"I'm glad!" Pat told herself. "I'm glad it's over, and I'm glad I
promised Dr. Carl--I guess I was mighty close to the brink of disaster
that time."
She examined the injuries on her face, carefully powdered to conceal
the worst effects from her mother. The trick had worked, too; Mrs.
Lane had delivered herself of an excited lecture on the dangers of
the gasoline age, and then thanked Heaven it was no worse. Well, Pat
reflected, she had good old Dr. Carl to thank for the success of the
subterfuge; he had broken the news very skillfully, set the stage for
her appearance, and calmed her mother's apprehensions of scars. And
Pat, surveying her image in the glass above her dressing-table, could
see for herself the minor nature of the hurts.
"Scars--pooh!" she observed. "A bruised cheek, a split lip, a skinned
chin. All I need is a black eye, and I guess I'd have had that in five
minutes more, and perhaps a cauliflower ear into the bargain."
But her mood was anything but flippant; she was fighting off the time
when her thoughts had of necessity to face the unpleasant, disturbing
facts of the affair. She didn't want to think of the thing at all;
she wanted to laugh it off and forget it, yet she knew that for an
impossibility. The very desire to forget she recognized as a coward's
wish, and she resented the idea that she was cowardly.
"Forget the wise-cracks," she advised her image. "Face the thing and
argue it out; that's the only way to be satisfied."
She rose with a little grimace of pain at the twinge from her bruised
knees, and crossed to the chaise lounge beside the far window. She
settled herself in it and resumed her cogitations. She was feeling more
or less herself again; the headache of the morning had nearly vanished,
and aside from the various aches and a listless fagged-out sensation,
she approximated her normal self. Physically, that is; the shadow of
that other catastrophe, the one she hesitated to face, was another
matter.
"I'm lucky to get off this easily," she assured herself, "after going
on a bust like that one, like a lumberjack with his pay in his pocket."
She shook her head in mournful amazement. "And I'm Patricia Lane, the
girl whom Billy dubbed 'Pat the Impeccable'! Impeccable! Wandering
through alleys in step-ins and a table cloth--getting beaten up in a
drunken brawl--passing out on rot-gut liquor--being carried home and
put to bed! Not impeccable; incapable's the word! I belong to Dr.
Carl's parade of incompetents."
She continued her rueful reflections. "Well, item one is, I don't love
Nick any more. I couldn't now!" she flung at the smiling green buddha
on the mantel. "That's over; I've promised."
Somehow there was not satisfaction in the memory of that promise. It
was logical, of course; there wasn't anything else to do now, but
still--
"That _wasn't_ Nick!" she told herself. "That wasn't _my_ Nick. I guess
Dr. Carl is right, and he's a depressed what-ever-it-was; but if he's
crazy, so am I! He had me convinced last night; I understood what he
meant, and I felt what he wanted me to feel. If he's crazy, I am too; a
fine couple we are!"
She continued. "But it wasn't Nick! I saw his face when we drove off,
and it had changed again, and that was Nick's face, not the other. And
he was sorry; I could see he was sorry, and the other could never have
regretted it--not ever! The other isn't--quite human, but Nick is."
She paused, considering the idea. "Of course," she resumed, "I might
have imagined that change at the end. I was hazy and quavery, and it's
the last thing I _do_ remember; that must have been just before I
passed out."
And then, replying to her own objection, "But I _didn't_ imagine it! I
saw it happen once before, that other night when--Well, what difference
does it make, anyway? It's over, and I've given my promise."
But she was unable to dismiss the matter as easily as that. There
was some uncanny, elusive element in it that fascinated her. Cruel,
terrible, demoniac, he might have been; he had also been kind, lovable,
and gentle. Yet Dr. Carl had told her that split personalities could
contain no characteristics that were not present in the original,
normal character. Was cruelty, then, a part of kindness? Was cruelty
merely the lack of kindness, or, cynical thought, was kindness but the
lack of cruelty? Which qualities were positive in the antagonistic
phases of Nicholas Devine's individuality, and which negative? Was the
gentle, lovable, but indubitably weaker character the split, and the
demon of last evening his normal self? Or vice-versa? Or were both of
these fragmentary entities, portions of some greater personality as yet
unapparent to her?
