By Ethel Cook Eliot
Ariel Dances Green Doors
ETHEL COOK ELIOT
GREEN DOORS
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
Boston 1933
Copyright, 1933,
BY ETHEL COOK ELIOT
All rights reserved
Published February, 1933
Reprinted February, 1933 (twice)
Reprinted April, 1933
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DEDICATED TO
MY FATHER
GREEN DOORS
Chapter One
“Hello! What’s up with you?”
Doctor Lewis Pryne was obviously surprised at the intrusion of a mere friend on office hours. “How did you persuade Miss Frazier to bring you in? You aren’t—or are you—looking for a doctor?”
Dick Wilder’s smile was tinged with awed diffidence.
“No, I’m not wanting treatment myself,” he said. “All the same, I did get a regulation appointment from your secretary via the telephone, and I’ve been out there in your reception office meekly waiting my turn for hours. But first I have a message for you, from Cynthia. They want you for the week-end in Meadowbrook. Harry’s counting on golf with you, and the children—”
Lewis broke in dryly. “Sorry, Dick, but I’m most frightfully busy just now. If you insist on staying to chat, I’ll send you a bill—regulation fee for a first appointment. But if you vanish at once, I’ll let you off. Give my fondest love to Cynthia, tell her I’ll call her up; thanks, good-by.”
But though the doctor rose, his visitor sat. “You’re hard, Lewis, hard,” he murmured. “But it’s all right with me. I expect a bill. I’m here to offer you a lovely new patient on a silver platter. It is rather—ah—private, though.”
His embarrassment was due plainly to the presence of the secretary, Miss Frazier. She had escorted him into the presence of the famous psychiatrist and she was now hovering near the door on tiptoes, it seemed, to escort him out again.
Lewis sighed, but with good nature. “Miss Frazier needn’t bother you,” he explained. “She is my confidential secretary and it saves time having her here to make a record as we go along. How many people are out there, Miss Frazier?”
“Only two, Doctor. Mrs. Dickerman and—”
“A sullen but gorgeous fellow who doesn’t want to be spoken to,” Dick finished for her. “Or is he one of the really unhinged ones and not responsible for his manners?”
Lewis smiled—fleetly—at his secretary. He said to Dick, “That will be Mr. Neil McCloud. He is perfectly sane. He’s lost the power of speech, that’s all.”
“Really? Somehow it didn’t look all to me. He has a flash in his eye,—well—a flash—. But I thought the dumb were deaf, Lewis. That fellow heard every word I said—listened as if he heard—and then coolly turned his shoulder. He might have wriggled his eyebrows or something, to show he couldn’t speak. I only asked him were you likely to keep us waiting much longer—assuming, do you see, that he was a regular patient and knew the ropes. What was there in that to antagonize any one?”
Lewis’ smile a moment ago had been very fleeting. Now his face had taken on its accustomed gravity. It was an unusual sort of gravity, however, lacking any element of heaviness. “That encounter will have been harder on McCloud than on you, Dick,” he said. “He isn’t deaf. Merely can’t articulate. Hasn’t been able to for some months. It’s a rather perplexing case of shock. Temporary, I’m certain, but awkward for him while it lasts. It’s after four, I think, Miss Frazier. Did McCloud or Mrs. Dickerman have appointments?”
“No, Doctor. Neither of them. Mrs. Dickerman telephoned yesterday and there was no time I could give her within a week. She came on the chance you might be able to work her in somewhere. Mr. McCloud dropped in in the same way. I had no idea how long Mr. Wilder’s appointment would take, so I rather encouraged them both to wait. Shall I tell them there’s no use now? It’s quarter to five.”
“No. Don’t do that. I’ll see them. Only let McCloud in ahead of Mrs. Dickerman.”
“Shall I? Mrs. Dickerman telephoned yesterday, as I told you! She came in several minutes ahead of Mr. McCloud too.”
“Did she? I suppose then you’d better convey to McCloud, somehow, that I won’t be long with Mrs. Dickerman. Tell Mrs. Dickerman that I will be free in another few minutes. Do that now, please, and then come back to take this record. Pardon all this, Dick. Have a cigarette?”
From the brief exchange between doctor and secretary, Dick had been able to form a pretty complete mental picture of what was back of it. Mrs. Dickerman must be some slightly neurotic lady of wealth who was falling over herself to pay fabulous fees to Lewis for a little mental coddling, while the rather gorgeous but definitely shabby dark-browed young giant was, of course, a charity case, and in real trouble. But supposing their needs had been equal, Dick suspected his friend still would favor the penniless down-and-outer, for Lewis was slightly snobbish in his mistrust of wealth and position. It was a little perverse in him. Even his own sister, Cynthia, thought so.
Dick frowned to himself. This matter of Lewis’ prejudice against paying patients was rather pertinent to himself at the moment on account of the errand which had brought him here. What could Petra Farwell seem to Lewis beyond what Dick himself thought her—a beautiful but dull ingénue whose psychic maladjustments (if that was the term) were the result of too much leisure and spoiling?
Dick took out his cigarette case, waving Lewis’ aside, for Lewis, he knew, was as economical when it came to cigarette brands as he was about clothes and office furniture. What a bare room this sanctum was! The reception office had been on the luxurious side, but that was Cynthia’s taste and doing. She had insisted on decorating it, and Dick could not doubt she had drawn on her own purse for most of the accessories. But even as he passed it up, Dick noticed that Lewis’ cigarette case holding the Luckies or whatever they were, was rather wonderful. Finest jade. You could see at a glance. Marvelous color. Some grateful woman patient, of course, had forced the gem on Lewis, and probably he did not dream what its value was; if he did, he would sell it, to give to the deserving poor....
Miss Frazier was back and ready with her shorthand pad. Since they were smoking, Dick offered her a cigarette, one of his own Club variety. But she refused it, coldly, her eyes on her pad. Dick did not so much get the idea of having been put in his place as of the secretary having insisted on keeping hers, which was that of an invisible, impersonal automaton—a dicta-phone with judgment. Suddenly Dick did not mind talking before her.
“It’s a stepmother stepdaughter situation,” he explained to Lewis. “The stepmother is my friend. She is a wonderful person. She knows that you and I are related in a way. (The relationship between them consisted in the fact that Lewis’ sister, Cynthia, was married to Dick’s first cousin, Harry Allen.) And she got the idea that because of the relationship I might have some sort of a pull with you, do you see? But perhaps that’s stupid. Perhaps nobody has a pull with you in that sense. I warned her. Is it stupid?”
Lewis smiled, that peculiar fleeting smile of his. But it was for himself this time. He had assumed the position he kept through all these office interviews. His chair was swung half around on its pivot so that he did not directly face the patient, and his eyes, for the most part, were on the knob of the door leading into Miss Frazier’s little private office. “Of course you have pull, Dick, all the pull in the world. But I don’t see what that has to do with it. When it comes to taking on patients, one does it on the merits of the cases themselves, naturally. Let me hear.”
“Well, it’s the stepdaughter who is—funny. Clare, who is my friend the stepmother, do you see, is utterly devoted to the girl. In fact, to my mind, she is almost obsessed with the idea that it’s up to her to make the girl happy. That’s far-fetched, of course. You can’t do that for any one. But Clare tries desperately. And all she gets for her pains is very nice polite manners and nothing under ’em. It is absurd. You would think so—you will think so—when you see Clare. But even if Clare weren’t so wonderful as she is, the girl’s indifference would still be absurd, for just on the material side she owes Clare everything she’s got in the world. She and her father were as poor as poverty until Clare came into their lives, married the father. Now that she is there, their lives are all luxury.—Charm.—Beauty too. But what good does it do? Clare is only getting her heart broken.
“But I ought to tell you,” Dick went on quickly, after a second’s pause in which he had suddenly remembered some last admonishments of Clare’s, “Clare doesn’t mind personal heartbreaks and things like that. That is not why she wants you to psychoanalyze the girl. It is for the girl’s own sake and her father’s sake. She doesn’t want those two to become estranged. And it is bound to happen if things go on the way they are going. The girl must be more responsive to Clare, return some of her devotion, or the father is going to begin to feel the antagonism in the air and blame his daughter for it. For, in a choice of loyalties, the man is Clare’s. It isn’t Clare’s fault it’s that way, though. From the very beginning she has worked to preserve—even to create—a fine relationship between her husband and his daughter. She is big enough, detached enough, to keep herself and her personal disappointments out of the situation and think only of those two. And that’s why she sent me here, at dollars a minute, I suppose, to ask you to see the girl and straighten her out. She has an idea that there is some deeply hidden resentment—some mix-up, anyway—in the girl’s subconscious mind and that it only needs you to excavate it. She thinks—”
But there Dick faltered. Lewis was smiling and no longer fleetingly. Miss Frazier, noticing Dick look around for it, pushed an ashtray along the desk toward him. He crushed out his cigarette stub in it, looking miserable and a little angry. “I can see what you’re thinking, Lewis,” he exclaimed. “You think that it is a simple case of stepdaughterish jealousy and that Clare and I are just too ingenuous for words to have come bothering a top-notch psychiatrist with it. But you happen to be wrong. You don’t know the people. Petra’s not jealous. Not for a minute. She hasn’t enough warmth in her for such a passion, if it comes to that. Really, she’s no jollier with her own father than with her stepmother. But Clare doesn’t see that. She thinks it’s only herself Petra pushes off. And what is there so absurd in her getting the idea that you might help?”
But if Dick had only noticed, his belated mention of the girl’s name had effectually changed his friend’s expression.
“Is it Petra Farwell you’re talking about?” he asked quickly. “Daughter of Lowell Farwell, the novelist?”
Dick hesitated an instant, glancing a little painfully at Miss Frazier’s efficient hand with its pen poised but so far idle—above her pad. But after all, Miss Frazier’s presence at this conference was Lewis’ responsibility, and one had to trust Lewis.
So he said, “Yes. It’s the Farwells. I thought you would guess. You know I built their house, Green Doors. We started it the minute they were back from the honeymoon. Clare made Featherstone’s give me a free hand with it. It was my first real chance at self expression. But Clare had as many ideas as I had and the nice part was that our ideas didn’t clash—merely supplemented. Until that summer I had only known Clare socially and even so not very well. She is in an older crowd. It’s an interesting crowd. The Lovings, you know,—the Stracheys, Jim Strange, Isabell Peters Clough. Rather exciting, being accepted by them! Clare sees to it that I am. And Lowell Farwell is the lion of the lot, I suppose. Clare herself ought to be. Wait till you meet her!”
“I have met Mrs. Farwell, once, for a few minutes,” Lewis said. “She was Mrs. Tom Otis then. It was just before the former Mrs. Farwell abdicated. But it’s Petra, the girl, I’m interested to hear about. Is she prepared to come to a psychiatrist for treatment for—what do you say the trouble is? General lack of appropriate feeling toward the latest Mrs. Novelist’s Wife? Or hasn’t she been consulted?”
“You keep on laughing at us,” Dick complained. “If I were a stranger, would you? Yes, I knew about that meeting with Clare, of course. But I meant, wait till you really know her. Clare hasn’t said a word about you to Petra, not yet. Petra would be sure to resent it, don’t you think? What Clare wants is to have it come about—gradually. If you’re week-ending at Cynthia’s, right there in Meadowbrook, you can drop around at Green Doors, meet the family, have tea informally in the garden, chat with Petra,—and let that call seem to put the idea of having Petra psychoanalyzed into Clare’s head. That way, Petra might get the idea that being psychoanalyzed by Doctor Lewis Pryne would be a pretty interesting experience, do you see? That’s Clare’s scheme and I think it’s a good one.”
Lewis, lighting himself another cigarette, murmured, “Good is an adjective that I myself seldom apply to the word ‘scheme.’ But it happens that I’ll like meeting Lowell Farwell. His psychological novels interest me—at least, to the point of wanting to find out how he gets that way. Even more I shall be glad of an excuse to see Petra again. I met her at the same time I met your Mrs. Clare. By the way, Mrs. Clare is Petra’s second or third stepmother, isn’t she! Mightn’t it be that the child’s stand-offish attitude toward the species is cumulative and not, strictly speaking, personal? Had that occurred to either of you?... But it doesn’t matter. I’m charmed by the invitation to tea at Green Doors. It’s only fair, though, that you should warn Mrs. Farwell that it cannot, not possibly, be a professional call. And just remind yourself, will you, Dick, if only now and then, that I’m not a psychoanalyst. It always annoys me a little, being called one.”
