“But you promised to bring her yourself, I thought! We’ve been waiting. Clare was delighted. She wants you to join our party at the Club. She called your office the minute I told her your plan about driving Petra out. But nobody answered. How do I know where Petra is, if you don’t?”
Lewis explained—but it sounded stupid in his own ears—that he and Petra had missed each other somehow and she had never learned that he was driving her out to Meadowbrook. She must have taken a train. Please would Dick have her call Lewis at his rooms here the minute she came. It was important. Yes, Lewis would wait in for the call.
After that, there was nothing Lewis could do but wait and try to read, or work on the book. He would read. He wished he had installed an electric fan this summer. It had been the expense, again, that had deterred him. But this was a most oppressive variety of heat. Not a breath. Extraordinary. You didn’t often get nights like this so close to the Atlantic. A good thing he hadn’t let Cynthia hang curtains at his windows. Every particle of air that could come in was here in his curtainless rooms. Lewis took “Phantastes” down from his bookshelves and settled into a chair against one of the windows to read. He had hesitated between “Phantastes” and “Saint Augustine’s Confessions,” and finally chosen the former. His recent talk with Cynthia on the subject of Petra was the deciding factor.
Eight. Half-past eight. Quarter to nine. Dick must have forgotten to tell Petra to call, that was all. They would be just about finishing dinner at the Club now. Lewis would make himself wait until nine, to make certain not to interrupt Dick’s dinner party, and then call.
This time he asked for Miss Farwell herself, but if she was not there then Mr. Richard Wilder. It was Dick who came, and with promptness. “Yes, just finished dinner. I was right here by the boxes, going to call you. Petra hasn’t showed up. Clare wants to speak to you.”
“Doctor Pryne? Good evening. I’m really rather anxious, you know. What’s become of Petra? Where is she? Dick doesn’t seem to have got it quite straight.”
If Clare knew Teresa Kerr’s whereabouts, Lewis would have asked her for the address then and there, in spite of the taboo Petra had imposed on mentioning Teresa to anybody at Green Doors, for of course it had occurred to him that Petra must have taken McCloud to see Teresa. If she was living in Boston. It was she, Teresa, who had prayed for his cure to Saint Thérèse. It was she who had understood that McCloud could say “I love.” But Clare, Lewis was sure, knew nothing of Teresa Kerr’s present existence. So he merely said, “The whole thing is due to my stupidity. We missed somehow, Petra and I. But I am sure she is all right, that there’s nothing to worry about. Only please ask her to call me the minute she does turn up, will you. I am waiting in to talk with her. Here at my rooms. Thanks so much.”
Lewis had been sincere in his assurances to Clare that Petra was all right and that there was no cause for anxiety on the part of her stepmother. Lewis’ only real anxiety at that time was about McCloud. He wanted to know whether the cure had lasted; and it seemed hard, having merely to sit here and wait for that information until Petra called him up. He grew more certain as the evening wore on that she had taken him to Teresa and that they were there now. The McCloud business had simply put Green Doors and all her social obligations right out of Petra’s mind. You could not wonder at that. Lewis’ own mind had had room for nothing else since, in spite of his pretended reading of many pages, already thrice familiar, of George MacDonald’s “Phantastes.”
He gave up even the pretense of reading now and started pacing his sitting room. It was a large, long, low room, almost bare of furniture. The partitions joining three rooms had been knocked out to make it. The two things Lewis demanded of his living quarters were spaciousness and absence of unessentials. So this sitting room of his—to which he had let Cynthia do nothing—was rather like a very large, beautifully proportioned cell,—except for a grand piano at one end set between corner windows. This was a beautiful rosewood instrument, beautiful in itself as a vase of flowers or a fire on a hearth. And it was heaped with stacks of musical scores. Lewis read music for diversion as other people read books. Sometimes he played to his reading—ghostlily, for his mind alone. But whether his hands gave him back the sounds he read as ghostly echo or not, he usually did his music-reading sitting at the piano as if he were playing. The instrument itself, even when he was not touching the keys, seemed in some inexplicable way to enrich his comprehension of the scores. Bach and Brahms were the masters he consorted with most, but he often turned to César Franck as well, and understood him.
Above the piano between the windows, Lewis had hung a picture, framed in narrow black wood. It was about a foot square, no more, and the only picture in the room. Three trees, done in ordinary pencil. The first impression was of meaning and beauty. The lines of the trees and the grasses at their roots flowed upward with an ineffable sweep of freedom. Even the trunks were fluid. That was the first strong impression. But if one looked again, came nearer, one was surprised at oneself for having seen it as full of meaning because now one guessed that here was but another modernistic performance, seemingly careless, yet (if one was given the grace to understand it) tremendously sophisticated—a production of the very latest moderns. Then if one stayed on there, trying to regain one’s first genuine thrilling response to loveliness, one saw better: now the upward fluid sweep of the trees’ living lines was pure unaffected copying of what some fresh, pure vision had seen. A child! It was a child’s drawing.