Psyche (22 page)

Reform school was an ugly threat which Psyche had heard used many times over when she was at school, and her actual ignorance of what such a place might be like made her fear of it no less than it would have been if she had known precisely. That it was infinitely worse than an ordinary school, she did realize, and that was enough in itself.

Although the words had come from what seemed to be a long way off, she had both heard and understood what Butch and Mag had said earlier, so now she asked only one question. “Where can I go, Mag?”

“You gotta be brave, kid, because you gotta——” A mental picture of the kid, whom she had come to think of almost as her own, alone and friendless on the dark highway, was for the moment too much for her. Her throat harsh and dry, she began again. “You ain't got nowheres exactly, kid. But you're growed, an' you can cook real good, an' if you starts out now——”

“Mag,” Psyche interrupted urgently, “I can't go without I tell Nick first.”

The artist fellow! It was almost as if a sky-rocket had gone off inside Mag's head. He had said—what had he said about the kid that day he had come to the shack? Something about wishing she could always work for him. He had laughed when he had said it, but he had sounded as if he meant it just the same. He had said— frantically she searched her memory, and suddenly it was as if he were beside her, saying again, “You ask me if she's a good model. She is so good I wish I could carry her off to work for me indefinitely.”

Getting to her feet with an agility she had not known she still
possessed, her face ten years younger than it had been a moment before, she cried, “Butch—Butch! You hear that? The artist fellow. The kid can go with him!”

“Where's he goin'?” asked Butch, looking up from a not altogether unhappy examination of the result of his own teachings.

“Don't ask no stoopid questions. There ain't time.”

“This here bastard mebbe ain't goin' to come to ‘til momin'. He's hit his head on somethin' as well's gettin' plugged.”

“If we don't do nothin' about the doctor for——” Mag calculated rapidly, “—'bout two hours, is he gonna be all right?”

Butch, perhaps because his limited mental capacities had been taxed with little else since, remembered most of what he had learned as a member of the police force, and a rough and ready first-aid was still one of his few accomplishments. “Sure, he ain't gonna die, not to-night, nor any time soon.”

“Can we move him? He's in the road there.”

Slowly Butch shook his head. He had seen men, in worse condition than this, hauled ungently into a police wagon and survive, but it was not treatment he felt he could recommend. “Better leave him lay. I'll get a blanket to put on him. He's gotta he kep' warm.”

By the time he had done this, Mag was seated at the table using a stub of pencil and a piece of lined paper torn from an old exercise book. “Light t'other lamp, will you. I can't see so good as I useta.”

“What you doin'?”

Mag did not reply. A few minutes later she reread her own painful scrawl, was far from satisfied with what she had written, but decided it would do. Folding the paper twice, she levered herself up from the bench and addressed Butch. “Take this here letter to the hotel an' find the artist fellow an' give it to him. Don't give it to no one else.”

Butch scratched his head in slow perplexity. Events were moving far too fast for him. “What you want for me to say to him?”

Psyche spoke then. “Mag wants for me to go with Nick, Butch, an' I guess this here letter's to tell him so. You see——” her voice
broke, and she steadied it with an effort, “—you see I can't stay here no more, else they—they'd get me sure.”

Butch's big, hairy hand closed over the letter. He put it carefully in the pocket of his worn blue serge jacket. He took his hat from its hook, walked to the door, opened it, and then stood stock still. Without looking back, he said, “Mag—Mag, you mean the kid ain't gonna rest with us no more?”

Mag tried to swallow the sharp lump in her throat, but it would not go down. “That's right,” she said hoarsely. “Now don't go awastin' no more time.”

Butch stepped out into the darkness, and the door, which he usually slammed with careless violence, closed behind him without a sound.

3

P
ATIENCE
was not one of Nick's virtues. the evening of The second day of rain found him pacing up and down a room he considered supremely unattractive, the while he cursed the weather and wished himself anywhere else but in a stinking hole where, he had by now convinced himself, it rained from year's end to year's end. he had tried sitting in the hotel lobby, but had retired in disgust from its brass cuspidors, dusty palms, and odour of damp linoleum.

