Authors: Franklin Gregory
But Pierre, who thrived on debating questions that didn’t mean a thing, shrank from argument with Sara about anything that mattered. He realized later that it might have been the one time in his life when he should have forced his will on hers.
Another day; again Sara sat stiffly in the room where the gaunt gray cat preened herself and the lean-faced man busied himself with the innumerable papers at his table.
Again, as before, there was a period of absorption. Sara relaxed, and she received. Under the brightening ray those clouded hungers focused into sharper relief. From vague values they took on some semblance of positive appetite. But it was still only a semblance, still unrecognized. She knew only that she was stumbling down some spiritual or psychical lane, serving a novitiate for an order the purpose of which escaped her.
Again, during a moment when the current withdrew, Sara questioned, “Who are you?”
And again the man gave the same answer.
“I think I would believe you,” Sara said.
The man smiled thinly.
“If I said the name, all this”—and the gesture of a graceful hand embraced the room— “would melt away. You, too, will find that out some day. We explain nothing. We admit nothing. That is confession.” Slyly, he added, “And if confession is good for the soul, it also closes the world we wish to enter.”
“You,” Sara asked, “have entered?”
The man threw back his head and laughed.
“One enters his own home,” he said. “You would enter through surrender.”
She thought about that. Then:
“If I surrender?”
“You would not know this world.”
“But the other. What would it be like?”
“That,” he replied, “is what you are learning.”
There were other visitors that afternoon. When the first—a fat greasy-handed Polish woman—entered the room, the period of receptivity ended.
The woman squatted down in a chair beside Sara. The fastidious girl, at any other time, would have found discreet reason to remove herself. That she did not was evidence, even to herself, of a profound change of character. She sat quietly until she was dismissed.
As she made her way down the corridor, she met still another woman even fatter than the Pole, even more unkempt. The woman leered at her as she passed.
Outdoors, Sara paused in the dirty sunlight that filtered through the city’s smoke. Her head throbbed. She drew a cool hand across her hot temple.
This was insanity, she felt.
“This must stop,” she said.
The effluvium of decaying foods, emanating from an uncovered garbage pail at the curb, assailed her nostrils. The sudden realization that the odor was not unpleasant gave additional vehemence to her declaration.
“No,” she said. “No, no!”
The negative sounded false.
She felt that from the windows behind her the man’s scorching eyes were staring at her.
She moved on. aimlessly, the fashionably dressed object of all the truck drivers and loungers and drunks with which the neighborhood abounded.
But even as she moved away, she felt the magnetism of the house behind her. She was empowered to swim against the stream for the moment only, she knew, because it was the will of that man with the ice-cold hands and the mincing walk.
She moved heavily, unmindful of her direction. And what did direction matter when, with a velocity she was unable to brake, she was being propelled toward some target she had not chosen for herself; indeed, when horrifying outlines were but dimly suggested by those lightning flashes of knowledge.
A red neon sign attracted her. She walked through the door. She sat down at a little table in a dirty barroom. The oilcloth on the table was crumbly with broken pretzels glued to the cloth with sticky beer. Near her chair on the floor stood a china cuspidor, tobacco juice dripping down its sides.
Sara ordered a drink. . . .
WHEN you walked into the Salon de W Camp-d’Avesnes, in the smart shopping district of Chestnut Street, you found yourself not in one of those modernistically mirrored, chromiumed and ebony-enameled palaces of trade, but rather in a museum. You were not buttonholed by one of those chic wenches with the' trick French accent who, while catering, looks down her pretty nose at you. You were left to roam at perfect ease.
If, by chance, you had a mind to perfume, there was a glass case discreetly out of the way at the rear and discreetly attended by a serene, well turned-out woman in middle life. It was Pierre's way of explaining to the world that not only was he proud of his museum but that he could get along quite well without trade.
The room itself was elegant in the gold and white and satin of royal and eighteenth- century France. But you appreciated at once that the chamber was only a setting for the many exquisite objects.
