“To-night,” he said, “I intend to vary our procedure a little. I want you to look forward rather than backward. It will be useful at this juncture to know what your aims are, what you think you might do with your life.”
Psyche did not reply at once, and when she did, it was to say slowly, “I don’t know.”
A shadow of impatience clouded the doctor’s unwavering gaze. “That is not an answer. You have not fought an unfortunate environment for nothing.”
Lacing slender hands tightly together, Psyche said evenly, “I didn’t think so—once. Now I do.”
“Now you do what?”
“Think it was for nothing.”
More than a little annoyed, Scarletti continued to question her for some time before he was forced to admit that his hitherto co-operative subject could neither be driven nor led in the particular direction he had chosen. That she was not being deliberately obstructive he knew, and yet at the same time there were elements in her refusal to think of the future that he felt she could have explained had she chosen to do so. Being thwarted in any way at all did not agree with him, and it was much earlier than usual, no more than ten o’clock, when he stood up abruptly, and said, “I think that will be enough for to-night.”
Psyche’s small sigh of relief was very audible in the ensuing silence. “I can’t” she began, and broke off. “What was that?”
The sound from the front hall had been very faint, but they had both heard it.
Muttering something unintelligible under his breath. Scarletti strode to the door, jerked at it, paused an instant in surprise when it did not give, and then unlocked and opened it. The hall, highly polished woodwork gleaming softly in the light of a single wrought-iron lamp, was empty.
A moment before. Psyche had wanted nothing so much as to escape from the close seclusion of the library, but, as the doctor stood aside for her to pass, she moved forward into the hall with an unaccountable reluctance. She had reached the foot of the stairway, and her hand was already on the broad newel-post when Nora’s voice, biting, malevolent, swung her around as suddenly as the lash of a whip might have done.
“Which was it, Maggie darling? Was I locked out—or were you locked in—or both?”
Her black dress melting into the darkness of the drawing-room behind her, emeralds flashing at her bare throat, Nora’s head undulated like that of a cobra about to strike. “Was it an anatomy class to-night, Maggie—darling?”
Sick with shock, white to the lips, Psyche clung to the newel-post unable to move or speak, a frozen corner of a triangle completed by the doctor still standing at the entrance to the library.
Scarletti’s voice was cold and emotionless, but it was the voice of wrath itself. “This time you have gone too far, Nora.”
The swaying figure in black shifted its focus of hate, and a soft hissing seemed to wrap itself around the sentences shaped by a thin red mouth. “I who have gone too far? Stop acting, you self-righteous hypocrite, if you haven’t forgotten how! You think youare God, don’t you? A little tin god before whom everyone must bow and scrape, and say yes and no as you dictate, and lick yourboots, and pay homage day and night in order to feed your insatiable vanity. You think”
Livid with anger, Scarletti cut in with such loathing in his voice and hooded eyes that, for a moment, Nora was silenced. “For this, my dear wife, I will see you stripped of all you possess, of every single thing you have taken from me, giving nothing in return. You are a parasite, a leech, from whom I will cut myself loose if it costs me all I have. You, and all your kind—useless, selfish, malice seeping from every over-perfumed pore—should be exterminated at birth. That you should be sterile is the only virtue you possess.”
Psyche, paralyzed by an ultimate and complete disillusionment, wished with every fibre of her being to run, and could not. What made her disillusion doubly terrible was the realization that these two had lived together feeling as they did, and might, for purely material reasons, conceivably continue to do so.
Her words no more than a hoarse whisper, she murmured, “No —no!”
Nora’s green eyes flicked across her and then back to her husband. “You call yourself a doctor. I call you a vulture, savouring pickings from minds you render even more helpless than when they grope their way to you for succour. You feed on them, lordit over them, think yourself their superior——”
“Will you be quiet!”
“A little tin god with no soul,” Nora crooned, “in love with your own profile, stalking the corridors of your empty kingdom.”
Scarletti’s hypnotic eyes blazed out of a smile that might have been modelled in old ivory. “A kingdom from which you are about to be exiled, my dear Nora. From the outside, looking in, you may think more highly of it. You are, I promise you, going to be poor, and therefore alone, your neuroses patterning your face daily with fresh lines.”
“While you become arthritic from kneeling at the altar of your own ego!” Nora flung at him. “And don’t mislead yourself into thinking I won’t be there to see it. I am not leaving, but your slum-reared patient is! And I tell you now that if you ever again try to bring any of your damned derelicts into this house, I will see you pilloried in every newspaper in the country. When I am through with you, you won’t even be accepted as a veterinarian.”
Still smiling, Scarletti said softly, “I have evidence collected against such a contingency as this. Evidence on which I can, and will, secure an uncontested divorce, unpleasant though the proceedings will be. I am in a position to get rid of you, my dear Nora, without the necessity of gagging you with so much as a single dollar bill.”
Taking one cat-like step forward, Nora almost spat at him. “Uncontested! You fool! Do you imagine that the games you have played here in this house with your—your bedraggled blondewon’t provide”
Psyche, running up the stairs, nausea climbing her throat, stumbled as she reached the top. The silken pile of thick carpeting was against outflung hands, then she was up again, and a moment later reached the white and silver bedroom.
