The Coral Tree

by Joyce Dingwell

  “And you, I presume, intend concentrating on the equestrian part of the therapy?”

  “If I can, if I’m capable,” said Cary with humility once more.

  The solicitor was looking at her sympathetically. “I gather you have some sort of idea as to what such a project as this entails?”

  Cary nodded.

  “Yes, it entails medical approval and supervision. It also means that I shall have to ‘beggar my cause’. It’s something that has never been tried out here before. It will be difficult, I anticipate that. Mrs. Bokker met difficulty when she started off. However, I feel that if there is any beggaring—or even fighting—to be done, I can do it. I only hope that this Mr. Stormer—”

  “Stormer— Ah, I remember now, our good specialist in child after-care, the man to whom you will have to answer for your good reports.”

  Cary said: “Yes.” She added, after a pause: “Nurse Browning has met him. She warns me he is hard and thorough.” She made a little mouth.

  Mr. Farrell nodded sympathetically again. “What would you say if I rang for an appointment at once?” he proposed. “Now, while this letter has you keyed up, eager and ready to begin?”

  “I would say that that was a good move,” smiled Cary. “I do feel really keyed up, as you say, and that’s the time when one should take a forward step.”

  Mr. Farrell was leafing through the telephone directory. Cary sat quietly staring through the window at the Sydney skyline. Six weeks ago, she thought, I was sitting looking at a London skyline and telling Mr. Beynon my decision. Now I am waiting for Mr. Farrell to arrange for this Mr. Stormer to give his decision. I only hope he will be reasonable, as Mr. Farrell has been reasonable. I don’t ask sympathy, even encouragement, I only ask to be able to begin.

  The solicitor was speaking on the phone by this time. Cary wished she had mentioned to him the close proximity now of a doctor to Clairhill. It was quite possible that Mr. Stormer might have appreciated that fact without making any move to contact his medical brother who had inherited her neighboring estate.

  She wondered, though without much interest, where the doctor had practised before he had inherited Currabong—then, as the solicitor finished speaking and put down the phone, she forgot the subject and looked eagerly to him across the desk.

  “You’re fortunate, Miss Porter. Not only has Stormer been abroad and only recently returned, but he has been absent from Sydney and has just flown in. I gave him a general outline, but no particulars as to locality and so on. If you care to go round, he’ll see you at once.”

  She shook Mr. Farrell’s hand, accepted Mr. Stormer’s name and address on a small white card, then went out of the office and down the stairs.

  Her step was light but purposeful as she hurried up King into Macquarie Street. She looked down the long, broad, treelined way with the medical buildings on one side, the green of the Gardens on the other, with the blue Harbor at its foot. She started down, scrutinizing each number as she went.

  The rooms were no trouble to find. They were well situated in a well-appointed building. The lift was smooth-running and the attendant courteous. Yes, this was the floor for Mr. Richard Stormer.

  She turned to the left as directed and stood a moment reading the name on the door; and after it the degrees and letters. She knocked and waited. Almost at once the door opened, and as he was awaiting her there was no receptionist or nurse.

  For a moment she stood disbelieving, for a longer moment she stood aghast.

  “No—!” she breathed at last.

  He responded evenly, although she could see that he, too, was completely surprised: “I might say the same. You are the person Mr. Farrell rang about?”

  “Yes.”

  He had stepped back to consult a memo pad by the telephone. “You are—Miss Porter?”

  “Cary Porter.”

  For another moment they both stood silent, regarding each other across the room, then Cary said, rather to break the awkward pause: “And you are Mr. Stormer. But how—why?”

  He did not speak. Instead he returned to and held back the door and bowed her in, indicating a chair, then he took a chair himself.

  “So,” he said thoughtfully but unrevealingly at length—the same, she remembered, as he had said it by the creek where the Currabong land joined Clairhill.

  It was typical of him, she fumed, not to bother to reply to her stammered query. It was typical of the man to regard her with that cool detachment that seemed to exclude everything from him, then deliberately to take his time in lighting a cigarette—still leaving any answer unsaid.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IT SEEMED to Cary as she sat dumbly there that in the weeks before her return to Sunset she had not been quite able to get the current of her proper destiny. She had been a little loose and adrift, in spite of Jan and Else Bokker, in spite of Sorrel, but when she had walked through those big old rooms, seen what could be the beginning of a dream come true, she had found a mooring at last. She was no longer purposeless. She had something big to do.

  But now, like a pack of cards, down fell her plans. She did not know why this man disliked her—perhaps he disliked all women— but she did know that to rebuild Clairhill she would need every advantage, every moral and physical support, and that to anticipate anything of the sort from him would be both, futile and pathetic. He had taken up a pen. “Any second name, or is it just Cary?”

  “Cary.”

  “Unusual—”

  Cary said: “Yes.”

  “Age?”

  She did not answer this time and immediately he looked up, irritated. “Age, Miss Porter.”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “It is necessary for my report.”

  “Your report that has a foregone conclusion, Mr. Stormer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You have no intention of passing Clairhill as an after-care home. It’s a waste of time my remaining here, it was a waste of time my coming—” Cary rose.

