn....” But her explanation died stillborn. Suddenly, like a thunderclap, Petra knew what a fool she had been, what a terrible thing she had done. She knew now why Janet looked as if she had come upon a murderer, his hands dripping blood. Petra put her hand up to her mouth. It was dry and her tongue was dry.
Janet said “You are stark crazy—or else you are a plain fool. It isn’t just the sneakiness of it—reading private records. It’s the cruelty. It’s violating another person’s rights to his own secrets. Petra, howcould you?Areyou crazy?”
She must be. Petra thought so herself now. It was worse than reading other people’s letters, reading a doctor’s records of cases. Any one who wasn’t crazy would know that. Even young children knew better than to open drawers in other people’s houses. Shewascrazy, crazy, crazy! She was ready to die!
“Why weren’t the files locked, Miss Frazier? How did this happen? How was it possible?” Doctor Pryne had come in without either of them noticing. His voice was hard—cold too—like ice. There was a white area around his lips.
“You went off with the key, Doctor. You were writing up the Fountain dope. I knew the files weren’t locked but I was leaving Miss Farwell in charge, you see. I was gone only a few minutes. I never dreamed that she herself would open the files. How could I?”
The secretary had nothing more to say, nothing more to look. Her face was paper white—white with anger at Petra, at herself, at Doctor Pryne. She went into her own little office and shut the door behind her with something approximating a slam. In another second the racket of an angry typewriter came in from her office by way of the doctor’s open windows.
“Better put those cards away now. Are they in their right order?”
Petra looked down from Doctor Pryne’s cold face to her hands and what they were all unconsciously still holding. She put the cards back into the drawer with careful quickness. “Yes, they are in their right order.” She almost whispered it. Her throat felt thick. Perhaps she was going to lose her speech as McCloud had lost his, or it might be tears.
“Petra! Whydidyou?”
“I wanted to know about this Neil McCloud. I was terribly interested.”
“Why?” And then with sudden sick suspicion Lewis asked, “Do you know his wife? Is that why you were interested?”
Petra nodded. “I do know Edyth, of course. She’s one of Clare’s friends. And I knew her before that, in Cambridge. But I didn’t know she was like this—cruel....”
“Petra, this is impossible. I simply can’t take it in, what you’ve done!” He was feeling in various pocketswith quick exasperated motions as he spoke, but his eyes had not left her face. “Lord! Miss Frazier was right. Here’s the key. That lets her out.” He added, “And us in—you and me in deep together. We both ought to go to jail.”
Petra exclaimed, “Not you! You couldn’t know I might be—abnormally dishonorable. But I haven’t told you really why I did it. And you asked. I didn’t know McCloud was that McCloud—Edyth’s husband. I didn’t even think about the names being the same. He came to the office this morning to see you. I said he must wait till to-morrow. Janet said that was a mistake, that you would have seen him. It came to me, while Janet was out at lunch, that if I had known about this case, McCloud’s case—as Janet knew about it—I wouldn’t have made the mistake. So I walked right in here and looked him up—the way you would in a library, you know, a Who’s Who or something. I wanted to be efficient, to understand what it was all about. But Iwascrazy. It was as bad as reading private letters. I see that now. I’m not like Shelley. The heat numbs me. My brains stand still....”
“It looks as if they did!” But then he was sorry. He needn’t have said that. But could he believe her in what she had just said? Could he believe that it had not been mere curiosity about the mistaken marriage of a woman she happened to know that had brought Petra to his files? Well, strangely, he did believe her. She had lied,he supposed, about the book she said she had been reading that afternoon at Green Doors, and he knew she had lied about his keeping her working here after hours. All the same, he believed that she was telling the truth now.
“I wonder what McCloud wanted. Wish I had seen him. Didn’t he leave any message?” He would make her forget his anger, which was so quickly passing.
Petra told him what McCloud had written, except for the upside-down sentence. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you he came, since he asked me particularly not to. But I couldn’t have you think it was because I knew Edyth. Curiosity of that sort—well, I wouldn’t have felt any temptation. Truly, I wouldn’t.”
His eyes were studying her face. She went on, “Of course, you will fire me. There’s no reason you shouldn’t. But since it was you who made my stepmother cut my allowance in two, you ought to persuade her to give it back again—if I’m not to have this job now. Will you do that?”
She stopped, waiting for him to answer. But he said nothing, merely continued to look at her, while his expression changed. It was ice again. With the instinct to justify herself she stammered, “I told you—Itold you—at the guest house—Saturday—that it was asalaryClare paid me, not an allowance. I know that she said it wasn’t so—that very night—that you heard her. But why should you believe her more than me? Anyway, I must have that thousand again. It is your fault I lost it.”
