The Breaking Point (15 page)

And David himself was improving rapidly. With the passage of each day
he felt more secure. The reporter from the Times-Republican—if he were
really on the trail of Dick he would have come to see him, would have
told him the story. No. That bridge was safely crossed. And Dick was
happy. David, lying in his bed, would listen and smile faintly when Dick
came whistling into the house or leaped up the stairs two at a time;
when he sang in his shower, or tormented the nurse with high-spirited
nonsense. The boy was very happy. He would marry Elizabeth Wheeler, and
things would be as they should be; there would be the fullness of life,
young voices in the house, toys on the lawn. He himself would pass on,
in the fullness of time, but Dick—

On Decoration Day they got him out of bed, making a great ceremony
of it, and when he was settled by the window in his big chair with a
blanket over his knees, Dick came in with a great box. Unwrapping it
he disclosed a mass of paper and a small box, and within that still
another.

"What fol-de-rol is all this?" David demanded fiercely, with a childish
look of expectation in his eyes. "Give me that box. Some more slippers,
probably!"

He worked eagerly, and at last he came to the small core of the mass. It
was a cigar!

It was somewhat later, when the peace of good tobacco had relaxed him
into a sort of benignant drowsiness, and when Dick had started for his
late afternoon calls, that Lucy came into the room.

"Elizabeth Wheeler's downstairs," she said. "I told her you wanted to
see her. She's brought some chicken jelly, too."

She gathered up the tissue paper that surrounded him, and gave the room
a critical survey. She often felt that the nurse was not as tidy as she
might be. Then she went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

"I don't want to worry you, David. Not now. But if he's going to marry
her—"

"Well, why shouldn't he?" he demanded truculently. "A good woman would
be one more anchor to windward."

She found that she could not go on. David was always incomprehensible to
her when it came to Dick. Had been incomprehensible from the first.
But she could not proceed without telling him that the village knew
something, and what that something was; that already she felt a change
in the local attitude toward Dick. He was, for one thing, not quite so
busy as he had been.

She went out of the room, and sent Elizabeth to David.

In her love for Dick, Elizabeth now included everything that pertained
to him, his shabby coats, his rattling car, and his people. She had
an inarticulate desire for their endorsement, to be liked by them and
wanted by them. Not that there could be any words, because both she and
Dick were content just then with love, and were holding it very secret
between them.

"Well, well!" said David. "And here we are reversed and I'm the patient
and you're the doctor! And good medicine you are, my dear."

He looked her over with approval, and with speculation, too. She was a
small and fragile vessel on which to embark all the hopes that, out of
his own celibate and unfulfilled life, he had dreamed for Dick. She was
even more than that. If Lucy was right, from now on she was a part
of that experiment in a human soul which he had begun with only a
professional interest, but which had ended by becoming a vital part of
his own life.

She was a little shy with him, he saw; rather fluttered and nervous, yet
radiantly happy. The combination of these mixed emotions, plus her best
sick-room manner, made her slightly prim at first. But soon she was
telling him the small news of the village, although David rather
suspected her of listening for Dick's car all the while. When she got up
to go and held out her hand he kept it, between both of his.

"I haven't been studying symptoms for all these years for nothing, my
dear," he said. "And it seems to me somebody is very happy."

"I am, Doctor David."

He patted her hand.

"Mind you," he said, "I don't know anything and I'm not asking any
questions. But if the Board of Trade, or the Chief of Police, had come
to me and said, 'Who is the best wife for—well, for a young man who
is an important part of this community?' I'd have said in reply,
'Gentlemen, there is a Miss Elizabeth Wheeler who—'"

Suddenly she bent down and kissed him.

"Oh, do you think so?" she asked, breathlessly. "I love him so much,
Doctor David. And I feel so unworthy."

"So you are," he said. "So's he. So are all of us, when it comes to a
great love, child. That is, we are never quite what the other fellow
thinks we are. It's when we don't allow for what the scientist folk call
a margin of error that we come our croppers. I wonder"—he watched her
closely—"if you young people ever allow for a margin of error?"

"I only know this," she said steadily. "I can't imagine ever caring any
less. I've never thought about myself very much, but I do know that. You
see, I think I've cared for a long time."

When she had gone he sat in his chair staring ahead of him and thinking.
Yes. She would stick. She had loyalty, loyalty and patience and a rare
humility. It was up to Dick then. And again he faced the possibility of
an opening door into the past, of crowding memories, of confusion and
despair and even actual danger. And out of that, what?

Habit. That was all he had to depend on. The brain was a thing of
habits, like the body; right could be a habit, and so could evil. As a
man thought, so he was. For all of his childhood, and for the last ten
years, Dick's mental habits had been right; his environment had been
love, his teaching responsibility. Even if the door opened, then, there
was only the evil thinking of two or three reckless years to combat,
and the door might never open. Happiness, Lauler had said, would keep it
closed, and Dick was happy.

When at five o'clock the nurse came in with a thermometer he was asleep
in his chair, his mouth slightly open, and snoring valiantly. Hearing
Dick in the lower hall, she went to the head of the stairs, her finger
to her lips.

Dick nodded and went into the office. The afternoon mail was lying
there, and he began mechanically to open it. His thoughts were
elsewhere.

Now that he had taken the step he had so firmly determined not to take,
certain things, such as Clare Rossiter's story, David's uneasiness, his
own doubts, no longer involved himself alone, nor even Elizabeth and
himself. They had become of vital importance to her family.

There was no evading the issue. What had once been only his own
misfortune, mischance, whatever it was, had now become of vital
importance to an entire group of hitherto disinterested people. He would
have to put his situation clearly before them and let them judge. And he
would have to clarify that situation for them and for himself.

