Dick's decision to cut himself off from Elizabeth was born of his
certainty that he could not see her and keep his head. He was resolutely
determined to keep his head, until he knew what he had to offer her. But
he was very unhappy. He worked sturdily all day and slept at night out
of sheer fatigue, only to rouse in the early morning to a conviction
of something wrong before he was fully awake. Then would come the
uncertainty and pain of full consciousness, and he would lie with his
arms under his head, gazing unblinkingly at the ceiling and preparing to
face another day.
There was no prospect of early relief, although David had not again
referred to his going away. David was very feeble. The look of him
sometimes sent an almost physical pain through Dick's heart. But there
were times when he roused to something like his old spirit, shouted for
tobacco, frowned over his diet tray, and fought Harrison Miller when he
came in to play cribbage in much his old tumultuous manner.
Then, one afternoon late in May, when for four days Dick had not seen
Elizabeth, suddenly he found the decision as to their relation taken out
of his hands, and by Elizabeth herself.
He opened the door one afternoon to find her sitting alone in the
waiting-room, clearly very frightened and almost inarticulate. He could
not speak at all at first, and when he did his voice, to his dismay, was
distinctly husky.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked, in a tone which was fairly sepulchral.
“That's what I want to know, Dick.”
Suddenly he found himself violently angry. Not at her, of course. At
everything.
“Wrong?” he said, savagely. “Yes. Everything is wrong!”
Then he was angry! She went rather pale.
“What have I done, Dick?”
As suddenly as he had been fierce he was abject and ashamed. Startled,
too.
“You?” he said. “What have you done? You're the only thing that's right
in a wrong world. You--”
He checked himself, put down his bag--he had just come in--and closed
the door into the hall. Then he stood at a safe distance from her, and
folded his arms in order to be able to keep his head-which shows how
strange the English language is.
“Elizabeth,” he said gravely. “I've been a self-centered fool. I stayed
away because I've been in trouble. I'm still in trouble, for that
matter. But it hasn't anything to do with you. Not directly, anyhow.”
“Don't you think it's possible that I know what it is?”
“You do know.”
He was too absorbed to notice the new maturity in her face, the brooding
maternity born of a profound passion. To Elizabeth just then he was not
a man, her man, daily deciding matters of life and death, but a worried
boy, magnifying a trifle into importance.
“There is always gossip,” she said, “and the only thing one can do is to
forget it at once. You ought to be too big for that sort of thing.”
“But--suppose it is true?”
“What difference would it make?”
He made a quick movement toward her.
“There may be more than that. I don't know, Elizabeth,” he said, his
eyes on hers. “I have always thought--I can't go to David now.”
He was moved to go on. To tell her of his lost youth, of that strange
trick by which his mind had shut off those hidden years. But he could
not. He had a perfectly human fear of being abnormal in her eyes,
precisely but greatly magnified the same instinct which had made him
inspect his new tie in daylight for fear it was too brilliant. But
greater than that was his new fear that something neither happy nor
right lay behind him under lock and key in his memory.
“I want you to know this, Dick,” she said. “That nothing, no gossip or
anything, can make any difference to me. And I've been terribly hurt.
We've been such friends. You--I've been lying awake at night, worrying.”
That went to his heart first, and then to his head. This might be all,
all he was ever to have. This hour, and this precious and tender child,
so brave in her declaration, so simple and direct; all his world in that
imitation mahogany chair.
“You're all I've got,” he said. “The one real thing in a world that's
going to smash. I think I love you more than God.”
The same mood, of accepting what he had without question and of refusing
to look ahead, actuated him for the next few days. He was incredibly
happy.
He went about his work with his customary care and thoroughness, for
long practice had made it possible for him to go on as though nothing
had happened, to listen to querulous complaints and long lists of
symptoms, and to write without error those scrawled prescriptions which
were, so hopefully, to cure. Not that Dick himself believed greatly in
those empirical doses, but he considered that the expectation of relief
was half the battle. But that was the mind of him, which went about
clothed in flesh, of course, and did its daily and nightly work, and put
up a very fair imitation of Doctor Richard Livingstone. But hidden away
was a heart that behaved in a highly unprofessional manner, and sang
and dreamed, and jumped at the sight of a certain small figure on the
street, and generally played hob with systole and diastole, and the
vagus and accelerator nerves. Which are all any doctor really knows
about the heart, until he falls in love.
