Part 14

But Lewis was such a grand person! Quite aside from his fame, his personality was head and shoulders above any other man Dick knew,—even Lowell Farwell’s. Oughtn’t that personality to make up for Lewis’ comparative poverty, even to Petra’s rather shallow young view? Dick, in all humility, should think that it would and that in a choice between them any girl would choose Lewis, not himself.... But Clare understood Petra better, it seemed. It was clever of her not to have told him that Lewis might be his rival for Petra, but instead to send them off down here together, where Dick could find it out for himself. But put yourself in Lewis’ place. If you were in love with a girl, and a friend came to you and told you he was _not_ in love with this same girl but wanted to marry her all the same,—how would you feel? Pretty furious! Just the way Lewis had acted! Dick wondered that Clare hadn’t had as much imagination for Lewis’ feelings, as she had had for Dick’s own, and Petra’s. Well, Clare loved him and Petra; and Lewis, after all, was only a respected acquaintance. That explained it. But it was tough on Lewis, all the same.

As they reached and crossed the wide trail toward Jordan Pond, Dick felt a new emotion coming to life and ascending in his heart—like a skyrocket. Elation! To win Petra from a fellow like Lewis! To imagine Petra desired—and by such a man—had had the effect of making her suddenly more desirable to himself. He would tell this phenomenon to Clare, when he got back, quite frankly. You could tell Clare anything. Her detachment was an exquisite, a consoling thing. If he told her that Petra, he felt, might in time come to take Clare’s own place with him, Clare would even then keep her dear, generous detachment. But of course, Dick could never have any such nonsense as that to tell Clare. No matter how fond he ever became of his beautiful wife, Clare would remain as long as he lived, his—his most beloved.

Abruptly, Lewis interrupted these forecastings. “See here, Dick, I’m sorry I got so hot. But let’s make a bargain. Don’t you mention Green Doors again or anybody in it as long as we are together on this holiday, and I’ll go back now and play golf with you instead of hiking. It’s what you want, I know, and you were merely being altruistic.... The idea of going on walking, anyway, doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Really?”

“Really! We can swing around to Asticou Inn and go back for our clubs, can’t we?”

They could and they did. But Dick did not know what Clare would think of the bargain he had struck with Lewis. She had expected the two to talk endlessly, to hash everything over.... Or what had she expected after all? Dick was no longer so certain. Well, he had only to get back to Clare, look in her candid, sweet eyes, to lose this sudden new sense of confusion about what her motives in getting him to confide in Lewis might be. She could and would explain to Dick’s complete enlightenment and satisfaction. She always did.

That evening Dick left Lewis reading Agatha Christie’s last detective novel by an open fire and walked into Northeast Harbor alone for their mail. If Clare had written him yesterday, as she had half promised to do, the letter would come to-night. All through the long hours on the misty golf course and ever since, this expectation of a letter coming to-night had been a steady undertow to all that went on in Dick’s mind. The entire day had been for him nothing in the world but a straight path to the letter window of Northeast Harbor’s little post office. The mail was sorted by eight-thirty, he knew, and sometimes a trifle earlier. But, taking hold on all the strength of character he possessed, Dick had determined not to arrive at that window of dreams one minute before the certain time of half-past eight. He knew how painful it would be to stand around waiting, watching the mail being sorted and not absolutely certain of his letter. Now, as he came down the village street through the drizzling fog, he saw that the cars parked near the post office were starting up their engines and that people with letters and papers in their hands were coming from the post-office door. And he walked faster. Whether the thick thugging tom-tom his heart had set up was delight or anguish, he did not consider.

The window gained, and Dick’s turn in the writing queue at last arrived, he snatched the little bundle of letters from the smiling postmistress with a muttered, blind “good evening” and turned with it to the counter. His fingers, shuffling the letters through as he looked for Clare’s hand, were shaking. There were half a dozen letters for Doctor Pryne readdressed in Petra’s script. But there was nothing for himself. Nothing that counted. Petra had written him, it seemed. A letter in a fat envelope. But he was so dulled by disappointment that he hardly bothered to wonder why she had written or what.

He stuffed the whole bunch into his pocket and returned to the delivery window. “Are you sure there’s nothing else for Richard Wilder?” he asked. It was a childish act, he knew, but he could not seem to help himself. Obligingly, the, to Dick, faceless automaton at that fateful window turned back to the letter boxes. She even thrust a hand up into the Wilders’ now grimly empty pigeonhole, pretending to make certain of what was already a certainty. The look on the man’s face asking the unreasonable question made the gesture, empty as it was, a human necessity. She came back to her window. “Nothing _now_.” The young woman spoke tentatively, averting kindly eyes. “In the morning’s mail perhaps.”

Out in the fog again Dick had to laugh at himself. Why did he need a letter so? They trusted each other, he and Clare. What did passionate friendship mean if not trust and peace, even in separation! Besides, it was scarcely sixty hours since they had parted. And he would see her in thirty-six more. Lewis and he had decided to cut their holiday short and return to-morrow, after all. They gave the weather as their excuse to each other, but not to the Langleys. It was agreed that the doctor to-night was to receive an important letter which made their dashing off necessary. The fact was that ever since Dick had begun to suspect Lewis’ feeling for Petra, a constraint had settled between them which made their close companionship just now more of a strain than a relaxation. So day after to-morrow Dick would be out at Green Doors again. It was unworthy of Clare’s beautiful friendship that he should feel actual written words from her, which he could keep in his pocket and touch, a necessity to his sense of assurance of that friendship. It was unworthy and faithless in him. But letters were uncanny things! _Wanting_ one so terribly was uncanny too....