He had had a weak moment or two. He knew that some men, many men, went
to marriage with certain reticences, meaning to wipe the slate clean and
begin again. He had a man's understanding of such concealments. But he
did not for a moment compare his situation with theirs, even when the
temptation to seize his happiness was strongest. No mere misconduct,
but something hidden and perhaps terrible lay behind David's strange
new attitude. Lay, too, behind the break in his memory which he tried to
analyze with professional detachment. The mind in such cases set up
its defensive machinery of forgetfulness, not against the trivial but
against the unbearable.

For the last day or two he had faced the fact that, not only must he use
every endeavor to revive his past, but that such revival threatened with
cruelty and finality to separate him from the present.

With an open and unread letter in his hand he stared about the office.
This place was his; he had fought for it, worked for it. He had an
almost physical sense of unseen hands reaching out to drag him away
from it; from David and Lucy, and from Elizabeth. And of himself holding
desperately to them all, and to the believed commonplaceness of his
surroundings.

He shook himself and began to read the letter.

"Dear Doctor: I have tried to see you, but understand you are laid
up. Burn this as soon as you've read it. Louis Bassett has started for
Norada, and I advise your getting the person we discussed out of town as
soon as possible. Bassett is up to mischief. I'm not signing this fully,
for obvious reasons. G."

The Sayre house stood on the hill behind the town, a long, rather low
white house on Italian lines. In summer, until the family exodus to the
Maine Coast, the brilliant canopy which extended out over the
terrace indicated, as Harrison Miller put it, that the family was "in
residence." Originally designed as a summer home, Mrs. Sayre now used it
the year round. There was nothing there, as there was in the town house,
to remind her of the bitter days before her widowhood.

She was a short, heavy woman, of fine taste in her house and of no taste
whatever in her clothing.

"I never know," said Harrison Miller, "when I look up at the Sayre
place, whether I'm seeing Ann Sayre or an awning."

She was not a shrewd woman, nor a clever one, but she was kindly in the
main, tolerant and maternal. She liked young people, gave gay little
parties to which she wore her outlandish clothes of all colors and all
cuts, lavished gifts on the girls she liked, and was anxious to see
Wallie married to a good steady girl and settled down. Between her son
and herself was a quiet but undemonstrative affection. She viewed him
through eyes that had lost their illusion about all men years ago, and
she had no delusions about him. She had no idea that she knew all that
he did with his time, and no desire to penetrate the veil of his private
life.

"He spends a great deal of money," she said one day to her lawyer. "I
suppose in the usual ways. But he is not quite like his father. He has
real affections, which his father hadn't. If he marries the right girl
she can make him almost anything."

She had her first inkling that he was interested in Elizabeth Wheeler
one day when the head gardener reported that Mr. Wallace had ordered
certain roses cut and sent to the Wheeler house. She was angry at first,
for the roses were being saved for a dinner party. Then she considered.

"Very well, Phelps," she said. "Do it. And I'll select a plant also, to
go to Mrs. Wheeler."

After all, why not the Wheeler girl? She had been carefully reared, if
the Wheeler house was rather awful in spots, and she was a gentle little
thing; very attractive, too, especially in church. And certainly Wallie
had been seeing a great deal of her.

She went to the greenhouses, and from there upstairs and into the rooms
that she had planned for Wallie and his bride, when the time came. She
was more content than she had been for a long time. She was a lonely
woman, isolated by her very grandeur from the neighborliness she craved;
when she wanted society she had to ask for it, by invitation. Standing
inside the door of the boudoir, her thoughts already at work on
draperies and furniture, she had a vague dream of new young life
stirring in the big house, of no more lonely evenings, of the bustle and
activity of a family again.

She wanted Wallie to settle down. She was tired of paying his bills at
his clubs and at various hotels, tired and weary of the days he lay in
bed all morning while his valet concocted various things to enable him
to pull himself together. He had been four years sowing his wild oats,
and now at twenty-five she felt he should be through with them.

The south room could be the nursery.

On Decoration Day, as usual, she did her dutiful best by the community,
sent flowers to the cemetery and even stood through a chilly hour there
while services were read and taps sounded over the graves of those who
had died in three wars. She felt very grateful that Wallie had come back
safely, and that if only now he would marry and settle down all would be
well.

The service left her emotionally untouched. She was one of those women
who saw in war, politics, even religion, only their reaction on
herself and her affairs. She had taken the German deluge as a personal
affliction. And she stood only stoically enduring while the village
soprano sang "The Star Spangled Banner." By the end of the service she
had decided that Elizabeth Wheeler was the answer to her problem.

Rather under pressure, Wallie lunched with her at the country club, but
she found him evasive and not particularly happy.

"You're twenty-five, you know," she said, toward the end of a
discussion. "By thirty you'll be too set in your habits, too hard to
please."

"I'm not going to marry for the sake of getting married, mother."

"Of course not. But you have a good bit of money. You'll have much more
when I'm gone. And money carries responsibility with it."

He glanced at her, looked away, rapped a fork on the table cloth.

"It takes two to make a marriage, mother."

He closed up after that, but she had learned what she wanted.

At three o'clock that afternoon the Sayre limousine stopped in front of
Nina's house, and Mrs. Sayre, in brilliant pink and a purple hat, got
out. Leslie, lounging in a window, made the announcement.

"Here's the Queen of Sheba," he said. "I'll go upstairs and have a
headache, if you don't mind."

He kissed Nina and departed hastily. He was feeling extremely gentle
toward Nina those days and rather smugly virtuous. He considered that
his conscience had brought him back and not a very bad fright, which was
the fact, and he fairly exuded righteousness.

It was the great lady's first call, and Nina was considerably uplifted.
It was for such moments as this one trained servants and put Irish lace
on their aprons, and had decorators who stood off with their heads a
little awry and devised backgrounds for one's personality.