“Dick’s driving me out.” But as Petra saw Doctor Pryne’s disappointment,

she said quickly almost the precise words she had said earlier to Dick,

“But it wouldn’t pay you, anyway, even if he wasn’t. Clare is giving a

big dinner party to-night and she’ll be busy seeing to things. She does

the flowers herself, cuts them and everything. It takes simply hours.”

“Good Lord! What has Mrs. Farwell’s cutting the flowers to do with it?

It is you I want to talk to. When will you finish about Teresa, then?

You said when we were alone next. And will you take me to see her? I

have been looking forward to seeing her again ever since our talk—at the

guest house.”

Lewis saw the look of deviousness creep over Petra’s face then, and he

knew, almost certainly, that whatever she said next would have no

reality in it. She was baffling to exasperation.

“I’ll take you to see Teresa if she invites you. But there’s nothing

more to tell you, really. Only I beg you not to mention her to Clare

again, not to tell her any more of all that I told you. I don’t know how

much you did tell her. She hasn’t said a word about it and I haven’t

asked. But you won’t again, will you?”

“My dear! That was a stupid slip I made. I broke my promise of secrecy.

But why should I talk about anything with Mrs. Farwell? It is you I am

trying to talk with—and you put me off. You don’t say anything _true_ to

me any more.”

“What do you want to know? About Teresa, I mean? I’ve told you the

absolute truth about her.”

“Yes, I know that—as far as it went. But I want the rest, all of it!”

Lewis exclaimed. “What Teresa did next. You said she was ready to become

a secretary and something happened. I want to know what happened, what

she is doing now, how things are with her. I’ve been waiting days.”

But even before Petra opened her lips, Lewis gave up hope of her

answering him truly. He saw her choosing between several possible

answers. And when she said, deliberately, very carefully, “Teresa got

her chance to go to college. She supports herself by dress-designing.

She’s all right, thank you,” Lewis knew that while these might be facts,

they weren’t the truth; they left him exactly where he had been left

Saturday. He knew not one real thing more. The swordlike reticence in

Petra’s gentian eyes guarded her against his knowing now every bit as

effectively as against Clare’s, her father’s, and Dick’s. But Dick!

Saturday Dick had seemed to stand with Clare and Farwell over against

Petra’s guard. But had that, perhaps, changed? Certainly he was very

much in evidence—lunching with Petra to-day, driving her out to-night.

Lewis himself had been away four days. Anything could have happened in

four days. Had Dick waked up, come to his senses?

“There’s your telephone,” he said then. “It’s been ringing some time.

Miss Frazier can’t hear it with her door shut and typing like that.

You’d better see to it. It’s your job.”

Petra flew to her desk, shutting the doctor’s door softly, on the wing.

The one thought she took with her, and it was utterly comforting, in

spite of the tears in her throat, was that she still had a job.

_Chapter Thirteen_

Saturday noon Lewis came near having a scene with his secretary, when he

insisted that, for once, she must take the half holiday. “No, you cannot

have the next chapter.” He felt rather like an ugly dog barking up at

her, with his paws on a bone—the bone his manuscript. “I’ve got to keep

it to revise. I fumbled it terribly last night. Couldn’t seem to

concentrate. You get along out to some beach or other. Lie in the sun.

You’re white as a daisy. Good-by and thanks.”

There had been strife; but Lewis, continuing to ape the behavior of a

dog with his bone, and doing it rather successfully, had finally won and

Miss Frazier went for her hat and bag. But she came back in a second to

explain, “Petra is staying to practice typing. Won’t it disturb you if

you’re working here? Mr. Wilder is coming for her at four. She wants to

wait for him.”

“What! Again?” But Lewis pulled himself up. He said in answer to her

question, “I don’t think it’ll disturb me. That door is very nearly

soundproof.”

“I want to tell you that she is broken-hearted about yesterday, Doctor.

She can’t get over it. Nothing like that will ever happen again, I know.

She’s awfully silly in some ways but she’s—she’s all right. Really she

is.”

“Yes, I know she is.” But Lewis looked up with quick gratitude at his

secretary. She was rather all right herself, he was thinking. He smiled

at her. It was a more human, a more personal smile than she had ever had

from her employer before. She smiled, dimly, back. She was silly

herself, a thousand times sillier than Petra. If Doctor Pryne saw that

she was fighting tears, he would think she had gone out of her head. She

turned quickly away.

In the reception office Janet said to Petra, “The door’s soundproof.

Doctor Pryne mightn’t even know you are staying if I hadn’t told him.

But it’s a long time till four. Don’t work too hard. I’ll meet you

Sunday at twelve.”

Petra answered, her hands suspended over the typewriter keys, “I love

it, Janet. I love typing. You’re going to be proud of me some day. I’ll

be as good a secretary as you are. To-morrow at noon, yes. How nice it

will be!”

That was at two. At three-thirty Lewis put the manuscript chapter into

his brief-case and got up, stretching. He lit a cigarette, turned to the

window and stood looking out for a minute. Then he took a few quick

paces back and forth between the windows and the reception-office door.

Then he pushed the patients’ easy chair from its usual position till its

back was at the window for whatever breeze there was. Dick was coming

for Petra at four. Lewis himself expected McCloud at the same time.

Well, this was only half-past three. He opened the door into his

reception office.

Petra was working at shorthand now, her typewriter covered up until

Monday. One hand was in her curls, ruffling them, and she appeared to be

eating the rubber end of her pencil. She looked at Lewis dazedly. She

was white with the heat in the stuffy little room. The doors should all

have been opened—or else she shouldn’t have stayed. It was not quite so

warm as yesterday, but it was bad enough.

“There’s a breeze in my office,” Lewis said. “A baby one, but rather

nice. Put away the lessons, do, and come along in. I’m going to lay off

too—till four.”

The violet of her frock was cool against the dark leather of the

patients’ chair. Why did she wear a yellow belt? Her thin stockings were

yellow, gold-yellow. Yellow and violet, with her gentian eyes, and vital

gold-brown curls brushed on her neck, back from her ears, made Petra too

lovely to look at with a level gaze. Why shouldn’t Petra care hugely

about clothes and spend all the dollars a year on them she could lay her

hands on—if clothes did this! The yellow belt was magic—a narrow yellow

magic made of nothing in the world but a silly, twisted bit of silk

cord.

Hundreds of women had sat in that chair facing Lewis, for years past,

and at no other time could he recall noticing what one of them had worn.

But he could no more help noticing this violet, cool frock of Petra’s

with the yellow belt than he could help noticing the texture of flowers

near at hand. The loveliness of Petra’s frocks was as inescapable as the

loveliness of flowers.

He offered her a cigarette. She took one but only, he felt, because she

did not see what they were going to talk about and this was something to

relieve the awkwardness.... This time, when he held the match for her,

their eyes did not meet....

Lewis put his arm along his desk. First of all, he had a duty to

perform. He should have done it yesterday had he not taken it for

granted it was unnecessary. But in the middle of the night he had been

bothered by that taking for granted. Now was the time to get it off his

mind,—and pray heaven it was not too late.

“You’re not to mind what I’m going to say, Petra. Probably it’s totally

unnecessary. But you will give me your promise now, won’t you, quite

solemnly, never so long as you live, to tell any one—any one at

all—anything that you learned about my patient McCloud yesterday. You

haven’t mentioned any of it to a soul, have you?”

Petra looked at him. No faltering now. Truth was on the way. She said

almost before he had finished, “No, of course I haven’t told a soul and

of course I promise. I do understand and you can trust me.” But even as

she finished, panic came. She put her hand to her mouth. She had

remembered something. Lewis _saw_ her remember.

His heart sank. This was too bad—too terribly too bad. He exclaimed,

“You have told some one, Petra. Who? In God’s name!”

“No,—no, I haven’t—” But she stopped the lie. She couldn’t lie to this

man. In the first place, he could spot it. In the second place, she did

not want to, somehow. She said, miserably, “I told Teresa. I told her

every word. I’d forgotten. But that doesn’t count as telling. It’s like

telling one’s self. She is so safe.... I told her that McCloud was

Edyth’s husband. She had known her in Cambridge. And all about the

flying accident. I told her that. And his mother’s dying. I told her,

too, how McCloud had only seen his baby at the hospital. Less than two

weeks. That seemed so unjust—so cruel! Oh, yes, I guess I told Teresa

everything. You see—You see, _I thought she might help_.”

“Petra! You are terrible!” Lewis groaned. “You’re impossible!”

But Petra seemed not to mind his consternation. She was looking past

Lewis’ head, a question in her eyes. Lewis swung around and there was

Neil McCloud himself, standing midway in the room—his expression

murderous.

McCloud was early for his appointment and had expected to be kept

waiting until four at least. But when he found the reception room

deserted and the doctor’s door wide open, he naturally came to it. It

had taken him some seconds to take it in—what was going on here—that the

man he had entrusted with his confidences as implicitly as if he had

been a priest in the confessional was using those confidences as a peg

on which to hang a flirtation with a beautiful new secretary. They sat

here in the place where he had written it all, hashing it over together.

Telling his secrets.... As Edyth had hashed over things with her father,

old man Dayton, telling his secrets.... Terrible secrets....

For in this moment he remembered what Pryne had so long wanted him to

remember! Pryne had questioned and questioned. Coaxed at his strangely

blank memory. And nothing doing. But now it was here. Clear, bright as a

lightning flash. Now, when remembering was no good to anybody! What the

old man had said, over the telephone, when McCloud had called him up

that night to ask him what he had done with Edyth and their son, was

this:

“Edyth has told me everything. You killed your brother. You broke your

mother’s heart. But you shan’t break my daughter’s heart and ruin my

grandson’s life. I have the power to protect my own. There isn’t

anything you can say. _Don’t say a word._”

And you had been obedient. You had gone dumb from that minute. In

obedience to Edyth’s father, who knew that you had killed your brother

and broken your mother’s heart. Edyth had told him all that. Told the

old man. All the things you had told her before you would marry her, in

sacred confidence. And now the old man was shouting at you through the

telephone. It was as if no time had passed since. As if you were hearing

it this minute, while you stood frozenly staring at Pryne and his

stenographer: “There isn’t anything you can say. Don’t say a word.”

Let the old brute shout! Keep on shouting through your brain! You don’t

mind it now. At least this one thing about you, Pryne shouldn’t ever

possess. One little bit he wouldn’t tell his beautiful

stenographer—simply because he wouldn’t ever know it. And now you’d get

out,—right out into the darkness which had been compassing you ever

since the moment the kid went out in your arms.

Pryne was getting up. The girl was up too. Why didn’t your hate and

scorn blast them where they stood? It was strong enough to do that. But

hate failing, there was the revolver. No! Shut up. Don’t think of that.

The kid—Mother—those were lives enough for you to have destroyed.

Two—three steps, and you would follow those beloveds into the dark void.

You should have followed before. But instead you had come whining for

help to this—fashionable psychiatrist. Hell! Your teeth were clenched

with the will it took not to put your hand to the pocket holding the

revolver. It was essential that you should be outside the door, that it

should be between you and them, or Pryne might somehow manage to spoil

it. The doctor had a look in his eyes—as if he suspected or even knew

your intention. But you weren’t even touching your pocket. Your hands

were at your sides. Straight down. How could Pryne know what you were

going to do?

Well, Pryne wouldn’t move, wouldn’t interfere, you were sure of it, as

long as you kept your eyes steady and your hands at your sides. You

started backing toward the door, holding the skunk where he was with

your scorn of him, and his girl beside him there, wide-eyed and scared.

She was a damned beauty. You had been right when you told her so. You

would back through the door. They should not stir. Then you would close

it with one lightning motion. But you must remember to use the left

hand. The right must be kept for the business of shooting your brains

out before either of them could stir. It would be a neat job. That was

one thing they should never hash over together,—your _attempted_

suicide. Attempted! Like hell, attempted! You’d have one clean mark for

that, so help you Christ.