“But don’t you want to keep this job?” Lewis asked.
He was beginning to admit to himself, at last, that Petra Farwell was beyond him. He simply did not understand her.
“Yes. I do want to keep it. Very much. But how can I—after this?”
“I think it would be much better to keep it and make a success of it than—than go back to the twenty-four-hour-a-day stepdaughter job. Don’t you?”
Petra nodded. She had a voice but she did not trust it.
“Easier, even?”
Again she nodded.
“Well, you’re a great help to Miss Frazier. She says so.”
“She won’t now.” Shesoundedall right. You couldn’t hear a tear.
“Oh, yes, I think she will. She was angry with herself just now, more than with you, I imagine. Just as I was—with myself, I mean. Am still, as a matter of fact. Miss Frazier realized that she should have warned you about the privacy of the files and I knew that it was very nearly criminal of me to leave the files unlocked while I was out. So we’ve all had a miserable time of it. Did you look at anything besides McCloud’s history, by the way?”
“No.”
“All right. If you’ll only wait a little this afternoon till I’m free, Petra, I’d like the pleasure of driving you out to Meadowbrook. I want you to finish about Teresa. Of course, you know that.”
“Dick’s driving me out.” But as Petra saw Doctor Pryne’s disappointment, she said quickly almost the precise words she had said earlier to Dick, “But it wouldn’t pay you, anyway, even if he wasn’t. Clare is giving a big dinner party to-night and she’ll be busy seeing to things. She does the flowers herself, cuts them and everything. It takes simply hours.”
“Good Lord! What has Mrs. Farwell’s cutting the flowers to do with it? It is you I want to talk to. When will you finish about Teresa, then? You said when we were alone next. And will you take me to see her? I have been looking forward to seeing her again ever since our talk—at the guest house.”
Lewis saw the look of deviousness creep over Petra’s face then, and he knew, almost certainly, that whatever she said next would have no reality in it. She was baffling to exasperation.
“I’ll take you to see Teresa if she invites you. But there’s nothing more to tell you, really. Only I beg you not to mention her to Clare again, not to tell her any more of all that I told you. I don’t know how much you did tell her. She hasn’t said a word about it and I haven’t asked. But you won’t again, will you?”
“My dear! That was a stupid slip I made. I broke my promise of secrecy. But why should I talk about anything with Mrs. Farwell? It is you I am trying to talk with—and you put me off. You don’t say anythingtrueto me any more.”
“What do you want to know? About Teresa, I mean? I’ve told you the absolute truth about her.”
“Yes, I know that—as far as it went. But I want the rest, all of it!” Lewis exclaimed. “What Teresa did next. You said she was ready to become a secretary and something happened. I want to know what happened, what she is doing now, how things are with her. I’ve been waiting days.”
But even before Petra opened her lips, Lewis gave up hope of her answering him truly. He saw her choosing between several possible answers. And when she said, deliberately, very carefully, “Teresa got her chance to go to college. She supports herself by dress-designing. She’s all right, thank you,” Lewis knew that while these might be facts, they weren’t the truth; they left him exactly where he had been left Saturday. He knew not one real thing more. The swordlike reticence in Petra’s gentian eyes guarded her against his knowing now every bit as effectively as against Clare’s, her father’s, and Dick’s. But Dick! Saturday Dick had seemed to stand with Clare and Farwell over against Petra’s guard. But had that, perhaps, changed? Certainly he was very much in evidence—lunching with Petra to-day, driving her out to-night. Lewis himself had been away four days. Anything could have happened in four days. Had Dick waked up, come to his senses?
“There’s your telephone,” he said then. “It’s been ringing some time. Miss Frazier can’t hear it with herdoor shut and typing like that. You’d better see to it. It’s your job.”
Petra flew to her desk, shutting the doctor’s door softly, on the wing. The one thought she took with her, and it was utterly comforting, in spite of the tears in her throat, was that she still had a job.
Saturday noon Lewis came near having a scene with his secretary, when he insisted that, for once, she must take the half holiday. “No, you cannot have the next chapter.” He felt rather like an ugly dog barking up at her, with his paws on a bone—the bone his manuscript. “I’ve got to keep it to revise. I fumbled it terribly last night. Couldn’t seem to concentrate. You get along out to some beach or other. Lie in the sun. You’re white as a daisy. Good-by and thanks.”
There had been strife; but Lewis, continuing to ape the behavior of a dog with his bone, and doing it rather successfully, had finally won and Miss Frazier went for her hat and bag. But she came back in a second to explain, “Petra is staying to practice typing. Won’t it disturb you if you’re working here? Mr. Wilder is coming for her at four. She wants to wait for him.”
