Testimony Of Two Men (24 page)

” ‘Doctors must always close ranks,’ ” said Robert, lighting his own pipe.

Jonathan laughed. It was a faint and exhausted sound. “Yes, we must, mustn’t we? What if our patients saw us as we are? By the way, have you settled on that house yet? I ought to have told you. It was Mrs. Winters’. Her children had put it up for sale.”

Robert paused for just a moment. Then he said with firmness, “Yes, I have settled on it.”

“Good. They wanted fifteen thousand, but I beat them down to ten. For you. Good night. But go in to see Hortense before midnight. This is your first case, Bob.”

The July night was hot and very still. Jonathan rode his horse slowly and wearily homeward. His eyes felt full and aching and his hands were faintly trembling. He had long ago learned to be objective about his cases, but sometimes he could not push them from his mind. He was less certain about Hortense than he had appeared. The chance of her surviving, the chance of the infection having been halted, were very poor. It was now, he thought, in God’s hands, as they say. And I wouldn’t trust those hands for a single minute! Not after what I’ve seen them really do when He’s in the mood.

The streets of the town seemed full of clinging steam and the gutters were pungent, and the drains. The gaslamps were haloed with rainbowed rings. Jon could hear the rattle of wheels on cobblestones, the sound of laughter in dark alleys, disembodied voices on porches. Hambledon’s odors appeared both nostalgic and too heavy to Jonathan Ferrier. He could smell the river, fishy in the heat, and the sweetness of linden trees and the almost anesthetizing fragrance of full-blown roses and the dust on the grass. Footsteps and the clatter of horses’ hoofs echoed in the hot night. Doors opened, shut, banged closed. Somewhere there was a thin singing of a gramophone, the distant shout of a young boy, the cry of a child, the call of an anxious mother in the dark; the giggle of a girl. It was all about him, but he felt himself unseen, unheard, unknown. It was as if he were already an apparition visiting old known places, alone and silent. It was well. Soon he would be gone and it would be as if he had never lived. He looked toward the mountains and they were only deeper shadows against a dim sky faintly sparkling with stars. He looked at the houses he passed and saw the yellow light against blinds or caught a glimpse of a small parlor and nondescript furniture, and men in shirtsleeves reading under lamps or a mother rocking a baby, or children at tables playing dominoes. He, Jonathan Ferrier, saw it all, but now it was strange and remote and he had no part in it. He had no home here. He had no one.

Dear Mavis, he thought. I should have killed you, nice and quietly, long ago.

He passed the swinging doors of saloons and heard the raucous laughter in their noxious depths. He was thirsty. He wanted a cold beer. He remembered that it had been many hours since he had eaten anything. He pulled up his horse. Then he went on. He looked down an intersection and saw. the distant square with its iron statue of General Sherman. It looked like a dream or a painted scene and not reality at all. The gaslights blinked and shifted. He went on and now as he approached the section where he lived it seemed a little cooler and the air was fresher and there was a small breeze from the river. The houses became larger and more isolated on dark lawns, and half hidden behind clusters of trees. His ancestors had known and had helped build this town, but he had no part in it and never would again.

He was growing more tired every moment. When he reached the stables where he kept his town horses, he could hardly drop down from the saddle and lift his bag. One of the stableboys came to him eagerly. “Good evening, Dr. Ferrier! My, this horse looks tuckered out.”

“He is.” Jonathan watched the horse being led away. Soon he would not ride this horse. He would have his farms. Would he ever visit them again? He did not know. He hoped not. He ought to sell all but one, and keep that one for his mother, who loved it. He would give the matter thought tomorrow. He glanced up the street and saw the dark Winters house, where Robert and his mother would live, and between his house and the Winters one he saw his offices, unlighted, silent. He had little more to do there. In fact, he had little more to do with living at all. He thought of the whiskey in his offices, and hesitated. Then he went up the long walk to his house, and the shadows of the trees fell over him and these old familiar creatures did not belong to him any longer, either.