At that moment McCloud’s seeking heel felt the rise of the doorsill, the

rim of the dark void.

_Chapter Fourteen_

On Wednesday Neil McCloud had lost his job of mechanic for the Ajax

people. At least the top boss had come along and Neil had surmised from

the dark looks he cast in his direction, as he spoke in a confidentially

low tone to Neil’s boss, that he was ragging him for keeping on such a

handicapped man when there were hundreds of good men to choose from. So

Neil had gone up, as soon as the fellow had left, and discharged

himself. His boss had a wife and small children. Nobody’s position was

any too secure these days. And the top boss had had a very nasty look in

his eye not only for Neil, but for Neil’s benefactor. Neil had quaked

under it. But not for himself. So he walked out of the place, just

another fellow out of a job.

A week ago, he had done a rash thing. One of the friends of his married

days—still, supposedly, a friend of Edyth’s—had seen him in crowded

Summer Street, rushed up to him and said that she must have some money.

Her husband had failed to meet her with it as he had promised, her bags

were waiting in the South Station for a week-end she was spending on the

Cape with friends, Neil must give her every cent he had on him and

probably that wouldn’t be enough! But would he hurry! He _had_ hurried.

He pulled his roll from his pocket—Saturday was pay day—and pushed it

into pretty, smart Joyce Clayton’s yawning snakeskin purse. His only

thought during the act was gratitude that the woman was in such a

tearing hurry that she seemed not to notice his wordlessness. It was his

pride that none of that crowd should know how things were with him, and

until this meeting with Joyce, success had seemed childishly easy; they

hadn’t bothered. But as Joyce had rolled off in the taxi into which he

had put her silent—and she not noticing his wordlessness—she had leaned

out and called back, “Your address, Neil darling! For heaven’s sake,

what is it? I’ll send a check to-morrow.” He had smiled, raised his hat

and blotted himself out from her eyes in the crowds of Summer Street.

When he discovered that he hadn’t even any loose change in his pocket

and must walk back to his room supperless and even put off breakfast

until he could borrow at the works on next week’s salary, he was not

much concerned. He had some chocolate in his room and plenty of

cigarettes. The chocolate served for supper and breakfast, and the few

dollars he let himself borrow on Monday kept him fed until Wednesday,

when—instead of asking for more—he walked out penniless an hour after

getting to the garage. There would be no more wages to ask an advance

on.

He walked over to the Common and sat on a bench all morning, doing what

he described to himself as face the situation. But every little while he

stopped looking into the ugly face of his predicament and tried to

speak. If he could only even whisper! He tried to say his own name. He

tried it dozens of times but the only result was the ghost of a sob.

When the noon bells and whistles sounded he came, before they ceased, to

a determination. He would look for work—yes—go into machine shops and

garages with pencil and pad in his hand, and offer his services. He

would face down all the curiosity and jeers that would come to him for

his inability to speak. He would scour Boston for any sort of job where

speech was not essential. But he would not go to any one to borrow money

for food. If he got a job, O.K. If not, starving would be a natural way

out and nobody, not even his guardian angel, could call it suicide.

Neil had followed what seemed to him this fair plan with action. Hungry,

he had job-hunted steadily, until Friday morning. Friday morning, in the

pursuit of the impossible job, he had stumbled, in a dirty alley, on a

little abandoned paper bag half full of peanuts. Yes, it seemed too good

to be true; and indeed he was by this time in such a giddy state that it

might very easily be illusion. He had not been sure it wasn’t, until he

had them in his teeth. Then, as he threw the bag from him, empty, Neil

remembered that to-morrow his room rent would be due. But something else

about Saturday was important too. After some groping he remembered—an

appointment with Doctor Pryne.

Doctor Pryne! The handful of peanuts seemed only to have increased his

hunger. Good luck, stumbled upon so astonishingly, had weakened his

will, he thought; but anyway, he would ask Doctor Pryne for the loan of

a dollar. Then he would buy himself food. He would go now and get the

money. With meat and coffee to back him up, the Saturday’s séance must

work—_Doctor Pryne must cure him._ Anyway, it would be Neil’s last shot

before letting himself starve. There was some chance it might work.

Pryne was always holding out hope—always seemed expectant of the thing’s

breaking. But even if it didn’t work, and the cure didn’t come through

on Saturday, and consequently he never got another job, and starved, and

so never paid back that dollar,—_Pryne was a good fellow._ Neil would

rather be owing Doctor Lewis Pryne a dollar through eternity than any

other soul he knew. He’d give himself that one more chance.

So he had walked the miles up to the doctor’s office on the strength of

the peanuts. And a new girl in the reception office—only she looked like

something in a fairy tale, and almost as illusory as the peanuts—had

said Pryne couldn’t possibly see him till his appointment the next day.

What he had done between then and his return just now a little ahead of

his appointment time, Neil could not have told—or written. The one thing

he knew, knew constantly, was that he had not eaten.

Now as his groping heel found the rim of the dark, and his left hand

reached for the door knob, Neil was grateful that after all he had not

seen Doctor Pryne yesterday. Now, as it was, he would be taking no debt

to this man over the ultimate doorsill; for, in this moment of

confusion, the hours the doctor had spent on him, for which he could

never now send a bill, did not loom as debt in the young man’s aching

brain.

His fingers had the door knob. It was cold and they were hot. Neil

exulted in the knowledge that one movement of his arm, and this door

would go shut forever and ever between himself and Doctor Lewis

Pryne—Doctor Lewis Pryne who had let him down to a girl with a

fairy-tale face in a violet dress with a yellow belt....

If it had been Lewis who had moved and spoken, the door would have

slammed then and the revolver roared. But it was Petra. To Neil’s

shaking vision the fairy-tale face was flaming—unbelievably—to a white

flame of angelicness—was becoming an angel’s face, against which no door

could shut. The blue eyes were swords. The violet, the yellow were gone,

and all her clothing was winged white fire. Fear that was awe and awe

that was fear paralyzed him. She—white fire—was coming upon him—

Lewis had put out a hand to drag her back. But to that hand Petra was

not spirit nor flame. She was solid young muscular strength, breaking

loose from his clutch. Before he had got around the desk, she had

reached the boy, her arms were around his neck, her face lifted to his,

which did not bend to it—only the eyelids were dropped so that he still

saw her angelic fire.

“Neil McCloud, you’ve got it all wrong. Doctor Pryne forgot to lock his

files and I came snooping in here and read your cards. That’s why you’ve

found us talking about you. Doctor Pryne is ready to _kill_ me for it.

And I ought to be killed. But the friend I told—she will keep your

secrets. Truly she will. Or she will tell them only in her prayers! It

is the Little Flower she is especially telling. She is offering a novena

to her for you—a novena to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Do you know the

Little Flower? Teresa, she has the Little Flower’s name herself, you

see—wants you to say ‘I love.’ She said last night, ‘Love is the Word.

He must say that.’ She asked the Little Flower to help you say it. Say

it now—Neil McCloud. Try to say, _I love_.”

Lewis was close to them. Petra was wild, mad. But no madder than

McCloud. If the boy lifted a hand, Lewis was ready. He had guessed about

the revolver. He would snatch Petra back, get between them, if the man

moved a finger. Then a strange thing happened. Up in McCloud’s face,

Petra’s face seemed to be reflected—or rather a flame, a flame burning

to whiteness that couldn’t be Petra, after all. It was an unearthly wing

of light. McCloud put his hands up to Petra’s hands that were clasped on

the back of his neck—but Lewis did not stir—and took them down; but he

kept them, as if he did not know he had them still. He was not even

looking at Petra now—but beyond her.

Neil said, “The Little Flower? Yes, of course, I know her. The kid had a

special devotion to her. Mother had too. The kid thought he saw her—his

First Communion morning. In his room. By the washstand. Mother believed

him. She had an idea he might be a priest some day. But he won’t grow up

now. He’s dead. The little fellow is dead.... How does the Little Flower

feel about that—my killing him?”

“You didn’t kill him. It was a fault, not a sin, when you took him

flying. Teresa says so. But see! The Little Flower has cured you, no

matter how she feels. She has answered Teresa’s prayers.... Even without

your saying ‘I love’! Your speech is perfect—you have spoken.”

Until Petra called his attention to it, Neil had not known that he had

spoken. But it was true. His voice still hung in the room—he heard it

now in echo—the warm, unstrained voice of young manhood. It was his own

voice!...

He let Petra’s hands go then. He backed up against the door jamb to his

full exultant young height. His face was rolling with tears, but it

could not be called crying. There was no grimace of the features and his

eyes were wide open. His hands were at his side. He spoke again: “I

love. My God, I do love. I love You, my Lord and my God. Have mercy on

me, a sinner.”

_Chapter Fifteen_

The elevator for which Lewis had rung brought Dick Wilder up with it.

Until he saw him there, Lewis had totally forgotten that he would be

coming along about now to keep his date with Petra.

“See here,” he exclaimed, taking Dick’s arm and pushing him back into

the elevator cage ahead of himself. “Come on down with me. I’ll explain

in the street. Petra’s busy just now and can’t possibly get away.” And

by the time they had walked out through the lower hall, come to the

sidewalk and crossed to the curb where Dick’s car was parked, Lewis had

decided how much—how little, rather—he would tell Dick.

“Petra’s doing something very special for me,” he said. “Helping with a

patient. Interruption would spoil the whole thing. You’d better wait

here in your car till she comes down. I’ll stick around with you for a

few minutes, if you’ll have me; then I must get back and see what she’s

accomplished.”

“But how long will she be?” Dick asked, puzzled. “Not long, I hope.

We’re a little late already. Featherstone kept me, talking over a

commission that came in this morning.”

“Yes? Well, Petra mayn’t be able to leave for half an hour or so. But

does it matter?”

“Oh, but see here, Lewis! She can’t be half an hour—or anything like it.

God! Do you expect me just to sit here in this heat?”

“Shut up!” Lewis’ anger blazed. It was too soon after that other voice,

McCloud’s, new-found, racked with love, had uttered the Name—and Lewis

could not bear it. But after all, Dick had not been there. He could not

know how shocking was the sound of his casual expletive.

So, quickly contrite for the injustice of his anger, Lewis exclaimed,

“I’m sorry. I’m edgy, I think. It is blistering, isn’t it!” Lewis was

decidedly not edgy and moreover, for some time now, ever since he had

invited Petra out of the reception office to sit in the patients’ chair,

facing him, he had not been aware of the heat. But it was the only

explanation of his mood he cared to trust Dick with, at the moment. And

his friend accepted it as reasonable.

“Oh, that’s all right.” Dick turned off Lewis’ apology, embarrassed,

then added quickly, “But look here. I’m taking the Farwell family to the

Meadowbrook Country Club for dinner. And there’s a tea party at Green

Doors first. Very special! In honor of little Sophia’s second birthday.

Her grandmother is coming—Clare’s mother. No one else. Clare’s counting

on Petra, of course. Why, she’ll be terribly disappointed if I don’t get

Petra there in the shortest possible time now. Do you see?”

Lewis did see, perfectly. Again Petra was to be forced into the role of

baby-snubber. Only this time it was his, Lewis’, fault.

“Too bad,” he said. “A pity. But what Petra is doing now is even more

important than two-year-old birthday parties. Take my deepest apologies

to Mrs. Farwell, will you please, and tell her that I was tiresome and

unreasonable and that Petra had nothing to say about it. Do that and

I’ll drive her out myself—get her there in time for your dinner at the

latest. I promise.”

“Well, Lewis, old-timer, I can only say that it seems to me you’re

taking a funny way to help Petra learn how to treat Clare. I don’t see

how anything can be quite so important as you’re making this out to be.

Really! If Clare forgives you, she’s an angel. But she will, of course.

She _is_ an angel.”

