by H. F. Heard
“Dicyanine,” Doc repeated the word. “Sounds like a cyanide to me. That’s pretty queer stuff to have around.”
“Yes, it degenerates so quickly.”
“Um, it degenerates even quicker anyone it gets inside of!”
“Yes, a quick poison, perhaps the quickest; but capricious.”
“You’re gassing gophers?”
There was another pause before Kermit said, “No. No, I’ll tell you some other time.”
Perhaps, if he had been pressed, he would have told quite a bit then. But Doc was already surfeited with research. He wanted to get back to what he felt was the real stuff—his city and the “white-mail” he levied on it, his care for its character and the welfare of all its “souls.”
Kermit realized that: “You didn’t, however, come to ask what I was experimenting with.”
“Oh, I don’t know that I didn’t. My job makes me have an interest in anything and everything.” Then, fearing that that might lead to a resumption of the lecture, Doc added, “And an absorption in nothing.” Doc, like others of his “profession,” didn’t much like being counterdiagnosed.
“All right; come out where we can enjoy the view. I’m not busy now.”
“That’s all right for you amateurs, but a sole city official has little time to spare.”
As Kermit followed out the city’s godfather he smiled behind the great good mixer’s back. Doc, however, not seeing the smile, strolled along. He was quite at his ease now that he had made it clear that he was not wasting his time, for he had officially seconded himself for his alternative duties, civic preventive peace work, as he liked to call it.
“Everything all right in the burg?” queried Kermit when they were seated on the log by the colonnade.
Given that proper invitation, Doc opened, “Always have found, Hal, that the onlooker sees most of the game.”
“Well, a wide-angled lens takes in most of the field.”
“All right; I want it turned on part of our city that ranges from the schoolhouse to the Plantation Mansion, and, if we can’t keep it focused, we’ll soon have all the city in the picture. You’re used to taking people in—I mean sizing them up.”
“Well, one can’t have spent thirty years of one’s life looking at homely people knowing they hope they’re handsome, and trying to make the camera not be too candid, without knowing something about human nature.” They laughed. “You used to say, ‘look pleasant, please.’ But soon the good photographer dropped that phrase. Law of Reversed Effort, I believe psychologists now call it, but we photographers, I’ll bet, found it out. As soon as you said that fatal word ‘pleasant’ they’d look as though you were going to shoot them, literally. ‘Just feel easy’ was the next try—why, that actually made them squint.”
“’Spect you’re right,” said Doc, anxious to avoid another return to pure research. “I’ve noticed that if you come with special-delivery mail, how on edge they are even at that, and how they’ll often be rude just because they’ve got a little fear of you as the official with the papers they can’t read and are to sign.”
“Have you been disturbing someone, carrying them echoes of alimonial pursuit?”
“No. The case I’m talking over with you isn’t that normal nuisance. Fact is, it’s a bit out of the common—the eternal triangle, but this time stood on end.” Doc was pleased with this simile and waited a moment for his mot to register. “Hal,” he used to say to his wife, “can take an instantaneous photo but, living alone up there, you have to make every really good remark a time-exposure if it’s to tell.”
“You mean ‘from one generation to another’?” The delayed reaction was after all not so lengthy.
“That’s it. It’s a little queer, maybe, to the layman, but psychologists know” (he nearly put “we” before the professional word) “that in fact it’s quite a common behavior pattern. ‘Smother love’ is the name that’s now becoming popular for it.”
“Well, what can you do about it? They’ll have to outgrow it for themselves. You can’t make a chick hatch if it prefers to stay yolked!”
Doc disdained to notice the pun. “It’s not as simple as all that, and I hope a man in my position doesn’t interfere unless he has reason.” He paused. “I know which way scandal goes. It always follows the line of a real flaw.” He cleared his throat, for Doc was a convincedly conventional gentleman. “I have no evidence,” he said judiciously, “that Mrs. Heron and her son are blood relations.”
“You mean …”
“I mean exactly what I say,” replied Doc, and immediately said the more which showed that of course he meant more. “I’ve told you, being mailman of a city you’re bound to know people—you see their mail and their faces when they take it. Two things I know, and to you I’ll add a third. She’s not his mother—they have some queer past back of them. Her mail’s always full of stuff forwarded to a Miss Ibis; yet I’ve never seen another white woman around the place. And, thirdly, she’s just winding him up, as though it were a white shroud, in that period piece she’s made of the place. We’re not an inquisitive town, thank God, but they do shun us as though if we knew we’d want to run them out of the place. And it’s just that that bothers me.”
“Yes, it is the way to get people to suspect the worst on the least evidence.”
“No; our people wouldn’t do that, but the more tolerance there is—and thank Heaven we out here have,” Doc waved his vigorous hands, “a fine latitude in every sense of the word—the more it’s natural to ask people, as they are so free and have no one to fear, not to be secretive.”
“Unless there is a real secret?”
“Well, granted she’s adopted him—there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that.”
“Then what?”