“Sorry. Yes, I do know, of course. But the differences are too slight for the laity to master. Then you will come for tea? That’s fine. All we wanted, as a start-off, really. Clare knows you won’t be lionized and I can promise you it will be informal. Shall we say Saturday afternoon? It’ll be just the Farwells themselves and me. I’m there such a lot, I’m almost family,” he added, flushing a little.
Dick was ready to get out now and give place to Mrs. Dickerman and Mr. McCloud. But he had a diffident feeling that since this was actually a professional seance he had been having with Lewis, it was up to Lewis to bring it to an end. And Lewis had not stirred in his chair. He was saying, “I’ll like seeing your work with that house, too. I’ve meant to get Cynthia to take me over, ever since you finished it. Why do they call it Green Doors?”
Lewis’ gaze, as he spoke, was still attached to the knob on Miss Frazier’s door. Dick, now that he had secured part of what Clare wanted and was no longer anxious, was looking at his friend with an increasing discernment in his vision.
“He’s got the look of a medieval monk,” he told himself,—seeing it, strangely, for the first time. Well, perhaps asceticism was the price Lewis had had to pay for his astonishing success. He had accomplished in ten years or so what usually takes a man in his profession the better part of his life, if he ever achieves it at all. “Naturally Lewis hasn’t had much time for the flesh-pots along the way,” mused Dick.
Doctor Lewis Pryne was only thirty-three, and yet in the years since graduating from Harvard Medical he had made himself a specialist in psychiatry, written three instantly famous books on dynamic psychology, and accumulated a clientele which might be the envy of any other psychiatrist not congenitally superior to envy, in the country. And he was self-made. At least, ever since his father had died when Lewis was a Senior in Latin High, he had earned his own way, and looked out for Cynthia as well, until she married Dick’s cousin, Harry Allen. Yet here he was, in spite of that stupendous early handicap, loaded with fame and honor—and if not with money, that was simply because money did not seem to be one of his goals.
Meeting Lewis in the ordinary way—that is, outside of an office visit—you got no hint of past struggles and their necessary austerities. His gray eyes were more sleepy than austere, with a languid droop at the outer corners of the heavy upper lids. His mouth curled, slightly, as if fleeting little smiles were habitual, and most of the time an almost palpable light played over the lower part of the face, particularly the full but chiseled lips. Without that light and the odd, fleeting smile, Lewis’ mouth would have been definitely sensuous. As it was, you never thought of that—only of its sensitive but exquisitely impersonal sympathy.
The gray sleepy eyes released the door knob, came to rest on Dick Wilder’s face. “How did Green Doors come by its name?”
Dick started, realizing that this was a repeated question. What had he been woolgathering about? Lewis, himself. He had been busy seeing Lewis in a new, fresh way, after a fifteen years’ friendship. That was strange. Then he understood it. He had been seeing Lewis as Clare would soon be seeing him,—looking at him through Clare’s eyes.
“Oh? The name? It was Clare’s idea. It’s in a poem. Published in The Glebe, 1914.” (He got up as he answered. Lewis’ time was precious, and staying to chatter now would be inexcusable, after Lewis had been so altogether patient and friendly.) “I don’t remember it all. But there’s a line—
“‘I know an orchard old and rare,
I will not tell you where,
With green doors opening to the sun....’
“Something like that anyway. Clare said we wouldn’t plan a house at all, but just green doors, opening to the sun. We’ve done it too! You’ll see, Saturday. I’ll pick you up at the Allens’ around four. Crazy to show the place to you!”
During the brief interval between Dick Wilder’s departure from the office and Mrs. Dickerman’s entrance, Lewis stood in the big window at the back of his desk, looking down onto the glistening river of automobile tops which was Marlboro Street, and recalled his first and only meeting with Petra—the girl who was, so it seemed, the one discordant note in the idyllic existence at that country estate, already famous to literature,—Green Doors, in Meadowbrook.
Chapter Two
Lowell Farwell’s voice making the appointment over the telephone—it was three or four years ago now—still vibrated through Lewis’ memory, melodious, interesting. Lewis had never happened to catch sight of the novelist at that time, nor had he since, but he knew from numberless newspaper cuts what he looked like. And the voice perfectly fitted those leonine, distinguished heads.
“My wife has been ill for months and now a friend has persuaded her to see you. Her doctor agrees that it may be a wise move to get your opinion, Doctor Pryne. You are acquainted with him. Doctor MacKay, here in Cambridge. He has come to the end of his resources and is ready to give psychiatry a try.”
It was a wind-clear, blue-red-gold October afternoon, when Lewis made that call in Cambridge. The Farwells were living on the upper floor of an unpretentious double house on Fayerweather Street. Instead of the expected maid in cap and apron opening the door, there was a girl in a brown smock.—Strange to be remembering color, and shades of color, after so many months!—Her eyes were brown-gold, and as photographically as Lewis remembered those gay and sincere eyes, he remembered the curves of the smiling mouth.
The room into which she brought Lewis was a blank in memory. Perhaps, even at the time, it had been a blank to his consciousness. Except for the blue gentians. There was a clump of them growing out of dark earth near where he laid down his hat. He supposed the flowers must have been planted in some sort of dish, but his memory of the Farwells’ Cambridge living room was fringed blue gentians growing out of dark earth.
The girl’s voice was as smiling as her mouth. “Mrs. Farwell will see you in a minute, Doctor.”
“Are you Miss Farwell?” he asked, for he knew, from Cynthia, probably, who read the columns of literary gossip in the Sunday papers, that Lowell Farwell had a daughter.
The smile became laughter. Laughter which sounded like pure happiness, translating itself into sound. The rarest sort of laughter in the world. Not amusement. Not embarrassment. Mere self-unknown joy.
“No. I am Teresa Kerr. This is Petra.”
The novelist’s daughter was sitting on the sill of an open window, her background wall-less—a sea of blue October air and light. She was a schoolgirl then, in a navy blue jersey schoolgirl dress. Her attentive, innocent eyes, set wide in a grave young brow, were the precise color of the gentians. That repetition of color and the eyes’ innocent attentiveness stabbed Lewis like some too pure, too perfect note in music. It was the most beautiful child’s face—or any face—of his memory. No wonder he remembered that so vividly! The short, straight nose, the upper lip—short to the exquisite point of breath-taking beauty—the Botticelli mouth, the strong, white, round chin!—The child was hardly human, she was so lovely!—Her head against the window’s blue background was a sculptor’s dream. Fine, very alive brown curls molded rather than obscured its classic contours. The gawky schoolgirl body, in its clinging jersey, was sculpture, too, with its wide shoulders and long thighs....
Lewis had supposed, since, that the mood which took possession of him when Teresa Kerr had opened the door to the Farwells’ Cambridge apartment, and which had increased like daylight upon dawn during the brief minutes he spent with those girls waiting for Mrs. Farwell to be ready to see him, was merely a state of rapport with their youth and happiness. Their relationship with life and with each other had by some miracle extended itself to him and created what at the time, and in memory ever since, had seemed a golden age circumferenced by a passing moment.
When the circumference contracted upon its enclosed eternity (these were Lewis’ similes, far-fetched, of course, but for himself alone), it was by way of a trivial voice calling out from the next room. Then he left timelessness, passed through a door into a ceilinged, four-walled space, and took a chair facing an emotional, pretty woman who lay relaxed among cushions on a chaise-longue; and at once, quite as if he had never passed through the sound of Teresa’s laugh and the sight of Petra’s attentive, innocent gaze to reach this meeting, he gave his complete attention to Mrs. Farwell and her woes.
She had these violent headaches. Weeks on end she could not sleep and then for other weeks she slept too much, could do nothing else but sleep. Her nerves needed either a stimulant or a sedative, constantly. But Doctor MacKay did not approve of drugs, not in the quantities her case demanded. Doctor MacKay said, “Exercise!” But she had this nervous heart. He admitted the nervous heart and yet insisted on the exercise. Imagine! Besides, how could she exercise? Riding was out of the question. Couldn’t afford it. And golf bored her. Terribly! And what other exercise is there, besides golf and riding? They hadn’t even a car. If they had, she might at least get some fresh air each day. But perhaps Doctor Pryne knew for himself—she was looking at his ready-made tweed suit—that fame did not pay in dollars and cents. Her husband’s novels were only for the discriminating few. The better the review, she noticed, the smaller the royalties always.... And noises—cooped up in a cheap little apartment like this—noises were a sort of crucifixion!
A laugh, muffled by the closed door, but audible enough for demonstration, coincidentally bore her out. Or so she imagined. She winced, becomingly, but genuinely enough.
“If only Petra could go away to school! She is my husband’s daughter, you know. But we can’t even afford a camp for her. And big girls like that are so noisy, so all over you! If she were a boy, she wouldn’t be always at home. It would be easier then. If Doctor MacKay ever thinks I am strong enough to have a baby I do hope it will be a boy!”
Lewis listened to all of this and much more with attention. And not until Mrs. Farwell had worn herself out with the emotion which accompanied her eager, fluent explanations of her nervous condition, did he venture a few tentative suggestions. But it appeared that Doctor MacKay had made the very same suggestions dozens of times already,—and none of them were any good.
“Well then—?” But it was only a mental question, a mental shrug. Lewis was grave and interested up till the very last. Doctor MacKay, however, had not had the slightest excuse for calling in a psychiatrist. It was an old story, but as disheartening and ridiculous as if it were the first occasion on which Lewis had wasted his time like this.
As it happened, the laugh which had penetrated Mrs. Farwell’s closed door, with its crucifying effect on one of its hearers, was Lewis’ last touch with Teresa and Petra. When he came out of Mrs. Farwell’s bedroom into the living room, they were gone. In their stead, a new individual—younger than Mrs. Farwell, older than the girls—was lying in wait for him. She had usurped Petra’s place in the open blue window, but she quickly left it and came forward.
“I am Mrs. Tom Otis, Doctor Pryne. A friend of the Farwells. Mr. Farwell has commissioned me to see you in his place. He is at a critical point in the new novel, and if he leaves it, he’s lost. You know how that is, since you write yourself. He is working in my house,—has his study there. He wants you to tell me your ‘findings’ here—if that’s the word—and then, when he comes to earth again, I’m to report to him. Do you see?”
Mrs. Otis had spoken in a lowered voice in spite of Mrs. Farwell’s closed door, and now she found a chair for herself with the obviously gracious intention of permitting Lewis to do the same. She appeared so altogether ingenuous a person that Lewis was fain to divert his irritation over the stupidity of the situation to the absent Lowell Farwell. Meanwhile he tried to get away from this Mrs. Otis as promptly and tactfully as possible.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m glad Mr. Farwell didn’t interrupt his work. There’s no reason why he should. Doctor MacKay will get in touch with me to-morrow and he’ll give Mr. Farwell my ‘findings’ such as they are, I suppose.”
He was looking for his hat, but wondering about Petra and Teresa. Why had they had to go away? He had meant to ask them where they had found the gentians.
“Here it is,” Mrs. Otis moved aside, so that he saw the dish of gentians, and then his hat beside them. “But please don’t go right away. Mr. Farwell will think I have failed him if you go without telling me what you think about Marian. It was stupid of me, perhaps, not to have explained myself more fully before I asked you to tell me. You couldn’t understand, of course. You couldn’t know how very close I am to these people. Why, it was I who persuaded them to get you. I couldn’t bear the way things were going. Something had to be done. Doctor MacKay is so tiresomely conservative. Any wise, up-to-date doctor would have seen long ago that Marian Farwell ought to go right away—to a sanitarium—abroad—anywhere—but away. It isn’t fair to let neurotics inflict their nerves on people who are perfectly sane and healthy. And it’s all the worse when an extremely sensitive artist like Lowell Farwell is the victim! You think so too, don’t you?”
