The Breaking Point (11 page)

"Doesn't anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?"

"A little jam, sometimes. Or perhaps they drop it, butter side down, on
the carpet."

"But that is tragedy, isn't it?"

He had had to acknowledge that it might be. But he had been quite
emphatic over the fact that most people didn't drop it.

After a long time he slept in his chair. The spring wind came in through
the opened window, and fluttered the leaves of the old prayer-book on
the stand.

The week that followed was an anxious one. David's physical condition
slowly improved. The slight thickness was gone from his speech, and he
sipped resignedly at the broths Lucy or the nurse brought at regular
intervals. Over the entire house there hung all day the odor of stewing
chicken or of beef tea in the making, and above the doorbell was a white
card which said: "Don't ring. Walk in."

As it happened, no one in the old house had seen Maggie Donaldson's
confession in the newspaper. Lucy was saved that anxiety, at least.
Appearing, as it did, the morning after David's stroke, it came in with
the morning milk, lay about unnoticed, and passed out again, to start
a fire or line a pantry shelf. Harrison Miller, next door, read it over
his coffee. Walter Wheeler in the eight-thirty train glanced at it and
glanced away. Nina Ward read it in bed. And that was all.

There came to the house a steady procession of inquirers and bearers
of small tribute, flowers and jellies mostly, but other things also.
A table in David's room held a steadily growing number of bedroom
slippers, and Mrs. Morgan had been seen buying soles for still others.
David, propped up in his bed, would cheer a little at these votive
offerings, and then relapse again into the heavy troubled silence that
worried Dick and frightened Lucy Crosby. Something had happened, she was
sure. Something connected with Dick. She watched David when Dick was
in the room, and she saw that his eyes followed the younger man with
something very like terror.

And for the first time since he had walked into the house that night so
long ago, followed by the tall young man for whose coming a letter had
prepared her, she felt that David had withdrawn himself from her. She
went about her daily tasks a little hurt, and waited for him to choose
his own time. But, as the days went on, she saw that whatever this new
thing might be, he meant to fight it out alone, and that the fighting it
out alone was bad for him. He improved very slowly.

She wondered, sometimes, if it was after all because of Dick's growing
interest in Elizabeth Wheeler. She knew that he was seeing her daily,
although he was too busy now for more than a hasty call. She felt that
she could even tell when he had seen her; he would come in, glowing and
almost exalted, and, as if to make up for the moments stolen from David,
would leap up the stairs two at a time and burst into the invalid's room
like a cheerful cyclone. Wasn't it possible that David had begun to
feel as she did, that the girl was entitled to a clean slate before
she pledged herself to Dick? And the slate—poor Dick!—could never be
cleaned.

Then, one day, David astonished them both. He was propped up in his bed,
and he had demanded a cigar, and been very gently but firmly refused.
He had been rather sulky about it, and Dick had been attempting to rally
him into better humor when he said suddenly:

"I've had time to think things over, Dick. I haven't been fair to you.
You're thrown away here. Besides—" he hesitated. Then: "We might as
well face it. The day of the general practitioner has gone."

"I don't believe it," Dick said stoutly. "Maybe we are only signposts
to point the way to the other fellows, but the world will always need
signposts."

"What I've been thinking of," David pursued his own train of thought,
"is this: I want you to go to Johns Hopkins and take up the special work
you've been wanting to do. I'll be up soon and—"

"Call the nurse, Aunt Lucy," said Dick. "He's raving."

"Not at all," David retorted testily. "I've told you. This whole town
only comes here now to be told what specialist to go to, and you know
it."

"I don't know anything of the sort."

"If you don't, it's because you won't face the facts." Dick chuckled,
and threw an arm over David's shoulder, "You old hypocrite!" he said.
"You're trying to get rid of me, for some reason. Don't tell me you're
going to get married!"

But David did not smile. Lucy, watching him from her post by the window,
saw his face and felt a spasm of fear. At the most, she had feared
a mental conflict in David. Now she saw that it might be something
infinitely worse, something impending and immediate. She could hardly
reply when Dick appealed to her.