“What! Again?” But Lewis pulled himself up. He said in answer to her question, “I don’t think it’ll disturb me. That door is very nearly soundproof.”
“I want to tell you that she is broken-hearted aboutyesterday, Doctor. She can’t get over it. Nothing like that will ever happen again, I know. She’s awfully silly in some ways but she’s—she’s all right. Really she is.”
“Yes, I know she is.” But Lewis looked up with quick gratitude at his secretary. She was rather all right herself, he was thinking. He smiled at her. It was a more human, a more personal smile than she had ever had from her employer before. She smiled, dimly, back. She was silly herself, a thousand times sillier than Petra. If Doctor Pryne saw that she was fighting tears, he would think she had gone out of her head. She turned quickly away.
In the reception office Janet said to Petra, “The door’s soundproof. Doctor Pryne mightn’t even know you are staying if I hadn’t told him. But it’s a long time till four. Don’t work too hard. I’ll meet you Sunday at twelve.”
Petra answered, her hands suspended over the typewriter keys, “I love it, Janet. I love typing. You’re going to be proud of me some day. I’ll be as good a secretary as you are. To-morrow at noon, yes. How nice it will be!”
That was at two. At three-thirty Lewis put the manuscript chapter into his brief-case and got up, stretching. He lit a cigarette, turned to the window and stood looking out for a minute. Then he took a few quick paces back and forth between the windows and the reception-office door. Then he pushed the patients’ easy chair from its usual position till its back was at the window for whateverbreeze there was. Dick was coming for Petra at four. Lewis himself expected McCloud at the same time. Well, this was only half-past three. He opened the door into his reception office.
Petra was working at shorthand now, her typewriter covered up until Monday. One hand was in her curls, ruffling them, and she appeared to be eating the rubber end of her pencil. She looked at Lewis dazedly. She was white with the heat in the stuffy little room. The doors should all have been opened—or else she shouldn’t have stayed. It was not quite so warm as yesterday, but it was bad enough.
“There’s a breeze in my office,” Lewis said. “A baby one, but rather nice. Put away the lessons, do, and come along in. I’m going to lay off too—till four.”
The violet of her frock was cool against the dark leather of the patients’ chair. Why did she wear a yellow belt? Her thin stockings were yellow, gold-yellow. Yellow and violet, with her gentian eyes, and vital gold-brown curls brushed on her neck, back from her ears, made Petra too lovely to look at with a level gaze. Why shouldn’t Petra care hugely about clothes and spend all the dollars a year on them she could lay her hands on—if clothes did this! The yellow belt was magic—a narrow yellow magic made of nothing in the world but a silly, twisted bit of silk cord.
Hundreds of women had sat in that chair facing Lewis, for years past, and at no other time could he recall noticing what one of them had worn. But he could nomore help noticing this violet, cool frock of Petra’s with the yellow belt than he could help noticing the texture of flowers near at hand. The loveliness of Petra’s frocks was as inescapable as the loveliness of flowers.
He offered her a cigarette. She took one but only, he felt, because she did not see what they were going to talk about and this was something to relieve the awkwardness.... This time, when he held the match for her, their eyes did not meet....
Lewis put his arm along his desk. First of all, he had a duty to perform. He should have done it yesterday had he not taken it for granted it was unnecessary. But in the middle of the night he had been bothered by that taking for granted. Now was the time to get it off his mind,—and pray heaven it was not too late.
“You’re not to mind what I’m going to say, Petra. Probably it’s totally unnecessary. But you will give me your promise now, won’t you, quite solemnly, never so long as you live, to tell any one—any one at all—anything that you learned about my patient McCloud yesterday. You haven’t mentioned any of it to a soul, have you?”
Petra looked at him. No faltering now. Truth was on the way. She said almost before he had finished, “No, of course I haven’t told a soul and of course I promise. I do understand and you can trust me.” But even as she finished, panic came. She put her hand to her mouth. She had remembered something. Lewissawher remember.
His heart sank. This was too bad—too terribly toobad. He exclaimed, “You have told some one, Petra. Who? In God’s name!”
“No,—no, I haven’t—” But she stopped the lie. She couldn’t lie to this man. In the first place, he could spot it. In the second place, she did not want to, somehow. She said, miserably, “I told Teresa. I told her every word. I’d forgotten. But that doesn’t count as telling. It’s like telling one’s self. She is so safe.... I told her that McCloud was Edyth’s husband. She had known her in Cambridge. And all about the flying accident. I told her that. And his mother’s dying. I told her, too, how McCloud had only seen his baby at the hospital. Less than two weeks. That seemed so unjust—so cruel! Oh, yes, I guess I told Teresa everything. You see—You see,I thought she might help.”