But Mrs. Otis had not waited for Lewis’ answer. She took his agreement for granted and hurried on. “Doctor Pryne, see here. I am so eager—and more important, perhaps—able to help. Did you think I was merely curious and officious? That would be too hateful of me, if it were true. But it isn’t. This affair is almost as much mine as it is Lowell’s—theirs, the Farwells’, I mean. I got Mr. Farwell to call you in, I am paying your fees, and I will send Marian abroad, anywhere, to-morrow, if you will only say the word. We—Society—owe to first-rate artists their chance for good working conditions. Well, you and I between us can manage things for this particular artist right now. He won’t let me give Marian the money for Europe as things are, just for my urging it. But if you say she must go— Don’t you see?”
Mrs. Otis had seemed to Lewis at the time a rather delightful person. A magnetic smile and an air of almost naïve simplicity had robbed what she said, and implied, of too much stupidity. And she went on to speak of her wealth with simplicity. “What use is all this money,” she asked, eyes shining and wide, “if I can’t do some ordinary human good with it outside of organized charity, and without fuss? What I can’t spend myself—spend beautifully, I mean—certainly belongs to the next person who needs it. And Marian, poor darling, is really and truly my next person. It’s as simple as that.”
But Mrs. Farwell, to Lewis’ mind, was neither mentally nor physically ill. She was a “happiness hound,” nothing else in the world, and he could not honestly prescribe Europe or a sanitarium as a cure for a deeply rooted perversion in human character. Yet getting away without committing himself to coöperation in Mrs. Otis’ naïve philanthropic schemes was difficult, the more so since he could not, of course, tell her his “findings.” But Lewis managed it at last and Dick’s errand here just now seemed to indicate that she had not stayed permanently resentful, however she had felt at the time.
And then, before anything of his call at the Cambridge apartment had had time to fade from Lewis’ memory, the papers were full of the divorce of Lowell and Marian Farwell. A little while more and two marriages were front-page news, Lowell Farwell to Mrs. Clare Otis née Fay, and Mrs. Marian Farwell, née Dodge to—somebody or other. The name hardly mattered since it was merely her recent connection with the celebrated novelist which gave the happiness hound’s new marriage its ephemeral public interest. And now, less than three years after that so simple solution of their problems—and a wonder Mrs. Clare had not hit on it sooner and had ever bothered to try plotting with a psychiatrist!—she had Lewis again marked down as a fellow conspirator.
What did she want to buy from him this time, Lewis asked himself. Her stepdaughter’s affection, according to Dick. But that would be only part of it. With three years for perspective, Lewis was more than a little doubtful of “Clare’s” simplicity. But he could not guess what she might be wanting. It would be interesting to see, possibly. And in any case, there would be Petra. And Teresa Kerr. Who was Teresa Kerr, anyway, and where was she now, Lewis wondered. Well, Petra could tell him that. He would ask her on Saturday, the first thing.
To-day was only Wednesday. Three days, then, to go until he should see Petra. It seemed an unconscionably long time to wait. But why, then, had he let three years go past without inquiring from Cynthia, or the dozen other people who could certainly have told him, what had become of Petra since Farwell’s last marriage, and who was Teresa Kerr?
He turned sharply around, as if startled away from the window by astonishment at himself for this strangely belated impatience.
Chapter Three
Green Doors lay a few miles beyond Meadowbrook, well away from the main highway on a meandering country road of its own. The new house had been built on the site of the old farmhouse which it had replaced, with its front door only a few paces from the road. In a general way the new house followed the contours of the old. The long, low lines of the sheds and the high, gabled lines of the barn—all house now—gave the place, as one came on it, a casual air of simplicity. It melted into the landscape as if it were painted on it. The white walls, shadowed by old, gnarled apple trees, were friendly with the dusty white country road, while the entire landscape of meadows and fields, with stretches of brook-cooled woodland, cradled the new dwelling as no changeling but its own child, in a peaceful lap. So Lewis at any rate felt as he arrived with Dick, in Dick’s car, at tea time on that Saturday afternoon which had come, at last.
“That’s Clare’s guest house,” Dick explained of a small one-story doll-house-like place directly across the way from the big house. “It used to be the cow sheds. We found it amusing, having the estate cut in two by the public road, and we have used the road in our landscaping—up to the hilt. Autos almost never come this way, and the hay carts and occasional cows that do only add to the flavor. Isn’t it jolly!”
“Very!” Lewis agreed. “And infinitely peaceful. Does Farwell write here at Green Doors?” He was contrasting the novelist’s Cambridge home with this latest one and thinking that Clare appeared, at least on the surface, to have been successful in giving this particular artist an ideal environment for his creative ventures.
“Oh, yes. But in a little studio off in the woods. He made us build it according to his own ideas and Farwell’s genius doesn’t work along the lines of architecture. But such as it is, it’s his own, and that’s charm enough, I suppose. We’ve laughed over it quite a lot, Clare and I, but it’s well out of sight and it doesn’t matter what it looks like so very much, just so long as it serves its purpose. And it does that. The man practically lives there.”
Lewis could not help thinking of his own books written in snatched minutes at his office, on trains, in hotel bedrooms in the dead of night with the call to sleep like a fire-engine siren shrieking a warning in his brain. But Farwell’s was creative writing and that was a different sort altogether, necessitating leisure and solitude, at any price—possibly! But there Lewis pulled himself up. “Lord! This matter of price is none of my business! They may be quite decent people at heart, really, and even happy!”
The front door had its step—a big, flat slate stone—a little below the level of the road. The hall into which one entered after so unpretentious an approach was almost startling in its palatial proportions. It was the height of the old barn, and the floor and the walls—with a balcony running around the second story on three sides—were made of composition which gave the effect of stone. In its own right, this great hall was a work of art; but on such a day as this, with the whole farther end opened to the New England countryside, it became merely a neutral frame for the garden, which, a mass of passionate color, cut a flaming swathe through a wooded valley to orchard-draped hills beyond.
The maid who had opened the door for them said, “Mrs. Farwell would like you to go through into the garden. She is under the elm.”
The terrace, as they came to it, was merely an unroofed continuation of the floor of the great hall. It ended with wide slabs of flower-rimmed stone shelving down into grassy sweeps of hot June color. Off at one side, in a distant corner of the lawn, some Chinese garden chairs were grouped around a rustic table in the shade of a perfect wineglass elm. A little beyond, in the same shade, a woman in a white dress lay stretched in a long chair, her back to the house. A big garden hat, brilliant orange, was tossed on the grass beside her.
But Mrs. Farwell was not asleep, for she heard their voices, and jumping up, came several steps out beyond the shade in her eagerness to welcome them.
“Petra and I were to play tennis. She was to have joined me here—oh—ages ago—and she hasn’t, and I’ve just stayed on waiting all afternoon, and never dreamed it was tea time. Look at me!”—Mrs. Farwell meant apology for her crumpled, sleeveless frock, for her ankle socks on suntanned bare legs, for rather shabby sneakers. “I meant to change, of course. But the afternoon is a dream and I have been dreaming with it, since Petra never came. The child must not forget her tea date, though, and I don’t think she will. She remembered you perfectly, Doctor Pryne, and seemed actually pleased that you were coming.—Yes, Richard! Petra showed pleasure. Doesn’t that sound propitious?”
She stood for another minute out in the glare where she had met her guests, looking hopefully toward the house, as if half expecting Petra’s arrival to coincide with theirs. “Lowell too!” she murmured. “My husband was terribly pleased you were coming, Doctor Pryne. But time doesn’t exist for him when he is working. He will be sure to turn up, though. He has no intention of missing you—this time.”
Then she shaded her brow with her palm and, turning suddenly to Dick, smiled deliberately and sweetly into his eyes. Lewis wished he had been looking somewhere else when this happened. She led them back to the chairs and herself took the one nearest the tea table.
His hostess was not nearly so pretty as Lewis remembered her. But she was much more than pretty! Yes—sitting upright against the fantastic high back of the Chinese chair, in her sleeveless white frock, her hair black as the lacquer of the wickerwork, her very long, curving lashes black, tipped in gold, and dimples subtly hinted in her thin cheeks—she was vital and engaging.
But specious!—Lewis quickly added. Before, when he had thought her rather beautiful and certainly naïvely ingenuous, he had been looking at her through the beginning of twilight in a city apartment. But this second time her background was an elm and the light was of broad day. That changed things somewhat. Lewis did not particularly enjoy his present skepticism. But he could not help himself. And his next unhallowed thought was “Poor Dick!” For the latest Mrs. Farwell’s particular variety of predatoriness was of the sort that relishes a spiritual flavor to its meat; so Lewis, at any rate, hazarded. The bodies, even the hearts of men, would not be enough: Clare Farwell would demand the soul before all.
“Pretty selfish of Petra to waste your afternoon for you like this!” Dick exclaimed. He turned to Lewis. “You can see for yourself how it is. You’ve run right onto it, first thing, without our showing you. It’s always like this. This is the way Petra treats Clare.”
“Oh, Richard! Please! How horrid that sounds. It’s a little unjust as well. This time I am almost certain she really and genuinely forgot I was waiting for her. Her offering to play with me at all was generous. Petra is a hum-dinger at tennis, Doctor Pryne, and I am only fairish. So it’s not much fun for her, playing with me. This is probably the truth of it: Petra wanted to be nice, then her subconscious mind got busy making her forget and so saved her from having to be nice. Doctor Pryne will tell you, Richard, that the hardest things not to forget are the duties which bore us.” She was laughing but in spite of that she meant them to believe her serious.
Clare would call Dick “Richard.” Given her type, it was almost inevitable. Lewis wondered why it had taken him so unaware and why it need so irritate him. And it was also inevitable—but for this he had been totally unprepared—that she would overtly exonerate the slandered Petra and in the very act make it look worse for the child. For she was a person who could have her cake and eat it too, every time. It was a trick act, peculiar to the type.... But Lewis liked his own critical self less and less in exact ratio as he found himself liking Petra’s stepmother less and less. He wished he had never had to see her by daylight.
“Subconscious mind nothing!” Dick scoffed. “Clare, you’re always making excuses for everybody, but most of all for Petra. Couldn’t she see you waiting out here all afternoon from every window in the house? Wouldn’t that circumvent her subconscious forgettery mechanisms?”
“Oh yes, if she were in the house, my dear Richard. But she may have gone for a walk. Now, though, she’ll be back, dressing for this party of ours. I should have!”
“Well, I only wish I had known you were just waiting around here for nothing!” Dick was thoroughly upset. “I’ve been spoiling for exercise all afternoon. Cynthia insisted it was too hot to play, Harry stuck at his bank, and Lewis couldn’t be torn from Marlboro Street one minute ahead of time. But I’m sleeping at the Allens’ to-night, after Petra’s dance. How about a game tomorrow morning?”
“But my dear boy, to-morrow is Sunday,” Clare reminded him. Then, to Lewis, she explained, almost with a blush, “Don’t be shocked, Doctor Pryne. I never impose my religious idiosyncrasies on others, not even on my family. One doesn’t! And I don’t even carry my peculiarity to the point of going to church—do I, Richard? Oh, yes, I do really, only not”—she laughed—“the Meadowbrook Congregational Church! Green Doors is my church.
“I know an orchard, old and rare,
I will not tell you where,
With green doors opening to the sun,
And the sky children gather there—
“I can slip away, with a volume of essays or poetry, stretch out anywhere in the grass and sun on one of those slopes up there, and feel God nearer than He would ever come to me in the four walls of any church on earth, even the most beautiful cathedral. My husband says that that’s pagan. Perhaps it is. I am pagan, I think. But words for one’s religion don’t matter, do they! I know what I know, and I feel what I feel, and it is—beautiful.”
Then, laughing again, she asked, “What church do you go to, on Sundays, Doctor Pryne? Not one built by men, any more than I, I’m sure. You too are beyond that kindergarten point in evolution. You see, I know you much better than you can even begin to know me, for I have read your books!”
Good Lord! What had Lewis’ books to say of his religion? They were austerely psychological, made up of the findings and the theories of a practising psychiatrist. The philosophical humility in all his writing was Lewis’ pride. But he was saved the trouble of defending his pride just then, even if he had thought it worth the trouble, for Clare’s stepdaughter, Petra, had come down the terrace steps and was hurrying across the lawn.
“Imagine Clare calling herself the mother of that!” Dick laughed—and Lewis, somehow, knew that the remark and its accompanying mirth was probably as familiar at this tea table as was Clare’s explanation of her individualistic out-of-doors worship.