“That’s reassuring. But seriously, Dick, it’s none of my business how

Petra treats her stepmother. Thought I’d made that plain. As a matter of

fact, though, and just from the outside, she seems to me to be playing

her part at Green Doors rather well.—If you aren’t going to wait, you’d

better get along and explain, hadn’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose I had. Clare can’t keep little Sophia up, of course.

Somebody must be there before the cake and the candles to explain about

Petra and help make a party. But be sure to get her out in time to dress

for dinner, won’t you! Where will you dine yourself, Lewis? At the

Allens’?”

“Perhaps. It doesn’t matter.... Cynthia’ll think I have a Meadowbrook

complex for sure, if I turn up three times within the week!”

The last was spoken to himself as he stood on the curb, watching Dick’s

car nose out and creep away in the traffic. Lewis would give Petra and

McCloud another ten minutes before returning to his office. He went

across to the Public Garden in the hope of finding an empty bench where

he could smoke while waiting that ten minutes. But he wondered, as he

went, what Dick would have thought, could he know how Lewis had left

Petra occupied up there,—if he could see her, as Lewis had seen her from

the door before he closed it softly. Dick would, of course, think him

quite mad. But he was not mad. Lewis knew himself as sane—and as

collected—as he had ever been in his life.

McCloud, after his declaration of love, had walked past Petra and Lewis,

not seeing them any more, and dropped on his knees by the patients’

chair. There he had put his head down in his folded arms on the leather

cushion. Lewis himself had stayed where he was, inert and doubtful of

what to do. As a psychiatrist, he had no cue for further action. But

Petra felt no hesitation. She did not even so much as glance at Lewis

for approval of her intention when she quickly followed McCloud, and

quietly seating herself on the arm of the patients’ chair, put her hand

down on his dark head. After that, there was no sound or motion in the

place.

... Petra’s eyes met Lewis’ through the stillness. He smiled his slight,

fleeting smile—a smile that declared both his gravity and his

comprehension. Then he got out of there, leaving Petra alone with

McCloud, as quietly as he could. McCloud, when he returned to common

day, had better find himself with Petra than with a psychiatrist. It was

his best chance—Lewis was certain—of hanging on to the liberty he had

regained, over the first minutes of difficult adjustments.

Lewis found his vacant bench in the garden and lit a cigarette. A

squirrel, boldest and most insensitive of all animals to the moods of

humans, came rollicking up to his feet. A motion picture of a squirrel’s

gyrations, slowed down, ought to be excitingly beautiful. Lewis had long

intended to buy a moving-picture camera for the one purpose of taking

organic life in motion,—flowers opening, horses trotting, unconscious

children playing. But so far he had not had the price,—not been willing

to give it, anyhow. At this very minute the clinic was in crying need of

a new ceiling. If he didn’t scare up the money for that and set them to

work on it, the plaster would be coming down on people’s heads. You

couldn’t wait for the hospital trustees to get around to vote the money.

The psychological effect of such dinginess was bad for the patients

too....

The Little Flower! Saint Thérèse of Lisieux! It was precisely as if a

friend of some of Lewis’ best friends had stepped in between him and his

patient this afternoon, curing the patient. For the Little Flower was no

far-off legend-enshrouded figure in Christian myth. She was of modern

times. She had died, in fact, a girl then of twenty-five, only half a

dozen years before Lewis was born. His mother’s contemporary! And in

dying she had asked the privilege of spending her heaven doing good upon

earth; and since then countless miracles had been credited to her

interventions. Joseph Duffield, Lewis’ one greatest friend, had had,

during the last few years of his life, what he in his Catholic

terminology called a special devotion to this particular saint. Joseph

had died, as it happened, midway in a novena he and his wife were making

to the Little Flower for the cure of his angina. Strangely, her

husband’s death and the unhealing grief it had brought her had not

shaken Laura Duffield’s faith in the Little Flower’s loving goodness.

There was even now a framed picture of the Little Flower on the bookcase

in Laura’s bedroom where she had moved Michael when he fell so ill.

Lewis had often looked across the suffering, paralyzed little form

during his long watches this past week, and himself taken heart from the

pure smiling face of the young saint.

Michael, too, knew Thérèse and loved Thérèse best after Mary and Joseph

of all the saints his grandmother had taught him to reverence. The boy

had told Lewis that first night he spent with him in his rooms, that he

had begged the Little Flower—begged her over and over—to make his

grandmother well again, right up until his separation from her at the

clinic that afternoon. And when that did not happen, Michael had gone on

praying and loving Thérèse all the same, as soon as the first spasm of

homesickness passed a little. Laura Duffield, when Lewis had remarked on

this persistence of the boy’s faith in this particular saint, had

smilingly said that to her mind that was one of the Little Flower’s

favorite miracles, preserving and even increasing faith in the hearts

whose dearest desires she could not, in God’s mercy, answer.... It was

the miracle beyond miracles, Laura had said, this increased love and

faith in the face of denial. Didn’t Lewis himself see that?

The squirrel was now actually on Lewis’ knee, begging with nose and paws

and eyes for nuts. But Lewis looked through the avid little beggar as

through a bit of glass. Shock of some sort—he had made up his mind to

that weeks ago, hadn’t he!—was the best hope of restoring McCloud’s

speech. The only question had been how to procure a shock that would not

be calamitous. Well, this afternoon, McCloud had had his shock. Two of

them, in fact, one right on top of the other. First, the most violent

sort of anger at finding his doctor betraying his confidences. Second,

Petra’s reminding him with such unexpected suddenness of the Little

Flower—a person intimately connected with the brother for whose death

McCloud held himself responsible. It was possible even that “the kid”

had spoken Saint Thérèse’s name while dying. In any case this afternoon

had shown that she was all bound up with memories of “the kid” in

McCloud’s tortured mind. So there were the two shocks, either one of

which might easily account for the cure. Lewis admitted the

possibilities. But all the same, he was not convinced of the rational

explanation. Nor was he exactly convinced of the supernatural

explanation. He simply felt no compulsion to decide between them. Who

was he, to dare to say!

One thing only was certain. The McCloud records should be abstracted

from the files at once and burned; for no psychiatric theories, no pages

for a new book, would ever be forthcoming from this particular case.

That was Lewis’ only certainty.

The squirrel sprang away as Lewis got up. The ten minutes he had given

Petra and McCloud alone together must be up. He threw away his cigarette

and went back to the office building.

The door into his reception room was locked. That was surprising. Lewis

remembered, distinctly, that the latch had been off when he came out. It

was always off, in fact, until the place was finally shut up for the

day. He got out his latchkey, wondering.

The rooms were deserted. No Petra. No McCloud. They had both gone. But

surely Petra had interpreted Lewis’ final look at her before he closed

the door to mean he would be back almost at once. She must have known he

would want to keep McCloud in his care for the next few hours. Why, he

had left his hat there on the desk even, and his papers lay scattered.

Petra could see, if she couldn’t reason, that he was coming back.

He looked his desk over, thinking she might have left a note of

explanation for him. But she had not even done that. Then Lewis thought

he understood. She must suddenly have realized that Dick was very late,

called the architect’s office, found that Dick had left it some time

ago, decided that he was not, after all, coming for her, and dashed for

a train. But where would McCloud have gone off to, so quickly, without a

word, or a note? His room, most likely. Quickly Lewis looked up the

address. There was a telephone number, but Lewis dared not submit the

stability of the young man’s cure to such a drastic test. So he started

off in search.

A little after seven o’clock Lewis was back in his own rooms in the

apartment hotel where he lived. He had waited in his car outside

McCloud’s rooming house for something over an hour, watching for

McCloud’s return, after first making sure he was not already at home.

Then he had dined in anxious solitude in a humble restaurant and now he

was here to telephone Green Doors. He got Dick, but only to discover

that Petra had not come on the train, hadn’t showed up at all.

“But you promised to bring her yourself, I thought! We’ve been waiting.

Clare was delighted. She wants you to join our party at the Club. She

called your office the minute I told her your plan about driving Petra

out. But nobody answered. How do I know where Petra is, if you don’t?”

Lewis explained—but it sounded stupid in his own ears—that he and Petra

had missed each other somehow and she had never learned that he _was_

driving her out to Meadowbrook. She must have taken a train. Please

would Dick have her call Lewis at his rooms here the minute she came. It

was important. Yes, Lewis would wait in for the call.

After that, there was nothing Lewis could do but wait and try to read,

or work on the book. He would read. He wished he had installed an

electric fan this summer. It had been the expense, again, that had

deterred him. But this was a most oppressive variety of heat. Not a

breath. Extraordinary. You didn’t often get nights like this so close to

the Atlantic. A good thing he hadn’t let Cynthia hang curtains at his

windows. Every particle of air that could come in was here in his

curtainless rooms. Lewis took “Phantastes” down from his bookshelves and

settled into a chair against one of the windows to read. He had

hesitated between “Phantastes” and “Saint Augustine’s Confessions,” and

finally chosen the former. His recent talk with Cynthia on the subject

of Petra was the deciding factor.

Eight. Half-past eight. Quarter to nine. Dick must have forgotten to

tell Petra to call, that was all. They would be just about finishing

dinner at the Club now. Lewis would make himself wait until nine, to

make certain not to interrupt Dick’s dinner party, and then call.

This time he asked for Miss Farwell herself, but if she was not there

then Mr. Richard Wilder. It was Dick who came, and with promptness.

“Yes, just finished dinner. I was right here by the boxes, going to call

you. Petra hasn’t showed up. Clare wants to speak to you.”

“Doctor Pryne? Good evening. I’m really rather anxious, you know. What’s

become of Petra? Where is she? Dick doesn’t seem to have got it quite

straight.”

If Clare knew Teresa Kerr’s whereabouts, Lewis would have asked her for

the address then and there, in spite of the taboo Petra had imposed on

mentioning Teresa to anybody at Green Doors, for of course it had

occurred to him that Petra must have taken McCloud to see Teresa. If she

was living in Boston. It was she, Teresa, who had prayed for his cure to

Saint Thérèse. It was she who had understood that McCloud could say “I

love.” But Clare, Lewis was sure, knew nothing of Teresa Kerr’s present

existence. So he merely said, “The whole thing is due to my stupidity.

We missed somehow, Petra and I. But I am sure she is all right, that

there’s nothing to worry about. Only please ask her to call me the

minute she does turn up, will you. I am waiting in to talk with her.

Here at my rooms. Thanks so much.”

Lewis had been sincere in his assurances to Clare that Petra was all

right and that there was no cause for anxiety on the part of her

stepmother. Lewis’ only real anxiety at that time was about McCloud. He

wanted to know whether the cure had lasted; and it seemed hard, having

merely to sit here and wait for that information until Petra called him

up. He grew more certain as the evening wore on that she had taken him

to Teresa and that they were there now. The McCloud business had simply

put Green Doors and all her social obligations right out of Petra’s

mind. You could not wonder at that. Lewis’ own mind had had room for

nothing else since, in spite of his pretended reading of many pages,

already thrice familiar, of George MacDonald’s “Phantastes.”

He gave up even the pretense of reading now and started pacing his

sitting room. It was a large, long, low room, almost bare of furniture.

The partitions joining three rooms had been knocked out to make it. The

two things Lewis demanded of his living quarters were spaciousness and

absence of unessentials. So this sitting room of his—to which he had let

Cynthia do nothing—was rather like a very large, beautifully

proportioned cell,—except for a grand piano at one end set between

corner windows. This was a beautiful rosewood instrument, beautiful in

itself as a vase of flowers or a fire on a hearth. And it was heaped

with stacks of musical scores. Lewis read music for diversion as other

people read books. Sometimes he played to his reading—ghostlily, for his

mind alone. But whether his hands gave him back the sounds he read as

ghostly echo or not, he usually did his music-reading sitting at the

piano as if he were playing. The instrument itself, even when he was not

touching the keys, seemed in some inexplicable way to enrich his

comprehension of the scores. Bach and Brahms were the masters he

consorted with most, but he often turned to César Franck as well, and

understood him.