“Petra! You are terrible!” Lewis groaned. “You’re impossible!”
But Petra seemed not to mind his consternation. She was looking past Lewis’ head, a question in her eyes. Lewis swung around and there was Neil McCloud himself, standing midway in the room—his expression murderous.
McCloud was early for his appointment and had expected to be kept waiting until four at least. But when he found the reception room deserted and the doctor’s door wide open, he naturally came to it. It had taken him some seconds to take it in—what was going on here—that the man he had entrusted with his confidences as implicitly as if he had been a priest in theconfessional was using those confidences as a peg on which to hang a flirtation with a beautiful new secretary. They sat here in the place where he had written it all, hashing it over together. Telling his secrets.... As Edyth had hashed over things with her father, old man Dayton, telling his secrets.... Terrible secrets....
For in this moment he remembered what Pryne had so long wanted him to remember! Pryne had questioned and questioned. Coaxed at his strangely blank memory. And nothing doing. But now it was here. Clear, bright as a lightning flash. Now, when remembering was no good to anybody! What the old man had said, over the telephone, when McCloud had called him up that night to ask him what he had done with Edyth and their son, was this:
“Edyth has told me everything. You killed your brother. You broke your mother’s heart. But you shan’t break my daughter’s heart and ruin my grandson’s life. I have the power to protect my own. There isn’t anything you can say.Don’t say a word.”
And you had been obedient. You had gone dumb from that minute. In obedience to Edyth’s father, who knew that you had killed your brother and broken your mother’s heart. Edyth had told him all that. Told the old man. All the things you had told her before you would marry her, in sacred confidence. And now the old man was shouting at you through the telephone. It was as if no time had passed since. As if you were hearing it this minute, while you stood frozenly staring at Pryne andhis stenographer: “There isn’t anything you can say. Don’t say a word.”
Let the old brute shout! Keep on shouting through your brain! You don’t mind it now. At least this one thing about you, Pryne shouldn’t ever possess. One little bit he wouldn’t tell his beautiful stenographer—simply because he wouldn’t ever know it. And now you’d get out,—right out into the darkness which had been compassing you ever since the moment the kid went out in your arms.
Pryne was getting up. The girl was up too. Why didn’t your hate and scorn blast them where they stood? It was strong enough to do that. But hate failing, there was the revolver. No! Shut up. Don’t think of that. The kid—Mother—those were lives enough for you to have destroyed. Two—three steps, and you would follow those beloveds into the dark void. You should have followed before. But instead you had come whining for help to this—fashionable psychiatrist. Hell! Your teeth were clenched with the will it took not to put your hand to the pocket holding the revolver. It was essential that you should be outside the door, that it should be between you and them, or Pryne might somehow manage to spoil it. The doctor had a look in his eyes—as if he suspected or even knew your intention. But you weren’t even touching your pocket. Your hands were at your sides. Straight down. How could Pryne know what you were going to do?
Well, Pryne wouldn’t move, wouldn’t interfere, youwere sure of it, as long as you kept your eyes steady and your hands at your sides. You started backing toward the door, holding the skunk where he was with your scorn of him, and his girl beside him there, wide-eyed and scared. She was a damned beauty. You had been right when you told her so. You would back through the door. They should not stir. Then you would close it with one lightning motion. But you must remember to use the left hand. The right must be kept for the business of shooting your brains out before either of them could stir. It would be a neat job. That was one thing they should never hash over together,—yourattemptedsuicide. Attempted! Like hell, attempted! You’d have one clean mark for that, so help you Christ.
At that moment McCloud’s seeking heel felt the rise of the doorsill, the rim of the dark void.
On Wednesday Neil McCloud had lost his job of mechanic for the Ajax people. At least the top boss had come along and Neil had surmised from the dark looks he cast in his direction, as he spoke in a confidentially low tone to Neil’s boss, that he was ragging him for keeping on such a handicapped man when there were hundreds of good men to choose from. So Neil had gone up, as soon as the fellow had left, and discharged himself. His boss had a wife and small children. Nobody’s position was any too secure these days. And the top boss had had a very nasty look in his eye not only for Neil, but for Neil’s benefactor. Neil had quaked under it. But not for himself. So he walked out of the place, just another fellow out of a job.
