Authors: Franklin Gregory
Pierre moved reluctantly to an alcove beside the fireplace. He picked up the ivory enamled handset instrument and asked for a number.
There was something joyous in the nature of Pierre de Camp d’Avesnes that, despite worry, could not be entirely subdued. It was not that at this moment he was untroubled. But the brightness of eye, the little smiling curve about the mouth (outward evidence of his fundamental belief in the rightness of all things) contributed to lessening the gloom with which he thought he spoke.
“Car’s still there,” he said.
“She’ll be along,” Hardt said, cheerily.
David, who knew Pierre better, asked, “Didn’t she leave any word?”
Pierre shook his head.
A wide beam of bright light glared at that moment against the square panes of the French doors and stamped blocks of brilliance on the room’s opposite wall. The sound of an automobile in second gear was heard. The sound of tires crunching on gravel stopped abruptly. The three men could hear a motor idling.
Pierre moved wonderingly through the open door into the large, long hall. He passed on to the front door. Almost as he reached it, it swung open in his face. Sara staggered in.
She giggled. Her low, musical voice was thick.
“ ’Lo, Pierre.”
Pierre stared at her.
“ ’Smatter? Never see ’body drunk?”
She reeled past him, saw four people in the library, started in, staggered and grabbed at the door frame.
“ ’Lo, Doc Hardt. N’know you had twin.” Hardt stiffened. Then she saw the two Davids. She approached them unsteadily. As she neared, the two Davids merged into one and she grasped at his coat lapels and looked up into his face.
“Darlin’. M’drunk. Glorious’ drunk. Darlin’. Cab man waitin’.” She tried to nod in the direction of the door. “Son’gun want’ eight dollar bring me all way Sou’ Stree’.” Her long lashes and the white lids drooped over her eyes. “Pay’m, somebody.”
David was holding her when she passed out.
It was the following Tuesday before David’s vigil was rewarded. Sunday, Monday, and for six hours now he had stood in the doorway of a vacant store front on South Street.
He fretted. There was work to be done on the farm. He hated inaction. Instead, all that he had for result was a carpet of burned cigarette butts on the cement—and that cement became harder every hour.
He had carried Sara to a sofa, had brushed past Pierre in the hall and had gone outdoors to pay the cabby himself.
“Where did you find her?” he asked.
The cabby said, “She barged up to me on South Street near Ninth.”
“Did she say where she’d been?”
“No. But I think she’s the same one I seen come out of a bar right across from my stand.”
David had spent a restless night. A hundred times he asked himself: But what was she doing there? And a hundred times he remembered their Halloween lark.
He pondered the gleanings of his knowledge of the world, things he had read, had heard, had seen:
Amazing cults into which some emotionally unstable women were drawn.
The strangely intricate methods of procurers and blackmailers.
The fascination used by unscrupulous rascals in plying their trades.
That man, now. David himself had felt attracted to him and couldn’t explain it. But what a salesman the fellow would make with that personality!
He tried to analyze, with as much detachment as his heart permitted, the young woman who was Sara. Far too sensible, he concluded, to be “taken in.” She had judgment, she had taste, she was discriminating, she was scarcely the sort to fall for a phony.
And suddenly David felt that the fellow was not a charlatan. All right, what was he, then? What could he be doing?
He dropped a cigarette butt on the cement, crushed it with the toe of his shoe. And then lie looked up—and there was Sara stepping out of a taxicab.
He watched her turn into Ninth Street. He sauntered to the corner. When he reached it. she was already halfway along the block. Yes, it was the same house. He saw her stand (or a moment on the stone stoop, a gloved hand resting lightly on the iron rail. He saw the door open and close behind her.
HE STROLLED past the house, casually—so he pretended—glancing at its curtained windows. A block farther on he turned and retraced his steps. He passed the house and a few other houses until he came to a vacant lot.
Then he took up a new station.
He could see the stoop. After a time, he saw another woman enter. And another.
And he saw a fat one come out and waddle slowly in the other direction.
An hour passed. David became uneasy. He felt the neighbors across the street were peering at him from behind their curtains. Once a policeman walked by and looked at him sharply.
When another thirty minutes passed, David began to worry. Then the door opened and Sara appeared. She stood a moment in front ot the house, then began to walk slowly toward him. He wondered:
“She can’t miss seeing me. What will she say?”
But when Sara reached the vacant lot, David saw that she walked with the dazed tread o£ a somnambulist. She looked neither to her right nor to her left. And when she was so close that David could, had he wished, reached out and touched her, he saw that her face—if it were possible—was more white and her lips more scarlet.
Impulsively he walked rapidly after her, caught up with her and grasped her by the arm.
“Sara!”
She stopped. Her head turned slowly. At first there was no note of recognition in her blank face.
“Sara, for Lord’s sake. . .
She leaned forward, peering at him as if she were hunting something in the dark. Then recognition came. Her eyes blazed hatred. And while David stood in his tracks, bewildered, she shook herself free and marched away. . . .
David did not retain his secret. He did not, it is true, trouble Pierre. But he stopped at a doorway on Spruce Street. There was only one difference between that doorway and a hundred other doorways in this center of the city’s medical profession. The brass plate, which was just like all the other brass plates, bore the name: Justin Hardt, M.D.
A trim maid in a black dress and white lace-edged apron opened the stained-glass door. She led David into a large airy reception room. Double doors, leading into the doctor’s office, were dosed. After about five minutes they opened. Dr. Hardt stuck his houndlike head out.
“Oh, hello, Trent.”
He motioned David in and seated him in a cozy chair on the opposite side of his wide mahogany desk. He offered David a cigarette and sat back, his full lips half parted, his blue eyes sharply on David’s face, his fingers adjusted to his glasses. He was blunt.