Here, on this slender Louis XV stand, stood an Egyptian jar, disinterred from the tomb of a Pharoah when it still held the fragrance of the perfume it had once contained.
Here, in a case, were samples of the first vials brought to France from the Holy Land by crusading knights.
There were sachets from the court of Queen Elizabeth. There were matching necklaces and rings, whose centers held perforated boxes for perfume.
There were gold and silver and ivory castlettes and printaniers which appeared in the courts of England and France a century after Elizabeth. There were perfume lamps and perfume pans and perfume bellows, forerunners of the atomizer.
There were thirteenth-century finger bowls, which once held rose water.
There were papier-mache rouge boxes hoary with age. There was a mother-of-pearl coffret in which Catherine the Great stowed her perfume flagons, her pomade jars and ivory manicure tools. And from all ages and all countries there were rare and costly vases.
Yet, it was not this room Pierre called his “crossroads of the world.”
This was the large vault at the rear in which he stood this Saturday morning, staring vacantly at a row of glass jars.
There were products here worth more than their weight in gold. There was soft fatty civet from Abyssinia. There was castor from Russia. There was Tonquin musk from Tibet, benzoin from Siam, storax from Asia Minor. The oils of ylang-ylang and jasmin, of rose and palmerosa were here—oils measured by the precious drop. There were balsams and gums. And there were also synthetics and isolates, for chemistry had brought the Salon de Camp-d Avesnes a very long way since Gervase had set up his little shop off Front Street.
A shadow crossed the steel door to the big vault. Pierre glanced up.
“Oh, hello, David.”
“Busy?”
“Not at all, son; come in.”
David stooped to enter the vault. He peered at the illuminated shelves.
“Quite a place you have here.”
Pierre beamed.
“Just about anything you’ll find in the trade. Never been here before?”
David, inspecting the labels on the containers, shook his head.
“Got ambergris?”
Pierre grinned.
“I knew you’d ask that right off. Everybody does. Seems all the public knows about perfume is what they read in the papers—fishermen picking up*a chunk along the beach. Yes, I’ve a little. That’s it there. Don't need much. Use it only in one of our products. Gives diffusiveness, you know. You probably didn’t.”
David pulled out a pack of cigarettes and started to light one. Pierre held up a pudgy hand.
“Not here, please. Too big an investment and smoke’s insidious. . . . Jasmin oil there. . . . What’s on your mind?”
There was a bench in the vault and David sat down, legs wide apart, hands loosely clasped between.
“Sara,” he said with frank directness.
Pierre looked at David shrewdly. “H'm-m-m.”
Pierre's left eyelid dropped and he fingered his mole. He said:
“She’s been pretty restless lately.”
“It’s more than that,” David said. “She’s—growing pretty cold.”
Pierre said, “H’m-m.”
He said it with more force. He added, “Think there’s someone else?”
“N-no,” David said hesitantly. “No. I’m pretty sure of that. I don’t know what. I thought perhaps—you’d know.”
Pierre, too, sat down on the bench. He didn’t look at David. He stared at a bottle labeled “methyl phenyl acetate,” a puzzled look in his eyes.
“I think she’s sick,” Pierre said gruffly. “But you can’t tell her anything. She’s bull-headed like her mother. Been moody. Got circles under her eyes. Noticed last night her dress was loose. Losing weight, I wouldn’t wonder. Needs to get away, that's what. But when I said so, she flounced out of the room.”
Pierre’s eyes, usually so merry, were somber now. He became contrite.
“My fault, I suppose. Don’t bring her up right. A man can't raise a girl. Shouldn't . have tried.”
David hoisted one leg over the other, leaned back and jammed his big hands into his trouser pockets.
“I don't think,” he began slowly, “it's that so much. I think. . . . Well, there might be something wrong with . . . well, with her. . . Pierre tapped his temple with a fat finger. “You mean here?” he asked in surprise. David nodded.