The house was old and strong and high and broad and long, and there were lights in a few windows. His grandfather had added this huge porch, which extended all about the house. The porch was secluded and resembled a colonnade, but it was all wood and painted a solid white. Here on rainy days he had played with his brother or had sat alone, listening or reading, or talking with his father. What had they talked about? He did not remember. His father’s voice came back to him, grave, thoughtful, musing. But damned if he could remember one single thing his father had said on all those days, through the years! It was very odd, however, that he could recall almost all that his mother had said to him briefly, on the few occasions she had talked to him on this porch. Jonathan stood there now, looking down the long shadowy reaches of the deserted boards and the still chairs and tables in the faint light that came through the windows and from the far-distant streetlamp. It was on a hot summer dusk that she had said to him somewhat sternly, “You really must stop laughing at Harald. You don’t know how you hurt him.” He had been fifteen then.

And it was on an early spring evening when he was returning from school that he had paused here. It had been raining all day and now the whispering sound of it was on the air, rustling mysteriously through new leaves and a wind was sighing down the long porch, which was empty. Then he had heard a sound of sobbing, dismal and faint, and he had turned and walked a short distance down the porch, which echoed with his footsteps in the fragrant half light, and he had found Harald, then twelve years old, crouched on the floor with his head and right shoulder pressed against the brick wall of the house. He had lifted his head at Jonathan’s approach and had stopped his sobbing, but he still crouched there desolately.

Jonathan said, “What the hell are you doing here, crying like a baby?”

Harald did not answer for a moment or two, and then he said, “Father laughed at one of my paintings. He said I had no talent.”

Jonathan knew his father’s taste in painting. He liked smooth satiny surfaces and subdued colors and artful postures and, even then Jonathan had to admit it, sentimental and obvious subjects. He particularly liked, for instance, a painting called “The Storm,” which depicted an overfed youth, all Hyacinthine curls, racing against a background of velvety dusk with a maiden with large plump legs and daintily disposed garments and flowing hair. The youth had ar- ranged a big cloak over the maiden’s head and it billowed with silken highlights. Jonathan had not liked it, but he did not know why. A good, and expensive, copy of it had “graced” the living room mantle until Adrian Ferrier’s death —when Marjorie had removed it

Jonathan had said bluntly to his brother, “I don’t know if you have any talent. But I do know that Father doesn’t have any.”

Harald had caught his breath, and then had slowly risen to his feet. He tried to see Jonathan in the wet gloom. “Do you mean that, Jon? Honestly, do you mean it?”

“Sure I mean it You’re such a baby! Crying out here, as if it’s important. If you have talent it will show. That’s all it should mean to you. If you start listening to people and their advice, you’ll never amount to anything.”

“Don’t you listen?” Harald had come closer to him and Jonathan had felt his ardent intensity, and he had stepped back with distaste.

“Never,” Jonathan had said with total firmness. “That is, I only listen to people who know what they’re talking about”

“But how can you tell?”

“Instinct, kid, instinct” And Jonathan had walked away and left him.

He stood alone on this hot July night, completely exhausted and beset, and he remembered that rainy twilight and Harald’s shadowy look of hope. It was certainly strange how things returned to a man when he least expected them and when his defenses were down. “Instinct,” he repeated with contempt. “Where was my instinct when I most needed it? Where is it now?”

He opened the hall door and went inside. The hall was long and wide and beautifully proportioned and the ceiling was high. It was Marjorie who had painted the dark wood in her favorite shade of pale gray with soft silver moldings, and it was she who had removed the heavy old dark furniture and had replaced it with graceful pieces exquisitely arranged: A marble console with a tall thin mirror on one side, two Louis XIV gilt chairs with white velvet upholstery, a sofa, and a table of the same period bearing an exquisite marble statuette of a faun and a lamb. The curving stairs at the rear had also been painted gray and were carpeted with blue plush in a dim shade. Marjorie had removed the wall lamps and had hung a majestic crystal chandelier, arranged for gas, from the ceiling. A few of the lamps were lighted now, and threw a golden shadow down on the Aubusson rug, which was colored in shades of misty rose and blue and yellow. There was nothing else here but tranquillity and space and unobtrusive hues and silence.