When Butch knocked on his door he had reached a stage where any kind of intrusion on his solitary frustration was a relief. Flinging the door open, confronted with an individual whom he had never seen before, he nevertheless said, “Come in.”

Butch came in, and there matters might have rested indefinitely if Nick had not said, “Did you want something?”

Butch's life, like that of an old grizzly bear, ran in grooves, in trails of habit worn so deep it was surprising they were not there to be seen. Deflected, without sufficient warning, from his usual paths, his thinking was even more laboured than it normally was. This direct question, coupled with the cool self-sufficiency of the stranger who asked it, upset him, and he could find nothing to say.

Nick, already bored with an encounter which promised to be entirely unproductive, said again, somewhat impatiently, “Did you want something?”

Still unable to frame a suitable verbal reply, Butch simply drew the letter from his pocket and handed it over.

Mag's illiterate note was not easy to read, but its content, once deciphered, was clear and to the point. Nick read it through three times before absently crumpling it up in his hand. Biting his lip, keen eyes looking straight through the bulk of Butch who stood fumbling awkwardly with his old felt hat, he saw Psyche in one pose after another while he weighed the pros and cons of a situation which affected him more vitally than Mag could possibly have guessed.

If he did not, as the note suggested, take the girl away at once, his chances of ever painting her again appeared to be nil. He hadtwo sketches of her unfinished, and it was unthinkable that he fail to complete them, impossible that they represent his lastopportunity to work with a model whose equal he might never find again. If he did take her, could he keep her at the studio without advertising her presence there? Yes, that could probably bemanaged—and. Lord, what an opportunity! If he could have her there under ideal working conditions twenty-four hours a day, hecould accomplish in months what it might otherwise take years to do. Alice—could this thing be done without his wife's knowledge? He would give his right—he mentally corrected himself his left arm before he would wilfully lose Alice. But Alice wasthree thousand miles away from the converted barn in its secludedvalley. She would be away until September—and this was onlythe beginning of June——

Suddenly he made up his mind. If the note contained truth, if the man were only injured, then he would take her. It was highly unlikely that an intensive search would be made for her if the man recovered. No charge more severe than juvenile delinquency could be made to stick, and taxpayers' money was not usually thrown away on a widespread hunt for a juvenile with no previous record.

His eyes finding a shorter perspective again, he looked directly at Butch, and said decisively, “I'll come.” He nodded toward a bottle of whiskey on the night-table. “Pour yourself a drink. I'll be ready in twenty minutes.”

He was ready in less time than that, the straps of his case of canvasses checked with care, his clothes and few personal belongings stuffed into a single suitcase.

“Did you see anyone you knew on your way here?” he asked Butch.

“Don't remember none.”

“What about the man at the desk downstairs?”

“I ain't never seen him afore to-night,” Butch told him stolidly, and then, slowly beginning to realize the purpose behind this interrogation, added, for further clarification, “I don't never come here at night.”

“Good. Now you go down the back stairs—they're on the left at the end of the corridor—and out the service entrance to the parking space. You'll find my car there, a black Buick, license number 4DB624. It isn't locked. Get in, and wait for me while I check out.”

These were the kind of concise instructions which Butch had been used to receiving and carrying out in a dim and distant past, and, rather than resenting the curt manner in which they were delivered, he was reassured. Almost but not quite saluting as he left the room, he lumbered down the corridor, curiously comforted.

Nick, meanwhile, overlooking no way in which he could protect himself in so far as was possible, went down to the lobby to play, with some flair, the part of an inebriated artist intent on searching out the morning in its lair, and this without delay.

When he left, staggering very slightly, he was quite satisfied that the smirking young man behind the desk would not, if subsequently questioned, in any way connect his abrupt departure with Psyche's flight from the shack.