“Can’t see how you figure,” Pierre said.
“I don’t. It’s only something I feel.” “H’m-m. I know. You’re sensitive to things. I am, too.”
“Maybe,” David said. “And maybe it’s something else. Do you remember Heath, the Great Dane we had that got hydrophobia? I could tell something was going wrong, but I couldn't tell what. And those Ayrshires of ours. Why, people think one cow’s just like any other. But they aren’t. Each one’s a little different. And sometimes I see where one's becoming quite a bit different, gets some crazy idea in her head and wants to raise the devil.”
David fell silent then. Along with his other troubles, he had suffered a speech defect when younger. He had learned to control his words, to force one to follow the other in slow measure—and never to say too much. He’d said too much now and he knew anything else he said would jumble up.
Pierre’s eyes remained fixed on the bottle of synthetic odor of gardenia.
“What's the answer?” he asked finally.
“W-well,” David said slowly, “I thought maybe if she saw a doctor. . . .”
“She won't.”
“I thought she wouldn't. But if there was some way of having a doctor see her, without her realizing. I mean—”
“Just a regular sawbones?” asked Pierre sharply.
“N-no. A specialist.”
‘‘A psychiatrist?”
“That was my idea. I just didn’t want to say it.”
Pierre nodded.
“Might help. Might not. Hardt’s a good man.” He added, cautiously, “So people say. But I know him pretty well. If I could get him up to dinner tonight. . . . I’d want you there, too.”
JUSTIN HARDT was a spare man with a very good opinion of himself and a booming voice. He was tall and he had long legs and he was fifty-six. His face was long and the leathery flesh hung in folds at the chin, giving him somewhat the loose look of a bloodhound.
His forehead was high and at the temples his brushy brown hair was beginning to show traces of gray. When he looked directly at you as he always did in conversation, his slate- blue eyes peered penetratingly through pince-nez glasses which were insured against breakage by a length of black silk ribbon running down to some secret recess of his vest.
The vest itself and its two dozen doublebreasted companions which hung in his handsome bachelor’s chambers at the Racquet Club were of the novel breed the world terms “fancy.” There were checks and stripes and extravagantly woven patterns in colors that ranged from cream and dull yellow to blues a tint too brilliant and greens a tint too bright.
Their jeweled buttons gleamed against the immaculate cloth, but, on the whole, on such a man as Dr. Justin Hardt, they did not look out of place—either with the semi-cutaway and striped gray morning trousers which encased his person by day or the dinner coat into which he invariably shrugged at five o’clock each afternoon.
Into this dinner coat Dr. Hardt had shrugged at his regular hour this afternoon to appear at seven for dinner at the Fountain Head. And there, with the dogmatic dignity which characterized his lectures at the Graduate School of Medicine, Dr. Hardt filled every cranny of the library with his resonant bass voice.
It was said of the doctor that if he did not scare you to death he would bludgeon a cure into you. He excelled in expressing his own firm convictions. And he expressed them with a warmth that bordered upon the rudeness for which his own social stratum is notorious.
Tonight the quiet detachment of his host provided fertile ground for Dr. Hardt’s bombast, so that he was not in the least disturbed by the tardiness of Sara.
“No, sir, that is not so,” he was saying in reply to an observation by Pierre about the death of Sigmund Freud. “I studied under Freud thirty-one years ago and know how wrong you are. He borrowed much more from Herbart than from either Charcot or Bern- heim.”
Pierre glanced thoughtfully at his watch.
“The fact is,” Dr. Hardt boomed on, “Freud was wrong on many counts.”
David, who was standing at the French doors peering expectantly into the shadows of the lane, turned around. He picked up a hammered silver cocktail goblet beaded with icy sweat. He sipped at it.
“She ought to be here by now,” Pierre said.
“Did she have her car?” asked David.
“Yes. Drove me down quite early.”
David suggested, “Why not phone the garage?”