A week ago, he had done a rash thing. One of the friends of his married days—still, supposedly, a friend of Edyth’s—had seen him in crowded Summer Street, rushed up to him and said that she must have some money. Her husband had failed to meet her with it as he had promised, her bags were waiting in the SouthStation for a week-end she was spending on the Cape with friends, Neil must give her every cent he had on him and probably that wouldn’t be enough! But would he hurry! Hehadhurried. He pulled his roll from his pocket—Saturday was pay day—and pushed it into pretty, smart Joyce Clayton’s yawning snakeskin purse. His only thought during the act was gratitude that the woman was in such a tearing hurry that she seemed not to notice his wordlessness. It was his pride that none of that crowd should know how things were with him, and until this meeting with Joyce, success had seemed childishly easy; they hadn’t bothered. But as Joyce had rolled off in the taxi into which he had put her silent—and she not noticing his wordlessness—she had leaned out and called back, “Your address, Neil darling! For heaven’s sake, what is it? I’ll send a check to-morrow.” He had smiled, raised his hat and blotted himself out from her eyes in the crowds of Summer Street. When he discovered that he hadn’t even any loose change in his pocket and must walk back to his room supperless and even put off breakfast until he could borrow at the works on next week’s salary, he was not much concerned. He had some chocolate in his room and plenty of cigarettes. The chocolate served for supper and breakfast, and the few dollars he let himself borrow on Monday kept him fed until Wednesday, when—instead of asking for more—he walked out penniless an hour after getting to the garage. There would be no more wages to ask an advance on.
He walked over to the Common and sat on a bench all morning, doing what he described to himself as face the situation. But every little while he stopped looking into the ugly face of his predicament and tried to speak. If he could only even whisper! He tried to say his own name. He tried it dozens of times but the only result was the ghost of a sob.
When the noon bells and whistles sounded he came, before they ceased, to a determination. He would look for work—yes—go into machine shops and garages with pencil and pad in his hand, and offer his services. He would face down all the curiosity and jeers that would come to him for his inability to speak. He would scour Boston for any sort of job where speech was not essential. But he would not go to any one to borrow money for food. If he got a job, O.K. If not, starving would be a natural way out and nobody, not even his guardian angel, could call it suicide.
Neil had followed what seemed to him this fair plan with action. Hungry, he had job-hunted steadily, until Friday morning. Friday morning, in the pursuit of the impossible job, he had stumbled, in a dirty alley, on a little abandoned paper bag half full of peanuts. Yes, it seemed too good to be true; and indeed he was by this time in such a giddy state that it might very easily be illusion. He had not been sure it wasn’t, until he had them in his teeth. Then, as he threw the bag from him, empty, Neil remembered that to-morrow his room rent would be due. But something else about Saturday wasimportant too. After some groping he remembered—an appointment with Doctor Pryne.
Doctor Pryne! The handful of peanuts seemed only to have increased his hunger. Good luck, stumbled upon so astonishingly, had weakened his will, he thought; but anyway, he would ask Doctor Pryne for the loan of a dollar. Then he would buy himself food. He would go now and get the money. With meat and coffee to back him up, the Saturday’s séance must work—Doctor Pryne must cure him.Anyway, it would be Neil’s last shot before letting himself starve. There was some chance it might work. Pryne was always holding out hope—always seemed expectant of the thing’s breaking. But even if it didn’t work, and the cure didn’t come through on Saturday, and consequently he never got another job, and starved, and so never paid back that dollar,—Pryne was a good fellow.Neil would rather be owing Doctor Lewis Pryne a dollar through eternity than any other soul he knew. He’d give himself that one more chance.
So he had walked the miles up to the doctor’s office on the strength of the peanuts. And a new girl in the reception office—only she looked like something in a fairy tale, and almost as illusory as the peanuts—had said Pryne couldn’t possibly see him till his appointment the next day.
What he had done between then and his return just now a little ahead of his appointment time, Neil could not have told—or written. The one thing he knew, knew constantly, was that he had not eaten.
Now as his groping heel found the rim of the dark, and his left hand reached for the door knob, Neil was grateful that after all he had not seen Doctor Pryne yesterday. Now, as it was, he would be taking no debt to this man over the ultimate doorsill; for, in this moment of confusion, the hours the doctor had spent on him, for which he could never now send a bill, did not loom as debt in the young man’s aching brain.
His fingers had the door knob. It was cold and they were hot. Neil exulted in the knowledge that one movement of his arm, and this door would go shut forever and ever between himself and Doctor Lewis Pryne—Doctor Lewis Pryne who had let him down to a girl with a fairy-tale face in a violet dress with a yellow belt....