The whole matter was a mystery; she shrugged in helpless perplexity.
"I don't think Dr. Carl knows as much about it as he says," she mused.
"I don't think psychiatry or any other science knows that much about
the human soul. Dr. Carl doesn't even believe in a soul; how could he
know anything about it, then?" She frowned in puzzlement and gave up
the attempt to solve the mystery.
The hours she had spent in her room, at her mother's insistence, began
to pall; she didn't feel particularly ill--it was more of a languor, a
depressed, worn-out feeling. Her mother, of course, was out somewhere;
she felt a desire for human companionship, and wondered if the Doctor
might by some chance drop in. It seemed improbable; he had his regular
Sunday afternoon routine of golf at the Club, and it took a real
catastrophe to keep him away from that. She sighed, stretched her legs,
rose from her position on the chaise lounge, and wandered toward the
kitchen where Magda was doubtless to be found.
It was in the dusk of the rear hall that the first sense of her loss
came over her. Heretofore her renunciation of Nicholas Devine was a
rational thing, a promise given but not felt; but now it was suddenly a
poignant reality. Nick was gone, she realized; he was out of her world,
irrevocably sundered from her. She paused at the top of the rear flight
of stairs, considering the matter.
"He's gone! I won't see him ever again." The thought was appalling; she
felt already a premonition of loneliness to come, of an emptiness in
her world, a lack that nothing could replace.
"I shouldn't have promised Dr. Carl," she mused, knowing that even
without that promise her course must still have been the same. "I
shouldn't have, not until I'd talked to Nick--my own Nick."
And still, she reflected forlornly, what difference did it make? She
had to give him up; she couldn't continue to see him not knowing at
what instant that terrible caricature of him might appear to torment
her. But he might have explained, she argued miserably, answering
her own objection at once--he's said he couldn't explain, didn't
understand. The thing was at an impasse.
She shook her shining black head despondently, and descended the dusky
well of the stairs to the kitchen. Magda was there clattering among her
pots and pans; Pat entered quietly and perched on the high stool by the
long table. Old Magda, who had warmed her babyhood milk and measured
out her formula, gave her a single glance and continued her work.
"Sorry about the accident, I was," she said without looking up.
"Thanks," responded the girl. "I'm all right again."
"You don't look it."
"I feel all right."
She watched the mysterious, alchemistic mixing of a pastry, and thought
of the vast array of them that had come from Magda's hands. As far back
as she could remember she had perched on this stool observing the same
mystic culinary rites.
Suddenly another memory rose out of the grave of forgetfulness and
went gibbering across her world. She remembered the stories Magda used
to tell her, frightening stories of witchcraft and the evil eye, tales
out of an older region and a more credulous age.
"Magda," she asked, "did you ever see a devil?"
"Not I, but I've talked with them that had."
"Didn't you ever see one?"
"No." The woman slid a pan into the oven. "I saw a man once, when I was
a tot, possessed by a devil."
"You did? How did he look?"
"He screamed terrible, then he said queer things. Then he fell down and
foam came out of his mouth."
"Like a fit?"
"The Priest, he said it was a devil. He came and prayed over him, and
after a while he was real quiet, and then he was all right."
"Possessed by a devil," said Pat thoughtfully. "What happened to him?"
"Dunno."
"What queer things did he say?"
"Wicked things, the Priest said. I couldn't tell! I was a tot."
"Possessed by a devil!" Pat repeated musingly. She sat immersed in
thoughts on the high stool while Magda clattered busily about. The
woman paused finally, turning her face to the girl.
"What you so quiet about, Miss Pat?"
"I was just thinking."
"You get your letter?"
"Letter? What letter? Today's Sunday."
"Special delivery. The girl, she put it in the hall."
"I didn't know anything about it. Who'd write me a special?"
She slipped off the high stool and proceeded to the front hall. The
letter was there, solitary on the salver that always held the mail. She
picked it up, examining the envelope in sudden startled amazement and
more than a trace of illogical exultation.
For the letter, post-marked that same morning, was addressed in the
irregular script of Nicholas Devine!
13