Stephenson, following up his telegram, he had had just time to dictate
from his office in town between trains. He had hated the look of concern
that came over the face of his stenographer when he announced, in the
letter, that he had been suddenly called home by his wife’s illness. It
seemed as if, so long as they could keep the trouble secret, it need
hardly be a trouble at all. But, after all, what could be more public
than George Delano, with his perpetual air of speaking for a cowed
group, behind him, of eleven good men and true? The whole house was so
peaceful, Annette so little seemed to want her opportunity of speaking
to him privately, Millicent seemed by inference so happy and harmless
over at the club yonder, he felt almost a fool not to have seen
Stephenson. And yet, could he have done otherwise? He took the letter
from his pocket and read it through once more. No; George had been
right. It _was_ alarming; and, more probably than not, Annette was
simply frightened and puzzled, or else silently laying plans to take
another place. Every element for apprehension that George had mentioned
was certainly there. Probably he never should see Stephenson; probably
he would simply have to turn over the Tractions case to Welby and miss
his chance. If anything went wrong with Millicent, it would go wrong
with him. George might be the kind to put a big deal through with a
thing like that going on at home. Harry Redreeve knew he himself wasn’t.
Then he turned with a start, for Millicent was before him.
“You here? Why did you come? Anything wrong?” She smothered him for an
instant in her frills.
“No, nothing wrong. I just came.”
“But didn’t you see Stephenson?”
“No. To-day’s interview was called off. I hope to see him in a few
days.”
The letter had still not attracted her attention. If she was aware of
it, she probably thought it a letter of hers to him. He must study her,
he thought wearily; must note every detail as if he were a doctor. And
indeed she did seem a little nervous, a little thin. But that was
positively all. She glanced at the letter once or twice, uneasily, he
thought. Of course, they hadn’t been apart enough for her to have
written him recently so many pages. He laid his arm over the thin, blue
sheets.
“Much doing down here?”
“Nothing. That’s why I have to go over to the club every blessed
afternoon and play auction. We make it a kind of half-way house--go
there instead of going to each other.”
“Do you like this place?”
“Do you?”
“I haven’t been here a great deal so far. It seems restful.”
“Oh, restful, yes. Sometimes”--her brow knotted; she seemed to
hesitate--“sometimes I do get a little bored. You aren’t here, you see,
to share the restfulness.”
“Doesn’t anything happen to interest you all the long days?”
She looked at him with wide, honest blue eyes.
“Not anything, Harry, except the bridge, which doesn’t really interest
me. No; I haven’t seen an intriguing human being all summer.”
“You know we chose it particularly for quiet.”
“Oh, yes; and I’m sure it’s the right thing. Only, next year, I hope I
shall be strong enough, and you will be free enough, for us to do
something amusing. I’m perfectly happy, but no one could say the place
is riotous. But, by the way, Harry, who called off the Stephenson
interview? Does that mean he will make trouble?”
Harry Redreeve lifted both hands and pushed his hair back from his
forehead. His sudden gesture loosened the pages of the letter at his
elbow. Millicent leaned over and looked at them. One glance was enough,
for, without listening to her husband’s explanation, she clutched it.
“Harry Redreeve, where did you get this?”
“I spent last night at George’s.”
“And he gave you this? The beast!”
Redreeve looked his wife gravely in the eyes, bracing himself for a
scene of some unknown kind. “I don’t know why he’s a beast. He couldn’t
well do other.”
“But I particularly told him I wasn’t telling you.”
“Yes; but you can see that, if George thought the thing serious, he
would feel I must know sooner or later.”
“Did you call off the interview with Stephenson?” She rose and stood,
very flushed, before him.
“I did.”
“Because of _this_?”
“Yes, dear. I was worried.”
“Oh, my poor darling, my poor darling! I wouldn’t have had it happen for
anything. What a pompous fool George is! I’ll never forgive him. And
Mary sat in a corner and said how wonderful George was. _I_ know. Oh,
you poor darling! But when can you see Stephenson?”
“I don’t know. Later in the week, I hope.”
“And you let George make you come home straight, and cut the interview?”
“Certainly not, my dear. I didn’t need any advice to make me come home
as straight as I could.”
“You don’t mean that that wretched letter worried you?”
“Why shouldn’t it?”
“How could it? George is capable of any idiocy, but you mustn’t tell me
that you believed those people in there were real.”
“No; and neither did George.”
“Oh, George deserves to be steeped to the lips in a saturated solution
of himself. But you! I never meant you to see the thing--naturally. I
shall never get over your having called off the Stephenson interview on
my account. I’ll owe George one for that to the end of time. But you
don’t mean to say that _you_ didn’t see?”