Clare murmured hurriedly, softly—her fingers just touching Lewis’ coat sleeve as she leaned toward him—“Richard is only teasing me. He knows perfectly well that I’m not flattered. I am thirty years old and have no ambition to compete with Petra’s lovely youth. What I long to be is a mother to her, a real one. How I long for it! But I need your help, Doctor Pryne. You will see how I need it....”
Petra, when she reached the shade of the elm, was constrained and even a little awkward. But that was hardly surprising. All three of them had watched her approach from the instant that she had come down the terrace steps, and she might very well have felt that Clare’s murmurings in Lewis’ ear, and even more, Dick’s laugh, concerned herself.
“Darling!” Clare exclaimed, smiling up at her through her really fascinating lashes. “What a perfectly enchanting frock! It’s new! And you never showed it to me! And look at me! I haven’t even changed!—This is my daughter, grown up, since you saw her, Doctor Pryne. Sit down quickly, darling. It’s too hot to keep the men standing. And here’s the tea. Draw your chairs to the table.—You needn’t stay to pass things, Elise.” She threw a warm, grateful smile to the maid who had brought out the tray. The look she won in return was humbly idolizing.
Lewis held a chair out for Petra, and when she took it, drew his own along beside it.
The gawky schoolgirl body had rounded into selfconscious maturity. Otherwise Petra was exactly the girl of Lewis’, in this case strangely explicit, memory ... until she turned from him and the intense gentian blue of her eyes no longer blurred his power for deeper perception. Then he saw that the attentive fairy-tale gaze was quite gone; or if there was attentiveness there now, it was not bent on a happy, mystery-brimmed world before the girl’s face, but on a realm within. Childlike receptiveness was transformed to a look of reserve made vivid. The utter beauty of the remembered child face was there—intact—but it no longer took one’s breath; it was protected by this vivid reserve as by a sword, on guard.
But Lewis was not sorry for the sword. He saw that it would, at any rate, keep her safe from Clare. He knew that Youth often has need of its seeming hardness until years give it some chance to acquire a little subtlety in its denials, if it is to protect with any success the inner, personal development of its own integrity.
Lewis took the teacup and saucer Clare handed him. He helped himself to toast and strawberry jam. He laughed, amusedly, at some remark or other of “Richard’s,” and could even have repeated the witticism word for word if it had been required of him. But in spite of all this overt conformity to the social requirements of those first minutes since Petra’s arrival under the elm and his holding her chair for her, he was conscious of one thing only, the young girl’s living, breathing, still self, there at his side.
Chapter Four
It was Dick who brought up the broken tennis date, not Clare. Petra came out of her stillness to show a mild surprise. “But I thought it wasn’t definite,” she turned to Clare. “I thought we were to play if we felt like it when the time came. And then it was so hot!”
The breath of silence which Clare allowed to follow this and the expression which crossed her face spoke an acute surprise on her part; but it was quickly followed by a seeming desire to shield Petra from anybody’s criticism, even her own. Tactfully she changed the subject to ask, “What did you do all afternoon, darling? It has been deliciously hot.” And then to Lewis, “I’m like Shelley. I adore hot summer days and am more alive then than ever.”—But she repeated her question to Petra: “What did you do with yourself all afternoon, darling?”
Petra answered, after a momentary hesitation, as if she needed the pause in which to choose between several possible replies, “After lunch I took a book and went off in the woods, where it was cool—and read.”
“That was nice. What book, darling?”
“‘Marius, the Epicurean.’”
“Really! It’s years since I’ve even looked into it. I should love to read some of ‘Marius’ with you, sometime, Petra. Why don’t we? I’ll take it to bed with me to-night, skim through as far as you have gone to refresh my memory, and then, to-morrow, we will go on with it together. Petra, yes! You come to my church with me to-morrow morning, early, and we’ll read ‘Marius.’ Where did you leave the book?”
Wild color flaming in Petra’s cheeks took Lewis by surprise. Again that hesitation before answering her stepmother’s simple question. “I’m afraid I left it in the woods—somewhere. I’ll find it before people begin coming to-night. I might go and look now?”
“Oh, no. Not now. Of course not. At least, it depends on what copy you took. Was it your father’s specially bound copy?”
“No.—I don’t think so.”
“My darling! You must know what your book looked like! If it was my Modern Library edition, of course it doesn’t matter a bit,—though it has my notes in it! Where did you find the one you used? In the library or my sitting room?”
Petra’s eyes met Lewis’. She found his look completely, absorbedly hers. She took a grip on that absorption, steadied herself by it, and answered Clare. “I don’t remember where I found it, but it hasn’t your notes. It’s not your copy. And it’s not Father’s. It’s my own.”
“But it must be your father’s or mine. There are only those two copies of Pater in the house. I don’t see—”
But suddenly Clare did appear to see and broke off. Indeed, an expression of seeing all too well had passed wavelike over her quicksilver face. She turned to Lewis as if to distract attention from what she had suddenly seen, and perhaps, too, from Petra’s hot cheeks, and asked him whether he had read her husband’s latest novel. He had and began talking about it. But he wanted to take Petra’s hand, where it lay on her chair arm, and close his down on it with strength. He did not care about what he surmised was a mere silly schoolgirl fib. If she wanted to impress Clare and Dick—even himself—with the seriousness of her reading, what of it! At least, she did not lie subtly, through the medium of fleeting quicksilver changes of facial expression. Hardly. The cheek he barely allowed himself to see was one flame—as if an angel had lied.
Tea and a protracted discussion of Lowell Farwell’s novels came to an end in time, and Lewis at last could turn to Petra with: “I want to hear something about Teresa. Or must I say Miss Kerr?—But I’m not going to ‘Miss’ you, Petra, if you don’t mind. Until to-day I have never thought of one of you girls without the other. Shall I meet her too, again? I hope so.”
But something was wrong, terribly wrong. This, surely, was not a question Petra would need to make up an answer for! But she was not even trying to make up an answer. She was looking, almost wildly, toward Clare.
Clare laughed. “Why, Petra! You never told me you and Doctor Pryne had mutual friends! Teresa—?”
“Yes. Teresa Kerr.” Lewis spoke shortly, dryly, because of his complete astonishment at Petra’s ill-concealed panic.
“Oh!” Clare remembered. Suddenly, it seemed. “That must have been the maid. Petra, I wonder what has become of Teresa? You were David and Jonathan once, you two. You were a funny child, my dear, when I first knew you in Cambridge—and so beautifully democratic! But I’m afraid we can’t tell you anything about the girl, Doctor Pryne. The whereabouts of vanished domestics is as much a problem as that of all safety pins. Richard! Do you remember Felix Fairfax, our inimitable butler! I wonder what has become of him! My husband made me get rid of him, Doctor Pryne, because he helped himself to one of my photographs and had it in his room. I wrote him a recommendation that was a marvel, though. Anybody who couldn’t read between the lines deserved what they got....”
Petra, who until this moment had tasted nothing, now took up her cold cup of tea and drank thirstily, while Dick and Clare became mildly hilarious over a growing volume of anecdotes concerning the inimitable Felix Fairfax, the flirtatious, vanished and banished butler, whom Lewis’ question about Teresa had brought to mind.
Lewis was silent. He was not looking at Petra, but he knew instinctively when she lost her strange, inexplicable fear, and relaxed. A baby, with a pretty young nurse in its wake, was running down the lawn, toward the tea table. Petra had been the first to notice the invasion and welcomed the diversion it brought. Then Clare, following Petra’s eyes, saw the baby.
“Little Sophia!” she cried, quickly on her feet, while anecdotes of Felix Fairfax hung broken off in mid-air. She ran forward a few steps and knelt on the grass, her arms spread wide to receive her little daughter. In that gracious moment Clare was like nothing in the world but a dancing Greek figure on some lovely old vase—all quicksilver, grace and charm. Dick’s face glowed appreciatively. Even Lewis, for that minute, was aware of Clare’s loveliness.
The baby, however, made a swooping detour to avoid the wide-flung, slender arms of the kneeling mother and plunged straight for Petra, her big half-sister. Petra held her off, at arm’s length. “You’ve been in the brook. You’re dirty. You’re muddy. Don’t touch my dress. No!”
The rebuffed cherub commenced to wail but Petra did not relent and draw her into her arms. “No! No!” She repeated it. “Mustn’t spoil Petra’s beautiful, clean dress. No. I’m not going to pick you up.”
Then Clare swept down upon them and snatched the baby up. Two muddy palms immediately made their mark on the shoulders of her white frock. But she lifted the delicious little hands and kissed them, one after the other, gravely—delicately. Her eyes, over the baby’s golden head, looked at Petra now with healthy, open accusation, and she held the delicious little body more and more tightly to her, while small wet shoes muddied her skirt.
Clare, looking away from Petra at last, met Doctor Pryne’s puzzled eyes. “I’m going to take little Sophia up to the nursery, if you’ll excuse me for only a few minutes,” she said. “Anyway, I wanted you to see our guest house—the view at its back. You get the river there. Petra will show you. And this is a good time—before Lowell comes along.—Richard, you may come up with us and see what a nice supper a nice cook has sent up to a nice nursery for an adorable baby! Only first we’ll help a nice nurse to wash these precious, dirty paws.... No, Richard, I want to carry her myself. Truly. You don’t mind, Doctor? I always run up to the nursery at little Sophia’s supper time, even in the middle of quite formal parties. But it only takes a few minutes.”
Her eyes, on Lewis’, were replete with meaning. “Now is your time,” they said. “Do make a beginning at helping me understand this strange girl. You can’t deny she is lacking in normal responses. Help me!”
“Good-by, sister,” Petra murmured, and went near enough to lay her cheek for just a breath against her little sister’s hair. “I couldn’t let you spoil my pretty dress, honey. But I do love you!”
At this belated gesture, Clare’s beseeching look at Lewis transformed itself to one of ironic amusement.
“If you are really interested in the view, Doctor Pryne, it’s across the road. We can go through the kitchen garden. That is shorter than going back through the house.”
The kitchen garden, through which Petra led him, was a jungle of drooping, white-starred blackberry canes. They came out of it through a little wicket gate and crossed the intimate, idle road to the guest house opposite.
“Clare won’t let them cut the grass here,” Petra explained. “Any objection to wading?” Lewis had none and followed the girl around the side of the little house and came to an uncovered piazza at the back. Ignoring the several chairs arranged with an eye to the view there, they sat down side by side on the edge of the piazza boards. From under their feet wide sweeps of June fields surged away in many-colored rippling waves. White and yellow daisies, red and white clovers, golden buttercups, orange devil’s-paintbrush, and sparkling sun-soaked grass dazzled Lewis’ eyes against the view of river and blue hills beyond.
“Paradise will be a June field like this,” he thought, “with the saints reunioning while the angels dance.” He was thinking of Fra Angelico’s “Last Judgment,” the detail of the left corner.—“Petra and I seem to have arrived somewhat ahead of time, though,—and, God knows, without our crowns! This girl! She is a breaker of promises, a vain poser, a liar, a traitor to friendship, and a repulser of innocent babyhood. Clare made her do her paces. Just didn’t she, though!”
But his next thought was more like shock than thought. “Why need her hands be as lovely as her face? Or is this Paradise!” They were clasped about her knees, strong, sun-tanned hands, with long, squarish-tipped fingers. Angelic hands!
Lewis remarked, “It’s nice here.”
Petra agreed, “Yes, isn’t it!”
Lewis lighted a cigarette and Petra pulled a grass blade to make a bracelet, bending forward from lithe hips.
“You thought I was horrid to my baby sister, didn’t you, Doctor Pryne?” she asked bluntly. “I wasn’t, not really. But I couldn’t let her spoil my dress, could I? This is the first time I’ve worn it. It would have to be dry-cleaned if I had picked her up. And things are never so nice again after they are dry-cleaned. Besides, I can’t afford it.”
The dress she had so ruthlessly protected against a bewitching baby was smooth silk, the color of heavy cream. Its only decoration was a flight of embroidered gold and brown bees. They flew up one full sleeve from wristband to shoulder, across the back of the neck and down the other body-side of the frock to the lower edge of the hem. It was—taken by itself—a lovely frock, and if it had not been so utterly Petra’s own, belonged so completely to her shapely young body and coloring, even Lewis—no connoisseur in women’s clothes—would have noticed its lovely detail before this.