He even began to wonder if he had read into the situation something
that was not there, and in this his consciousness of David's essential
rectitude helped him. David could not do a wrong thing, or an unworthy
one. He wished he were more like David.
The new humility extended to his love for Elizabeth. Sometimes, in his
room or shaving before the bathroom mirror, he wondered what she could
see in him to care about. He shaved twice a day now, and his face was so
sore that he had to put cream on it at night, to his secret humiliation.
When he was dressed in the morning he found himself once or twice
taking a final survey of the ensemble, and at those times he wished very
earnestly that he had some outstanding quality of appearance that she
might admire.
He refused to think. He was content for a time simply to feel, to be
supremely happy, to live each day as it came and not to look ahead. And
the old house seemed to brighten with him. Never had Lucy's window boxes
been so bright, or Minnie's bread so light; the sun poured into David's
sick room and turned the nurse so dazzling white in her uniform that
David declared he was suffering from snow-blindness.
And David himself was improving rapidly. With the passage of each day
he felt more secure. The reporter from the Times-Republican--if he were
really on the trail of Dick he would have come to see him, would have
told him the story. No. That bridge was safely crossed. And Dick was
happy. David, lying in his bed, would listen and smile faintly when Dick
came whistling into the house or leaped up the stairs two at a time;
when he sang in his shower, or tormented the nurse with high-spirited
nonsense. The boy was very happy. He would marry Elizabeth Wheeler, and
things would be as they should be; there would be the fullness of life,
young voices in the house, toys on the lawn. He himself would pass on,
in the fullness of time, but Dick--
On Decoration Day they got him out of bed, making a great ceremony
of it, and when he was settled by the window in his big chair with a
blanket over his knees, Dick came in with a great box. Unwrapping it
he disclosed a mass of paper and a small box, and within that still
another.
“What fol-de-rol is all this?” David demanded fiercely, with a childish
look of expectation in his eyes. “Give me that box. Some more slippers,
probably!”
He worked eagerly, and at last he came to the small core of the mass. It
was a cigar!
It was somewhat later, when the peace of good tobacco had relaxed him
into a sort of benignant drowsiness, and when Dick had started for his
late afternoon calls, that Lucy came into the room.
“Elizabeth Wheeler's downstairs,” she said. “I told her you wanted to
see her. She's brought some chicken jelly, too.”
She gathered up the tissue paper that surrounded him, and gave the room
a critical survey. She often felt that the nurse was not as tidy as she
might be. Then she went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I don't want to worry you, David. Not now. But if he's going to marry
her--”
“Well, why shouldn't he?” he demanded truculently. “A good woman would
be one more anchor to windward.”
She found that she could not go on. David was always incomprehensible to
her when it came to Dick. Had been incomprehensible from the first.
But she could not proceed without telling him that the village knew
something, and what that something was; that already she felt a change
in the local attitude toward Dick. He was, for one thing, not quite so
busy as he had been.
She went out of the room, and sent Elizabeth to David.
In her love for Dick, Elizabeth now included everything that pertained
to him, his shabby coats, his rattling car, and his people. She had
an inarticulate desire for their endorsement, to be liked by them and
wanted by them. Not that there could be any words, because both she and
Dick were content just then with love, and were holding it very secret
between them.
“Well, well!” said David. “And here we are reversed and I'm the patient
and you're the doctor! And good medicine you are, my dear.”
He looked her over with approval, and with speculation, too. She was a
small and fragile vessel on which to embark all the hopes that, out of
his own celibate and unfulfilled life, he had dreamed for Dick. She was
even more than that. If Lucy was right, from now on she was a part
of that experiment in a human soul which he had begun with only a
professional interest, but which had ended by becoming a vital part of
his own life.