  “Sit down,” he said harshly.

  Almost as though he had read her previous thoughts he said: “You have a narrow outlook if you think I would permit such a small thing as my own personal feeling to influence me in a matter like this. Also, I have not the jurisdiction, favorable or otherwise, in the opening of any home. I only prepare the reports, advise when asked for advice—”

  “And make sure, when the subject touches you sufficiently, that you are asked,” suggested Cary.

  He was smiling now. It was the tilted, humorless smile of speculation that she had met in him before. “What makes you think that this subject does touch me?” he taunted. “What makes you think I have any interest in you, Miss Porter?”

  She could think of nothing to answer; she could only repeat to herself the futility of her staying on to plead her cause. What was it she had said so bravely to Mr. Farrell?— “If there is any beggaring—even fighting to be done, I can do it.”

  ... Yes, but she had not thought to beggar from, to fight this man.

  “Age, Miss Porter.” His voice was quite expressionless, his pen was poised.

  “I am twenty-two.”

  “That’s young, surely, to play matron to an after-care home.”

  “I would not be playing, Mr. Stormer.”

  “Yet you would still be young, even if you were serious.”

  “I am serious, otherwise I would not be here. This is scarcely my idea of a pleasant interlude.”

  “Nor mine, either. However, it has to be done. You have applied for permission, I have to prepare the application, so let us proceed. You said twenty-two?”

  “Having commented on it and having written it down, do you need to have it repeated?”

  He smiled again, still that tilted, humorless smile. “Don’t tell me you are age-conscious already. Would it help if I assured you that you look only eighteen?”

  “Are you going to say so in your report?”

  “My report only states fac
ts, not opinions.”

  “All the same,” she persisted, “I’ve no doubt that you will find a way of adding that twenty-two is young for the matron of a home.”

  “It is young, madam.”

  “I fail to see it. Many girls are mothers of little families by then.” She was annoyed at herself because she knew her cheeks were flushing. She was angry that she could not meet the dark, amused eyes.

  “But you are more ambitious still,” he observed; “you want to be the mother of a large family.” He turned over the pages. “Twelve, to be precise.”

  “Mr. Stormer, it’s no use my stopping here, is it? It’s a waste of time for both of us.”

  He looked at her with delicate contempt. “Is that the extent of your enthusiasm to open Clairhill as a home for after-care? You won’t even expand a small effort to fight for what you want?”

  “I would fight,” said Cary with spirit, “for ever if I did not know it was so useless. You have no intention of letting my appeal go through, and you know it.”

  “On the contrary, I have every intention. Even if I have doubts, as quite honestly I have with you, I never turn my back on a chance like this. After-care establishments are so few and far between in this young dominion, the people who propose to operate them so small in number, we just have to take the chance.”

  “What chance?”

  “Of indifferently run institutions mainly operated with one of two ambitions in view.”

  “Yes?”

  “One, financial return; two, social acceptance. Which is your spearhead, Miss Porter? Monetary stability, or your name in the glossy press? Oh, come”—as her eyes flashed at him—“you must have known that our social pages, like social pages in any country, are always open to founders of charitable projects.”

  Cary said as levelly as she could: “That was not my ambition.”

  He shrugged. “It was the worldly reward, then. Oh, well, I appreciate frankness.”

  Cary took a deep breath. “Mr. Stormer, I stand to lose, not gain, when—I mean if—I open Clairhill as an after-care home.”

  He laughed shortly at that. It was a disbelieving laugh. “Oh, come, Miss Porter, what do you take me for? According to my brief conversation with Mr. Farrell just now, the Marlow will left you the choice of two inheritances. One was a sum of money, not a substantial sum—”

  “It was substantial to me.”

  He ignored the interruption. “The other was a very substantial home.”

  Desperately, she said: “Not as my own, though. Only to be mine as long as I—”

  Smoothly, suavely, he forestalled her. “Exactly, Miss Porter. Only for so long as you operated it in a charitable capacity. And that constitutes the chance we must take, as I just said.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you are not really interested in any of this”—he waved an arm to the papers— “you are only interested in maintaining yourself in Clairhill. I suppose I should make allowances for you. It’s only natural in one so young that she should angle for the bigger fish; in this case a property in lieu of a small lump sum.”

  “You’re hateful.” Cary said it slowly, a little tremblingly.

  “Yet honest?” he suggested smoothly. “I am only going on facts.”

  Again there was that silence. Again she heard the clock chime, somewhere the lift stop.

  She wondered in what way he would react if she told him the truth: how an old lady had written a letter, how what was asked in that letter now kept her eager, anxious—and humiliated—waiting for his final word.

  He was turning the pages.

  “What gave you the idea of accepting children?”

  “I am fond of young people.”

  “Both sexes?”

  “Certainly. Why do you ask?”

  He was looking up now. His eyes were cold and hard. “If I recall rightly your preferences in Mungen ran only to young males—one young male. When it came to female company you preferred the elderly English ladies.”