"Are you going to let him get rid of me like this, Aunt Lucy?" he
demanded. "Sentenced to Johns Hopkins, like Napoleon to St. Helena! Are
you with me, or forninst me?"

"I don't know, Dick," she said, with her eyes on David. "If it's for
your good—"

She went out after a time, leaving them at it hammer and tongs. David
was vanquished in the end, but Dick, going down to the office later
on, was puzzled. Somehow it was borne in on him that behind David's
insistence was a reason, unspoken but urgent, and the only reason that
occurred to him as possible was that David did not, after all, want him
to marry Elizabeth Wheeler. He put the matter to the test that night,
wandering in in dressing-gown and slippers, as was his custom before
going to bed, for a brief chat. The nurse was downstairs, and Dick moved
about the room restlessly. Then he stopped and stood by the bed, looking
down.

"A few nights ago, David, I asked you if you thought it would be right
for me to marry; if my situation justified it, and if to your knowledge
there was any other reason why I could not or should not. You said there
was not."

"There is no reason, of course. If she'll have you."

"I don't know that. I know that whether she will or not is a pretty
vital matter to me, David."

David nodded, silently.

"But now you want me to go away. To leave her. You're rather urgent
about it. And I feel-well I begin to think you have a reason for it."

David clenched his hands under the bed-clothing, but he returned Dick's
gaze steadily.

"She's a good girl," he said. "But she's entitled to more than you can
give her, the way things are."

"That is presupposing that she cares for me. I haven't an idea that
she does. That she may, in time—Then, that's the reason for this Johns
Hopkins thing, is it?"

"That's the reason," David said stoutly. "She would wait for you. She's
that sort. I've known her all her life. She's as steady as a rock. But
she's been brought up to have a lot of things. Walter Wheeler is well
off. You do as I want you to; pack your things and go to Baltimore.
Bring Reynolds down here to look after the work until I'm around again."

But Dick evaded the direct issue thus opened and followed another line
of thought.

"Of course you understand," he observed, after a renewal of his restless
pacing, "that I've got to tell her my situation first. I don't need to
tell you that I funk doing it, but it's got to be done."

"Don't be a fool," David said querulously. "You'll set a lot of women
cackling, and what they don't know they'll invent. I know 'em."

"Only herself and her family."

"Why?"

"Because they have a right to know it."

But when he saw David formulating a further protest he dropped the
subject.

"I'll not do it until we've gone into it together," he promised.
"There's plenty of time. You settle down now and get ready for sleep."

When the nurse came in at eleven o'clock she found Dick gone and David,
very still, with his face to the wall.

It was the end of May before David began to move about his upper room.
The trees along the shaded streets had burst into full leaf by that
time, and Mike was enjoying that gardener's interval of paradise when
flowers grow faster than the weeds among them. Harrison Miller, having
rolled his lawn through all of April, was heard abroad in the early
mornings with the lawn mower or hoe in hand was to be seen behind his
house in his vegetable patch.

Cars rolled through the streets, the rear seats laden with blossoming
loot from the country lanes, and the Wheeler dog was again burying bones
in the soft warm ground under the hedge.

Elizabeth Wheeler was very happy. Her look of expectant waiting, once
vague, had crystallized now into definite form. She was waiting, timidly
and shyly but with infinite content. In time, everything would come.
And in the meantime there was to-day, and some time to-day a shabby car
would stop at the door, and there would be five minutes, or ten. And
then Dick would have to hurry to work, or back to David. After that, of
course, to-day was over, but there would always be to-morrow.

Now and then, at choir practice or at service, she saw Clare Rossiter.
But Clare was very cool to her, and never on any account sought her,
or spoke to her alone. She was rather unhappy about Clare, when she
remembered her. Because it must be so terrible to care for a man who
only said, when one spoke of Clare, "Oh, the tall blonde girl?"