“See what?” He was bewildered. He felt as if he himself were perhaps a
little mad. Certainly Millicent looked the acme of sanity, with her eyes
shining and all that delicate color in her face.
“Why, that it was a gigantic hoax on George, of course! If I had ever
dreamed of your seeing the letter at all, I should have expected you to
rock with delight over my cleverness. I got so tired of his
encyclopaedic ways, I thought I’d give him a _stoss_. I meant George to
think I was going off my head. Though I thought he might be dull enough
to stop at wondering if I wasn’t doing something unconventional. But
you--I should have thought you would see it the first minute. You _must_
have been tired, if you thought your old Millikins would spend her
afternoons with a lot of spooks and, on top of that, write to George
about it! It must have been a good rag, if it could take you in. I’m
rather proud of it. Why, I was afraid even George would see through that
little girl in the blue sunbonnet.” She lay back in her chair and
laughed consumingly. “Forgive me; I’ll put my mind on the serious things
of life in a moment. But it is funny!”
If it had not been for the accident with the Stephenson interview, Harry
Redreeve would have been tempted to laugh himself. As it was, there was
the practical worry at the heart of his great relief.
“I nearly didn’t post the letter, you know. I just started out to see
what I could do, and then it grew so beautifully under my hand that I
thought George ought to have it. So I posted it, after all, and it has
led to this! It comes of being bored. I always used to startle George
when I was bored. But if I had dreamed of your going up there--”
“I didn’t expect to; but it turned out to be convenient, and I
telephoned them yesterday afternoon that I would come for the night.”
“What did you say to Stephenson?”
“Wired him that my wife was ill.”
“And you haven’t written him?”
“Yes, to-day, from the office, before I took the train up here.”
“What did you say?”
“That I hoped for a later appointment.”
“Very well; you can telegraph him from here to-night. Say that I’m out
of danger, and fix another day. He will forgive you if he knows you
telegraphed him as soon as I _was_ out of danger. I’m sorry about the
fibbing, but this is a good deal truer than the lie George got you into.
Don’t send until after dinner. That will be more plausible. Now I must
dress.”
As Mrs. Redreeve went through the door, she turned to look at her
husband and laughed again.
“I can’t help it, dear. I know I was a beast to do it just because I was
bored. When I think of Blue Bonnet, I feel like Mrs. Piper or Palladino
or ‘Sally.’ But I shan’t laugh about it again. You see, the cream of the
joke is gone forever if you were taken in, too. I’m glad I didn’t
‘register’ delirium tremens for George. He would have had an ambulance
and a strait-jacket down here on the afternoon train.”
At last Harry Redreeve grinned.
“He nearly did have Dr. Boyce. He’s expecting to send him down over
Sunday.”
Millicent leaned against the lintel of the door, and closed her eyes in
mock-consternation.
“An alienist? For me? Oh, George Delano, you have _such_ an unclean
mind! It isn’t decent to be so up to date as George is. He gave me Freud
to read last winter, you remember, and for a week I dreamed things that
didn’t need any interpreting. And you were going to let the man into the
house?”
Redreeve looked at her very gravely.
“Yes, I was going to let him in.”
Mrs. Redreeve dashed back to the porch and picked up the letter. Then
she tore it viciously, scattering the pieces over the porch-floor.
“There! I’m sorry to make a mess, but Annette’s a saint. She won’t mind.
I must have been inspired by the devil to write stuff that would affect
you like that. It’s pretty bad, you know, that you could have thought me
off my head.”
Her husband leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“Yes, dear, it is pretty bad. But I’m awfully tired, and George
considers he has a gift for presenting evidence. He isn’t easy to
interrupt. I’m very sorry; but you must take it as a compliment. It was
damnably well done--to the lay mind, at least.”
By the time that Redreeve had had a chance to communicate with Delano,
Delano’s zeal had outstripped their original plan. He himself had run in
on Boyce, and disclosed his fears. Dr. Boyce promised to hold himself in
readiness to go to the Redreeves should he be summed, and Delano then
set himself frantically to recover the lost letter from Millicent’s
husband. He naturally wished to submit it to Boyce. Redreeve was,
however, far too busy with the Tractions case to inform Delano that the
letter, in a thousand pieces, had been swept into the dust-bin by “the
maid Annette.” He had to arrange to see Stephenson and a dozen other
men. He was caught in the big machine and had to keep time to the
engines. Beyond once reassuring Delano in a cryptic telegram, he had
done nothing. George’s letters he had no time to answer. Millicent
promised to attend to the matter.