Working with feverish speed, she emptied the contents of cupboards and drawers on to a bed already turned down for the night. Her possessions were too few for their transference to her suitcase to take long, and it was no more than ten minutes after she had fled from a scene grown intolerable past bearing that, coat over her arm and suitcase in hand, she made her way noiselessly down the back stairs to the service entrance.
Out on the street, the summer night heavy and still around her, she did not hesitate, but turned at once toward the north in response to a homing instinct that would not be denied. Somewhere to the north lay the shack. She was not going back to it, but in facing in that direction she underlined her rejection of nearly everything she had known since leaving it.
Three-quarters of an hour later she walked away from the end of a street-car line toward the beginning of the highway she intended to follow.
Behind her she heard thunder, like a muffled roll of drums, and, looking back, saw rose-red lightning flash across the southern horizon. The storm had broken over the city, but overhead, and to the north, the sky was a clear, dark canopy emblazoned with stars.
9 THE TRUCK DRIVER
FOR a time scattered dwellings bordered the highway, some already shrouded in a sleeping darkness, others showing yellow squares of light. Keeping to the shoulder of the road, walking neither slowly nor fast. psyche was as indifferent to them as she was to the occasional cars that, in passing, touched her with sharp gusts of air and traced her shadow, weirdly distorted, on dusty grass and hedgerows, across road signs and fence-posts.
Unoppressed by any necessity other than that of putting one foot in front of the other, she realized, to her surprise, that disgust and disillusion had given way to a light-hearted satisfaction in simply being alive and entirely on her own.
Listening to the even sound of her footsteps, to the crickets in a nearby field, to an owl in a copse ahead of her, she thought, “I should be afraid; afrai
d of being alone in the night, in the world; afraid because I am not yet really strong again; afraid of what may happen to me when my small amount of money is gone. Instead—I am afraid of nothing. I am free, and that is enough. To hell with Nora, to hell with the doctor—to hell with everybody.”
The big oil truck, when it passed her toward two o’clock in the morning, was doing more than sixty miles an hour. Psyche noticed it, and no more than that, but the harsh grinding of its brakes as it slowed down and came to a halt some hundred yards ahead of her drew her full attention. If she had ever been going to remember another truck, and another night when faulty brakes had been applied too late, it would have been then. But, remembering nothing, she approached now stationary tail-lights with no more than the wariness natural to an encounter which might, or might not, be of use to her.
When she came up beside the high cab on the off side from the driver, the door was already open, and she leaned against it as she looked up at the man clearly picked out by the lights on the dashboard.
“Want a lift, sister?”
She saw a crew cut, a rocky profile, and a sweat-stained T-shirt disclosing muscular arms and a burly chest. The truckers who had stopped at the derelict mail-box in the slag had not been any more beautiful, but they had always been good to her. It was a breed with which she was thoroughly familiar, and in this instance a quick scrutiny was enough to convince her that it would be perfectly safe to accept the offer.
“Thanks,” she said, and handing her bag up to him, pulled herself up the steep step.
It was not until the truck was under way again, and she had settled herself as comfortably as possible on the hard seat, that she began to realize how close to physical exhaustion she must have been. Her feet and legs ached, and the hand in which she had been carrying her suitcase jerked with small spasmodic cramps. Flexing her fingers, she opened her purse and took out cigarettes and matches.
“Like a smoke?” she asked.
Without taking his eyes from the road, the trucker said, “Don’t mind if I do. Going far?”
Drawing smoke deep into her lungs, exhaling it slowly. Psyche said, “I don’t know.”
“You out of a job?”
“I suppose you could put it like that.”
“Broke?”
“Not quite.”
The rhythm of the heavy engine was soothing, and the sameness of the small area trapped in the brilliance of the headlights was pleasantly soporific. Quite content to be where she was, Psyche let her head rest in the angle made by the door and the back of the seat, and stretched her long legs forward until her feet were braced against the floor where it sloped upwards toward the hood. She might not know where she was going, but for the first time in many weeks she knew what she was doing.
The large, blunt-fingered hand, coming to rest on her knee, was not entirely unexpected. Firmly, but without haste, she removed it. “Nothing personal,” she said quietly. “I just don’t, that’s all.”
“Didn’t figure you would, but no harm in trying, was there?”
“No,” Psyche said, “there’s never any harm in trying.” No harm in trying anything, ever, as long as one knows when to stop. No harm in dreaming, in straining after the impossible, as long as one knows when to stop.
“You got any folks, sister?”
As long as one knows when to stop. “No.”
“What kind of work you figuring on getting?”
“Just about anything anyone will give me, I guess.” Shifting her gaze, she glanced sideways at him, and was held, fascinated, by the snake, tattooed around his brawny arm, which writhed and twisted as he handled the wheel.
“That there’s Irma,” he said conversationally. “T’isn’t everyone who falls for Irma, but you can’t deny she’s a lively little bitch.”