Petra dropped her grass bracelet—half made—into the grass and picked up the hem of her skirt, folding it back. “Look,” she said, “how beautifully finished it is.”
The flight of bees had been carried on, in all its careful perfection, to the upper edge of the hem on its inner side, where it would never show. It was as if the embroiderer had loved her work too well to realize when she had done enough.
“Clare’s dress was nothing at all,” Petra was saying. “It didn’t matter what little Sophia did to it. Besides, if Clare ruined a dozen dresses, it wouldn’t matter. She could buy dozens more.... So it wasn’t fair, was it?”
“No. It was hardly fair,” Lewis agreed absently.
Petra jumped up. The bee-embroidered hem of her skirt brushed through the flowers in the deep grass. She came closer to Lewis, stood there before him in the long grass.
“Could you spare me a cigarette?” she asked.
She had not smoked at the tea table and Lewis had taken it for granted she was that rare thing, a modern girl who did not smoke. Apologetically, he offered her his opened cigarette case and struck a match for her on the piazza boards. (The grateful patient should have given Lewis a lighter along with the case!) But he might as well have kissed her as have held the light for her,—with his face like that. Even before the girl saw Lewis’ face, she felt what was there for her to see. Her eyelids swept up, to verify her suddenly alert instinct, and for just that instant blue reticence, under Lewis’ own startled eyes, leapt into blue flame.... Petra drew a little away, trying to smile and utterly failing. Lewis lighted a fresh cigarette for himself.
Petra puffed at hers for a minute only and then it went the way the bracelet had gone, only she bent to press out the spark—firmly, securely—into damp grass roots. Returning to her place, she clasped her hands around her knees again and explained.
“Really I don’t know how to smoke, not gracefully. You shouldn’t have watched me! You made me feel hypocritical, watching me like that. But I do smoke, sometimes. Almost every night. One or two cigarettes after dinner with Father. So I wasn’t pretending, you see....”
She went on, after a minute, “You asked me about Teresa, remember? I’ll tell you now. I couldn’t say a word with Clare listening. But Clare lied about her. She knows perfectly well that Teresa wasn’t our maid—not in the sense that that Fairfax person was Clare’s butler, I mean. Teresa was nothing in the world but our guardian angel,—father’s, Marian’s, and mine. And she is my best friend.”
Lewis said coolly, “Yes, of course! I knew that. I saw that it was so, that afternoon in Cambridge. And when Mrs. Farwell said that Teresa was gone out of your life like a lost safety pin I knew it couldn’t be true. But why did she say it? And why did you let her say it?”
“Oh, Clare wasn’t lying when she said that. She thought, I mean, that it was true enough. It was in saying Teresa was our maid, putting her with Felix Fairfax,—that was the lie. But so far as Clare knows, Teresa is gone—just as absolutely as any disappearing safety pin. I wish I were as elusive,—that Clare had mislaid me too. But she has a use for me. She thinks she has, anyway, and she actually pays me a wage of two thousand dollars a year to live here at Green Doors and be a model stepdaughter.”—Petra flashed a defiant look at Lewis and added, “I’m different from Clare’s other servants, you see. I don’t adore her!”
The girl’s hands, Lewis noticed, were no longer clasping her knees. They were gripping them. But he gave no sign that he was conscious of her anger and her rebellion.
“Will you just listen to that bird,” he said. “Bobolinks are usually cheerful, of course. But this fellow is carrying it beyond reason, it seems to me! He might have a peephole into heaven,—the way he sounds.” For a bobolink, apparently beside himself with rapture, was circling and swooping, swooping and circling, singing his jetty little throat to bursting. His nest must be hidden somewhere in the grass not a dozen yards from where they sat on the piazza’s edge.
Petra tilted her head to see the speck of song against the sunlight. She stayed silent until the rapture ended and the heaven-glimpser sank home. She even waited a minute or two beyond that sudden silence before she said, but calmly now, her twined fingers relaxing their grip, “My friend, Teresa, is like that bobolink’s song. At least, she’s as happy as that. Jolly as that. I’ll tell you about her, Doctor Pryne. I am glad that you think of us together. I adore her, of course. She was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and she lived there till she was fifteen. Her father and mother kept a day school for boys. But Teresa had four sisters and they all went to the boys’ school. There were three brothers. Eight children in Teresa’s family, you see....”
Chapter Five
Lewis listened, without looking at Petra. As she told him about Teresa, they were both watching for another flight of the bobolink, their eyes focused on the delicately waving tide of grass above the hidden nest. Hearing Petra’s voice, this way, without looking at her, Lewis learned as much about her as she was telling him about Teresa; for her voice had none of the reticence of her gentian eyes nor the stubborn power of her rounded chin. It was a gentle voice, clipped and ingenuous. Above all ingenuous. What her face had lost with childhood her voice had strangely taken on. It had a listening, attentive quality. Lewis, in the practice of his profession, had gradually acquired a habit of separating voices from their possessors. He had discovered that while the face and the very pose and carriage of a person may deceive, the human voice simply cannot. It is the materialization of personality into sound waves.
“... Eight children. Teresa’s mother had taught the fifth grade in a public school in Cambridge. Teresa’s father was Scotch. They met when Mr. Kerr was over here working for a doctor’s degree at Harvard. He came from Edinburgh. They fell so much in love that they couldn’t wait for the degree but got married and went to Edinburgh and started the day school. But it didn’t pay except just in the beginning. By the time all eight children were there in the Kerr family, they began to be really poor. The Kerr children themselves were half the school, you see. Teresa was the oldest. When Teresa was fifteen, they gave up the school in Edinburgh and returned to Cambridge. Teresa’s father got all the tutoring he could do. He was a magnificent teacher. They lived in a five-room apartment on Lawrence Street, all crowded in, but soon they moved to Boston and had a bigger place, in the top floor of a tenement on Bates Street.
“Teresa’s mother and father taught the children as they had done in Scotland. Only her mother did most of it, of course, because her father was away tutoring all day. But the Kerrs had their own ideas about education and didn’t want the children to go to public school. They wanted them to learn Greek and Latin, you see, almost in their cradles. But Teresa did go to High School. She was fifteen when they came to America and her father let her go into the Senior Class in the High School just so she could get a diploma that June. After school she helped with the housework and helped with the children’s lessons too.
“That January two of Teresa’s sisters died, the two who came next her in age. They had T B anyway, the doctor said, but they actually died of pneumonia. Very suddenly. They had been Teresa’s playmates. The rest of the children were more like her babies, she took so much care of them. But Teresa stayed out of school only one week when they died. She needed her diploma, you see, because she was going to go on through college and become a teacher.
“... Well, but when spring came ... something terrible happened.... It is too terrible to tell. But if Teresa bore it, I guess you can bear hearing it, Doctor Pryne. Shall I tell you?”
“Yes,” Lewis urged. “I want to hear,” but added with quick compunction, “if it doesn’t hurt you too much, Petra,”—and was utterly astonished by the devastating look Petra gave him. But her scorn was for herself.
“Hurt me too much!” she exclaimed. “I only wish it could hurt me! Really hurt me! It is too terrible that one person had to bear it all alone. And Teresa, of all people! When she is so happy, so jolly—and loves God more than all the rest of the people I know put together love Him! It was to her it happened. All I’m doing is tell it!
“The twenty-third of April, the Principal of the High School sent for Teresa to come to his office before she went home. He told her that she was to graduate with very highest honors and that he had got a Radcliffe scholarship for her. It was Teresa’s birthday. She was sixteen. Teresa could hardly wait to get home to tell her mother all the Principal had said. It would be Teresa giving a birthday present to her mother, you see. Mothers should have presents even more than the children they have borne should have them, Teresa thinks. For the mothers remember the birthdays and the children can’t.... She ran as fast as she could, the minute she got out of the subway. She didn’t care if people stared at a grown-up girl racing through the streets. She wanted so to get there with the wonderful news. There was a crowd of people at the end of her street held back by ropes. The air was full of smoke....”
Again the bobolink soared, cascading rapture. Petra stopped telling about Teresa’s sixteenth birthday and listened and watched with Lewis. But this time she did not wait for the music to sink and fall away home; after a breath or two she went on, her voice of necessity raised a little, indenting itself through the bobolink’s Gloria.
“The whole building where the Kerr family lived was burned down to the pavement. Somebody told Teresa that everybody had escaped except a woman who lived in the top-story corner tenement and her six children. They had all been burned alive. They came to the windows too late for the fire ladders to reach them. They must have been asleep when the fire started and waked too late. The alarm was sounded a little after eight. Yes ... Teresa had left her mother and all the children sleeping deeply. She and her father had got breakfast together and gone out with infinite care not to wake them,—she to school, he to his work in Cambridge. The baby had had croup during the night, you see, and the whole family had been disturbed by it. Even the younger children. Teresa’s mother had made a tent with sheets over the crib, and boiled a kettle in it, and toward dawn it was over and the baby was sleeping. The police had learned there were six children in the family and that was why they said six were burned. But Teresa, you see, had gotten up early. She and her father. They had been at infinite pains—I told you that—not to wake the others. Infinite pains. The baby was sleeping naturally, breathing softly when they stole out.
“It was a policeman who told Teresa about how the mother and ‘six’ children had come to the window. He had seen them himself.... But a priest shoved him one side. That was Father Donovan. He was their parish priest. The Kerrs were Catholic. Teresa is a Catholic. Teresa couldn’t pray. But Father Donovan’s praying was really hers. He said, ‘My mother, my brothers and sisters, my baby brother. May perpetual light shine upon them.’ ... They gave Teresa brandy. In the rectory. They put it in hot tea. The housekeeper rubbed her feet and hands, while Father Donovan called up all the places her father might be. Father Donovan had thought the police had made certain when they said that all six Kerr children had come to the window, and until Teresa got there, you see, he had no way of tracing her father. But now Teresa gave the names and addresses. Finally somebody said yes—Mr. Kerr was there. Father Donovan said, ‘Then keep him and don’t let him know anything until I come. I must tell him. Nobody else.’ But the people didn’t wait,—or something happened. I don’t know what. I can’t ask Teresa. Perhaps she doesn’t know. Whether he died of the shock or whether he killed himself—thinking all were burned.... All that Teresa said was ‘Father Donovan was in time to give him absolution.’
“Father Donovan boarded Teresa with his housekeeper’s sister. And she went on and got her diploma and graduated from High School with very highest honors in June. Nobody came to her graduation for by then Father Donovan was dying of cancer. He had not told Teresa until he had to. When he found he couldn’t go to the graduation, you see, he told her. She took her diploma right to him. She ran to the rectory the minute she was out. He blessed her and was as delighted and proud as her mother would have been, Teresa says, and her father, and her brothers and sisters. He told her that his death would not be even an interruption to his prayers for her goodness and happiness, and he asked her to pray for him always, all her life. He died early the next morning....
“The week after Father Donovan died Marian found Teresa through an employment agency, and she went to Cape Cod for the summer with us. That was the summer Marian began to be ill. Teresa and I did the work and took care of her, and swam all the rest of the time. I taught Teresa to swim and she was simply mad about it. Marian had melancholia and Father was terribly unhappy that summer. And I was selfish and cross, having to wash so many dishes.... But Teresa was happy!... Yes, it is true. She was the one who was happy.... But gradually, I grew terribly happy too, because of her. She didn’t tell us anything about her family or what had happened to them, only that they were dead. Whenever I asked her about her brothers and sisters who had died, she put me off. And Marian never asked her anything, I think. She had merely hired somebody who was to be one of the family and work for less money because of that privilege. But above all, Marian had chosen Teresa from all the other applicants for the job at the agency because she seemed the most cheerful.
“In September, when we went back to Cambridge, Teresa wanted to use her scholarship and enter Radcliffe. But Marian needed her so much and had come to depend on her for everything so much—but most of all it was her cheerfulness she needed—that Teresa gave up college for that year and stayed on with us. But she told Father and me, then, when she decided to stay on with us, about the fire, and about the two sisters who had died of pneumonia, and about how her mother and father had wanted her to go to college. Father said that she must go, of course, but that she was surely young enough to wait a year. He was appalled about the fire and said she must never tell Marian. It would be too harrowing. And he was very sorry I had heard it....