The crisis drew nearer, and sometimes Redreeve felt as if the days
lengthened in arithmetical progression. By late September, when the case
was actually called, it seemed to him that the sun took fifty hours for
its diurnal course. Yet he could not have spared one of the fifty, if he
was to go fully armed, with not an inch of unprotected skin, into court.
There was excitement in it, a kind of fury of astuteness, a Pythian rage
of foresight, that lifted him above the crowd he directed. It divorced
him from country peace, and he saw little of Millicent in the fervid
autumn weeks. Sometimes she went up to town for a few days in order to
lunch and dine with him; but after the case was actually on, she found
that such jaunts tired her, and she went back to the country to rest and
wait for her husband to be free. It had been decided that they should
keep the house until November, and try for a quiet holiday there
together in the late autumn when the case was over. Harry now came home,
unless he gained a brief respite from the law’s delays, only at the
week-end. On the long Sundays, before he took the evening train, they
sat, almost silent, on the wide porch, in the subdued autumn warmth. He
was too tired even for her chatter; too tired to dare to relax, when his
nerves would have to be taut as a singing rope on the morrow. And when
at last the case was over, and Redreeve’s clients had got their verdict,
he was almost too tired to be glad.
Still, she pushed him off for a little golf now and then on a fine day;
and occasionally they had friends, belated birds like themselves, to
dinner. It marked one of the long stages of Harry Redreeve’s relief when
he asked her one night:
“Did George ever answer your letter? I positively forgot to ask.”
“What letter?”
“Your letter explaining about the hoax.”
“I never wrote it.” She flushed.
“Never wrote it? Oh, my dear girl, you said you would. That’s why he has
never congratulated me on my luck.”
“I’m sorry,” she faltered. “I will write to-morrow, honor bright. If I
hadn’t thought so much about just what to write him, I dare say I could
have done it long since. When I haven’t been thinking of the case, I’ve
been thinking of George. I wish you could have got a verdict against
_him_.”
“Well, I suppose I can write now. Perhaps it will be easier for me. Only
you must give me carte blanche to say all sorts of things for you.
George had a right to be cut up, I think, dear.”
“He’d take every right of the sort he had, you may be sure.” But her
tone was listless.
“Yes, George is not an easy-going person. However, we’d best not quarrel
with them. Have they asked us up there next month?”
“Not yet. We didn’t intend to go, in any case.”
“No; but it’s odd they haven’t asked us. They always do. I think I’d
better write to-night.”
“Won’t it do as well to-morrow?”
“I dare say. But why not to-night?”
“Because I want to talk to you.” They rose from the table at this point,
and she put her arm through his. “Coffee on the porch, Annette, please.”
“A very odd thing has happened,” she went on a few moments later, as
they faced the harvest moon. “You remember those people I wrote about?
Those people I made up to bother George with?”
“Yes.”
“Well”--she turned her head away, and he saw her pure profile in the
moonlight--“I saw them this afternoon.”
“At the club?”
“No, here on the porch, where I told George they used to come. Blue
Bonnet and all. They sat in the chairs. They went away in the motor.
They did all the things I said they did. Only this time they _did_
them.”
“Millicent!”
“Harry, dear, I’m not such a fool as to play the same game twice.
Besides, I never meant to play it on you. Of course it’s a
hallucination. It must be. It”--her voice broke a little--“it takes some
courage to say it, because every sense I have could swear that they were
real. If I hadn’t made them up in the first place, I should say now, to
you, that they _were_ real. I don’t dare to, having invented them once.
Life doesn’t give you coincidences like that. But, as far as I am
concerned, I _would_ believe in them. I took the little girl’s blue
sunbonnet off and felt of it--crumpled the stiff edge in my hand. It’s
gingham, starched. For your sake, I didn’t ask Annette to bring them
tea.” She stopped.
“You’re very tired,” began Redreeve in a shaking voice.
“No, I’m not tired that way. I’m horribly--yes, horribly, that’s the
word--rested. I wish I were tired. But I’ll do anything you say.”
“Then go to the club to-morrow while I’m in town. I’ll come back right
after luncheon, and pick you up there. I’m afraid I have to go, dear.
I’ve promised to see the district attorney. Do you want to come?”
“Oh, no, I’d rather stay here. Must I go to the club? There won’t be any
one there except a few golfing men. No one goes any more.”
“I’d rather you would. I wish we had a motor: I’d send you over to the
Stacys’ for the day.”