If it had been Lewis who had moved and spoken, the door would have slammed then and the revolver roared. But it was Petra. To Neil’s shaking vision the fairy-tale face was flaming—unbelievably—to a white flame of angelicness—was becoming an angel’s face, against which no door could shut. The blue eyes were swords. The violet, the yellow were gone, and all her clothing was winged white fire. Fear that was awe and awe that was fear paralyzed him. She—white fire—was coming upon him—
Lewis had put out a hand to drag her back. But to that hand Petra was not spirit nor flame. She was solid young muscular strength, breaking loose from his clutch. Before he had got around the desk, she had reached theboy, her arms were around his neck, her face lifted to his, which did not bend to it—only the eyelids were dropped so that he still saw her angelic fire.
“Neil McCloud, you’ve got it all wrong. Doctor Pryne forgot to lock his files and I came snooping in here and read your cards. That’s why you’ve found us talking about you. Doctor Pryne is ready tokillme for it. And I ought to be killed. But the friend I told—she will keep your secrets. Truly she will. Or she will tell them only in her prayers! It is the Little Flower she is especially telling. She is offering a novena to her for you—a novena to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Do you know the Little Flower? Teresa, she has the Little Flower’s name herself, you see—wants you to say ‘I love.’ She said last night, ‘Love is the Word. He must say that.’ She asked the Little Flower to help you say it. Say it now—Neil McCloud. Try to say,I love.”
Lewis was close to them. Petra was wild, mad. But no madder than McCloud. If the boy lifted a hand, Lewis was ready. He had guessed about the revolver. He would snatch Petra back, get between them, if the man moved a finger. Then a strange thing happened. Up in McCloud’s face, Petra’s face seemed to be reflected—or rather a flame, a flame burning to whiteness that couldn’t be Petra, after all. It was an unearthly wing of light. McCloud put his hands up to Petra’s hands that were clasped on the back of his neck—but Lewis did not stir—and took them down; but he kept them,as if he did not know he had them still. He was not even looking at Petra now—but beyond her.
Neil said, “The Little Flower? Yes, of course, I know her. The kid had a special devotion to her. Mother had too. The kid thought he saw her—his First Communion morning. In his room. By the washstand. Mother believed him. She had an idea he might be a priest some day. But he won’t grow up now. He’s dead. The little fellow is dead.... How does the Little Flower feel about that—my killing him?”
“You didn’t kill him. It was a fault, not a sin, when you took him flying. Teresa says so. But see! The Little Flower has cured you, no matter how she feels. She has answered Teresa’s prayers.... Even without your saying ‘I love’! Your speech is perfect—you have spoken.”
Until Petra called his attention to it, Neil had not known that he had spoken. But it was true. His voice still hung in the room—he heard it now in echo—the warm, unstrained voice of young manhood. It was his own voice!...
He let Petra’s hands go then. He backed up against the door jamb to his full exultant young height. His face was rolling with tears, but it could not be called crying. There was no grimace of the features and his eyes were wide open. His hands were at his side. He spoke again: “I love. My God, I do love. I love You, my Lord and my God. Have mercy on me, a sinner.”
The elevator for which Lewis had rung brought Dick Wilder up with it. Until he saw him there, Lewis had totally forgotten that he would be coming along about now to keep his date with Petra.
“See here,” he exclaimed, taking Dick’s arm and pushing him back into the elevator cage ahead of himself. “Come on down with me. I’ll explain in the street. Petra’s busy just now and can’t possibly get away.” And by the time they had walked out through the lower hall, come to the sidewalk and crossed to the curb where Dick’s car was parked, Lewis had decided how much—how little, rather—he would tell Dick.
“Petra’s doing something very special for me,” he said. “Helping with a patient. Interruption would spoil the whole thing. You’d better wait here in your car till she comes down. I’ll stick around with you for a few minutes, if you’ll have me; then I must get back and see what she’s accomplished.”
“But how long will she be?” Dick asked, puzzled. “Not long, I hope. We’re a little late already. Featherstonekept me, talking over a commission that came in this morning.”
“Yes? Well, Petra mayn’t be able to leave for half an hour or so. But does it matter?”
“Oh, but see here, Lewis! She can’t be half an hour—or anything like it. God! Do you expect me just to sit here in this heat?”
“Shut up!” Lewis’ anger blazed. It was too soon after that other voice, McCloud’s, new-found, racked with love, had uttered the Name—and Lewis could not bear it. But after all, Dick had not been there. He could not know how shocking was the sound of his casual expletive.
So, quickly contrite for the injustice of his anger, Lewis exclaimed, “I’m sorry. I’m edgy, I think. It is blistering, isn’t it!” Lewis was decidedly not edgy and moreover, for some time now, ever since he had invited Petra out of the reception office to sit in the patients’ chair, facing him, he had not been aware of the heat. But it was the only explanation of his mood he cared to trust Dick with, at the moment. And his friend accepted it as reasonable.