“Well, what I fear is just this. I think she may be going queer in the head. Going queer in the head doesn’t mean always going weak—unfortunately, far from it. And to add to the subtle mess-up, he’s the weak daydreaming fantasist. She rules him and he submits and half likes it and half deceives her. I’ll bet he dreams and then she, with her queer unbalance, rams the dream into hard fact. He doesn’t like that—dreamers don’t.”
“Premature publication,” murmured the researcher.
“Well, now he’s kicking, not really openly, but as you might say under the table, and she’s grim. He’s playing hookey from that great white schoolhouse in which she has him all day, the one lonely pupil under the old governess’ eye. He’s been going off with the real schoolteacher—seen ’em again today. If it goes on like this she’ll be putting him into uniform so he can’t go out and lose himself in a crowd.”
“Well, we let dreaming dogs lie.”
“I’m not for having a case of hydrophobia in the place.”
“That’s strong language.”
“No; our little burg is new. The Herons, or whoever they are, have made, in their ostentatiously quiet and exclusive way, not a splash but a sort of great white swelling on the city’s side. Why, it’s almost enough in itself to bring down your tribe on us—the publicity photographers. Remember that issue not so long ago back in one of the big photo weeklies? Just guying us, to make the old crabbed East feel that we were just a set of loose-necked lightwits. It’s real bad for a growing burg to get called names and be written up as notorious. And if on the top of our being written up as a home for cranks—the new Wild West trying to out-willy old Williamsburg—there was also a hundred-per-cent unhealthy human-interest-story—if she went off her head and imagined, as she might with all that period stuff about, that she was the divorced and banished ex-Empress Josephine …” Doc warmed with prophetic fervor to his theme and under his excitement recalled history he hadn’t thought of since college. “Oh, by gum, what publicity we’d be in for! There’d be guide-accompanied pilgrimages to see the place, and our poor little burg would be busted. I won’t have it, not if I can help it, and I won’t have them, just because they are a little odd, hunted out, just because they might, very
well might, do Aumic bad mischief. But if something isn’t done we’re taking a risk, and I won’t take it.”
Doc had discharged so many ruling negatives that he was almost out of breath. He waited for Kermit to catch up. Kermit was following and reflecting. It was, of course, a conventional tension—the “triangle up on end.” But, true enough, in a place like this its breakup might make an awkward noise.
“What’s Mrs. Heron’s age?” he asked.
“Oh, she’s anywhere in the ‘F’s.’ Sometimes she looks every day of fifty-nine—other days I’ve seen her look as though with a successful rear action she’d temporarily recaptured some of the forties.”
“Anyhow, she’s in the dangerous ages. And the son?”
“He’s almost as difficult to place as she. I’ve thought once or twice he could be her son, a son who’d taken after his father, for they’re not a bit like in face; though good lookers and homely can be like each other, these aren’t. But then at other times they look, he so faded and she so dominant, as if there wasn’t ten years between them.”
“Well, we can’t touch the two women’s sides of the problem—that’s clear. The man facet, that must be our approach.”
“That’s true. Wonder, Hal, whether you’d see him?”
“You docs say, don’t you, ‘never diagnose without seeing the patient’? All right; I will.”
Doc rose; he was pleased and hopeful at once. “I believe that may do it. After all, perhaps all he’s needing is some company. And, maybe, you could be the bridge for making the old woman come out of her big vacuum shell she’s built for herself. You’re a recluse, and like takes to like.” Already in Doc’s mind all the difficulties were melting away. He was not made to brood on disaster. “I’ll find a chance of asking him whether he’d like to see your work. Somehow seem to remember hearing that he had some interest in radio, and that’s near enough the stuff you’re working on here. Guess it was one of the men working up at the place when they first took it who told me.”
They rose and went across the little patio to its rim. Soon Doc was back patrolling his beloved streets, feeling that he’d done a good day’s work and could now devote himself again to mail and general conversation.
Chapter VI
Arnoldo made one more effort to be frank with Irene. She gave him an opening by complaining that he was out more than ever.
“I need the exercise,” he said.
“Do you walk by yourself?” Her tone was, neutral—not suspicious but not friendly.
“Few people here seem to like walking,” he began. “I sometimes come across Miss Gayton going for a stroll after school.”
Suddenly she lost her control. “You’re concealing it from me.” Her voice was a bitter scold. “Because I wouldn’t ask that little schoolmistress here again, you’re meeting her on the sly. I’ve made this place for you. I’ve done everything possible to make you happy in it; I’ve asked you to be the center of it and to entertain in it as it deserves to be used. I found you dreaming away your life in a cramped, wretched way and I’ve taken you out and made your dream come true and given you a chance which would have made the ordinary man of taste which you claimed to be happy, content, grateful. And now you steal out at the back ways to consort …” Her attack gave out, but the wave returned. “No doubt you’ve told her that you have fine prospects and not too far in the distance.”
Her resentment and her self-pity suddenly checked each other and she had a chance to hear her own voice. As suddenly as the storm had burst, she swept it aside. She could stop herself speaking but she could not find words to fill the silence in which what she had said still seemed to be echoing. She lay back. Her face was gray now, with curious leaden shadows in its folds.