“I’m quite all right here, dearest; but I’ll telephone and ask Kate
Stacy to come over and lunch and take me for a drive.”
“Good. And don’t worry about it. We’ll consult a nerve-man; and if you
have to go to Europe on a bat, off you go. You’ve never seen them
before, have you?”
“Never.”
“You’ll do, dear. That was a brick to tell me. And I’ll write to George
to-morrow. I think if you put him and the damned apology quite out of
your mind, you’ll pull through with no further trouble. Don’t worry
about it: that’s the thing I beg of you.”
“I won’t.” And she turned her face to him again.
When Redreeve came home late the next afternoon, he did not see his wife
in her accustomed chair. “Hardly time yet for Kate Stacy to bring her
back,” he muttered to himself. Just then Annette, the maid came through
the door of the service wing, very quietly, into the hall where he
stood.
“What time did Mrs. Redreeve say she would be back?” he asked.
“She didn’t go out at all, sir. Mrs. Stacy was in town, she found when
she telephoned.”
“Where is she?”
“Up-stairs in her room, I think, sir.”
“Well, tell her I’m here. And you might bring me something to drink,
Annette. I’m frightfully thirsty.”
“Yes, sir. Would you mind stepping on the porch a moment--just a moment,
sir?”
He followed her. There was the tea-tray still uncleared. Six cups stood
on it, and all had been used.
“I left them for you to see, sir. Now I must clear them, or Mrs.
Redreeve will be displeased.”
“What is the matter?” The six cups seemed somehow reassuring.
The maid looked behind her furtively into the empty hall, then bent and
whispered quickly:
“There was no one here to-day, sir. And from inside I saw Mrs. Redreeve
wet the spoons, and drink a little sip out of each cup.”
Redreeve turned on her angrily, but the maid’s eyes were full of tears.
He pushed past her and went up-stairs, while she began quietly clearing
the tea-things away.
“Oh, Harry, I’m so sorry! I’ve been asleep. I meant to be down to meet
you.” Millicent raised a flushed face from her pillows. “And the Carles
are coming to dinner to-night. I telephoned them this afternoon. Kate
Stacy was in town to-day, so I couldn’t get her to lunch or motor or
anything.”
He felt a wild impulse to sneak down and ask Annette or some other maid
if the Carles really were coming, but he forbore.
“Good! What sort of day have you had?”
“All right, dear. Only”--she roused herself to a sitting position, and
began patting his knee softly with her hand--“they came again
to-day--and took tea. They’ve never done that before. I had to ask
Annette to bring tea for them, Blue Bonnet and all. I wasn’t sure even
this afternoon, you see, that they were real, though I think they are.
And Annette brought the tea perfectly. She didn’t stumble over any of
them.”
“Did they drink the tea?”
Mrs. Redreeve flushed.
“You can ask Annette if she didn’t find every cup used!”
A great wave of pity swept over him, bringing a kind of choking relief
with it. She wouldn’t lie to him, poor darling, so long as she could
keep truth on her lips. But how real they must have been to her, for her
to adopt that subterfuge--to try to prove to Annette, in Annette’s own
crude terms, that they were there. She must have a hideous, baffled
sense of being the only person with eyes in a blind world--so much worse
than being blind in a world of those who see. He bent and kissed her.
“I must dress if the Carles are coming. So must you. Don’t worry,
sweetheart. We’ll work it all out. I’ll stay and see them to-morrow.
They never come in the morning, do they?”
“Never.”
“Well, then, it’s all right. I have to go round the links with Stacy in
the morning, but I’ll be on deck all the afternoon.”
The next morning Redreeve went to the club. He was glad Stacy was a
scratch man; he might have had to try to beat him if he had been in his
own class. It would have been pretty hard to try to beat any one that
day. The links were all hazards and bunkers, and on the fifth green--his
ball had got to within a few inches of the hole, he couldn’t remember
how--he swung his cleek mechanically as if for a tremendous drive.
“Good Lord!” murmured Stacy.
“Good Lord, indeed,” echoed Redreeve. Fact is,”--he pulled himself
together quickly--“my mind is anywhere, and my general game is too poor
to go on by itself. Sorry to have played tennis all the morning. A man
telegraphed he was coming down this afternoon for an important
conference. I’m wool-gathering. I think I’ll pull out.”
Stacy nodded good-humoredly.
“I’m just out for the fun of the thing. I’ll finish and see what I can
do with Bogey. You have a right to be off your feed. So long!”