“The summer after that we couldn’t afford the cottage on the Cape and we stayed on in Cambridge. That was bad for Marian. All the time that she was in the apartment she spent in her bedroom on her chaise-longue. But it was frightfully hot and she would get wildly nervous and go out then to luncheons and tea dances and places—looking very gay and well. But it was only a false, nervous strength, the doctor said....
“Then that fall you came, Doctor Pryne. Teresa and I were so relieved! But you didn’t have a chance. Marian went away, and there was the divorce. But she went away without saying anything to Teresa and me. We came back from a day in the country in time to get dinner that afternoon, and she was gone. That evening Father explained it all to us—in words of one syllable, you know,—what had happened.
“Teresa took it so hard that I don’t remember how I felt about it. I didn’t feel anything, I think. I was so surprised to hear Teresa crying that that was all I thought about, really. It was as if the world was shaking under us—under Father and me—with Teresa, of all people, crying. But Father was angry with Teresa. She said, you see, that he must bring Marian back. He said he would not think of doing any such thing—that she had a right to her freedom, if she wanted it. Teresa started crying when Father said to us, ‘I can honestly say I am happy in Marian’s happiness and I think she has done exactly right. It’s sheer stupidity for people who are not happy together to go on pretending they are. It is happiness that matters. There’s at least one person the happier in the world to-night, and any one who really and genuinely cares for her must be glad for her,—even if it means separation from her, of a sort, and for a time. And after the divorce goes through, you know, there’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t all be as good friends as ever.’
“But Teresa cried just exactly as if somebody was dead. And this time Father Donovan was dead too and could not pray her prayers for her, while she cried. That is what I thought, I remember, though I didn’t understand why she was crying like that. I was terribly frightened by her crying like that—and Father’s walking the floor so white and angry with her.
“Clare came in about then. I think Father called her up and asked her to come, to help him with Teresa. She made Teresa drink some water. And then, when Teresa was quiet, she said, ‘You are a self-righteous, ignorant girl. Mr. Farwell has the patience of a saint but this is more than he can bear.—He is going to give you a month’s wages and you must go away. You are only making things that are hard for him already much harder.’
“I went with Teresa while she packed her suit cases. Clare called up Morris Place House and told them to get a room ready for Teresa. She is a trustee there. She ordered the taxi too, and told us when it came. She took everything in charge, as if she were in Marian’s place already. But Teresa told the taxi-driver to go somewhere else, not Morris Place House. She wasn’t crying any more but she looked ghastly. She wouldn’t let me go away with her but she promised never to forsake me. And she never has. She is my guardian angel.... But Clare doesn’t know any more about Teresa now—how she is, where she is—than she told you she did. And she’s not going to know. That is something I can do for Teresa.... But you asked about her, Doctor Pryne. You remembered her. And now I have told you about her.... I really wanted to....”
The bobolink’s Gloria had reached its climax minutes ago and ceased. Petra’s voice—when she had come to telling how Clare had discharged Teresa and sent her away, “as if she were in Marian’s place already”—had taken on the reticence of her eyes. It was not her personality any more—that voice—not as it had been. But the girl’s eyes, now that both she and the bobolink were silent, and Lewis looked at her, were thick with tears.
“But what did Teresa do? Was it too late to get into Radcliffe that fall? I suppose so. That was late autumn—nearly three years ago. What did Teresa do? Where did she go?”
Lewis had to know. Teresa had become increasingly real and important to him with every word that Petra had said of her. Petra must go on, must tell it all, even if she did cry, doing it.
But there were no tears in her voice. “Yes, it was too late for Radcliffe. Father had again, you see, persuaded her to wait another year. But I went to see her the next morning and she had a plan. She had decided to get some kind of job—any kind—until she could begin earning her way through Radcliffe in the shortest time possible. In the end she meant to be a private secretary and I would go and live with her. Then I would begin going to Business School. We would both be independent and I needn’t live with Clare and Father. After Teresa had gone away in the taxi, they told me, you see, that they were going to be married as soon as the divorces went through,—so it was a very relieving idea, to live with Teresa and earn my own living. Teresa started in to make it come true right away. And it was coming true. She was all ready to graduate when—”
Petra broke off there, jumping up as if a bell had rung for her, and her first duty in life was to answer it. But it was only Dick Wilder, whistling to them from the road.
“Teresa was all ready to graduate and what happened? It doesn’t matter about Dick. Go on.” Lewis was impatient at the interruption.
“But they want us. Clare has sent him for us. She thinks I have kept you too long,” Petra whispered, and promised, quickly, under her breath, “I will tell you what happened the minute we are alone again. I want to tell you. I want your advice, Doctor Pryne. Things have happened.—But not now. Teresa is a secret here at Green Doors. From Dick Wilder too. From everybody.”
Dick had come around the side of the house. “Why didn’t you sing out?” he inquired, astonished at finding them there. “I thought you must have passed up our famous view and gone somewhere else, you two! Lowell has turned up at last. But whatever—”
Dick was silenced by a fresh astonishment. This was stranger than their hiding and not answering,—Petra crying. Of all things! And even Lewis was not quite himself. Well, Dick knew nothing to do about it other than to recommence talking faster than ever—which he did—and somehow hurry them back to the elm and Clare’s management. He began explaining, very swiftly and at some length, as they went, how little Sophia had refused to let anybody but her mother feed her her supper, and that that was why they—he and Clare—had been gone such an unconscionably long while themselves, and how, taking everything together, he was afraid that Petra’s father was feeling that they hadn’t any of them much realized that he had broken off his work half an hour ahead of the usual time to join them at tea, since nobody was anywhere near the tea table when he came up from his studio.
Petra may have heard something of Dick’s nervous chatter. Lewis heard nothing. Left to himself, he would never have been so docile under Dick’s high-handedness, of course. But Petra had shown such a passionate will to obedience from the instant of the summoning whistle that there was nothing else for Lewis but to seem docile too.
And here they were back on the lawn again, going down toward the group of chairs under the elm. Lowell Farwell had risen and was standing, waiting for them. He was more imposing even than the published portraits. His leonine mane of frosty curls, his elegant but wide shoulders, his height—and as they reached the shade and were near enough—his luminous black eyes under striking black brows, were the concrete and visible aspects of a personality to conjure with.
Chapter Six
Lewis had dined with his sister and her family and now he and she were promenading her piazza. Cynthia was like her name, fragrantly feminine, blond and delightful, a cool petaled flower of New England. They caught glimpses of Harry, her banker husband, as they passed and repassed the living-room windows. He was lying back in what might very well be the world’s most comfortable chair, reading the financial pages of the Transcript, smoking his Corona, and supposedly enjoying the jazz music which came blaring to him from a Boston hotel through his radio; he had only to raise a hand—no need even to lift his head—to turn the knob which would produce a decent quiet.
“I always promise myself when I’m here that I will come oftener,” Lewis was saying. “Then I get so devilish busy I don’t manage it. But now, Cynthia, it may be different. You may be seeing too much of me.”
“That’s nice. I should love to see too much of you. But why now? Oh! Green Doors, of course! And I’ve been trying to get you to go over there with me for a year or more! You see why, now, don’t you! It’s fascinating, isn’t it! I feel, sometimes, when I’m there, that the very air is charged with a sort of electricity, if you know what I mean, which you don’t, since it doesn’t express what I mean. But it’s all high spots, somehow. We must seem commonplace to them, Harry and I. But Clare is sweet to us, all the same. Even Lowell Farwell doesn’t seem bored. He and Harry discuss international affairs, Russia and that sort of thing. And Clare herself is so human. Isn’t she beautiful—in an unusual way!”
“But why wouldn’t Mrs. Farwell be human?” Lewis laughed. “Do you imply that she is above or below the norm? As to being beautiful—Petra is really beautiful.”
“Petra—really beautiful? Yes, I suppose she is. But her features are too classical to be interesting, don’t you think? And she’s so impassive. She’s too big too. She’ll be positively statuesque some day. That type always develop into Junos. Clare is frightfully sweet to her. Frightfully patient. And what a background she’s providing her with! All it needs is just a little playing up to! If she only knew how!”
“What do you mean, background?” Lewis asked curiously. And he wondered, what had Petra ever done to Cynthia to bring out such malice. Malice was no more natural to Cynthia than to himself.
“What do you think I mean?” she exclaimed, a little impatiently. “The people she is meeting, of course. Yourself to-day, for instance. How many times have you gone anywhere socially during the last year, Lewis? Yet you went to the Farwells’. And you say you want to go again, often. But it’s not only celebrities. Socially, too, Clare is giving Petra everything. This dinner dance tonight. Dick says there isn’t a man invited who isn’t the last word in eligibility. Why, Clare is providing Petra opportunities any ordinary girl would give her eyes for. And it’s probably wasted. Men want more than mere passive beauty these days. Temperament, vivacity are what count. Clare doesn’t realize it, of course, but the very contrast between herself and Petra puts them off Petra in spite of Clare’s disadvantage in being married and thirty. It couldn’t help to. Wait till little Sophia grows up, though. Then Clare will have her innings as a mother. The little thing sparkles already! Personality is a queer thing, isn’t it?”
“I’ve sometimes almost thought so,” Lewis agreed dryly. Then he asked, “Can you tell me, Cynthia, why Dick, who is adult, after a fashion—anyway, he isn’t a mere callow college boy—and seems practically to live at Green Doors, hasn’t fallen in love with Petra? And she with him? It’s a miracle.”
Lewis meant his question earnestly. For hours now, in his heart, he had been religiously grateful for the miracle mentioned.
“Are you serious?” Cynthia asked. “Couldn’t you see for yourself—this afternoon? Let’s sit down. No—I don’t want a chair. You take it. I’ll perch here on the rail. Yes, do smoke. What an absolutely precious cigarette case you’ve got there! My dear, let me take it! How delicious! Just feeling it in your hand is thrilling! A present?”
Lewis nodded, but absently. Cynthia, as Dick had done, refrained from commenting on the probable value of the gift. If Lewis realized the value, he would only be made uncomfortable by it.
“You want to know why Dick doesn’t fall in love with Petra Farwell? It’s too obvious. How could a person like Dick look twice at that gauche girl, with Clare all the while in the same picture? Besides, Dick, more than most moderns, is a romantic. It sticks out all over him. He’s an incorrigible idealist. But I’m not worried for Dick. He won’t get his heart broken. Clare is too big to let that happen. It’s really the most civilizing thing that could happen to him to be in love with a woman like Clare at precisely this stage in his development. Think of the color, the sheer beauty, the depth that knowing Clare so well—even thinking he is breaking his heart over her—is giving to Dick’s life! As for falling in love with a girl like Petra—why, he isn’t aware of her, except, perhaps, as one of Clare’s problems. Dick hasn’t said anything to us—Harry and me—of Petra’s being a problem at Green Doors. Clare herself is too selfless and big in every way ever to let on, of course. But anybody can see! Clare’s being so extraordinarily sweet and patient only makes it stand out all the more, how much a problem Petra is. Couldn’t you see it yourself, this afternoon, Lewis? Where’s your psychology?”
“Where is your own, Cynthia, my dear?” Lewis’ voice was oddly constrained, Cynthia thought, wondering at it. “Why don’t you look at Petra for yourself? It’s obvious you never have. You’ve supinely accepted Clare’s version of her, without using your own intelligence.”
“Clare’s version of Petra! But haven’t I just been saying that Clare is absolutely loyal to Petra? She defends her, every time. She even goes so far as to call her sullen silences ‘reticence.’ And her vanity—Petra’s obsessed over clothes, thinks of nothing else—Clare merely treats that as touchingly young and naïve. Or else she pretends that it’s evidence of artistic appreciation and taste. But if that’s what it is, why doesn’t it show itself in other directions, now and then? I’ve never seen it. Why, the other day I mentioned something in her father’s last novel, and Petra had to admit she hadn’t even read it! Imagine! No, whatever Clare pretends to herself and the rest of us about it, Petra is just plain dull.... One is sorry for Clare, of course....”
Lewis was keeping only a tenuous hold on his good temper. “How can you be so dull yourself?” he asked. “She—Petra—is as far from dull as any human being I’ve ever had the honor to know. I suppose you’ve seen her nowhere but against the general unreality of Green Doors. That’s the ‘background’ your Clare has given the child.... Petra’s truth, against her background’s untruth, has bewildered you. It hasn’t me....” He lighted a fresh cigarette.