Marjorie came through a door at the left of the graceful stairway, and her thin silk dress in a tint of mauve rustled as she moved. She smiled but her hazel eyes were anxious. “Dear Jon,” she said, “I was worried about you. Why, you look so tired.” She glanced down at his hands. She saw they were red and the skin appeared dry and so she knew he had been operating—a thing he had sworn never to do again in Hambledon. He saw her glance and he said, “Yes. I did, and
I
still don’t know why. Don’t ask me who; I’ll tell you later.”

She came to him and kissed him on the cheek and she saw how weary he was and how ghastly his color. She said, “I’ve waited dinner for you, of course. And”—she paused a second —“and I’ve laid out your whiskey and soda, and you must have a drink before dinner.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll go upstairs and wash and change.”

“Oh, don’t change. Do you know how romantic you look in riding clothes?” She smiled again. “I never saw another man who looked so in jodhpurs and boots. Just freshen. I’ll wait for you in the living room.” Her smile was still fixed as she watched him go upstairs. He walked heavily and slowly and he did not look back. His dark head was bent. She sighed, tightened her hands together and went out of the hall.

She sat down in the large parlor and never had it seemed so empty before to her and so lonely. As a bride and a very young matron she had again used her taste here, removing the ponderous and frowning furniture and introducing the delicacy of an earlier age, including painted walls in a silvery shade and a dimmed Oriental rug that almost covered the polished floor. A lovely Florentine mirror hung where the despised “Storm” had once hung, and the white and carved fireplace had no fire and only a basket of pale yellow roses, which filled the room with a cool scent of tea. The silken draperies at the tall windows were the color of the roses and they fell about long lengths of weblike imported lace. The windows were slightly ajar, and the hot wind moved them. Now Marjorie, waiting for her son, could hear thunder prowling among the mountains and she saw a flash of lightning.

There will be a storm, she thought vaguely. She had been so listless all day, and her head had ached, and she thought, now, I’m really very tired of living. I won’t be able to stand it when Jon leaves. He mustn’t leave. Yes, I suppose he must It’s too dangerous for him here, too dangerous for— Her mind fluttered away in fear. She looked at the silent and shimmering furniture, at the Empire settees in blue and soft rose, at the waiting chairs in white and yellow, at all the crystal and marble and silver and at the gilded buhl cabinets which sheltered her collections of china and
objets d’art,
and it seemed to her that no one had ever lived here and no one ever would. The restless pain in her heart was not totally physical; it was like a rat gnawing in the dark under her breast

There were a cook and a maid in the kitchen, but they were far distant behind thick doors. Marjorie could hear nothing in the breathless silence but a surly grumbling among the mountains. Not even the trees stirred in that slight and burning wind. She thought of the empty bedrooms upstairs on the second floor. Two only were used, hers and Jon’s, and once she had anticipated the sound of grandchildren there. But there would be no grandchildren. Jonathan would never marry again, and Harald lived, a widower, on that foolish island and dared not leave it for more than five months a year. Even when he left it, he did not come to sleep here. His room had no tenant, and no others did. The domestic staff slept on the third floor and they went up a back staircase and had their own living quarters. How could she, Marjorie, endure it here alone after Jonathan went away, the only living thing on the second floor, the only tenant of these great rooms, the only person to walk the gardens or watch the snow fill up the trees?

She did not think of her dead husband. His ghost would not keep her company.

She started when someone took her wrist firmly, and she said, “Jon! I didn’t hear you come in.”

But he was counting her pulse and scowling a little. “Heat too much for you?” he asked, laying her hand down on the arm of the chair.

“A little. Will you mix me a drink also?”

Jonathan went to the silver tray on a marble table. He poured a large amount of whiskey into one glass, added only a little soda, then poured a smaller amount of liquor in the other glass but a considerable quantity of soda. He brought the latter to his mother. Then, standing, he drank deeply of his tall crystal glass as if he could not swallow the liquid fast enough. He had almost drained the glass before he took it from his mouth. He smiled down at his mother, then seated himself. Marjorie kept her face carefully bland.