Above the piano between the windows, Lewis had hung a picture, framed in

narrow black wood. It was about a foot square, no more, and the only

picture in the room. Three trees, done in ordinary pencil. The first

impression was of meaning and beauty. The lines of the trees and the

grasses at their roots flowed upward with an ineffable sweep of freedom.

Even the trunks were fluid. That was the first strong impression. But if

one looked again, came nearer, one was surprised at oneself for having

seen it as full of meaning because now one guessed that here was but

another modernistic performance, seemingly careless, yet (if one was

given the grace to understand it) tremendously sophisticated—a

production of the very latest moderns. Then if one stayed on there,

trying to regain one’s first genuine thrilling response to loveliness,

one saw better: now the upward fluid sweep of the trees’ living lines

was pure unaffected copying of what some fresh, pure vision had seen. A

child! It was a child’s drawing.

It was, indeed, one of little Michael Duffield’s drawings. If Michael

kept this way of _seeing_ (for that was what his drawing was now, pure

_seeing_) through the rapids of adolescence, where so much is torn apart

and swept away as well as so much gathered together and added to in the

make-up of the psyche, Michael would be one of the masters. A great

artist. Lewis was certain of it. Meanwhile, this one drawing was enough

for Lewis to possess, of the hundreds Laura Duffield so carefully

cherished. When the piano was silent and the musical scores were put

away, it filled the room for him with perpetual music.

Lewis stopped his pacing. What sense was there in all this miserable

anxiety, when trees rose up out of the earth, like that, fluid, peace in

their flowing boughs! He went to the piano bench—opened Brahms’ Rhapsody

in G-minor—smoked and read, read and smoked.

It was after midnight when the telephone rang in the bedroom. He was

there almost before the second ring had started, sitting on his bed,

lifting the instrument from the table by the pillow. He knew it must be

Petra. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Lewis speaking.” Not Doctor Pryne. At

midnight, after two hours with Brahms, one’s surname is a thing of

peculiar unreality, impossible to speak seriously. Hence his “Lewis

speaking.” But there was silence on the wire. For a breath there came no

response to his announcement of baptismal selfhood. So he spoke again,

with an almost fantastic presumption, into the night at large, “Petra!

Are you there.... Petra?”

_Chapter Sixteen_

Out of the dark, out of the invisible, Lewis got his response: “Yes,

this is Petra. I hope you hadn’t gone to sleep. They said you wanted me

to call you. I’m sorry it’s so late.”

“That’s all right. No, I’m still up. But look here, Petra, of course I

want to know about McCloud. What you did with him. How he is.” And then

Lewis could not help adding to that, “Petra, have you only just got

home?”

Again the brief silence. Because of the hour, the stillness, and all the

Brahms in which Lewis was steeped, the stillness on the wire took on the

proportions of a cosmic stillness. Or was she only hesitating between

fabrication and fabrication—between stories to tell him? If he could

only see her face, he would know.

Finally, “Yes, I’ve just come in. Clare waited up for me. I’d forgotten

to telephone her, you see; I put it off, and then forgot it. I worried

them, I guess. But it was Neil—made me forget. Yes, he is all right. He

was starving, Doctor Pryne. Friday, when he came to the office, he was

starving. He lost his job early in the week. He came Friday to borrow a

dollar for food. Teresa and I have been feeding him up. He’s coming

around to-morrow to talk with you, at your hotel, at ten o’clock.... Is

that all right?”

She had paused before the question,—afraid, apparently, that she might a

second time have made a mistake. Lewis was appalled.

“But Petra! Starving! This is a bad business. Where is he now? Do you

mean he hasn’t money to buy meals with? What about his breakfast

to-morrow morning?”

“Oh, I loaned him some money, all he would take. He’s gone back to his

room. He thinks they’ll trust him for the rent until he gets a job. He’s

perfectly sure he’ll get a job, now, you see,—now that he’s all right,

you know. He’s terribly confident. He’s going to try to sell cars again.

He says he has a knack for that....”

“You say you and Teresa fed him.—Teresa—” Lewis stopped. But surely now

the barrier was broken down! Teresa was no longer to remain a mystery.

For after all, Lewis and Petra and McCloud and Teresa were now linked

together by the twist fate had taken this day. But Petra did not catch

the implications of his tone and his hesitation. She offered no further

details of the evening’s doings. Where they had fed the starving man,

what they had fed him, and Teresa’s part in it all, were not

forthcoming. “Is it all right about to-morrow at ten? That Neil should

come to see you then?”

“Of course. I wish he had come to breakfast, though. I wish you had

waited till I came back, this afternoon. Why didn’t you, Petra?”

“That’s what Teresa said, that we should have waited. But when I found

that Neil was _hungry_—everything else went out of my mind. I’m sorry.”

“My dear! You have nothing to be sorry about. You’d better be rather

satisfied with your day’s work, I should say! I hope your family

understand that your not turning up for the birthday party was—was not

your fault in any way.”

Petra lowered her voice to answer that. It was almost a whisper. Lewis

suspected then that she was afraid that her end of this midnight

conversation might be overheard. Clare had waited up for her. “I

couldn’t really explain anything much about it, Doctor Pryne. You

see—he—Neil—doesn’t want any one to know about—about what’s been

happening to him. He cares a lot that nobody should know. So I just said

it was work for you—my job—that kept me away, and that it had to be

confidential. But Clare’s upset—a little.”

“I’m sorry.... I’ll write your father a note tomorrow morning, Petra.

I’d better. He will make your stepmother understand. But I’m sorry it

was unpleasant when you got home....”

“Oh, I don’t mind that. Clare wasn’t cross. Only hurt, you know. But the

evening—well, the evening has been—lovely. We’ve had a wonderful time!”

“_We’ve had a wonderful time!_” The words and the lilt in them echoed

over and over in Lewis’ head, forbidding sleep. He told himself it was

the oppressive heat of the night which held him awake, his eyes open on

the dark. At least, he told himself that in the beginning. After an hour

or more of restless tossing, however, Lewis admitted the truth. It was

Petra’s happy, excited voice saying “_We’ve had a wonderful time_” that

was making the very idea of sleep fantastic. The words and the new tone

in which she uttered them opened vistas to Lewis’ imagination. It was

absolutely inevitable in the light of to-day’s happenings that McCloud

should—_worship_ Petra. How could he fail to! Only an imbecile, given

the situation, could help it. McCloud, of course, was no imbecile. And

Petra—how would she respond to the fellow’s idolization! Now that Lewis

was at last face to face with the prophetic misery which was keeping him

wakeful, he went on with it—followed the train of thought which he had,

in his attempted self-deception, dammed up, while he tossed and blamed

the stuffiness of the night.... McCloud was a gorgeous person. Gorgeous

was a cheap adjective ordinarily, but in this one instance, it was the

right adjective. McCloud—let Lewis face it, see it—was a gorgeous

creature, not only physically, to look at, but in inward ways as well.

Directness, simplicity and courage. Those qualities make for

gorgeousness in a man. How could Petra, after to-night, fail to see

McCloud as godlike? Why, her very share in bringing him back to life—for

wasn’t that practically what she had done?—would add to her sensibility

of his splendor.

“_Oh, I don’t mind. The evening—well, the evening has been—lovely._”

Lewis laughed audibly. Why should she mind! Why had he ever thought she

might, and been concerned about it? How should a stepmother’s annoyance

tarnish such a meeting and recognition as had come into Petra’s life

to-day! The very tone in which she used McCloud’s Christian name showed

how things had gone between them.... Neil and Petra.... “My God!” said

Lewis into the dark. “Neil and Petra! Was it foreordained?” He felt a

powerful impulse to communicate further with Him of whom he had so

spontaneously asked the bitter question. He turned over and buried his

face in his crossed arms. But he did not know how to go on with the

Contact—did not know how to pray. Lewis had been born into the tradition

that formal prayers which one has by heart have no functioning quality.

One must make up one’s own prayers, for originality is the only

guarantee of His creatures’ sincerity the Omniscient will recognize. But

Lewis doubted this proud notion now, as he lay here, facing down into

the dark, helpless with the anguish of loss. If only there were

patterns: sweet, fluent channels of accustomed prayer, through which one

could pour one’s blind groping toward fortitude and peace! What was it

McCloud had said to God in Lewis’ office this afternoon? That was

prayer, certainly,—even though not uniquely and strikingly the boy’s

individual invention. “God have mercy on me a sinner.” Yes, that would

do. “God have mercy on me a sinner.” Lewis uttered the ancient

unoriginal cry-of-all-souls with stark sincerity to God imminent, God

transcendent, and added to it, after a long sweet stillness, “It is Your

justice. Why did I think Petra was for such as me? Your justice is Your

mercy, Lord.”

In the morning Lewis seemed to remember that peace had flowed into the

channel his prayer had cut through his dark with a rushing benediction

in a sound as of many waters. Peace. Then sleep.

In the weeks that followed, Cynthia Allen gradually came to admit to

herself that she had had all her worry for nothing about Lewis’ untoward

infatuation for an uninteresting young girl; for the affair—if one could

give anything so fleetingly ephemeral such a title—had blown over. She

had been silly even to imagine it serious. A person like Lewis, so

subtle, so perceptive, could not long be held in thrall to mere physical

attraction and youth, with nothing to give it depth. No, Harry had not

succeeded in convincing Cynthia of the ineptitude of qualifying passion

with “mere.” Harry was a simple soul, really, in everything except

finance. You could not expect him to understand a man like Cynthia’s

famous brother. Lewis was all intellectual subtlety. First of all, in

any contact, he would look for understanding and depth. Passion, when it

appeared, would be a by-product of the discovery of his ideal. He was

like Anodos in “Phantastes” in that. Cynthia was sure of it. He was not

common clay!

For weeks now Lewis had not come out to Meadowbrook. That was hard on

the children and on Harry. They were so devoted to him. But Cynthia

herself was not the loser. She frequently met him in town for lunch,

where she had him much more to herself than she possibly could in the

midst of the family. And it was fun gossiping with him, her interesting

brother, in undomestic freedom, giving him innumerable anecdotes of the

children, telling him what Harry thought of the financial situation

between the countries, and in our own country, and of what she herself

thought of the latest selections of the book clubs. Cynthia subscribed

to all the American book clubs and had recently added an English one to

the list.... And sometimes, always in fact, she slipped in gossip of

Green Doors; for Green Doors and its inmates fascinated Cynthia

increasingly. The life there—the people who came and went—the parties,

the talk—all of it was just a degree above anything Cynthia had ever

experienced before of sophistication and a “newer, larger liberty of

thought and feeling.” The air was electric. She remarked on it often.

Why, even Petra now interested her, rather, and had taken her place as

part of the general fascination of all that made Clare’s life so

dramatic. For Petra was having a romance; and all the world loves a

lover—at least when no relations are involved. It was that attractive

young Irishman, Neil McCloud. Petra had picked him up somehow, all on

her own, without anybody’s help, it seemed. Cynthia’s curiosity as to

the precise how of that had never been satisfied, exactly. But he was

forever at Green Doors these days—followed Petra around like a faithful

dog—literally. If they weren’t engaged, it was obvious they were the

next thing to it. Perhaps they were engaged and were refraining from

mentioning it until Edyth Dayton McCloud should return from Switzerland

with a divorce in her pocket. Cynthia often imagined to herself—and with

some enjoyment—how the snobbish Daytons were going to feel when they

woke to the fact that the husband whom Edyth had so casually jilted was

marrying Lowell and Clare Farwell’s extraordinarily beautiful daughter.

Cynthia imagined that the wedding, when it came, would be at Green

Doors, outside, on the terrace or lawn; for Clare had no use for stuffy

churches and organized religion, although she was more religious,

Cynthia was sure of it, than most so-called pious people. Clare lived

her religion without any pretense. She would plan a beautiful wedding.