Redreeve went home, dully thankful that he had won his big case, and the
consideration of men with it. He had tried deliberately to keep life in
the normal round, thinking that, until he could decide, that was the
safest thing to do for Millicent. Whatever happened or didn’t, in these
few crucial days, he would make her take everything sanely. He wouldn’t
deviate; he wouldn’t turn the house into a psychopathic ward. People
should come and go, and the business of life should be pursued, until he
knew. She was still quite perfect with outsiders: she had been
delightful with the Carles the night before; she would be charming with
the district attorney if he got there in time for luncheon. And never
again, during this little period of suspense, would he leave her alone
in the afternoon. Everything should go by the board rather than that.
If he could once be present when the “people” came! He thought it
unlikely that he ever should; yet he hoped once at least to watch her
with the hallucination full upon her. Perhaps he could hold her tight to
his side, make her see with his eyes, force her to stare until the
chairs were empty, even for her. He built great hopes on the fact that
she hadn’t lied to him; that she had kept, poor dear, the mirror of her
consciousness as clear for him as she could. Some little spring that
still worked in her brain had clicked out, at his direct question, an
evasion instead of a lie. But he wouldn’t play golf again until it was
over. He should have to see Boyce sooner or later, he supposed.
Mrs. Redreeve met him on the porch. Though Annette was beside her,
pulling chairs into place, his wife spoke at once:
“Harry, I told you they never came except in the afternoon. But they did
come this morning--to say good-bye. They’re going back to town. Isn’t it
extraordinary that I don’t know their names yet?”
“Come in, dear, come in.” He tried to draw her into the house.
“No, wait a minute. The old gentleman looked at his watch and said they
would be late for luncheon if they didn’t hurry. And his wife said how
unfortunate it was, and how odd, they had never met you. You don’t have
to worry about me any more, darling, for this time I _know_ they were
real. See?” She pulled out a blue sunbonnet from behind her back.
He had his arm about her and was leading her into the house. But she
detained him.
“Tell Mr. Redreeve where you found it, Annette.”
“On the long chair, under the cushion.” The maid’s eyes were lowered.
“She’s such a madcap! They’ll hardly send back for it; it’s perfectly
worthless. Throw it away, Annette. But you see they _are_ real.”
Redreeve stopped in the hall. “Hadn’t you better put on something else?
The district attorney may be here to luncheon.”
“Of course. I was just going to dress. You’d better hurry, yourself.
Don’t you want a shower first? It’s extraordinarily hot for October.
Bye-bye.” She ran up the stairs, but leaned over the rail and spoke
again:
“I’m glad Blue Bonnet left it, so you could see. Tell Annette to throw
it away. It’s a horror. No, you can call to her. Come up at once, dear.
You’ll be late, and he’ll be here.”
But Redreeve went back to the porch. The maid, as white as wax, was
holding the blue sunbonnet in a shaking hand. When she saw Redreeve
emerge from the house alone, she burst into tears.
“Oh, Mr. Redreeve, I can’t stand it any longer!”
“Who was here, Annette?” He took the sunbonnet from her and held it with
numb fingers.
“No one, sir, no one.”
“Where did this come from, then?”
“She bought the gingham in the village this morning, Mr. Redreeve, just
after you went over to the club. I saw the package under her arm when
she came back. And she sewed it in her room. I didn’t dream, sir--I
wouldn’t spy on a lady--but I saw her when I was tidying the
dressing-room. Look at it, sir--how gobbled the stitches are. It don’t
hardly hold together. And an hour after, I found it on this chair, with
the pillows all throwed round. She made it herself, Mr. Redreeve, so as
you’d think somebody left it here. Do you understand it, sir?”
Harry Redreeve was very white.
“No, Annette, I don’t. But you had better throw it away, as she told
you. And, for heaven’s sake, stop crying!”
He went into the house to dress, but before he went up-stairs, he
entered the telephone-closet and shut the door. Watch in hand, he
telephoned the telegram. He had to spell “Delano” three times.
VII
EAST OF EDEN
I was with Twining when it happened. Nothing but that--actual presence
on the spot--could give me the right to tell the tale; for, untypical as
it is, irrelevant, unique, unexpected, to sit at home and imagine it
would be merely morbid. Some people may think it morbid to relate it, in
any case. To such I can only say that facts need no apology. The thing
occurred. What is morbid is the comment of the people very far away who
never understood. I was there; day by day, by his side, I saw him
through it, and I can honorably assert that Twining was sincere to the
core, honest to the bitter end. Though why chosen for this peculiar
destiny, I have never been able to guess.