As the dash-lights found her, and then lost her again, Irma was like a living serpent seen by the flicker of a jungle camp fire.
“I’m almost afraid she’ll get away from you,” Psyche said, amused in spite of her recoil from an art form that did not appeal to her at all. “How long have you had her?”
“Let me see. I got out of the navy three years ago Christmas, and Irma and me got together maybe a year before that. Close as I can figure it, four years.”
Slowing briefly, they rumbled through a hamlet where a single bulb hanging above a cross street, and one coldly blue neon sign, seemed to emphasize, rather than deny, the apparent absence of any living being. Then, picking up speed, they were again roaring through a countryside empty of buildings other than occasional farm-houses.
“Why did you leave the navy?”
“Too goddam much water. Night driving in these big babies is kind of like being on a ship, only you can get off, if you see what I mean. I like to get off when I want. Another thing, once I pull out, I’m captain of this rig. I sets her on the North Star, and from there on what I says goes.”
Studying two signs above the windshield which read, without equivocation, “NO SMOKING”—“NO RIDERS”, Psyche asked idly, “The North Star. What is that?”
“That’s the one star that don’t move. You’re setting a course for somewheres, you look for the North Star and you can figure where you are and where you want to go.”
What a lot there is that I don’t know, Psyche thought soberly. “I don’t suppose you could show me where it is?”
Irma stretched and appeared to yawn as her master pointed in front of him. “Sure. You see them pines up ahead on the left?”
Locating a pyramid of darkness denser than the luminous darkness of the summer sky. Psyche said, “Yes.”
“Well, now, you look to the left some more and then up and you see the Big Bear. Got it? Now you follow off the side away from the tail and take a line not just straight up to that bright one there, and that’s it, sort of off by itself a ways.”
Looking at heavens blazing with close-packed galaxies. Psyche wondered how anyone could ever distinguish one star from another, let alone describe one as being “sort of off by itself”. Actually, she supposed, they were all very much off by themselves, but they certainly did not appear to be.
Feeling that the greater probably included the less, and recognizing a more specific quest as quite hopeless, she said, “Thanks. I see it.”
“You’ll find that star useful,” he told her, pleased with himself. “I’m stopping to refuel here. Me and the wagon both. Want some coffee?”
As the truck turned off the highway between gas pumps and an all-night lunch counter. Psyche shook her head. “I’ll wait for you here.”
“What’s the matter with you, sister? You running away from something?”
“No, not in the way you mean. But you don’t really want me to go in there with you, do you?”
“Why in hell wouldn’t I? I’m never ashamed to be seen with a good-looking dame.”
Psyche pointed to the sign that so plainly said “NO RIDERS”. “What about that?”
The trucker’s square face broke into a grin that took ten years off his possible forty or more. “The bastards that care about that type thing are all snug in their beds, or maybe some person else’s. Anyway, they aren’t here, you can bet on that.”
They sat at a marble-topped counter, where Psyche, eating a thick sandwich served to her on a thick white plate, and drinking coffee from a thick white mug, rejoiced not only in the coarseness of the china but also in the clatter around her. Here was contrast that pushed the Scarlettis’ elegant dining-room further into the past, and nothing could have pleased her more.
“Do you know how to use a lobster pick?” she asked her companion.
“Dunno that I do.”
“Maybe that’s why we get along.”
“Do you?”
“Do I what?” asked Psyche, who had begun to work out how long it was since she had seen a sandwich with a crust on it.
“Know how to make out with one of them lobster things?”
“I do now. But don’t hold it against me.”<
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“I don’t hold nothing against nobody, sister. Live and let live, that’s my motto.”
A smile touched one corner of Psyche’s lovely mouth. “And anyone who doesn’t agree with it gets a poke in the nose. Is that right?”
“That’s right. You ready to go?”
Outside, a lessening of the darkness was a first intimation that before long the night would begin to give way to daylight. Pausing an instant on the steps of the lunch counter, Psyche yawned and shivered slightly.
The next two hours were a blur in which she dozed, and waked, and dozed again. “Can you add figures, sister?”
Blinking, surprised to find that the sun was rising, gilding a green countryside with a promise of heat to come, she said, “I’m quite good at it.”
“Ever worked as a cashier?”
“No.”
Changing to low gear as the big truck lumbered toward the crest of a long gradient, he said, “Well, maybe that won’t matter.”
Psyche thought in passing that sunshine did not improve Irma. “Is it a job? Do you know of one I might get?”
“Maybe.”
With difficulty Psyche kept her voice calm, almost uninterested. “Where?”
“Oliver’s. An eatery about fifty miles north of here. We’ll hit it soon after six-thirty.”
Psyche’s first impression of the town in which she was to live for a time was more than favourable, and, even from the outside, Oliver’s restaurant attracted her at once. Its imitation-log frontage was in the centre of the single, long block of shops that comprised the commercial life of the little town—a mart bounded on the north by a post office and a hotel, and on the south by a railway crossing. Around this small hub there spread out a lazy pattern of unpaved side-streets lined with white frame houses, and maples that enfolded them in cool, protective shadows.
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