Cynthia flapped her arms and burst into as good an imitation of a rooster crowing as is possible to the human species. It was an accomplishment retained from childhood. In those early days it had been, usually, the closing note in some argument between brother and sister, where Cynthia had been proven the winner; and now, if ever, she knew herself right.
“You lose! I win!” she laughed, dropping her wings. “What good does it do you to be a psychiatrist? And a famous one? Petra and truth! That girl would as soon tell an out-and-out lie as wink. Clare never knows where she is with her when it’s a question of fact.”
“Oh, so Clare has admitted that much—not excused it?”
“Not a bit of it. You haven’t caught me, darling, in a fib. Clare couldn’t excuse it or cover it up. It’s too obvious. Petra is always avoiding the truth.”
“Yes. I got a hint of that myself this afternoon. Couldn’t help it.”
But now that so suddenly and even surprisingly Lewis had acknowledged her victorious in the scrimmage, Cynthia felt a little remorseful. Not on Lewis’ account—he could afford his losses—on Petra’s.
“I needn’t have been so malicious!” she owned. “Come to think of it, I suppose Petra Farwell’s never had one atom of religious training. What is there to make her feel an obligation to be truthful—or even grateful, for the matter of that? She’s never had a chance to see life lived beautifully—till now.”
“But who of us has had religious training?” Lewis asked, surprised. “You haven’t. I certainly haven’t. Your own children haven’t. What’s that got to do with your judgments on Petra, then?”
“Oh, don’t be so logical, darling. I was only making excuses for her, I suppose. But we are different, you must admit. Lying doesn’t come natural to us, does it! And we are sincere....”
“Doesn’t it? Are we? Well—possibly. But then we are at peace with our environment. Not in danger from it. Our best policy is sincerity, telling the truth. If we were living in a jungle, my dear, an unfriendly and mysterious jungle, where we couldn’t tell the trees from the shadows, you know, we’d fall back on protective coloring and other hypocrisies, lies, wouldn’t we? That’s where Petra’s living. In a jungle. Where she can’t tell the shadows from the trees, if you want to know....”
“You’re being fantastic on purpose. Or else you’re overworking and not responsible!” Cynthia accused and then, suddenly, stopped breathing. How had they ever got to talking like this, so earnestly, about Petra Farwell? Lewis, anyway, who never talked personalities! What had happened to him? Why was he looking so strained and different? Was Lewis really interested in Petra Farwell for herself—in some particular way?
For years Cynthia had wanted Lewis to marry. Her husband agreed with her that, unmarried, the world was losing much that her famous brother could give it. He was terribly sweet with children. Her own four adored him. And some of his best and most famous work had been done with children. Besides, he was—although Cynthia herself, being only his sister, could not quite see why—extraordinarily magnetic to women. They pursued him shamelessly. Avoiding that pursuit, both in his work and socially, had developed into something approximating an art in his contacts, Cynthia imagined. So he had a world to choose from. If only he had met Clare before Lowell Farwell met her! Cynthia had sighed this sigh to herself before to-night. Clare would have been perfect. But there were others. There must be. Lewis needn’t fall back on a Petra—a sullen, stodgy young beauty, who wasn’t even enough of a personality herself to appreciate personality in another, in Clare. If Lewis should be hypnotized by mere beauty and youth, and do anything so stupid,—how simply ironic that would be!
Catching back her breath, Cynthia descended precipitately from her perch on the piazza rail. She wanted to be nearer Lewis. Physical nearness might help their sympathetic nearness, which had been—she knew now—scattered to the four winds when she flapped rooster wings and crowed a minute ago. Besides, she had an inspiration. She drew a chair close to his. The arms of the two chairs touched.
“Lewis!” she said. “Do you remember that strange book, ‘Phantastes,’ by George MacDonald? We read it together the summer after Father died. No, it was the summer before. Aunt Cynthia read it to us. Those weeks we stayed with her. That was the summer before Father died, wasn’t it? Anyway, we were really too young for that book. But we got something out of it. I remember parts quite vividly, every now and then.... Particularly that gruesome bit about the Maid of the Alder. Remember that? How she was so perfectly beautiful to look at? Anodos thought so, anyway. And he went with her that long walk through the forest and spent the night with her in her cave? He thought she was the Lady of the Marble—or was it Alabaster?—whom he had sung to life and who had fled from him. He had never clearly seen her face but she was his ideal woman, the woman his soul was seeking. Now he thought he was to possess her at last.... But when morning came and he woke, his companion of the night had waked ahead of him and was at the door of the cave, standing there, looking out. Her back was turned to him.... Remember?... She had had her desire of Anodos and she simply didn’t care now if he discovered that she was not his ideal woman? She was perfectly careless that he should see how she was hollow! Do you remember her standing there, in the cave door, looking out into the forest—her hollow, rotten back, like the stump of a decayed tree? Like a coffin stood upon end? Wasn’t it gruesome just!”
Cynthia was genuinely shuddering by this time. Lewis laughed. “I should say I do remember. That morning-after scene darkened my boyhood,” he chuckled. “I’ve read ‘Phantastes’ through several times since that summer. I keep it by me. I can’t imagine—can you?—why Aunt Cynthia chose that particular book for youngsters like us? I suppose because of its fairy element—the enchanted forest, and all. To my mind, it’s one of the world’s deepest, wisest, but almost too obscurely mystical books. Do you remember, Cynthia, how one begins to feel the horror threatening Anodos’ soul’s life, early, in the very beginning of this Maid of the Alder business, when he starts off with her on the walk to the cave? Your first twinges of horror and dread for Anodos set in when she takes such precautions to keep her face always squarely toward him, walking backwards to accomplish it, when necessary! Then, when they at last reach the cave, she makes him go in ahead of her. Inside, she always keeps her back to the wall. How horrible it is when the lamp shines through her! Anodos should have guessed then that she was hollow!... It is a nightmare....”
“But Lewis! I meant—I’m afraid I meant—that Petra Farwell, young girl though she is, has several times made me remember the Maid of the Alder. I haven’t just made it up now. Truly. I thought of it the last time I was at Green Doors. We were there for dinner....”
“Petra—the Maid of the Alder! You’re a little mad! But it’s rather a curious coincidence that I myself have been brooding on ‘Phantastes’ very lately, this afternoon, in fact, at Green Doors and apropos of Petra too. Fact! Do you remember Anodos’ song to his ideal woman—the genuine one, not the imitation—through her shrouding marble? It says how the world’s sculptors in their search for her have succeeded in embodying in their creations no more than their ideas of what she may be. They’ve never taken hold of her living self. I even remember some lines. Bless me if I don’t!
“Round their visions, form enduring,
Marble vestments thou hast thrown;
But thyself, in silence winding,
Thou has kept eternally;
Thee they found not, many finding—
I have found thee: wake for me.”
Lewis murmuring poetry in the dusk! And with the little curly smile that with him, paradoxically, meant utterest sincerity in what he was saying, even solemnity! Cynthia’s heart beat slowly and with a kind of awe at the simplicity of the way in which Lewis’ curly smile and his poetry had shut her up, permanently, on the subject of Petra. The whole situation—trivial and really nothing at all to Cynthia until only a minute ago—had between a breath and a breath been lifted to the dignity of a position on the knees of the gods, where she must perforce leave it to its own developments in that realm of pure fatality. And she thought they had been talking lightly!
But now her brother was asking—casual again, thank goodness—“Have the kids gone up to bed yet? I’m terribly afraid I promised ’em a yarn after they were packed away and that model starched nurse you indict on ’em was well out of the picture. They’ll be looking for me.”
Chapter Seven
Lewis was pledged to return to Green Doors at ten o’clock that evening. Cynthia and Harry, Clare was aware, had made plans which would keep their cherished guest occupied for all of Sunday, and he could not come then. This was the only time left. She had made the rendezvous under cover of walking up to the house with Lewis when he was leaving Green Doors this afternoon. He was to let himself in by the wicket gate and she would meet him on the terrace, for Petra was not to know that he had come back. Dick had explained her scheme to him, had he not?
Yes, Dick had explained, and while at the time of the explanation Lewis had had no intention of collaborating with Mrs. Farwell in any schemes whatever, now he agreed to return for a “talk.” Anything that touched Petra’s existence would have drawn him irresistibly back.
The great hall was wide open onto the terrace tonight, as it had been this afternoon. It made an excellent ballroom. It was a small party and every one was inside, dancing. At least, as Lewis came up onto it, the terrace seemed deserted.
His eyes found Petra first of all. She was dancing with a tall, dark youth, over a restricted area in the center of the floor. Lewis saw that the other girls were like flowers in the black-coated arms of their partners—scarlet flowers, blue, yellow, exotically scented. Or was the perfume from the flowers on the terrace? In any case, it harmonized with the exotic music. But the girls themselves seemed too fragile for the voluptuous implications of the perfume and the music. They were flowers drifting on the dark current of sensuousness with petals not yet sodden.
Lewis was amused at himself over his fancifulness but it continued to spin itself along. If the girls there were flowers, the boys were leaves. And the leaves, no more than the flowers, belonged to the dark current under the music; they were merely eddying over its surface, vacant and bemused. It was strangely unreal, unconvincing—both the would-be savage music and the would-be voluptuous dancing.
But Petra was different. His eyes came back to her. She was not bemused and she was too alive to drift. So her dancing was out of key and came near to awkwardness. Given solid earth, she could run fleetly, beautifully, Lewis was certain,—a Diana, spirit and body one. But she was too alive and too vital to find herself in this syncopated dalliance with a shadow world of sensuousness. Passion, for her to recognize it, must be bright, whole, burning with sun. Lewis was not amused now at his thought. He knew what he knew about Petra, and his heart offered up a gratitude that was religious in the knowing.
Clare stole up and stood beside him. She had been watching for his arrival, sitting with Dick in the shadow of a tall flower-grown urn. She had sent the young man back to the party peremptorily and with some excitement the instant the older and more eminent visitor appeared.
“Aren’t they precious!” she exclaimed, her fingers just touching Lewis’ arm. “All of them! But my Petra in particular? In that frosty gown!—Come to the library. We can’t talk against this racket. Lowell’s in town speaking to a meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club, otherwise he would be hiding in the library himself. He detests jazz. Except when your brother-in-law plays it. Harry’s jazz is superb. He makes it art!”
The library was a surprisingly small room but its walls rose through two stories with books all the way up to the high ceiling. A mild, yellow and diffused light, radiating from unseen sources, would make reading here—even at the top of the book ladder—as easy for the eyes as if it were broad day.
Clare settled herself in a corner of the very low, built-in modern divan which extended down one entire length of the room, and Lewis, obedient to her gesture, sat down, experimentally, beside her. He had had little practice with modernistic furniture such as this, which, he was learning now, demanded a new technique in posture, unless one were built on angular lines and accustomed to lolling. It would quite suit Farwell, for instance, whose divan it was. But Lewis, who was stocky rather than angular, found himself having to bend in all the wrong places to adapt himself to it. Mrs. Farwell, however, was perfectly at home. She had drawn her feet up under her, Japanese fashion, and sat now perched on her heels, wand-straight, small and exquisite. But then, she was as supple-bodied as a child and as poised as a dancer in every attitude that she assumed.
“I am really delighted,” she was saying, “that you have come, like this. If I had gone into town some day, instead, and seen you in your office, everything would have been so different. I should have had to tell you about things. We may have saved weeks, don’t you think so, Doctor Pryne, in getting you here where you can see it all for yourself and needn’t draw it out bit by bit with questions?”
Clare’s evening gown was flame-colored taffeta, her jewels pearls, her feet—out of sight but remembered—were sandal-shod with gold heels, curved like dagger blades. It was an elegance in striking contrast to the simplicity and seeming carelessness of her afternoon’s appearance. But Lewis felt no contrast. It was all of the same piece: all part of the game. And when he looked away from her, which he did rather quickly in very shame for the ungenerosity of every thought he seemed able to think concerning Petra’s stepmother, it was only to find her voice increasing his prejudice. No matter what ideas her words in themselves conveyed, certain inflections in the tones seemed to be asking over and over, “What do you think of me, what do you think of me, what do you think of me?” It was the eager and unappeasable cry of an insatiate vanity. Lewis hated himself for hearing it so plainly; but his nerves were taut. When had Doctor Pryne allowed himself the excuse of nerves before! Yet to be so near Petra and shut away in here with Mrs. Farwell!