Arnoldo looked at her fixedly in silence for quite a long while. She was now lying back on the couch on which she had been resting when he came in. She had been staring at him, but under his gaze her eyes wavered. After another minute, perhaps, still with complete silence, he knelt down beside her. He slowly put his hand over hers and, automatically, looked over her head to see if there was a mirror. He remembered feeling relieved that there was not. The old pattern was repeating itself and he felt a new firmness come into his touch. His was now the initiative. Her hand and arm trembled a little under his touch. They stayed like that for ten minutes or almost a quarter of an hour.
“It’s time now to change for dinner,” he said very quietly, and got up and left the room.
In his own room he sat down. He was determined now not to be rushed. He felt, in a way, that he saw his path, that he could really go as he pleased, if only he were careful, as he put it, not to mix his moods. He must be cool and considerate. Owing to his not thinking things out, he saw that he was always making the worst of two possible lines of action, or rather taking from each their worse features. He let himself get flustered and blindly irritable so that he was considerate neither to himself nor to her. He had seen downstairs that she was really quite easy to manage. All he had to do was deliberately, and not with a sense that he was being managed, fall in with her moods and wishes until—until he saw exactly what he next wanted to do and how to do it. He was pleased to find his mind so clear. He was pleased, too, that when he came to think of the next immediate step, that too was clear. He would make a real concession but not a complete surrender. He would give her something “on account,” keeping something more in reserve; and then, should she demand more before he had made up his mind as to what his next decisive step should be, he would have something more to hand out to her. By the time all his possible concessions were exhausted he should be able to see pretty plainly what would have to be done and how it might be—effected.
So he reasoned with himself and made his own lack of purpose seem a positive policy. Certainly the concessions he could make were quite clear. He could make a move now so that when they met again at dinner she would see that he was meeting her wishes. When they were still in the East she had presented him with some jewelry—links and studs—quite museum pieces. He couldn’t remember quite how it had come about. Possibly it had sprung from a remark of his. She had complained that beautiful silver was made to be used, handled, passed about, filled with “viands”—he remembered she had liked, rather mouthed the word, preferring it to the plain term “food.”
“It shouldn’t be in museums set behind thick, unbreakable glass, glimmering like an enchanted treasure at the bottom of the sea.”
He had added that that was true of all objets d’art—rings, carved jewels, they were made and meant to fit hands, ear, neck. That was the range and perspective at which they were made to be viewed. But, he had added, they can’t be worn today. They are high lights of fine living. To carry them, men and women must dress the part. Our clothes today make fine jewelry look garish. If only one could be where one were free to be fine. He didn’t, of course, mean it seriously. His birthday came not long after and he found that she had bought these links and studs for him. He was quite embarrassed.
“You know I can’t wear them because I can’t live up to them, can’t dress up to them.”
He was relieved that he had made that excuse ready before he had known that he would actually need it. But since they had come away she had, of course, raised the subject time and again.
Well, tonight he’d show her that he could meet her wishes. He had already put out the tuxedo and his other evening clothes which he now wore at dinner. He slipped into them and then fitted in the shirt the links and studs. True, they stood out rather flagrantly, but without looking too carefully at himself he turned and went down to the ground floor. She was wearing a white satin dress with a train, a silver circlet in her hair, and over her shoulders a thin stole of silk with a silver fringe. As the level sunset shone through the high windows onto her, from the side, and he could only see her through the candles’ light in between her and him, she looked, he thought, like an Ingres, or rather a wax model dressed to look like a reconstruction in the round of an Ingres
. She and the revived house were really a tableau. “She isn’t real,” he thought. “She isn’t alive; she is only a dream projected from somewhere by her real self—or perhaps by me.” The glitter of the odd jewelry at his wrists and on his breast caught his eye. He watched a prism shot from a small diamond in the center of one of the studs. You had only to turn your head ever so slightly to see the whole spectrum go by.
“I’m glad you’ve found those links and studs,” she said. (Did she think that he had given them away, and if so, to whom? No; she was really cheerful.) She was saying, “Jewelry is meant to be worn.”
“I’m glad you think it looks all right,” he conceded.
“I always knew it would.” Her reply was almost merry.
He spent thus day after day with her. He just kept close to her, remembering the kind of things she liked to talk about and play with. One morning they spent hours rearranging the cabinets of silver. The next they would go through the lists of what was still in store. Each felt that a victory had been won. He was pleased with feeling that he could manage her—or with this fresh rationalization of his captivity. She was certain that now quite soon the complete life she had planned would be fulfilled. Indeed, it was she who made the first move away from the present status quo. And as he had thought out that this might happen, he did not revolt. He had already decided, after that outburst and his soothing of it, that there was still another position, in reserve, in the rear on which he could fall back, before he would have to turn and fight it out. She felt that now he was “sensible”; she was really only recalling to him, not a promise to her, but something which he really himself wanted to carry out and only needed her encouragement to go through with.
When they were completing the decoration of Plantation House he had remarked, in his usual romancing manner, “Now it’s perfect Southern Colonial. What a pity we don’t fit the scene.”
“Why not?” was her matter-of-fact counter-question, and she had run on, “Why shouldn’t we give, not a ‘coming of age’ but a ‘recovery of youth’ party for the house?”