He arrived with Butch at the shack a half-hour later, having left the Buick parked beside the highway close to a red convertible that had caused him to raise his eyebrows and whistle softly under his breath.

They found Mag alone with the owner of the red car. Although still prostrate, he was showing signs of returning consciousness, groaning and stirring restlessly under the blanket which had been laid over him.

Nick looked around the room. “Where is she?”

Mag nodded toward one of the two limp curtains at the back of the shack. “She's layin' down. She's been sick.”

“She's better now?”

“Yeah she'll be okay. It done her good, really. You goin' to take the kid?”

Nick went over to the man on the floor, looked at him for a moment, felt his pulse, and then turned to Mag, and said quietly, “Yes. And we'd better leave at once. This man is going to come to soon. It's important that he doesn't see me. Are her things packed?”

Silently Mag pointed to a cardboard carton, tied with oddments of string, which stood beside the door.

Butch cleared his throat. “You better go get the kid, Mag,” he said thickly.

Mag's hand was already on the curtain when she said, “You understand that the kid can't never come back?”

Nick nodded. “I understand.”

A terrible, urgent appeal appeared in the big woman's voice and eyes. “You'll treat her decent, won't you? She's—she's a good kid.”

Nick nodded again, and because he believed what he was saying for at least as long as it took him to say it, there was both sincerity and conviction in his reply. “I'll take good care of her.”

“God bless you,” Mag whispered, and went into the little storeroom to her kid for the last time.

4

T
HE
long night drive through darkness into a grey dawn was, although neither nick nor psyche knew it, not unlike a film being run in reverse. For psyche was going back to the city in which she had been born, following a road, again by night, and again in haste, over which she had travelled for the first time nearly fifteen years earlier.

Nick drove, as he did everything else that he enjoyed doing, with a concentration that allowed no unnecessary distractions. Lean brown hands close together on top of the wheel, intent eyes never wavering from the outer rim of the white path cut by the headlights, he kept the speedometer needle hovering just under eighty on the straightaway, and took the curves for the most part without dropping below fifty. The small towns through which they passed were silent, deserted islands, apparently as untenanted as the black oceans of forest that surrounded them on all sides —forests that began to give way reluctantly to the greyer darkness of fields and pastureland only after they had been on the road for something over three hours.

During the earlier stages of the journey Psyche, a waxen figure with a waxen face, sat rigidly clutching the tattered portion of the ancient Bible that Mag had at the last moment thrust into her hands. Her sole tangible link with the shack, she held on to it as if she never meant to let go of it again. Yet, as mile after mile dropped away behind them, with darkness producing only further darkness, the tight fingers gradually relaxed their frantic grip, and
the golden head began to loll and jerk with the motion of the fast-moving car.

For a time fatigue blotted out all thought, conscious or unconscious, and her awkward sleep was that of utter exhaustion.

Her nightmare began as a pleasant dream. Warm and happy, she drifted through space in a bed encircled by white bars which, rather than imprisoning, gave a wonderful sense of security. And just out of sight someone was singing a song whose words would not come through clearly to her, but whose musical cadences were achingly familiar.

“Mmmm—Mmmm—” she murmured.

Nick, glancing sideways, and seeing that she slept, did not disturb her.

Below her there spread away, it seemed to infinity, a great field of pale-blue grass, while above her she could see a cloudless pink sky. Slowly, the pink sky began to darken; a chill wind whined between bars no longer white but black as the slag at night; and the soft blue blanket, under which she lay, began to creep of its own volition over her face, a stifling weight forcing the breath back into a throat choked with screams that died before they found utterance. Wildly, hopelessly, she thrashed out at a faceless, formless horror that attacked her now in a chaotic, bruising turmoil of darkness.

Nick was caught completely off guard by her piercing scream. The car swerved dangerously. Then he had it under control again, and slowed to a stop at the side of the empty highway.