Once or twice, too, she had found Clare's eyes on her, and they were
hostile eyes. It was almost as though they said: "I hate you because you
know. But don't dare to pity me."

Yet, somehow, Elizabeth found herself not entirely believing that
Clare's passion was real. Because the real thing you hid with all
your might, at least until you were sure it was wanted. After that,
of course, you could be so proud of it that you might become utterly
shameless. She was afraid sometimes that she was the sort to be utterly
shameless. Yet, for all her halcyon hours, there were little things that
worried her. Wallie Sayre, for instance, always having to be kept from
saying things she didn't want to hear. And Nina. She wasn't sure that
Nina was entirely happy. And, of course, there was Jim.

Jim was difficult. Sometimes he was a man, and then again he was a boy,
and one never knew just which he was going to be. He was too old for
discipline and too young to manage himself. He was spending almost all
his evenings away from home now, and her mother always drew an inaudible
sigh when he was spoken of.

Elizabeth had waited up for him one night, only a short time before, and
beckoning him into her room, had talked to him severely.

"You ought to be ashamed, Jim," she said. "You're simply worrying mother
sick."

"Well, why?" he demanded defiantly. "I'm old enough to take care of
myself."

"You ought to be taking care of her, too."

He had looked rather crestfallen at that, and before he went out he
offered a half-sheepish explanation.

"I'd tell them where I go," he said, "but you'd think a pool room was on
the direct road to hell. Take to-night, now. I can't tell them about it,
but it was all right. I met Wallie Sayre and Leslie at the club before
dinner, and we got a fourth and played bridge. Only half a cent a point.
I swear we were going on playing, but somebody brought in a chap
named Gregory for a cocktail. He turned out to be a brother of Beverly
Carlysle, the actress, and he took us around to the theater and gave us
a box. Not a thing wrong with it, was there?"

"Where did you go from there?" she persisted inexorably. "It's half past
one."

"Went around and met her. She's wonderful, Elizabeth. But do you know
what would happen if I told them? They'd have a fit."

She felt rather helpless, because she knew he was right from his own
standpoint.

"I know. I'm surprised at Les, Jim."

"Oh, Les! He just trailed along. He's all right."

She kissed him and he went out, leaving her to lie awake for a long
time. She would have had all her world happy those days, and all her
world good. She didn't want anybody's bread and butter spilled on the
carpet.

So the days went on, and the web slowly wove itself into its complicated
pattern: Bassett speeding West, and David in his quiet room; Jim
and Leslie Ward seeking amusement, and finding it in the littered
dressing-room of a woman star at a local theater; Clare Rossiter
brooding, and the little question being whispered behind hands,
figuratively, of course—the village was entirely well-bred; Gregory
calling round to see Bassett, and turning away with the information that
he had gone away for an indefinite time; and Maggie Donaldson, lying in
the cemetery at the foot of the mountains outside Norada, having shriven
her soul to the limit of her strength so that she might face her Maker.

Out of all of them it was Clare Rossiter who made the first conscious
move of the shuttle; Clare, affronted and not a little malicious, but
perhaps still dramatizing herself, this time as the friend who
feels forced to carry bad tidings. Behind even that, however, was
an unconscious desire to see Dick again, and this time so to impress
herself on him that never again could he pass her in the street
unnoticed.

On the day, then, that David first sat up in bed Clare went to the house
and took her place in the waiting-room. She was dressed with extreme
care, and she carried a parasol. With it, while she waited, she drilled
small nervous indentations in the old office carpet, and formulated her
line of action.

Nevertheless she found it hard to begin.

"I don't want to keep you, if you're busy," she said, avoiding his eyes.
"If you are in a hurry—"

"This is my business," he said patiently. And waited.

"I wonder if you are going to understand me, when I do begin?"

"You sound alarmingly ominous." He smiled at her, and she had a moment
of panic. "You don't look like a young lady with anything eating at her
damask cheek, or however it goes."