It was pretty wonderful of her, too, to take Neil McCloud in as she had

done, without apparent question or hesitation. Petra liked him. Petra

admired him. That was enough for Petra’s stepmother. She was ready to

like and admire him also. But it was only good luck and no special

credit to Petra’s discrimination, Cynthia felt, that nobody could help

liking the man. He was a perfect darling.

To-day Lewis himself had taken the trouble to call Cynthia up and ask

her to dine with him. And he was being very generous and extravagant,

for him; he had brought her to the New World Hotel, the best dining room

in the city. It was almost the middle of August, the end of a summer

that had been the warmest in Boston’s weather record. Lewis was

beginning to show, Cynthia saw, what the strain of the vacationless

summer in the city had been. There was a perpetual white line around his

mouth, two dark hollows in his forehead, and he was certainly thinner.

But—bless him—he appeared to be as interested in herself and her chatter

as ever, and as alive to all her interests. About himself and his work

he had nothing to say except to tell her, when she asked about it, that

his new book was all but finished. The last set of proofs, in fact,

would go to the publisher within a few days.

“That’s grand,” Cynthia congratulated him. “All’s well then and the

goose hangs high?”

“Oh, yes,” he laughed. “The goose hangs high. They’ve already started

arranging in Vienna for the translation. I’ve let Mendel have it. I’ve

quite a nice letter from him about it. Came to-day. If he comes over

this fall, and he must, I think, may I bring him to Meadowbrook? I

should like him to meet you.”

Cynthia was thrilled, naturally. Between her famous brother and Green

Doors, her life held all sorts of potentialities these days. It was fun

having interests outside and a little beyond mere “Society,” with all

its futilities!

“Somebody told me Mr. Malcolm Dayton has come to you for treatment,”

Cynthia said, suddenly remembering it. “Clare told me, I think. Not

Petra. She’s as secretive with me about office affairs as if I weren’t

your sister. Is it true?”

“No,” Lewis answered. He was always a little short when she questioned

him about his patients. Cynthia never got used to it nor quite

understood it. “Where’d Mrs. Farwell get such a notion?”

“She was waiting for Petra. In the reception office. She said he came in

while she was there. She was interested, of course, on account of Neil.

Very much interested, as you may imagine!”

“Oh? But yes, I remember. He wanted to see me about a personal matter.

It was a damned interruption in office hours.”

“Was it about Neil?” Cynthia was curious almost beyond bounds. And it

would be gratifying to have some really interesting news to take to

Clare. “Has old Dayton tumbled to the situation? Does he know Neil’s

fallen on his feet—in the inner circle at Green Doors?”

“No. At least, I don’t know anything about what he knows or doesn’t know

about his son-in-law. Certainly he didn’t mention McCloud to me. He

wouldn’t. It’s to be hoped he doesn’t even know McCloud came to me for

treatment. It’s Dick Wilder’s fault that anybody knows it. He saw him

here one day and then meeting him at Green Doors he remembered. That’s

how you know, my dear Cynthia, and the Green Doors crowd. Petra never

told. No, Dayton wanted my ideas on something in connection with a new

charity he is starting. That, too, was confidential.”

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to be prying, darling. But I hope he doesn’t know

about Neil and Petra. He might get dog-in-the-mangerish feelings and

stop the divorce going through. I’m not often so hateful, but I rather

hope that Edyth is going to see what a fool she has been, too late. Why,

from her, you’d think Neil was the veriest bounder. Clare says so,

anyway. Edyth had filled Clare up with stories. Now Clare doesn’t

believe a word of any of it. She never happened to see Neil, or she

wouldn’t have believed them before, she says. But how she detests Edyth!

Now more than ever—although she has always seen through her more or

less. I always liked Edyth myself; though now, of course, I can see what

Clare means about her! It’s nice Neil makes money so easily, isn’t it,

in these times! He sold Harry a car last week—on the very day when Harry

said we simply had to begin economizing. A joke on Harry! We have no

more need of a third car than—than you have, Lewis! But after Neil had

talked a few minutes, Harry thought life wouldn’t be life without it!

He’s a super-salesman,—must be. Clare is wonderful about the whole

thing. She says they’re bound to be happy if Petra goes into it

open-eyed. Petra must realize, though, Clare says, that Neil is the type

always to have affairs. Nobody so stunning-looking, so amusing and

good-natured, can help it. But also he is the type—if Petra’ll only be a

little understanding—who’ll be reverential to his wife and simply adore

his children. All Petra will need to manage him will be a little

adroitness. That’s Clare’s only worry about it—that Petra won’t know how

to manage him. Why even now—before he’s got Petra safely for his, he

flirts with Clare herself—absurdly—under Lowell’s very nose. With me

too. But nicely, you know. I’m rather thrilled and I love seeing Harry

glower! Petra’s a lucky girl.”

Lewis had decided that he wouldn’t have dessert, after all. Only black

coffee. He’d begin drinking it while Cynthia had her ice, if she didn’t

mind. He’d have a second cup with her when she came to it. He had some

work he had to do to-night later. Lots of coffee was necessary. He had

brought some English Ovals along for Cynthia. Yes, truly. Would she have

one now—or wait?

“_He’s a type who’ll be reverential to his wife and simply adore his

children._” Petra the wife, Petra’s the children. Why, now, after weeks

of mental self-discipline and grim philosophizing—and nightly prayer—did

such a remark have the power to rock Lewis’ very being in agony?

Cynthia was eating what she considered a particularly delectable ice.

Too bad Lewis didn’t want his. “But there’s one thing may spoil the

whole show,” she went on. Her chatter to-night was tireless! “It looks

almost as if Dick himself is getting serious about Petra. Remember your

asking me why he didn’t, weeks ago? And I said, how could he? Well, he

seems to be like most men—let another male admire a woman and they begin

to think there may be something in her. Men act like sheep in their

erotic adventures. I don’t know whether Clare has noticed it. But if she

has, she probably isn’t bothering. Dick needs some one quite different

from Petra—a younger Clare. He is so utterly a product of

super-civilization. While Petra and Neil—there’s something untamed,

unaccountable, about both of them. With Neil it’s his Celtic blood, I

s’pose. I shouldn’t wonder if Petra’s mother was Irish. Those blue eyes!

Are you interested in all this chatter? Lewis, _I’m boring you_!”

“No, Cynthia. I’m not bored. Only it’s all so futile. I didn’t know you

and your friend Clare had those two already married. Haven’t either of

you remembered that Neil is a Catholic? His marriage to Edyth Dayton was

confirmed by a priest. No matter how legal a divorce she gets, so far as

McCloud is concerned, he is married to Edyth as long as they both live.”

“Oh!—But if Edyth can be free, why can’t Neil? He never mentions

anything religious. I don’t believe he gives it a thought!”

“Perhaps not. I don’t know anything about that. But if your surmise is

true, it is only temporary. In his heart McCloud would feel that any

marriage he contracted now was no marriage. Whatever his plunge into

Clare’s circle has done to him, it won’t—in the last analysis—change his

Catholic heart. At least, I don’t see how it can.”

“But Lewis! Surely—surely you aren’t so—why, I don’t understand! You

wouldn’t have a man like that go _unmarried_! He’s just the sort to go

to the devil—if he hasn’t ties. Of course he will marry again. If not

Petra, some one else. He’s bound to.”

Lewis had good hold of himself now. He said, “No one is bound to be

disloyal to the truest thing in him. Any more than he’s bound to be

loyal to it. We’re creatures of free will. But if McCloud does use his

free will toward the destruction of his new-found integrated self, I

hope that it won’t be Petra who is the instrument. I’m very fond of

Petra, as it happens,—deeply fond of her; and to see her ruin any man’s

life—I simply can’t, that’s all. No matter what tragedy this means for

them both, I hope they don’t go so far as a marriage pretense. Now I’ve

told you my ideas on the subject, let’s forget it. It’s really their

affair, not ours. But somehow I’m putting my faith on McCloud’s

integration saving them both from inevitable misery. Petra’s doing

awfully well at the office, by the way. Losing her would be no joke!”

... He ended on something which Cynthia, taking it at its face value,

considered a laugh.

But though she let the sound pass as a laugh, Cynthia looked at her

brother rather keenly. Had she been wrong? Was he still attracted by

Petra himself? She shrugged it off. No, she was not wrong. Mere physical

attraction wasn’t going to twist Lewis’ fine, important career out of

shape, wasn’t going even to worry him for a minute. She was happily sure

of it.

It was true, what Lewis had just said of Petra’s work. She had made

herself invaluable in these long, hot, trying weeks, both to him and

Miss Frazier. She could take dictation now, if given a trifle slowly,

and when Lewis and Miss Frazier were both working under pressure, they

sometimes even left letters unread for Petra to sign. And in the

reception office people trusted her and liked her. They liked her even

to the point, it seemed, of not minding being put off by her. This was a

blessing in itself, since putting off people was one of the chief

functions of her job. Just her voice over the telephone seemed to have

the power to salve wounded feelings and instil resignation in

importunate patients.

Lewis had taken her out to lunch several times during the summer,

getting in his bid ahead of Neil or Dick. But those intimate hours

afforded no reprieve from his loneliness for the real Petra. Those hours

tête-à-tête over little tables turned Petra and Lewis into strangers.

Although Lewis never accepted Clare’s eager invitations to parties and

intimate teas at Green Doors, and met Clare only by accident at times

when she came up to the office ostensibly to see Petra, Petra still

considered him Clare’s friend, not hers. She clung almost passionately

to that assumption. Lewis knew no way of breaking it down. Her

stubbornness in this one matter was equalled only by her reticence. And

since their midnight telephone conversation, she had never spontaneously

brought Teresa into the conversation once. To his own tentative and

diffident suggestions, she had always the same answer, “If she asks me,

I will take you to see her some day. But not just now. She is—very

busy.”

So paradoxically their casual contacts in the office were better, more

satisfying, than any planned tête-à-têtes. When he stopped by her desk,

going out to lunch or coming back, Petra might tell him of some comical

incident that had come up during the morning in her gracious sphere, the

reception room, and they would chortle over it in good fellowship. But

sometimes she seized the opportunity to plead somebody’s case with him.

To-day she had done that. Wouldn’t he please give Mrs. Jack Loring more

attention? It was so special, so pitiful,—the thing she wanted his help

with. Wouldn’t Lewis at least talk with Mrs. Loring about it? Lewis had

not minded taking the time to explain to Petra—standing by her desk,

looking down into her lifted, serious eyes,—that this particular

committee worker was hysterical, and hopelessly sentimental, as well as

outrageously interfering. Children were better off—he expounded it at

some length, just to stay there near Petra—better off in degraded homes

than in public institutions. But he would promise to do something in his

own way, leaving the meddlesome social worker out of it, if he found

that anything could be done without violating ordinary human rights to

privacy.... It was at such moments as this that Petra was herself with

Lewis and that something real was regained—and retained for as many

precious minutes as it lasted—of their first intimacy on the edge of the

June meadow.

But suddenly Petra had looked past him, in their whispered colloquy this

afternoon, and smiled. McCloud had come in and was waiting until “the

boss” should leave off and Petra be free for him to take for a noon spin

in the glittering, swanky, sports roadster which, as a salesman, he had

at his disposal. Looking from one to another of them in that minute,

Lewis had been impressed more profoundly than ever with how alike they

were. The eyes were the identical shade of blue. Such a terribly intense

blue! They might be brother and sister. Or first cousins. But it was

always startling,—as freshly and poignantly startling, every time he saw

them together, as if he had never before noticed it. And they were both

so vibrantly young! Tall, long-limbed, wide-shouldered,

strong-chinned—and then again that intense blue of their eyes! They

might be Siegmund and Sieglinde in love, and above the incest-taboos of

mere mortals, belonging to each other by their very resemblance....

“Lewis, you look ghastly!” Cynthia broke into her brother’s swift lapse

into revery, shattering it with her concern for him. He was grateful. It

was not very easy, seeing Petra give to Neil what she had once seemed to

give to himself—and then withdrawn—with such adamant mysteriousness.