“What’s on your mind?”
David was equally blunt.
“Sara de Camp-d’Avesnes.”
Hardt ‘‘h’m-m-ed.”
“I don’t cure dipsomaniacs,” he said coldly. “Get Fulton.”
“But she isn’t,” protested David, “a dipsomaniac.”
“She looked like it the other night.”
“It was the first time,” David replied deliberately, “that I ever saw her drunk. And even if she were one, it certainly would fall into your specialty.”
Hardt’s tone was belligerent.
“No, sir; I draw the line there.”
David leaned forward, his arms resting on the flat top of the desk, the fingers of his huge hands entwined.
“There’s something there more than that,” he urged.
Hardt nodded slowly.
“I dare say,” he returned coldly. “There usually is something behind the craving. But I stay away from those cases. They injure my practice.”
Words tangled in David’s throat as they always did when he became excited. He struggled to control them. Finally:
“Now, see here, Doctor. If I can show you that there are other things—that—well, led up to that night. . . . I know—I admit—well, hang it! When a person’s drunk is no time to give ’em a going over. I'm not crazy enough not to know that. . . . I mean, I don’t know anything about your work, but there were probably symptoms there that—if you saw ’em when she wasn’t drunk—you’d assign to some other causes.”
He was actually pleading. Dr. Hardt continued to stare into his face. His confidence in his own beliefs made him a hard man to convince of anything. But he listened, if impatiently, to David’s recital.
David began by describing the changes in Sara in the last two months; the growing lack of interest that finally became listlessness; its change, with almost clocklike regularity, to nervousness that took her on lonely walks.
She had grown thinner; had lost appetite; yet there seemed to be no physical pain, for she made no complaint.
He told of the Halloween visit; how, since that night, her irritability had trebled.
“She goes back there,” he said, and he described his vigil.
Dr. Hardt shifted his position with impatience.
“She goes back there?” he repeated. “Well, why?”
“I don’t know. But you and I know that no young woman of good breeding messes around in that part of town.”
“Unless she is addicted to drugs,” Hardt said.
“I wasn’t aware that dipsomaniacs go in for narcotics.”
Hardt did not smile.
“Not normally.”
“Well?”
Dr. Hardt picked up a pencil and began to tap it on the desk. And then he began to tap it thoughtfully against his teeth.
“If I return,” he said, “will you guarantee she won’t be drunk?”
David considered. He remembered that Sara had passed two saloons and had stepped into a cab.
“Yes,” he said. He reached for the telephone and made arrangements with Pierre.
It was eleven o’clock when Dr. Hardt took his departure from Fountain Head. He had watched with interest Sara’s reaction when she learned David was staying for dinner. Her eyes smouldered with a fury for which David had found no words that afternoon save to term them maniacal. And Hardt was not so sure but what David was right.
And then the fire went out and the eyes froze. And Sara, throughout the meal, seemed unaware of David. She had paid little attention to her food, save for the meat course.
She had sipped her wine sparingly. But—and Pierre noticed this with increasing complacency: and David, with wonder—she chatted brightly with Hardt throughout the entire hour.
Hardt considered, with the analytical detachment essential to his trade, that somehow she had divined the reason for his visit; that some super-intelligence (not uncommon in certain types of insanity) had warned her that he and she were pitted against each other as antagonists; and that, being a woman, she had thought to use her charm to throw him off the scent.
It might, of course, have been Hardt's imagination. He was prone to look upon each of his cases as a contest between the patient and himself, in which each sought to outwit the other. He had little time for the practitioner who approached the problem by attempting to gain the confidence and friendship of the diseased. There was a natural enmity there, he felt, and the more honest one was about it, the sounder the final cure.
Sara left them to themselves after the dessert. When they found her in the library, she had changed again. At first, it seemed to be reserve; but later, Hardt saw that she seemed to be listening for something. He saw a certain tenseness of muscle take her. It was revealed in her hands, which she gripped so tightly in her lap that the blood left them. And then the tenseness melted away before impatience. The fingers entwined themselves and released themselves and re-entwined themselves. Finally, without a word, she got up, threw a wrap about her shoulders and went outdoors.
Hardt, who had been prepared, after talking with David, to see physical fatigue (and indeed there were deep hollows under her eyes) was surprised when he moved to the French doors. Across the lawn he saw Sara striding with catlike agility.
He shrugged into his topcoat, and stood for a moment in the wide hall, fumbling in his pockets for a cigarette. He found one and inserted it between his lips and started fumbling for a match.
David said, “Well?”
Pierre looked up with gentle expectation.
But Dr. Hardt said savagely, “Good night!”
And he jammed on his hat and left.
A WEEK passed. And then another. David, uncertain whether he was ashamed he had spied on Sara, did not try again. He called at the house on four occasions. It was with trepidity, arid he was uncomfortable in Sara’s presence. He could see by the calculation of her look that she neither forgave nor forgot their encounter on South Ninth Street.
And that calculating look was something new in Sara. It had a hard quality dissociated from the Sara with whom David had fallen in love. Indeed, every change that manifested itself in this tall slender girl seemed to rob her of something of her feline softness and replace it with a harsh veener. David noticed that even the manner in which she handled her cigarette had changed: from feline daintiness to the jauntiness of a woman of the streets.
Dr. Hardt called three times, each time at dinner. And each time, Pierre thought, the man went away muttering to himself. He had known Sara most of her life; a sketchy enough acquaintanceship, true, but enough to assure him that he was watching the disintegration of a personality. And yet, what troubled him and what his self-assurance would not permit him to confess aloud, was that he was unable to classify the girl's mental make-up.