He wound his arms around his knees. That was it. That was what you had to do to come to terms with this fantastic divan. Stick your knees up, almost to your chin, and then not to be altogether too orang-utan-like, wind your arms. The only alternative would be to sit on your feet, as his hostess was doing.
“There wouldn’t have been any need for you to come to my office,” he said. “Not to talk about Petra. She is the last person in the world, to my mind, to need psychiatric treatment.” He might as well get this part over quickly, Lewis felt.
Clare was surprised by the dry conviction with which Lewis spoke, but she was not warned. She swayed toward him, from her heels, and put her hand on his arm. The gesture was as unselfconscious, and un-sex-conscious, as if she were a child of ten. Lewis was aware of her unconsciousness all the time that her fingers stayed there, pressing into his coat sleeve, and her soft warm breath was almost on his cheek. He wondered whether she pawed Dick like this, with casual unselfconsciousness,—and whether Dick found it engagingly innocent. Dick was just the sort of romantic youth—Lewis hadn’t needed Cynthia to explain Dick to him—to confuse sexual paucity with purity.
“Oh, but you don’t understand what we meant then, Richard and I,” she protested. “Psychiatry—anyway as you practise it, Doctor Pryne—is not for diseased minds merely. Petra is terribly sane. Saner than I am, I’m certain of that. It is something less tangible I am asking your help with. I want you to make it possible for my stepdaughter to be true to herself and to be happy.—That wasn’t Petra’s true self you saw this afternoon. I know, Doctor, that it is your faith, as much as it is mine, that most people want to find themselves and be true to themselves, to their best selves, I mean, if only they can be shown how. If you hadn’t that faith in human nature, then you couldn’t do for people what you do. You see I know something about your work. Mrs. Dickerman is one of my intimate friends. Cornelia James too. I’ve known Cornie ever since we were at Miss Foster’s School together. So I know, for I have seen, how you took at least one woman and made her into a charming, agreeable person when she was over thirty. Why, Cornie was the most morbid, oversensitive and unhappy soul until you began treating her!—And even if I hadn’t seen these miracles, I’d still know from reading your books what you can do for people in the way of orientating them with their own highest potentialities. And all I am asking, Doctor Pryne, is that you should do that for my Petra. You do believe, don’t you, that it isn’t natural to her—can’t be natural to any one—to be so secretive and indifferent as she seems? Not at nineteen, anyway! And with Lowell Farwell for a father—and I so devoted to her!”—Clare’s fingers had relaxed their steady pressure but she was slow to remove them from Lewis’s coat sleeve.
Lewis might have laughed. He frowned to save himself from doing so; for it would not have been a pleasant laugh and the frown was, at least, silent. Clare was not the first blasphemous wealthy woman who had tried, casually and even patronizingly, to buy his services as a cure of souls for themselves or members of their family. But in this instance it was Petra’s reserve—that clean, sword-edged reserve—he was being asked to violate. Yes, this woman was looking forward to his pulling Petra all apart, like the works of a clock, and laying the pieces on the table, for them to mull over together.
He could hear Mrs. Lowell Farwell expatiating on it to her next dinner partner. Yet, no. She would hardly do that. It would be worth saving until the conversation was general. “Oh, yes. Doctor Pryne is psychoanalyzing my stepdaughter. He is frightfully interested in her case. It is too wonderful what he has done for her already. She’s a different person. Oh, but you must know who he is! Doctor Lewis Pryne! He wrote ‘Learning to be Adult.’”
Oh, yes! Mrs. Farwell would exploit it for all it was worth at dinners, luncheons, teas and in the arms of dancing partners for weeks to come, while all the time the inflections in her voice demanded, “What do you think of me, what do you think of me, what do you think of me now?”
Only, of course she would not—because she could not. Fortunately she had come to the wrong counter. Lewis had nothing to sell her—but, on second thoughts, something, possibly, that he would give her for nothing; for it had suddenly occurred to him that if he failed her entirely to-night, she might try elsewhere. There were psychoanalysts quite the sort she imagined him to be, of course. Would Petra, with Mrs. Farwell setting her heart on it, have the hardihood to stand out against going through the fashionable paces of being psychoanalyzed? He must do what he could to avoid such a possible calamity.
“This question of finding one’s self,” he murmured,—“it’s living one’s life, isn’t it, that accomplishes that, in the end? Petra is too young to have found herself in that sense, of course. But she is old enough, on the other hand, to want to. That may be the conflict, the cause of all her ‘indifference’ to you and her life here. She said something to me this afternoon about wanting to go to business school and be independent. Wouldn’t her father send her? That would be cheaper, anyway, and infinitely more sensible than having her psychoanalyzed. She could get quite away from Green Doors. Live in the Girls’ Studio Club—or perhaps even set up an apartment with some girl friend....” He was, of course, thinking of Teresa.
It had the effect, anyway, of removing Mrs. Farwell’s hand from his arm. She was back in her corner, looking at him with surprise and even doubt.
“Petra didn’t tell you that she wanted to get away from Green Doors and all I am doing for her here? Did she? Petra didn’t actually say—this afternoon, the minute you were alone with her—that she was unhappy? Did she? I simply don’t understand, Doctor Pryne!”
“But why are you surprised?” Lewis evaded. “I gathered from young Wilder when he came to my office on Thursday that that was how things were with Petra. You felt she was abnormally indifferent to you, he said, and to all the nice things you were trying to do for her and to give her. But, do you know, now I’ve seen Petra, that indifference seems perfectly healthy to me? She is, after all, not a child. She’s a woman. Let her learn a profession and be independent! Why not?”
Mrs. Farwell was growing wider and wider eyed. Then suddenly Lewis knew what he should have guessed: Clare had never really believed that Petra was antagonistic to her. She had thought her indifference and reticence merely temperamental idiosyncrasies. In fact, she had in all sincerity thought Petra what she had made Cynthia think her, a girl deficient in sensibility. So she was only tampering with Petra’s temperament, or rather, asking Lewis to tamper with it, for the sake of drawing him—Doctor Lewis Pryne—into the Farwells’ “interesting” circle. Modern morbid psychology was much in the air these days. Being psychoanalyzed by “well-known” doctors had become a fashionable pastime. Having one’s stepdaughter, to whom one was in every way so marvelously generous, psychoanalyzed, and then oneself discussing the case in the wings, as it were, with the famous psychiatrist ad infinitum, would be a new way to play the game.
A strained laugh from Clare interrupted Lewis’ bitter train of thought. “I am afraid Petra has been deceiving you, rather,” she exclaimed. “What I can’t understand is how she managed it, and in so short a time, with you, who are so—so wise. She must have deliberately set out to engage your sympathies the minute I left her alone with you. But why? And as for a girl like Petra living at the Studio Club—after Green Doors—can you imagine it, really? Don’t tell me she suggested that!”
“Perhaps not,” Lewis answered. “As a matter of fact, she would be more restricted in her freedom there than here, I suppose. But with a friend, then—in an apartment—”
Again the laugh. “You don’t know Petra, Doctor Pryne! She hasn’t an intimate friend to her name. I invite girls here, of course, all the time. They come, enjoy themselves with each other and the boys, and invite Petra to their homes in return. But as for friends, she simply doesn’t make them. She hasn’t the gift of friendship. It’s one of my worries about her,—one of the things I thought your analysis of her might cure!”
“But there’s Teresa. That’s one friend, at least, Teresa—” Too late Lewis knew himself a traitor to Petra’s confidences, and broke off, embarrassed and sorry. But to his great relief, Clare seemed not to have even heard. She was repeating, but almost as if for her own ears, and very softly, “I don’t understand. Petra took you to the guest house to show you the river view. That is all the time you two were together. And in that short while Petra conveyed to you that she was unhappy here and wanted to get away. Why, it’s unbelievable! How could even Petra be quite so—so outrageous as that!”
“But mightn’t Petra think it a little outrageous of us, of you and me, to be discussing her here now, as we are doing?” Lewis inquired reasonably. “Why shouldn’t she be wounded—and angry? I don’t see any difference, really....”
Shock dried the tears, just gathered, from the widened eyes which were turned on him. If Clare had taken anything for granted, as certain to result from to-day’s anticipated contact with this supposedly brilliant psychiatrist, it was that he would be deeply impressed by her beautiful disinterested kindness toward this girl who had no natural claim on her whatever. But from the very first minute, so Clare began to think now, Doctor Pryne had missed everything of what should have been obvious to him. He had no subtlety then! But if this were true, why was everybody so mad about him and how could he be a successful doctor of souls! That was what Lowell called him, and he was even talking of putting him into his next novel,—disguised, of course. And then the miracles he worked! You simply had to have penetration of some sort, understanding of some sort, to do for personalities what he had done for Julia Dickerman, Cornie and all the rest! But even without any extraordinary amount of penetration you would expect him to see that it was both disloyal and cheap for Petra to have confided in him as she must have done this afternoon, the very minute they were alone together.
Suddenly Clare gave up the idea of being hurt by Petra’s astounding disloyalty. She would be too generous, too big to think of herself in the situation at all. But she understood now that she would have to say to this man whatever it was she wanted him to know. No use trusting to his discerning anything! That was what Petra had done, apparently. Said things. Simply because Petra had said things, Doctor Pryne had believed them—and that in spite of all that he should have seen and all that Clare had meant him to see for himself! Well, she—Clare—would have to descend to Petra’s crude methods. She would explain herself to this exasperating person in words and expound her relations with Petra. But she would leave the malice to Petra. The very contrast between her generosity and Petra’s smallness ought to speak for itself. He simply could not be so obtuse as to miss that much—or could he?
She refrained from touching him, although her impulse had again been to put her fingers on his arm. Instinctively she had a minute ago come to feel that physical contact made this particular man uncomfortable. But the urgency of Clare’s fingers’ pressure was transferred to her voice when she said:
“I am afraid that you have begun by misunderstanding almost everything, Doctor Pryne. But it doesn’t matter. I mean, it doesn’t matter that you consider Petra justified in her attitude toward me and what I am trying to do for her, as you seem to. What does matter—all that I care about at all—is Petra’s good. It is for her own sake I want her to become adjusted and happy, an integrated personality. It is not for my sake. Not even for her father’s. And if you are right and I ought to give her up, let her go away,—why, then I hope I am unselfish enough to let her try it. But why business school—of all things, for a daughter of Lowell Farwell’s? It will be interesting to know.”
But she gave Lewis no chance to answer that. She hurried on:
“First you must tell me everything she said to you. I don’t mean what she may have said about Green Doors, her home here, or me. No, I am afraid hearing that would hurt too much. But what she wanted different. Let us just concentrate on the positive side of things and let the negative go.... You see, even if you won’t take her as a patient, in the way I hoped you would take her, I still need your advice, your wisdom, Doctor. For in those brief moments you were alone with my stepdaughter, you seem to have come nearer to understanding her than I have in the years of our close association. You made her articulate for once. That in itself is something. Petra, articulate!”
She paused there, but only to draw Lewis’ glance to her face. “You see, my husband can’t help me with Petra.” Her eyes probed in the shallows of Lewis’ cold, sleepy gaze. “He is out of it, even if she is his own daughter. There is almost nothing of sympathy between them. That is what I have been working for, ever since my marriage, to help them to a more happy relationship. I have dreamed that Lowell might come to love the daughter of his youth as he loves our little Sophia. He adores the baby. But that, I am afraid, is merely because she is mine, and her very existence makes me more his. That is the way it is in happy marriages, of course. Father-love is all bound up in the father’s love for the mother. But Lowell, you see, loved Petra’s mother (if you can call it love)—well, differently—and that is why Petra herself—I have figured it out—means so little to him....”
Again Clare kept her fingers from Lewis’ coat sleeve but she actually clutched her hands on her lap to accomplish it. And she swayed toward him, her eyes insisting on holding his cold gaze. Her whole vivid, quicksilver face was alive with her intention to make Lewis her ally, to win from him something at last, of what she had intended to win when she invited him back to-night.