“You do. Simply ghastly! You’ve put off your vacation too long this

year. When are you taking it?”

“Well, that’s why I got you in to-night, to tell you. I’m taking a

little one right away. Going off to-morrow. With Dick. Down to Mount

Desert. We’re starting early in the morning. I’m driving. We’ll be there

several days. Sailing. Climbing. Dick’s in some sort of difficulty.

Something he wants to talk over, anyway. And it’s a good time to go. I

can take the proofs with me.”

“Oh, need you? Don’t. It’s too silly, on a vacation! But then it’s too

silly to call it a vacation, anyway—a few days! Yes—I’ve seen myself

Dick’s worried. But why doesn’t he confide in Harry or me—or Clare? Why

does he think he can spill it all out on you—you of all people—who have

altogether too much of this talking-it-all-out-stuff in your daily

grind! It’s pretty inconsiderate of him, I think. Clare’s wise, capable

of complete detachment, and besides all that, utterly devoted to the

creature. I suppose it is sympathy he wants. Or perhaps—I wonder—is he

all snarled up over Petra? If he is—Clare’s certainly the person to hash

that over with!”

Lewis said, “No, I don’t believe Dick has anything on his mind that has

to do with Petra. Why do you put that idea into my head, Cynthia? If I

had thought it was that—but it isn’t—I’d have gone alone. Cynthia, you

are the world’s prize idiot. Do lay off prying and finish your coffee.

It must be stone cold. How does Harry abide you! If you start crowing

here, they’ll put you in jail as a disturber of the peace. No, you can’t

have another cigarette. If I’m going in the morning, I’ve got to get

back to work now. It’s fun getting you furious in a position where you

have to consider your dignity. You’re really quite sweet, all bottled up

like that, but foaming around the cork. Come along, sweetheart. Let’s

get going.”

People turned to look at them as they left. Their conversation had been

far too animated for husband and wife. No, it was romance, it must be.

But how distinguished they were! It was always interesting, dining at

the New World! You might catch a glimpse of anybody there. It was

cosmopolitan and very chic for Boston.

_Chapter Seventeen_

Lewis had anticipated three or four days of sailing among the islands

about Mount Desert to the tune of blue sea, blue sky, white clouds,

whitecaps, and the salt wind over all. But an unprophesied nor’easter

did its best to ruin the holiday. The sky was clear when they started

from Boston in Lewis’ car (Dick had been unselfish in letting it be

Lewis’ car rather than his own) and it stayed clear until they were

within sight of the island. Then suddenly the wind changed and every

aspect told them that they were in for a likely three days of drifting

fog.

“It will have to be golf and walking, I’m afraid,” Dick apologized for

his island. “This is rotten luck. And we’ll have to use all the tact we

can muster in dealing with the Langleys. They will be humiliated beyond

words!”

The Langleys were the married couple, Yankees and native to Mount

Desert, who lived on the Wilder estate in Northeast Harbor and were in

charge of the place the year around. The elder Wilders for years past

had spent most of their time in Europe, returning for a few weeks each

winter to their Brookline home, but coming down to their Mount Desert

estate almost never. It had tacitly become Dick’s responsibility and

playground. Each summer he entertained several house parties here, and

often came alone with some friend, as he was doing now, for a few days

of sailing and climbing. If at his appearance the weather was not

“typical” the Langleys felt it a flaw in their hospitality; and his days

here with Lewis, Dick feared now, would be rife with the good couple’s

reiterated apologies for the weather—and all the more insistently

because the guest of this particular visit was so important a personage.

“Tell ’em you’d rather walk than sail!” Dick pleaded. “Tell them you

know the views so well that it is just as if they were there for you

behind the fog! Tell them that fog’s darned restful and just what you

need. You see, they are really well-informed people, and you can bet

they know all about who you are. You’ll have to work hard, right at the

beginning, to put them at their ease, or they’ll be so chagrined they’ll

follow us around apologizing all the time. They will be like parents who

keep saying when the rector calls that their children never acted up

like this before and they simply can’t understand it. You’d think they

had created Mount Desert and lived only to display it to me and my

guests.”

“I understand.” Lewis laughed. “I’ve noticed that most Mount Desert folk

are like that, other years. The first time I came down here, do you

know, I couldn’t see any farther than my hand could reach, practically,

for two solid weeks. That was in August too. I wouldn’t have known there

were any mountains if they hadn’t told me. But you can imagine _how_

they told me! We were just puffing away in the old _Morse_, when the

wind changed and it all came out diamond clear. It was like the

never-never land. I thought then that it was the finest scenery in the

world. Norway itself can’t beat it. I’ll tell the Langleys that. I’ll

tell them how I know it by heart. We’ll see, between us, that they don’t

suffer beyond endurance!”

So they drove in at the wide stone entrance gates, laughing.

It was pretty disappointing, all the same. The sky, the sea, the

mountains were all there, like the next page in a book—but a page that

has annoyingly stuck. Dick took it harder than Lewis, however. He had

counted on the sharp clear outlines of this Mount Desert environment to

make self-expression easy. He had got Lewis down here, really, for the

sole purpose of clearing his own mental and emotional decks of clutter.

And the fog, somehow, seemed now an externalization of that inward

confusion. Having it here, visibly and sensibly pressing in around him,

turned him inarticulate. It was Clare who had planned this expedition,

really. She it was who had suggested that Dick “clear his emotional

decks by talking things all out with Doctor Pryne.” But it wasn’t going

to be so easy.—Besides, Lewis wasn’t acting like himself, Dick thought.

You couldn’t call him morose exactly, but neither was he particularly

exuding sympathy. He was abstracted: as if he had his own thoughts—even

possibly his own worries.

At breakfast the next morning they decided against golf. Lewis wanted

exercise, he said, and how about climbing a few mountains? Even without

the view, he felt like climbing—strenuously. So Dick, putting aside his

own silent preference for a morning of golf, started off as cheerfully

as he could manage on a foggy all-day walking and climbing jaunt with

this somehow new and strange Lewis. The plan was that they should begin

gradually—Asticou Hill, Cedar-Swamp Mountain, and then with second wind

acquired, traverse the mile-long ledge to Sargent’s top, swim in the

pond below Jordan, and descend the bluffs to Jordan Pond, and a taxi

home in time for dinner.

They left Lewis’ car at the foot of Asticou Hill, and started up, thick

bars of chocolate in their pockets and thick Alpine sticks in their

hands. Lewis was ahead on the faint thread of trail, straining his eyes

for the cairns which marked the way. Gray gnomes, these cairns seemed to

him, each as it pierced the fog, toppling forward or sidewise, beckoning

him back from the pathlessness of foot-high forests of blueberry scrub

to the faint footworn windings of the climb.

“I planned a house one summer to stand right here,” Dick said, when they

came to a giant gray boulder and automatically halted, leaning their

backs against its inviting side, looking down into the sea of fog that

shut them onto the hill. “It was my first completely visualized house,

really. I was twelve, about. I saw the house as a sort of a growth out

of the hill. The skies came down, the sea came up, and the doorsill was

solid sunlight. Sometimes I really can’t believe it isn’t here, it was

so real to me then. But I went farther than architecture in that first

venture. I peopled that house, created a family to live in it. You

needn’t believe me, Lewis. I don’t expect you will. But the mother of

that family was quite extraordinarily like Clare Farwell. Looked like

her, I mean. When I first saw Clare, years after, I recognized her as

the woman of my early imagination—the mother in that first house of

mine. By the way, we are standing by one of the windows in the bedroom I

gave her. The bedrooms were on the ground floor, you see. The whole top

story was living room—one huge, spacious apartment, practically all

windows. But wasn’t it—eerie—about Clare! Imagining her like that when I

was just a kid! I’d never seen anybody like her then. Of course, I

couldn’t have. There isn’t anybody like her.... Is there?”

“No, I suppose not,” but Lewis’ response had an absent-minded

tonelessness. Yet in another minute he asked, his psychological

interests stirring, “What were you yourself in that picture, Dick? Or

weren’t you in it?”

“I was the middle son of a large family. I remember you that summer,

Lewis. You were down here at Doctor Montague’s with Cynthia. She and

Harry got themselves engaged at Jordan Pond. The second time they’d seen

each other! I remember my tutor saying to somebody or other that it was

a whirlwind affair and he wondered how it would turn out. The word

‘whirlwind’ was what made the grown-up gossip exciting to me and why I

remember it now. An exciting word! But speaking of Clare, don’t you

think it is rather thrilling the way she has managed to express herself

in Green Doors? The firm would be surprised if they knew how little,

really, I put myself into it. But that’s good architecting, as I see it.

Something like portraiture. If you see what I mean.”

Lewis’ mind was busy with a picture of Dick, a neglected only child,

spending long summers on Mount Desert with servants and callow young

college-boy tutors while his mother globe-trotted and his father made

money,—a child stealing off up here to this lonely, wild hill to plan

the ideal house and people it with a mother of his dreaming and a large

family of which he was the middle member. “Do you see what I mean? About

Green Doors? That it’s portraiture? Portraiture of Clare? And that’s why

it’s so perfectly what it should be?”—Would Lewis please come out of his

abstraction and pay attention. That’s what Dick’s tone said.

Lewis obeyed and answered. “But is that quite fair? Most houses have

more than one person living in ’em. Green Doors has. If you’re going to

do portraiture in your architecting, I should think it would have to be

composite portraiture.”

“Possibly, with some houses. But not Green Doors. It’s Clare who colors

everything there, and a lucky thing for the others! Have you ever known

such—such simplicity and utter _goodness_? Isn’t she wonderful! Aren’t

you grateful that I have brought you together? Isn’t just knowing her

worth all the trouble you’ve taken with Petra? I bet it is.”

“What do you mean, trouble with Petra? It’s Miss Frazier who had to take

trouble with Petra just at first, perhaps. But now she’s invaluable to

us both, let me tell you. She has a positive flair for the work.”

“Really! I didn’t realize that. Have you told Clare? She thinks it’s

really a kind of charity on your part, keeping Petra occupied. Petra

herself says you are patience itself and that she is always doing

something wrong.”

“That’s nonsense. Or else a form of perverted modesty. Miss Frazier and

I would be lost without her now.”

Dick would repeat this to Petra’s stepmother, Lewis hoped. It was

something at last, though almost infinitesimal, of course, that he could

do for Petra, who asked and wanted nothing of him really.

Then Dick fell mercifully silent, occupying himself by scrawling letters

in the sand at the base of the rock. Lewis began counting the fir-tree

tops which pricked the fog with their pointed spires at irregular

intervals down the hill; for Lewis had acquired a habit, when Petra was

called to mind suddenly, as she had been just now, or came without being

called, as she did all too often, God knew, of concentrating on the

first other thing that came to hand. Now he counted tree tops. And

though he was smoking far too much—he knew—but to whom could it

matter!—he took out his cigarette case.

“Clare wanted me to talk to you down here,” Dick said suddenly. “Tell

you things. But I rather suspect you know them already. You do, don’t

you?”

“What she means to you?” Lewis asked. He was sorry Dick had decided to

plunge into intimate confidences exactly at this point. If he would only

wait till the fog lifted—till the seascape was diamond clear. If a

northwester would only blow! If the weather shifted, Lewis might be able

to listen patiently (which was all Dick wanted, of course) to his

“If-you-know-what-I-means,” and “Do-you-sees.” But he was in for it now.

Dick had Lewis cornered just as, in his utter overworked weariness, he

felt the fog had him cornered.

“Yes, what Clare means to me and what I mean to her,” Dick was saying.