“Oh, that’s all right.” Dick turned off Lewis’ apology, embarrassed, then added quickly, “But look here. I’m taking the Farwell family to the Meadowbrook Country Club for dinner. And there’s a tea party at Green Doors first. Very special! In honor of little Sophia’s second birthday. Her grandmother is coming—Clare’s mother. No one else. Clare’s counting on Petra, of course. Why,she’ll be terribly disappointed if I don’t get Petra there in the shortest possible time now. Do you see?”
Lewis did see, perfectly. Again Petra was to be forced into the role of baby-snubber. Only this time it was his, Lewis’, fault.
“Too bad,” he said. “A pity. But what Petra is doing now is even more important than two-year-old birthday parties. Take my deepest apologies to Mrs. Farwell, will you please, and tell her that I was tiresome and unreasonable and that Petra had nothing to say about it. Do that and I’ll drive her out myself—get her there in time for your dinner at the latest. I promise.”
“Well, Lewis, old-timer, I can only say that it seems to me you’re taking a funny way to help Petra learn how to treat Clare. I don’t see how anything can be quite so important as you’re making this out to be. Really! If Clare forgives you, she’s an angel. But she will, of course. Sheisan angel.”
“That’s reassuring. But seriously, Dick, it’s none of my business how Petra treats her stepmother. Thought I’d made that plain. As a matter of fact, though, and just from the outside, she seems to me to be playing her part at Green Doors rather well.—If you aren’t going to wait, you’d better get along and explain, hadn’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose I had. Clare can’t keep little Sophia up, of course. Somebody must be there before the cake and the candles to explain about Petra and help make a party. But be sure to get her out in time to dress fordinner, won’t you! Where will you dine yourself, Lewis? At the Allens’?”
“Perhaps. It doesn’t matter.... Cynthia’ll think I have a Meadowbrook complex for sure, if I turn up three times within the week!”
The last was spoken to himself as he stood on the curb, watching Dick’s car nose out and creep away in the traffic. Lewis would give Petra and McCloud another ten minutes before returning to his office. He went across to the Public Garden in the hope of finding an empty bench where he could smoke while waiting that ten minutes. But he wondered, as he went, what Dick would have thought, could he know how Lewis had left Petra occupied up there,—if he could see her, as Lewis had seen her from the door before he closed it softly. Dick would, of course, think him quite mad. But he was not mad. Lewis knew himself as sane—and as collected—as he had ever been in his life.
McCloud, after his declaration of love, had walked past Petra and Lewis, not seeing them any more, and dropped on his knees by the patients’ chair. There he had put his head down in his folded arms on the leather cushion. Lewis himself had stayed where he was, inert and doubtful of what to do. As a psychiatrist, he had no cue for further action. But Petra felt no hesitation. She did not even so much as glance at Lewis for approval of her intention when she quickly followed McCloud, and quietly seating herself on the arm of the patients’ chair,put her hand down on his dark head. After that, there was no sound or motion in the place.
... Petra’s eyes met Lewis’ through the stillness. He smiled his slight, fleeting smile—a smile that declared both his gravity and his comprehension. Then he got out of there, leaving Petra alone with McCloud, as quietly as he could. McCloud, when he returned to common day, had better find himself with Petra than with a psychiatrist. It was his best chance—Lewis was certain—of hanging on to the liberty he had regained, over the first minutes of difficult adjustments.
Lewis found his vacant bench in the garden and lit a cigarette. A squirrel, boldest and most insensitive of all animals to the moods of humans, came rollicking up to his feet. A motion picture of a squirrel’s gyrations, slowed down, ought to be excitingly beautiful. Lewis had long intended to buy a moving-picture camera for the one purpose of taking organic life in motion,—flowers opening, horses trotting, unconscious children playing. But so far he had not had the price,—not been willing to give it, anyhow. At this very minute the clinic was in crying need of a new ceiling. If he didn’t scare up the money for that and set them to work on it, the plaster would be coming down on people’s heads. You couldn’t wait for the hospital trustees to get around to vote the money. The psychological effect of such dinginess was bad for the patients too....
