It was, indeed, one of little Michael Duffield’s drawings. If Michael kept this way of seeing (for that was what his drawing was now, pure seeing) through the rapids of adolescence, where so much is torn apart and swept away as well as so much gathered together and added to in the make-up of the psyche, Michael would be one of the masters. A great artist. Lewis was certain of it. Meanwhile, this one drawing was enough for Lewis to possess, of the hundreds Laura Duffield so carefully cherished. When the piano was silent and the musical scores were put away, it filled the room for him with perpetual music.
Lewis stopped his pacing. What sense was there in all this miserable anxiety, when trees rose up out of the earth, like that, fluid, peace in their flowing boughs! He went to the piano bench—opened Brahms’ Rhapsody in G-minor—smoked and read, read and smoked.
It was after midnight when the telephone rang in the bedroom. He was there almost before the second ring had started, sitting on his bed, lifting the instrument from the table by the pillow. He knew it must be Petra. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Lewis speaking.” Not Doctor Pryne. At midnight, after two hours with Brahms, one’s surname is a thing of peculiar unreality, impossible to speak seriously. Hence his “Lewis speaking.” But there was silence on the wire. For a breath there came no response to his announcement of baptismal selfhood. So he spoke again, with an almost fantastic presumption, into the night at large, “Petra! Are you there.... Petra?”
Chapter Sixteen
Out of the dark, out of the invisible, Lewis got his response: “Yes, this is Petra. I hope you hadn’t gone to sleep. They said you wanted me to call you. I’m sorry it’s so late.”
“That’s all right. No, I’m still up. But look here, Petra, of course I want to know about McCloud. What you did with him. How he is.” And then Lewis could not help adding to that, “Petra, have you only just got home?”
Again the brief silence. Because of the hour, the stillness, and all the Brahms in which Lewis was steeped, the stillness on the wire took on the proportions of a cosmic stillness. Or was she only hesitating between fabrication and fabrication—between stories to tell him? If he could only see her face, he would know.
Finally, “Yes, I’ve just come in. Clare waited up for me. I’d forgotten to telephone her, you see; I put it off, and then forgot it. I worried them, I guess. But it was Neil—made me forget. Yes, he is all right. He was starving, Doctor Pryne. Friday, when he came to the office, he was starving. He lost his job early in the week. He came Friday to borrow a dollar for food. Teresa and I have been feeding him up. He’s coming around to-morrow to talk with you, at your hotel, at ten o’clock.... Is that all right?”
She had paused before the question,—afraid, apparently, that she might a second time have made a mistake. Lewis was appalled.