“I imagine you saw how I felt about her almost before I saw myself. That

day when I came to your office! And all during the summer it has gone on

getting—well, more and more so. But it isn’t Clare’s fault. She saw

things as they were even before I did and she warned me. She wanted me

to go away, for my own good. She was sane and beautiful about it. Why,

she talked in as detached and clear a way as you could have talked

yourself, Lewis. And all the time—which makes her detachment so

wonderful—she herself was involved in it all, do you see! I don’t mean

that she—that she feels exactly the way I do. She wouldn’t. She isn’t

like that, anyway. She’s too—unphysical. But our friendship means

everything to her, all the same. She says that passionate friendship is

actually more involving than passionate love. Because it absorbs and

colors the imagination, you see. If we were lovers, she says—as the

world understands the phrase, you know—why, we mightn’t mean nearly so

much to each other as we do with things as they are with us. But she was

ready to sacrifice this passionate friendship for my sake. She was

afraid I might suffer too much, if it continued. You mustn’t think I am

crazily conceited, Lewis, when I tell you that not seeing me any more

_would_ have meant sacrifice to Clare. I don’t understand myself why she

cares for me as she does. The miracle of her caring fills me with the

deepest humility. But she does care. Our being together so much means

everything to her, as it does to me, only in a different way. And she

was ready to give it up! She said that, quite aside from the suffering

it might bring me, there was always the chance that my caring so much

for her might keep me from falling in love with some girl I could marry,

do you see. And she talked it all out with me—quietly, bravely. But I

wanted to stay, of course,—just so long as I was sure it was not hurting

her, or making her unhappy. Do you understand?”

Lewis sighed. Not only Clare herself, but Clare even heard about,

invariably overwhelmed Lewis with the greatest ennui—or in happier

moments made him swearing, cursing mad. Just now it was ennui. But he

tried to conceal his weariness for Dick’s sake. Dick was not only

Cynthia’s husband’s cousin. He was Lewis’ friend of many years. He had

no brains—certainly—but artistic functioning in his brainpan somewhere

took the place of brains, and most whiles made him companionable enough.

So now, after sighing, Lewis said, “Yes, I understand perfectly. But

Clare is obviously right: clearsighted, as you yourself must see. The

friendship is destructive to you while it leaves her unhurt. You ought

to snap out of it. It’s no joke, I know, being head over heels in love

with a married woman. But it does happen. And it’s never any good

sticking around and trying to get nourishment on half a loaf. A clean

break is the only self-respecting possibility. Sorry—but you asked for

it, old-timer.”

A silence, charged with emotion (another of Dick’s substitutes for

brain) moving toward articulation followed. Then he blurted, “I can’t do

it, Lewis. One can’t choose to starve. Half a loaf is better than

none—even if it isn’t filling!”

Lewis’ response to that was unequivocal. “It is not better. It’s just a

sweet little hell. Clare gave you the right dope. Take it from her, if

you won’t from me. If you want to salvage your future, stay a long way

away from Green Doors, and snap out of it.”

“You talk as if you knew....” Dick was looking at his friend now with as

much curiosity as surprise. “But Clare has stopped saying anything about

my going. She put it up to me to decide for myself, anyway. She wasn’t

dogmatic and opinionated. Not for a minute! I decided to stay. It’s not

_that_ I want your opinion on. I believe, with Clare, in the

individual’s right to decide on the happiness or the misery he will take

for himself.... So I’m staying,—but, thanks to Clare, with my eyes open.

It hasn’t been easy. It is just about what you say—a sweet little hell.”

“Well, of course.... So that’s that. Shall we get going?” Lewis picked

up his stick and crushed a half-smoked cigarette under his heel.

“No, wait a minute. See here, Lewis, I want to talk to you. I can’t

talk, walking. It was Clare, really, who sent me off down here with you.

And I haven’t come to the point of what she wanted me to tell you yet.

That was only preliminary. Clare has a scheme.—She thought you’d agree

that it was, perhaps, rather a good one.”

Lewis groaned but selected another cigarette. Another “scheme”—“good.”

Clare was indomitable. He leaned back again, his elbows on the rock.

They might as well have the rest of it now, he supposed, so long as they

were messing about in thick fog, anyway. A little more or less confusion

from poor Dick’s mindlessness—what did it matter! But the next minute

Lewis was galvanized into feeling that it mattered enormously. For Dick

had said, “I didn’t go away, you see. And I’m not going to. I couldn’t

leave Clare, to save my life. Our friendship (Clare’s and mine) has

become of such importance to us both—yes, Clare too—that now we see that

nothing in this world could have the power to part us. Least of all,

mere physical separation. We must stay—passionate friends. We belong to

each other. I don’t think you can imagine, Lewis, what such friendship

can be—or what trying to stamp it out of one’s life would do to one. It

would be infinitely easier to stamp out a sexual relationship than such

a one as Clare’s and mine.... Well, this is her scheme. She thinks it

will make it possible for our friendship to go on being beautiful, even

grow more beautiful, more dynamic. She wants me to marry Petra. That

will make it safer for us both, do you see? What’s the matter?”

The obvious matter was that Lewis had torn his coat sleeve, a jagged

rent, somehow on the rock.

“Mrs. Langley will mend it for you. She can do a magnificent mend. But

how’d you manage it? You were just leaning—”

“Yes, just leaning, and hearing the ravings of a blasted idiot. What are

you trying to do? Be funny, I suppose! But I don’t care for that kind of

funniness. You can leave Petra out of it.”

Dick was amazed but not silenced by Lewis’ violence. “I felt surprised

myself at first,” he owned. “But it isn’t so wild as you seem to think.

And not a bit idiotic. I like Petra. I like her a lot. I didn’t used to.

It’s only lately I’ve begun to understand her. She’s—why, she’s a

stunning girl, really. And she isn’t in love with anybody else, that I

know of. She’s not engaged to that McCloud person, in spite of Clare

thinking for a while that she might be and was keeping it secret, the

way she likes keeping things secret. But now Petra has told me herself

she isn’t. And I’ve got Saint Paul with me: It’s better to marry than to

burn.... There’s the whole Greek idea, too. Those Greek fellows, of

course, weren’t faithful to their wives in the sense that I shall be

faithful to Petra. But the situation was rather parallel, all the same.

They had their intellectual and spiritual friendships with men or with

women not their wives—and it succeeded. It was wise and sane. Clare

thought you would be sympathetic—understand—”

“Look here, Dick! Prick me and wake me up. This isn’t real. If it is, if

I’m awake, then somebody’d better advise Farwell to get in a good

psychiatrist—but not me, thanks. I’m out of it. But Clare should be

under observation. You too. You both had better leave Petra alone. Not

that anything either of you could say or do will even so much as touch

her wholesomeness! I’m a fool to get so excited about it. What do you

say—shall we go back to the car and start for Boston—or shall we stick

this out till the fog lifts? I’m perfectly ready to go back.”

_Chapter Eighteen_

Dick was in favor of sticking it out. He thought Lewis madder, if

anything, than Lewis thought him, which had the advantage of evening

things up between them.... And then, halfway down the hill, Dick was

struck by an idea. Was Lewis himself in love with Petra? Could anything

be more probable? Petra was utterly beautiful. Propinquity too, and all

that!... But why hadn’t Clare seen this possibility? Suppose she had

seen it—. Was that the reason why she had been so insistent on Dick’s

telling Lewis the whole situation? So that Lewis would be forewarned?

But why would not Clare consider marriage between Petra and Doctor Pryne

a very good marriage indeed? Clare wanted the very best for Petra, Dick

never doubted that. Did Clare think, perhaps, that Petra could never be

happy without a great deal of money? Well, Petra probably couldn’t, and

Dick, not Lewis, had the money. Petra was mad about clothes, lovely

clothes. She dressed more interestingly than any girl he knew. Pretty

big of Clare, with her own indifference to luxury and clothes, to

consider Petra’s different temperament, and have such long, wise

thoughts for the girl’s future.

But Lewis was such a grand person! Quite aside from his fame, his

personality was head and shoulders above any other man Dick knew,—even

Lowell Farwell’s. Oughtn’t that personality to make up for Lewis’

comparative poverty, even to Petra’s rather shallow young view? Dick, in

all humility, should think that it would and that in a choice between

them any girl would choose Lewis, not himself.... But Clare understood

Petra better, it seemed. It was clever of her not to have told him that

Lewis might be his rival for Petra, but instead to send them off down

here together, where Dick could find it out for himself. But put

yourself in Lewis’ place. If you were in love with a girl, and a friend

came to you and told you he was _not_ in love with this same girl but

wanted to marry her all the same,—how would you feel? Pretty furious!

Just the way Lewis had acted! Dick wondered that Clare hadn’t had as

much imagination for Lewis’ feelings, as she had had for Dick’s own, and

Petra’s. Well, Clare loved him and Petra; and Lewis, after all, was only

a respected acquaintance. That explained it. But it was tough on Lewis,

all the same.

As they reached and crossed the wide trail toward Jordan Pond, Dick felt

a new emotion coming to life and ascending in his heart—like a

skyrocket. Elation! To win Petra from a fellow like Lewis! To imagine

Petra desired—and by such a man—had had the effect of making her

suddenly more desirable to himself. He would tell this phenomenon to

Clare, when he got back, quite frankly. You could tell Clare anything.

Her detachment was an exquisite, a consoling thing. If he told her that

Petra, he felt, might in time come to take Clare’s own place with him,

Clare would even then keep her dear, generous detachment. But of course,

Dick could never have any such nonsense as that to tell Clare. No matter

how fond he ever became of his beautiful wife, Clare would remain as

long as he lived, his—his most beloved.

Abruptly, Lewis interrupted these forecastings. “See here, Dick, I’m

sorry I got so hot. But let’s make a bargain. Don’t you mention Green

Doors again or anybody in it as long as we are together on this holiday,

and I’ll go back now and play golf with you instead of hiking. It’s what

you want, I know, and you were merely being altruistic.... The idea of

going on walking, anyway, doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Really?”

“Really! We can swing around to Asticou Inn and go back for our clubs,

can’t we?”

They could and they did. But Dick did not know what Clare would think of

the bargain he had struck with Lewis. She had expected the two to talk

endlessly, to hash everything over.... Or what had she expected after

all? Dick was no longer so certain. Well, he had only to get back to

Clare, look in her candid, sweet eyes, to lose this sudden new sense of

confusion about what her motives in getting him to confide in Lewis

might be. She could and would explain to Dick’s complete enlightenment

and satisfaction. She always did.

That evening Dick left Lewis reading Agatha Christie’s last detective

novel by an open fire and walked into Northeast Harbor alone for their

mail. If Clare had written him yesterday, as she had half promised to

do, the letter would come to-night. All through the long hours on the

misty golf course and ever since, this expectation of a letter coming

to-night had been a steady undertow to all that went on in Dick’s mind.

The entire day had been for him nothing in the world but a straight path

to the letter window of Northeast Harbor’s little post office. The mail

was sorted by eight-thirty, he knew, and sometimes a trifle earlier.

But, taking hold on all the strength of character he possessed, Dick had

determined not to arrive at that window of dreams one minute before the

certain time of half-past eight. He knew how painful it would be to

stand around waiting, watching the mail being sorted and not absolutely

certain of his letter. Now, as he came down the village street through

the drizzling fog, he saw that the cars parked near the post office were

starting up their engines and that people with letters and papers in

their hands were coming from the post-office door. And he walked faster.

Whether the thick thugging tom-tom his heart had set up was delight or

anguish, he did not consider.

The window gained, and Dick’s turn in the writing queue at last arrived,

he snatched the little bundle of letters from the smiling postmistress

with a muttered, blind “good evening” and turned with it to the counter.

His fingers, shuffling the letters through as he looked for Clare’s

hand, were shaking. There were half a dozen letters for Doctor Pryne

readdressed in Petra’s script. But there was nothing for himself.

Nothing that counted. Petra had written him, it seemed. A letter in a

fat envelope. But he was so dulled by disappointment that he hardly

bothered to wonder why she had written or what.