She was a little shy with him, he saw; rather fluttered and nervous, yet
radiantly happy. The combination of these mixed emotions, plus her best
sick-room manner, made her slightly prim at first. But soon she was
telling him the small news of the village, although David rather
suspected her of listening for Dick's car all the while. When she got up
to go and held out her hand he kept it, between both of his.
“I haven't been studying symptoms for all these years for nothing, my
dear,” he said. “And it seems to me somebody is very happy.”
“I am, Doctor David.”
He patted her hand.
“Mind you,” he said, “I don't know anything and I'm not asking any
questions. But if the Board of Trade, or the Chief of Police, had come
to me and said, 'Who is the best wife for--well, for a young man who
is an important part of this community?' I'd have said in reply,
'Gentlemen, there is a Miss Elizabeth Wheeler who--'”
Suddenly she bent down and kissed him.
“Oh, do you think so?” she asked, breathlessly. “I love him so much,
Doctor David. And I feel so unworthy.”
“So you are,” he said. “So's he. So are all of us, when it comes to a
great love, child. That is, we are never quite what the other fellow
thinks we are. It's when we don't allow for what the scientist folk call
a margin of error that we come our croppers. I wonder”--he watched her
closely--“if you young people ever allow for a margin of error?”
“I only know this,” she said steadily. “I can't imagine ever caring any
less. I've never thought about myself very much, but I do know that. You
see, I think I've cared for a long time.”
When she had gone he sat in his chair staring ahead of him and thinking.
Yes. She would stick. She had loyalty, loyalty and patience and a rare
humility. It was up to Dick then. And again he faced the possibility of
an opening door into the past, of crowding memories, of confusion and
despair and even actual danger. And out of that, what?
Habit. That was all he had to depend on. The brain was a thing of
habits, like the body; right could be a habit, and so could evil. As a
man thought, so he was. For all of his childhood, and for the last ten
years, Dick's mental habits had been right; his environment had been
love, his teaching responsibility. Even if the door opened, then, there
was only the evil thinking of two or three reckless years to combat,
and the door might never open. Happiness, Lauler had said, would keep it
closed, and Dick was happy.
When at five o'clock the nurse came in with a thermometer he was asleep
in his chair, his mouth slightly open, and snoring valiantly. Hearing
Dick in the lower hall, she went to the head of the stairs, her finger
to her lips.
Dick nodded and went into the office. The afternoon mail was lying
there, and he began mechanically to open it. His thoughts were
elsewhere.
Now that he had taken the step he had so firmly determined not to take,
certain things, such as Clare Rossiter's story, David's uneasiness, his
own doubts, no longer involved himself alone, nor even Elizabeth and
himself. They had become of vital importance to her family.
There was no evading the issue. What had once been only his own
misfortune, mischance, whatever it was, had now become of vital
importance to an entire group of hitherto disinterested people. He would
have to put his situation clearly before them and let them judge. And he
would have to clarify that situation for them and for himself.
He had had a weak moment or two. He knew that some men, many men, went
to marriage with certain reticences, meaning to wipe the slate clean and
begin again. He had a man's understanding of such concealments. But he
did not for a moment compare his situation with theirs, even when the
temptation to seize his happiness was strongest. No mere misconduct,
but something hidden and perhaps terrible lay behind David's strange
new attitude. Lay, too, behind the break in his memory which he tried to
analyze with professional detachment. The mind in such cases set up
its defensive machinery of forgetfulness, not against the trivial but
against the unbearable.
For the last day or two he had faced the fact that, not only must he use
every endeavor to revive his past, but that such revival threatened with
cruelty and finality to separate him from the present.
With an open and unread letter in his hand he stared about the office.
This place was his; he had fought for it, worked for it. He had an
almost physical sense of unseen hands reaching out to drag him away
from it; from David and Lucy, and from Elizabeth. And of himself holding
desperately to them all, and to the believed commonplaceness of his
surroundings.
He shook himself and began to read the letter.
“Dear Doctor: I have tried to see you, but understand you are laid
up. Burn this as soon as you've read it. Louis Bassett has started for
Norada, and I advise your getting the person we discussed out of town as
soon as possible. Bassett is up to mischief. I'm not signing this fully,
for obvious reasons. G.”