CHAPTER VI
There was nothing more than this to the meeting that night, but early the next afternoon I was called to the telephone. As such a summons was rare in the club, I went to the instrument in some trepidation.
“Hello! This is Frank Melbury.”
“This is Doctor Cantyre. You remember that we met last evening?”
“Oh, rather!”
“I’m motoring out in my runabout to see a patient who lives a few miles up the river, and I want you to come along.”
The invitation, which would mean nothing to you but a yes or a no, struck me almost speechless. There was first the pleasure of it. I have not laid stress on the fact that the weather was sickeningly hot, because it didn’t enter into our considerations. We were too deeply concerned with other things to care much that the house was stifling; and yet stifling it was. But more important than that was the fact that any one in the world should want to show me this courtesy. Remember that I had been beyond the reach of courtesies. A drink from some one who would expect me to give him a drink in return was the utmost I had known in this direction for months, and I might say for years.
Is it any wonder that in my reply I stammered and stuttered and nearly sobbed?
“Oh, but, I say, I—I look too beastly for an expedition of—of that sort. I’m awfully sorry, but—but I—well, you know how it is.”
“Oh, get out! You’ve got to have the air. I’m your doctor. I’m not going to see you cooped up there day after day in weather like this. Besides, I’m bringing along a couple of dust-coats—the roads will be dusty part of the way—and we shall both be covered up. Expect me by half past two.”
As he put up the receiver without waiting for further protests, there was nothing for me but submission.
“I’ve been ’ere as long as you ’ave,” Lovey complained when I told him of my invitation, “and nobody don’t ask me to go hout in no automobiles.”
“Oh, but they will.”
He shook his head.
“Them swells’ll take you away, sonny. See if they don’t.”
“Not from you, Lovey.”
He grabbed me by the arm.
“Will you promise me that, Slim?”
“Yes, Lovey; I promise you.”
“And we’ll go on being buddies, even when the rich guys talks to you about all them swell things?”
“Yes, Lovey. We’re buddies for life.”
With this Mizpah between us he released my arm and I was able to go and make my preparations.
In spite of the heat and the fact that on a windless day there was no dust to speak of, Cantyre was buttoned up in a dust-coat. It would have seemed the last word in tact if he hadn’t gone further by pretending to be occupied in doing something to the steering-wheel while I hid my seedy blue serge in the long linen garment hehanded me out. As even an old golf-cap can look pretty decent, I was really like anybody else by the time I had snuggled myself in by his side.
During the first mile or two of the way I could hardly listen to Cantyre, to say nothing of making conversation. In spasmodic sentences between his spells of attention to the traffic he told me of his patient and where she lived; but as it was nothing I was obliged to register in my mind, I could give myself to the wonder of the occasion, in awe at the miracle which had restored me to something like my old place in the world at the very moment when I seemed farthest away from it. Here I was, with not a penny to my name and not two coats to my back, tooling along like a gentleman with a gentleman, and as a man with his friend. Moreover, here I was with a new revelation, a convincing revelation, of something I had long since ceased to believe—that in this world there was such a thing as active brotherly kindness.
I came out of these thoughts to find that we were following the avenue with part of which I had made myself so familiar ten days before. I began to ask myself if Cantyre had a motive in bringing me this way. The houses were thinning out. Vacant lots became frequent. I noted the southern limit of my pacings up and down on that strange midnight. Cantyre slowed the pace perceptibly. My heart thumped. If he accused me of anything, I was resolved to confess all.
As we passed one particular vacant lot, a tangle of nettle, fireweed, and blue succory, I noticed that Cantyre’s gaze roamed round about it, to the neglect of the machine. We had slowed down to perhaps ten miles an hour.
“Do you know whose house that is?” he asked, suddenly.
But I refused to betray myself before it was necessary.
“Whose?” I riposted.
“Sterling Barry, the architect’s.”
The machine almost stopped. He looked the façade up and down, saying, as he did so: “It’s closed for the season. They left town a few days ago. Barry’s bought the old Hornblower place at Rosyth, Long Island.”