  “You seem to remember a lot about me,” observed Cary, and had the satisfaction of seeing him disconcerted, if only temporarily, instead of her.

  He returned to the papers. “You refer to the Bokker Institute here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you go there?”

  “Yes.” Unwillingly she related her walk that morning and the idea that had been born.

  “You gathered, of course, that the main purpose of Mrs. Bokker’s lodge was the use remedially of horseback riding in assisting children back to health.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how do you refer it to yourself?” he asked deliberately.

  “I—I believed I could do the same. Clairhill had ponies—I could ride—”

  “Could you?” Again the question was deliberate. “Can you ride, Miss Porter?”

  She turned this time and looked fully at him. “Yes, I can, Mr. Stormer; I ride well. What happened on Toby the day before yesterday was what could have happened to anyone after twelve months away from the saddle. Also, you were in the way.”

  “And in the way now as well.” He spoke lazily. “A pity, isn’t it, when everything looked so rosy for you. Perhaps several thousands of doctors in Australia, and not only did I have to be the one interested in after-care hostels, but also the one to become your neighbor, Miss Porter. In other words, you can never hope to escape my watchful eyes.

  “Incidentally”—with a thin smile—“to quench your undoubted curiosity on that latter point, the Currabong angle, it was my mother’s brother who left me the property. I can see the fact that the name is Stormer instead of Willoughby has had you perplexed. You never associated the former with a homestead next door to your own.”

  “No,” admitted Cary, and then with a spirit: “As a matter of fact I never thought of it at all.”

  “It will be different now.” His voice held a note of grim amusement as though her situation rather entertained him.

  Cary looked at him speculatively. “You will not be at Currabong much.” Unwittingly she said her thoughts aloud. She had been thinking that his medical activities in Sydney should make his visits very cursory there. She flushed hotly at his instant rejoinder.

  He said warningly: “I would not bank on that, madam.”

  He asked briefly about her proposed staff, and did not appear greatly impressed when she proudly announced Sorrel’s inclusion. “How much experience? What age?”

  “She was certificated in Sydney, nursed at Lady Anne in London and then with a family in Alexandria. She is”—triumphantly—“older than I.”

  It was typical of the man that he pounced on the triumph and gave it a derogatory sense. “You are age-conscious,” he announced blandly, “just as I said. I believe there is nothing more satisfactory for any woman than a companion who is her senior in years.”

  “Of course,” agreed Cary equally blandly, “look at my friendship with the elderly Whitneys.”

  “You mean the English ladies who admired your ‘courage’ and ‘nerve’.”

  “That,” defended Cary indignantly, “was one of their little harmless idiosyncrasies.”

  His lips twisted. “Working on something very grimly contrasted in a sick-room upstairs made it sound more nauseous to me than harmless.” His words were unadorned, almost brutish. He began fastening the notes together.

  “All right, Miss Porter,” he said abruptly, “you can go.”

  She looked at him in surprise and question.

  “Your papers will be returned in due time, but meanwhile you can romp ahead with your furnishing and outfitting and gathering of children—subject, of course, to my approval.”

  “Just what will you give that approval to, Mr. Stormer?”

  “A reasonable home, reasonably run. I don’t ask miracles.”— Miracles again, thought Cary, and she remembered the miracle she wanted, the miracle that would be a case of another Else Bokker. “Can I gather any children?” she asked cautiously.

&nbs
p; His brows had met together again in that forbidding line.

  “Of course not, only ones that I pass as suitable to be allowed in your hands.”

  “And they will be—”

  “Disabled Children, but not badly disabled. I could not take the risk of giving you the care of a very afflicted child.”

  “But Sister Browning would be with me.”

  “That would make no difference. Try your hand and experiment on little ones you cannot harm, Miss Porter—for that is what it finally amounts to, doesn’t it, experiment with the hope of possible success and subsequent public applause.”

  Cary said slowly and with difficulty: “Perhaps it could mean more than that. Perhaps it could mean a return to health, Mr. Stormer. Health to a girl or boy who never had health before.”

  “I would like to think so. I would like to think, too, that you were capable of bringing that about. But, frankly, I doubt it. I doubt it so strongly that I am not giving you the opportunity to try it. Go ahead with your project, but don’t make a step beyond the boundary I have specified. Under no circumstances shall I countenance your acceptance of a deeply afflicted child.”

  “But that is what I really want—that is what—” She paused. How could she say, “That is what, and that alone, can bring back blossoming to a house.”

  Coldly, he interrupted: “I quite understand if I do not praise your fervor, madam. Such a miraculous announcement as a child returned to physical normality would go well in the papers. It would be something new, something quite out of the ordinary.— Quite charming, also, if you spread yourself to a new and flattering riding-suit for the inevitable cheesecake picture in the glossy press.”

  Cary got up. She inquired too evenly: “That is all, then, Doctor?”

  He said briefly: “Good morning, Miss Porter,” and, getting up, he went and opened the door for her.

  There was a waft of light perfume as the girl passed him by. It was frail and flower-like, oddly sweet and suitable to the clear day. Suitable, too, to this fair, fresh, uncluttered young woman.