The Little Flower! Saint Thérèse of Lisieux! It was precisely as if a friend of some of Lewis’ best friends hadstepped in between him and his patient this afternoon, curing the patient. For the Little Flower was no far-off legend-enshrouded figure in Christian myth. She was of modern times. She had died, in fact, a girl then of twenty-five, only half a dozen years before Lewis was born. His mother’s contemporary! And in dying she had asked the privilege of spending her heaven doing good upon earth; and since then countless miracles had been credited to her interventions. Joseph Duffield, Lewis’ one greatest friend, had had, during the last few years of his life, what he in his Catholic terminology called a special devotion to this particular saint. Joseph had died, as it happened, midway in a novena he and his wife were making to the Little Flower for the cure of his angina. Strangely, her husband’s death and the unhealing grief it had brought her had not shaken Laura Duffield’s faith in the Little Flower’s loving goodness. There was even now a framed picture of the Little Flower on the bookcase in Laura’s bedroom where she had moved Michael when he fell so ill. Lewis had often looked across the suffering, paralyzed little form during his long watches this past week, and himself taken heart from the pure smiling face of the young saint.
Michael, too, knew Thérèse and loved Thérèse best after Mary and Joseph of all the saints his grandmother had taught him to reverence. The boy had told Lewis that first night he spent with him in his rooms, that he had begged the Little Flower—begged her over and over—to make his grandmother well again, right upuntil his separation from her at the clinic that afternoon. And when that did not happen, Michael had gone on praying and loving Thérèse all the same, as soon as the first spasm of homesickness passed a little. Laura Duffield, when Lewis had remarked on this persistence of the boy’s faith in this particular saint, had smilingly said that to her mind that was one of the Little Flower’s favorite miracles, preserving and even increasing faith in the hearts whose dearest desires she could not, in God’s mercy, answer.... It was the miracle beyond miracles, Laura had said, this increased love and faith in the face of denial. Didn’t Lewis himself see that?
The squirrel was now actually on Lewis’ knee, begging with nose and paws and eyes for nuts. But Lewis looked through the avid little beggar as through a bit of glass. Shock of some sort—he had made up his mind to that weeks ago, hadn’t he!—was the best hope of restoring McCloud’s speech. The only question had been how to procure a shock that would not be calamitous. Well, this afternoon, McCloud had had his shock. Two of them, in fact, one right on top of the other. First, the most violent sort of anger at finding his doctor betraying his confidences. Second, Petra’s reminding him with such unexpected suddenness of the Little Flower—a person intimately connected with the brother for whose death McCloud held himself responsible. It was possible even that “the kid” had spoken Saint Thérèse’s name while dying. In any case this afternoon had shown that shewas all bound up with memories of “the kid” in McCloud’s tortured mind. So there were the two shocks, either one of which might easily account for the cure. Lewis admitted the possibilities. But all the same, he was not convinced of the rational explanation. Nor was he exactly convinced of the supernatural explanation. He simply felt no compulsion to decide between them. Who was he, to dare to say!
One thing only was certain. The McCloud records should be abstracted from the files at once and burned; for no psychiatric theories, no pages for a new book, would ever be forthcoming from this particular case. That was Lewis’ only certainty.
The squirrel sprang away as Lewis got up. The ten minutes he had given Petra and McCloud alone together must be up. He threw away his cigarette and went back to the office building.
The door into his reception room was locked. That was surprising. Lewis remembered, distinctly, that the latch had been off when he came out. It was always off, in fact, until the place was finally shut up for the day. He got out his latchkey, wondering.
The rooms were deserted. No Petra. No McCloud. They had both gone. But surely Petra had interpreted Lewis’ final look at her before he closed the door to mean he would be back almost at once. She must have known he would want to keep McCloud in his care for the next few hours. Why, he had left his hat there on the desk even, and his papers lay scattered. Petra couldsee, if she couldn’t reason, that he was coming back.
He looked his desk over, thinking she might have left a note of explanation for him. But she had not even done that. Then Lewis thought he understood. She must suddenly have realized that Dick was very late, called the architect’s office, found that Dick had left it some time ago, decided that he was not, after all, coming for her, and dashed for a train. But where would McCloud have gone off to, so quickly, without a word, or a note? His room, most likely. Quickly Lewis looked up the address. There was a telephone number, but Lewis dared not submit the stability of the young man’s cure to such a drastic test. So he started off in search.
A little after seven o’clock Lewis was back in his own rooms in the apartment hotel where he lived. He had waited in his car outside McCloud’s rooming house for something over an hour, watching for McCloud’s return, after first making sure he was not already at home. Then he had dined in anxious solitude in a humble restaurant and now he was here to telephone Green Doors. He got Dick, but only to discover that Petra had not come on the train, hadn’t showed up at all.
“But you promised to bring her yourself, I thought! We’ve been waiting. Clare was delighted. She wants you to join our party at the Club. She called your office the minute I told her your plan about driving Petra out. But nobody answered. How do I know where Petra is, if you don’t?”