To my relief, we sped on again; but I was not long in learning the motive behind his interest.
Chiefly for the sake of not seeming dumb, I said, as we got into the country, “You and Ralph Coningsby are by way of being great friends, aren’t you?”
“No,” he replied, promptly. “I see him when I go to the club; not very often elsewhere. I know his sister, Elsie Coningsby, better. Not that I know her very well. She happens to be a great friend of—of a—of a great friend—or, rather, some one who was a great friend—of mine. That’s all.”
So that was it!
I said, after we had spun along some few miles more, “Your name is Stephen, isn’t it?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
I hedged. “Oh, I must have heard some one call you that.”
“That’s funny. Hardly any one does. They mostly say Cantyre—or just doctor.” He added, after a minute or two, “You call me Stephen, and I’ll call you Frank.”
Once more the swift march of happenings gave me a slight shock.
“Oh, but we hardly know each other.”
“That would be true if there weren’t friendships that outdistance acquaintanceships.”
“Oh, if you look at it that way—”
“That’s the way it strikes me.”
“But, good Heavens! man, think of what—of what I am!”
His gaze was fixed on the stretch of road ahead of him.
“What’s that got to do with it? It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you were a murderer or a thief.”
“How do you know I’m not?” I couldn’t help asking.
“I don’t know that you’re not; but I say it wouldn’t make any difference to me if you were.”
The word I am tempted to use of myself at this unexpected offer of good-will is flabbergasted. I am not emotional; still less am I sentimental; both in sentiment and emotion my tendency is to go slow.
After a brief silence I said: “Look here! Do you go round making friends among the riffraff of mankind?”
“I don’t go round making friends among people of any sort. I’m not the friendly type. I know lots of people, of course; but—but I don’t get beyond just knowing them.”
“Is that because you don’t want to?”
“Not altogether. I’m a—I’m a lonesome sort of bloke. I never was a good mixer; and when you’re not that, other fellows instinctively close up their ranks against you and shut you out. Not that that matters to me. I hardly ever see a lot with whom I should want to get in. You’re—you’re an exception.”
“And for Heaven’s sake, why?”
“Oh, for two or three reasons—which I’m not going to tell you. One of these days you may find out.”
We left the subject there and sped along in silence.
This, then, was the man Regina Barry had turneddown; and, notwithstanding his kindness to myself, I could understand her doing it. For a high-spirited girl such as she evidently was he would have been too melancholy. “Very nice” was what she had called him, and very nice he was; but he lacked the something thoroughly masculine that means more to women than to men. Men are used to the eternal-feminine streak in themselves and one another; but women put up with it only when it is like a flaw in an emerald, noticeable to the expert, but to no one else.
I asked him how he came to be what Coningsby called physician in ordinary to the club.
“By accident. Rufus Legrand asked me to go over and see what I could do for a bad case of D. T.”
“He’s the rector of the church opposite, isn’t he?”
“Yes, and an awfully good sort. Only parson I know who thinks more of God than he does of a church. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of these days he got the true spirit of religion.”
“What’s that?”
“What they’re doing at the Down and Out.”
“Oh, but they skip religion there altogether.”
“They don’t skip religion; they only skip the word—and for a reason.”
“What reason?”
“The reason that it’s been so misapplied as to have become nearly unintelligible. If you told the men at the club that such and such a thing was religion they’d most of ’em kick like the deuce; but when they get the thing without explanation they take to it every time. But you were asking me about my connection with the club. It began four years ago, when they first got into Miss Smedley’s house. Fellow had the old-fashionedhorrors—bad. As I’d been making dipsomania a specialty Legrand railroaded me in, and there I’ve stayed.”
When we drew up at the gate of an old yellow mansion standing in large grounds Cantyre left me in the machine while he went in to visit his patient. The blue-green hills were just beginning to veil themselves in the diaphanous mauve of afternoon, and between them the river with its varied life flowed silently and rapidly. It was strange to me to remember that a short time ago I had been wishing myself under it, and that this very water would be washing the oozy, moss-grown piles of Greeley’s Slip.