He stuffed the whole bunch into his pocket and returned to the delivery

window. “Are you sure there’s nothing else for Richard Wilder?” he

asked. It was a childish act, he knew, but he could not seem to help

himself. Obligingly, the, to Dick, faceless automaton at that fateful

window turned back to the letter boxes. She even thrust a hand up into

the Wilders’ now grimly empty pigeonhole, pretending to make certain of

what was already a certainty. The look on the man’s face asking the

unreasonable question made the gesture, empty as it was, a human

necessity. She came back to her window. “Nothing _now_.” The young woman

spoke tentatively, averting kindly eyes. “In the morning’s mail

perhaps.”

Out in the fog again Dick had to laugh at himself. Why did he need a

letter so? They trusted each other, he and Clare. What did passionate

friendship mean if not trust and peace, even in separation! Besides, it

was scarcely sixty hours since they had parted. And he would see her in

thirty-six more. Lewis and he had decided to cut their holiday short and

return to-morrow, after all. They gave the weather as their excuse to

each other, but not to the Langleys. It was agreed that the doctor

to-night was to receive an important letter which made their dashing off

necessary. The fact was that ever since Dick had begun to suspect Lewis’

feeling for Petra, a constraint had settled between them which made

their close companionship just now more of a strain than a relaxation.

So day after to-morrow Dick would be out at Green Doors again. It was

unworthy of Clare’s beautiful friendship that he should feel actual

written words from her, which he could keep in his pocket and touch, a

necessity to his sense of assurance of that friendship. It was unworthy

and faithless in him. But letters were uncanny things! _Wanting_ one so

terribly was uncanny too....

Lewis glanced up at Dick welcomingly as he came in. The detective story

had returned him to a healthy, intellectual mood. He was accustomed to

find this type of reading as effective as a good game of contract or

chess for keeping one sensible.

“This Christie is O.K., Dick,” he said. “You must read it yourself. It’s

as good as anything she has done. I’ll be through in half an hour or so

and you can have it.”

“Good! I picked up a new Dorothy Sayers as I came along, at Blaine’s

drug store. You can have that to finish the night with. Here’s your

mail.”

Dick had dropped the little pile of letters onto the arm of Lewis’

chair, and pulling another chair up to the hearth, he sprawled himself

into it, eyes moodily on the fire.

Petra’s fat letter to Dick was on the top of the pile. In his

disappointment at not hearing from Clare, Dick had completely forgotten

he had any letter at all. Lewis picked it up, turned it around in his

fingers, looked at Dick. But Dick was bent forward, poking the fire. He

jumped when Lewis spoke.

“This seems to be yours.”

“Oh, sure! I forgot it. Toss it across, will you. It’s a fat one.

Funny!”

Putting down the tongs and leaning back in his chair, Dick tore the flap

open with his thumb, and twisting around to get a better light on the

sheets, began lazily reading Petra’s long letter. Lewis made no pretense

of returning to his detective story or of looking over his own mail.

Petra’s handwriting on the envelopes in his little pile that remained

stared up at him ironically. This was as much as he had of her, or ever

would have, he felt. Her hand readdressing somebody else’s letter to

him. Petra’s handwriting was stirring—and Lewis believed it would be

stirring to him even if he did not know and love and desire Petra as he

did. The characters were consistently round, dear, black and perfectly

spaced. The writer of such a script was scrupulous—exquisitely

scrupulous—not to waste one instant of the recipient’s time or energy.

It was like Petra’s own perfect manners, visible in black and white. But

how arid to be sitting here, studying and appreciating the nuances of

Petra’s agreeable manners, while Dick was reading her heart; for Dick

had lost his indifferent, lounging attitude when he began to read

Petra’s long letter, and his profile—all that Lewis could see of his

face—was tense and excited.

Lewis got up hastily, leaving his letters where they were on the arm of

the chair, and went out onto the piazza. The fog sucked up to him,

enveloped him. He coughed, choked sharply. These Mount Desert fogs were

like no others in the world, he thought, and for once, it occurred to

him that he ought to possess himself of an automatic cigarette lighter:

you couldn’t strike a match successfully out here in this insidious fog.

But cigarette or not, he would not return to the warm fire-cheered room

until Dick had done with that letter and put it away out of sight.

What would Dick do with the sheets when he had finished them, anyway?

Lewis visualized him tossing them casually into the fire. Then he

visualized himself putting his own bare hand into the fire and pulling

them out! “Am I crazy?” he wondered. “What is there in her mere

handwriting that stirs me more than the sight of Petra herself? It is

the essence of her personality—as the voice is—only visible.” If Petra

should ever write himself a letter—if such a day ever came—Lewis felt

now that her handwriting on the envelope would produce as profound a

feeling in him as would her first kiss. He coughed again. The fog hated

him. Then Dick came to the door, shouting “Lewis! Oh, Lewis!”

“Oh! But I couldn’t see whether you were there or not, Lewis! This

heathenish fog! But come along in, do. I’ve got to talk to you. Really!”

And back in the room, over by the fire, the men stood facing each other

across Petra’s letter. For Dick had not tossed it in the fire. That had

been only a daydream of Lewis’ tired, driven mind. The letter lay on a

little table, under Dick’s palms, as he stood leaning on the table,

looking down at it.

“See here,” he was saying, “I promised to lay off our morning’s

discussion—Clare—Green Doors—all that. But something has happened....

This letter ... Petra has written.... Amazing.... It’s quite moving ...

Sweet.... And I want you to read it. It may open your eyes to something.

It has mine. You may thank me. What I didn’t get around to tell you this

morning was that I had already done it—proposed to Petra. She turned me

down but I wasn’t sure she meant it. Clare was sure she didn’t mean it.

Anyway, I meant to try again when I got back. But now I see Clare was

wrong. Petra did mean it. Will you read this?” Dick’s face was glowing

with the sheer generosity of the thing he was doing. “Will you read it?”

he asked again, for Lewis was looking at him strangely—blankly.

“Would Petra mind?” Lewis asked.

“That can’t matter. She wouldn’t mind if she really knew you. And I owe

it to you—after this morning. If we were two men in a novel, old boy, I

wouldn’t give it to you, and you wouldn’t know right up to the last

chapter that your girl is yours for the asking. But this is life and

we’ll let the suspense of the situation go by the boards. Read and see

what a darned fool I’ve been.”

Lews took the letter. The sheets were steady in his strong, long

fingers. Dick lounged back in the chair and watched his friend with

growing uneasiness; for no light dawned in Lewis’ serious dark face as

he read. That face seemed, indeed, under Dick’s very eyes, to grow thin

and grim with controlled emotion of a sort totally other than Dick had

expected.

_Chapter Nineteen_

It was the seventeenth of October. It was also Petra’s birthday; and

Lewis had relaxed in his practice of turning down all Mrs. Lowell

Farwell’s invitations and was now driving out to Green Doors to a dinner

party given in honor of the birthday. Himself, Dick and the Allens were

to be the only guests. Neil McCloud had been invited but was, Lewis

understood, not coming. Lewis suspected that Neil’s refusal had been the

cause of Petra’s manner to-day—not a birthday manner exactly. She had

moved about at her work in a spirit of recollection, but a strained,

anxious recollection which no doubt she thought went unnoticed by her

employer. Lewis had first been struck by it when he asked her who was

coming to her party to-night, and her answer had been that Neil was not.

He had laughed and said, “But it was a list of acceptances I wanted—not

refusals.” She had lifted her eyes to his, at that,—she was sitting at

her desk and he had stopped by it as he passed through to his own office

to say good morning—and they had been blank with a kind of subdued

misery. But she had answered, “Clare tells me that you are coming,

Doctor Pryne. The Allens. Dick. It is nice of _you_ to have accepted.”

“Don’t say that. I am looking forward to it very much. My dear, will you

accept this present? I’ve been days finding it, and if you don’t like it

I shall be terribly disconcerted.”

It was the detail from the Fra Angelico picture: angels dancing, and

saints embracing in a flower-studded meadow. A very good print, framed

in silver. Lewis had brought the cumbersome thing under his arm, done up

in brown paper, just as it had been sent to him from the store. Lewis

did not hope, of course, that Petra would ever know why he had hit upon

this particular present. It seemed inappropriate, perhaps, for a

twenty-year-old girl’s birthday present. But to Lewis it meant something

they had once experienced together—a meeting of souls where language and

explanations are no longer necessary, where all is unselfconscious joy,

camaraderie and fluent communication between the saints in Paradise.

That first sight of the June meadow behind Clare’s guest house, which

Lewis had likened to this picture—and thought of Petra and himself as

saints, without their crowns to be sure, and their presence there in the

paradisiacal meadow purest accident—had remained all summer a poignant

memory. He hoped that Petra would keep this picture all her life,

wherever she lived, and that even not understanding anything of what it

meant to him in the giving, she would remember him now and then in

looking at it; and thus his memory would stay alive for her because of

something which stood to him for their own one brief real meeting and

recognition. Let that same quality of recognition never come again on

this earth,—still it might yet come in heaven. Perhaps it only needed

their crowns for the consummation of its promise.

An early frost had followed the unprecedentedly hot summer, and the

trees all along the state highway to Meadowbrook had been stripped

during the past few days of their flaming foliage. The fields and

meadows stretched away brown and purple, barren too. But the clouds,

like levitated mountain ranges, hung above the western horizon, blazing

with autumn colors, red, gold, purple, buff. The day had had an Indian

summer warmth over it and to-night the sky promised to be divinely clear

with a full moon.

Lewis had sent Petra home from the office when she returned from her

lunch. “Somehow you don’t look like a party to-day,” he had said. “Lie

out in the sun on a blanket somewhere. It’s warm enough. Get rested.

This has been a heavy week.” Miss Frazier was away on the vacation she

had insisted on putting off until the book was actually in print and

Petra really had been working up to the full capacity of her strength

and ability.

If Lewis had not packed Petra off early, however, she would be beside

him now in his rushing car, sharing the beauty of those levitated

cloud-mountains along with him, and the bare tracery of tree branches

against the mellowed fields. He had had a selfish impulse to keep her

late just to make this drive together inevitable. And he would have

succumbed to his selfishness, had he not a better plan. Neil was not to

be there to-night. Whether Dick was absolutely out of the running or not

Lewis did not actually know. But Lewis had reached his limit of passive

endurance. He had accepted the invitation because in the very act of

reading Clare’s note a few days ago, tending it, he had made up his mind

that he would go with Petra by moonlight to the edge of that meadow

(October now, not June, but in the moonlight it would still be Paradise)

and tell her how he wanted her. If she was in love with Neil—and he

knew, of course, that she was—it did not matter. He wanted Petra at last

even if she came to him with a broken heart. It had taken Lewis weeks to

reach this depth of humility. But now it was reached. He had struck

bottom in his longing and suffering. If Petra in youth’s scorn of

compromises said that she had nothing she could give him, let it be so.

At least, he would have reached for his star. But if he did not touch

the sky to-night, did not draw it down to him, he must find Petra

another job at once. It was impossible to have her in his office,

feeling as he felt, longer.

At its very least, Lewis’ proposal would have the advantage of making

Petra see the necessity for her not going on at his office. She would

understand and not be wounded. And he would find her something even

better. In spite of the “depression” and Petra’s lack of business

experience, he promised himself—and he would promise her—that she should

not be the loser. In fact, all Lewis honestly hoped of this onrushing

moonlight night was for an understanding between himself and Petra. A

bitter understanding on his side—since she was going to tell him that

she could not possibly marry him without loving him—but on hers

illuminating. She would not go on, after to-night, so dangerously

unconscious of the power of her young beauty and loveliness.

Remembering her letter to Dick two months ago down at Northeast—and when

had Lewis forgotten it for a single hour!—he trusted Petra’s ability to

face things squarely, once they were given her to face. She had a clear,

honest mind. She had been clear and honest with Dick. Lewis would now,

to-night, by moonlight, on the edge of the Paradise meadow, be equally

clear and honest with her.

The car reached sixty-nine on the clear-ahead highway, and the lines of

Petra’s brave letter streaked through Lewis’ mind with almost a like

speed. He knew it by heart from the one reading—that brave, dear letter

to another man:

Dear Dick: