Pettishly he reached out and clutched at a scalpel, cleansed it for an
instant in the flame, and jabbed the point of it into his wrist. The red
blood spurted instantly.
"There!" he cried out triumphantly. "I have blood in me! It isn't
embalming fluid at all."
"Oh, quit your fooling, you old death-digger," I said. And then with
overtense impulse I asked, "Sagner, man, do you really understand Life?"
Sagner's jaw-bones stiffened instantly. "Oh, yes," he exclaimed. "Oh,
yes, of course I understand Life. That is," he added, with a most
unusual burst of humility, "I understand everything, I think, except
just why the gills of a fish--but, oh, bother, you wouldn't know what I
meant; and there's a new French theory about odylic forces that puzzles
me a little, and I never, never have been able to understand the
particular mental processes of a woman who violates the law of species
by naming her firstborn son for any man but his father. I'm not exactly
criticising the fish," he added vehemently, "nor the new odylic theory,
nor even the woman; I'm simply stating baldly and plainly the only three
things under God's heaven that I can't quite seem to fathom."
"What's all this got to do with Mary Lennart?" I asked impatiently.
"Nothing at all to do with Mary Lennart," he answered proudly. "Mary
Lennart's son is named Harold." He began to smoke very hard.
"Considering the real object of our being put here in the world," he
resumed didactically, "it has always seemed to me that the supreme test
of character lay in the father's and mother's mental attitude toward
their young."
"Couldn't you say 'toward their children'?" I protested.
He brushed my interruption aside. "I don't care," he persisted, "how
much a man loves a woman or how much a woman loves a man--the man who
deserts his wife during her crucial hour and goes off on a lark to get
out of the fuss, and the woman who names her firstborn son for any man
except his father, may qualify in all the available moral tenets, but
they certainly have slipped up somehow, mentally, in the Real Meaning of
things. Thank God," he finished quickly, "that neither Harold Lennart
nor Mary has failed the other like that--no matter what else happens."
His face whitened. "I stayed with Harold Lennart the night little Harold
was born," he whispered rather softly.
Before I could think of just the right thing to say, he jumped up
awkwardly and strode over to the looking-glass, and puffed out his great
chest and stood and stared at himself.
"I wish I had a son named Bertus Sagner," he said.
"It's all right, of course, to have him named after you," I laughed,
"but you surely wouldn't choose to have him look like you, would you?"
He turned on me with absurd fierceness. "I wouldn't marry any woman who
didn't love me enough to want her son to look like me!" he exclaimed.
I was still laughing as I picked up my hat. I was still laughing as I
stumbled and fumbled down the long, black, steep stairs. Half an hour
later in my pillows I was still laughing. But I did not get to sleep. My
mind was too messy. After all, when you really come to think of it, a
man's brain ought to be made up fresh and clean every night like a hotel
bed. Sleep seems to be altogether too dainty a thing to nest in any
brain that strange thoughts have rumpled. Always there must be the white
sheet of peace edging the blanket of forgetfulness. And perhaps on one
or two of life's wintrier nights some sort of spiritual comforter thrown
over all.
It was almost a week before I saw any of the Lennarts again. Then, on a
Saturday afternoon, as Sagner and I were lolling along the road toward
town we met Lennart and "Little Sister" togged out in a lot of gorgeous
golf duds. Lennart was delighted to see us, and "Little Sister" made
Sagner get down on his knees and tie her shoe lacings twice. I escaped
with the milder favor of a pat on the wrist.
"We're going out to the Golf Club," beamed Lennart, "to enter for the
tournament."
"Oh," said Sagner, turning to join them. "Shall we find Mrs. Lennart
out at the club? Is she going to play?"
A flicker of annoyance went over Lennart's face. "Why, Sagner," he said,
"how stupid you are! Don't you know that Mary is lame and couldn't walk
over the golf course now to save her life?"
As Sagner turned back to me, and we passed on out of hearing, I noted
two red spots flaming hectically in his cheeks.
"It seems to me," he muttered, "that if I had crippled or incapacitated
my wife in any way so that she couldn't play golf any more, I wouldn't
exactly take another woman into the tournament. I think that singles
would just about fit me under the circumstances."
"But Lennart is such a 'splendid fellow,'" I quoted wryly.
"He's a splendid fool," snapped Sagner.
"Why, you darned old copy-cat," I taunted. "It was Miss Hubert who rated
him as a 'splendid fool.'"
"Oh," said Sagner.
"Oh, yourself," said I.
Involuntarily we turned and watched the two bright figures skirting the
field. Almost at that instant they stopped, and the girl reached up with
all her clinging, cloying coquetry and fastened a great, pink wild rose
into the lapel of the man's coat. Sagner groaned. "Why can't she keep
her hands off that man?" he muttered; then he shrugged his shoulders
with a grim little gesture of helplessness. "If a girl doesn't know," he
said, "that it's wrong to chase another woman's man she's too ignorant
to be congenial. If she does know it's wrong, she's too--vicious. But
never mind," he finished abruptly, "Lennart's foolishness will soon
pass. And meanwhile Mary has her boy. Surely no lad was ever so
passionately devoted to his mother. They are absolutely inseparable. I
never saw anything like it." He began to smile again.
Then, because at a turn of the road he saw a bird that reminded him of a
beast that reminded him of a reptile, he left me unceremoniously and
went back to the laboratory.
Feeling a bit raw over his desertion, I gave up my walk and decided to
spend the rest of the afternoon at the library.
At the edge of the reading-room I found Madge Hubert brandishing a
ferocious-looking paper-knife over the perfectly helpless new magazines.
With a little cry of delight she summoned me to her by the wave of a
_Science Monthly_. Looking over her shoulder I beheld with equal delight
that the canny old Science paper had stuck in Sagner's great, ugly face
for a frontispiece. At arm's length, with opening and narrowing eyes, I
studied the perfect, clever likeness: the convict-cropped hair; the
surly, aggressive, relentlessly busy features; the absurd, overwrought,
deep-sea sort of eyes. "Great Heavens, Miss Hubert," I said, "did you
ever see such a funny-looking man?"
The girl winced. "Funny?" she gasped. "Funny? Why, I think Bertus Sagner
is the most absolutely fascinating-looking man that I ever saw in my
life." She stared at me in astonishment.
To hide my emotions I fled to the history room. Somewhat to my surprise
Mrs. Lennart and her little lad were there, delving deep into some
thrilling grammar-school problem concerning Henry the Eighth. I nodded
to them, thought they saw me, and slipped into a chair not far behind
them. There was no one else in the room. Maybe my thirst for historical
information was not very keen. Certainly every book that I touched
rustled like a dead, stale autumn leaf. Maybe the yellow bird in the
acacia tree just outside the window teased me a little bit. Anyway, my
eyes began only too soon to stray from the text-books before me to the
little fluttering wisp of Mrs. Lennart's hair that tickled now and then
across the lad's hovering face. I thought I had never seen a sweeter
picture than those two cuddling, browsing faces. Surely I had never seen
one more entrancingly serene.
[Illustration: "Oh, I wish I had a sister," fretted the boy]
Then suddenly I saw the lad push back his books with a whimper of
discontent.
"What is it?" asked his mother. I could hear her words plainly.
"Oh, I wish I had a sister," fretted the boy.
"Why?" said the mother in perfectly happy surprise.
The lad began to drum on the table. "Why do I want a sister?" he
repeated a trifle temperishly. "Why, so I could have some one to play
with and walk with and talk with and study with. Some one jolly and
merry and frisky."
"Why--what about _me_?" she quizzed. Even at that moment I felt
reasonably certain that she was still smiling.
The little lad looked bluntly up into her face. "Why you are--_so old_!"
he said quite distinctly.
I saw the woman's shoulders hunch as though her hands were bracing
against the table. Then she reached out like a flash and clutched the
little lad's chin in her fingers. If a voice-tone has any color, hers was
corpse-white. "I never--let--_you_--know--that--you--were--too--_young_!"
she almost hissed.
And I shut my eyes.
When I looked up again the woman was gone, and the little lad was
running after her with a queer, puzzled look on his face.
Life has such a strange way of foreshortening its longest plots with a
startling, snapped-off ending. Any true story is a tiny bit out of
rhetorical proportion.
The very next day, under the railroad trestle that hurries us back and
forth to the big, neighboring city, we found Mrs. Lennart's body in a
three-foot pool of creek water. It was the little lad's birthday, it
seems, and he was to have had a supper party, and she had gone to town
in the early afternoon to make a few festive purchases. A package of
tinsel-paper bonbons floated safely, I remember, in the pool beside her.
For some inexplainable reason she had stepped off the train at the wrong
station and, realizing presumably how her blundering tardiness would
blight the little lad's pleasure, she had started to walk home across
the trestle, hoping thereby to beat the later train by as much as half
an hour. The rest of the tragedy was brutally plain. Somehow between one
safe, friendly embankment and another she had slipped and fallen. The
trestle was ticklish walking for even a person who wasn't lame.
Like a slim, white, waxen altar candle snuffed out by a child's
accidental, gusty pleasure-laugh, we brought her home to the sweet,
green, peaceful library, with its resolute, indomitable hearthstone.
Out of all the crowding people who jostled me in the hallway I remember
only--Lennart's ghastly, agonized face.
"Go and tell Sagner," he said.
Even as I crossed the campus the little, fluttery, flickery, hissing
word "suicide" was in the air. From the graduates' dormitory I heard a
man's voice argue, "But why did she get off deliberately at the wrong
station?" Out of the president's kitchen a shrill tone cackled, "Well,
she ain't been herself, they say, for a good many weeks. And who
wonders?"
In one corner of the laboratory, close by an open window, I found Sagner
working, as I had expected, in blissful ignorance.
"What's the matter?" he asked bluntly.
I was very awkward. I was very clumsy. I was very frightened. My face
was all condensed like a telegram.
"Madge Hubert was right," I stammered. "Mrs. Lennart's--business--has
gone into the hands of a--receiver."
The glass test tube went brittling out of Sagner's fingers. "Do you mean
that she is--dead?" he asked.