Lewis glanced up at Dick welcomingly as he came in. The detective story had returned him to a healthy, intellectual mood. He was accustomed to find this type of reading as effective as a good game of contract or chess for keeping one sensible.

“This Christie is O.K., Dick,” he said. “You must read it yourself. It’s as good as anything she has done. I’ll be through in half an hour or so and you can have it.”

“Good! I picked up a new Dorothy Sayers as I came along, at Blaine’s drug store. You can have that to finish the night with. Here’s your mail.”

Dick had dropped the little pile of letters onto the arm of Lewis’ chair, and pulling another chair up to the hearth, he sprawled himself into it, eyes moodily on the fire.

Petra’s fat letter to Dick was on the top of the pile. In his disappointment at not hearing from Clare, Dick had completely forgotten he had any letter at all. Lewis picked it up, turned it around in his fingers, looked at Dick. But Dick was bent forward, poking the fire. He jumped when Lewis spoke.

“This seems to be yours.”

“Oh, sure! I forgot it. Toss it across, will you. It’s a fat one. Funny!”

Putting down the tongs and leaning back in his chair, Dick tore the flap open with his thumb, and twisting around to get a better light on the sheets, began lazily reading Petra’s long letter. Lewis made no pretense of returning to his detective story or of looking over his own mail. Petra’s handwriting on the envelopes in his little pile that remained stared up at him ironically. This was as much as he had of her, or ever would have, he felt. Her hand readdressing somebody else’s letter to him. Petra’s handwriting was stirring—and Lewis believed it would be stirring to him even if he did not know and love and desire Petra as he did. The characters were consistently round, dear, black and perfectly spaced. The writer of such a script was scrupulous—exquisitely scrupulous—not to waste one instant of the recipient’s time or energy. It was like Petra’s own perfect manners, visible in black and white. But how arid to be sitting here, studying and appreciating the nuances of Petra’s agreeable manners, while Dick was reading her heart; for Dick had lost his indifferent, lounging attitude when he began to read Petra’s long letter, and his profile—all that Lewis could see of his face—was tense and excited.

Lewis got up hastily, leaving his letters where they were on the arm of the chair, and went out onto the piazza. The fog sucked up to him, enveloped him. He coughed, choked sharply. These Mount Desert fogs were like no others in the world, he thought, and for once, it occurred to him that he ought to possess himself of an automatic cigarette lighter: you couldn’t strike a match successfully out here in this insidious fog. But cigarette or not, he would not return to the warm fire-cheered room until Dick had done with that letter and put it away out of sight.

What would Dick do with the sheets when he had finished them, anyway? Lewis visualized him tossing them casually into the fire. Then he visualized himself putting his own bare hand into the fire and pulling them out! “Am I crazy?” he wondered. “What is there in her mere handwriting that stirs me more than the sight of Petra herself? It is the essence of her personality—as the voice is—only visible.” If Petra should ever write himself a letter—if such a day ever came—Lewis felt now that her handwriting on the envelope would produce as profound a feeling in him as would her first kiss. He coughed again. The fog hated him. Then Dick came to the door, shouting “Lewis! Oh, Lewis!”

“Oh! But I couldn’t see whether you were there or not, Lewis! This heathenish fog! But come along in, do. I’ve got to talk to you. Really!”

And back in the room, over by the fire, the men stood facing each other across Petra’s letter. For Dick had not tossed it in the fire. That had been only a daydream of Lewis’ tired, driven mind. The letter lay on a little table, under Dick’s palms, as he stood leaning on the table, looking down at it.

“See here,” he was saying, “I promised to lay off our morning’s discussion—Clare—Green Doors—all that. But something has happened.... This letter ... Petra has written.... Amazing.... It’s quite moving ... Sweet.... And I want you to read it. It may open your eyes to something. It has mine. You may thank me. What I didn’t get around to tell you this morning was that I had already done it—proposed to Petra. She turned me down but I wasn’t sure she meant it. Clare was sure she didn’t mean it. Anyway, I meant to try again when I got back. But now I see Clare was wrong. Petra did mean it. Will you read this?” Dick’s face was glowing with the sheer generosity of the thing he was doing. “Will you read it?” he asked again, for Lewis was looking at him strangely—blankly.

“Would Petra mind?” Lewis asked.

“That can’t matter. She wouldn’t mind if she really knew you. And I owe it to you—after this morning. If we were two men in a novel, old boy, I wouldn’t give it to you, and you wouldn’t know right up to the last chapter that your girl is yours for the asking. But this is life and we’ll let the suspense of the situation go by the boards. Read and see what a darned fool I’ve been.”

Lews took the letter. The sheets were steady in his strong, long fingers. Dick lounged back in the chair and watched his friend with growing uneasiness; for no light dawned in Lewis’ serious dark face as he read. That face seemed, indeed, under Dick’s very eyes, to grow thin and grim with controlled emotion of a sort totally other than Dick had expected.

_Chapter Nineteen_

It was the seventeenth of October. It was also Petra’s birthday; and Lewis had relaxed in his practice of turning down all Mrs. Lowell Farwell’s invitations and was now driving out to Green Doors to a dinner party given in honor of the birthday. Himself, Dick and the Allens were to be the only guests. Neil McCloud had been invited but was, Lewis understood, not coming. Lewis suspected that Neil’s refusal had been the cause of Petra’s manner to-day—not a birthday manner exactly. She had moved about at her work in a spirit of recollection, but a strained, anxious recollection which no doubt she thought went unnoticed by her employer. Lewis had first been struck by it when he asked her who was coming to her party to-night, and her answer had been that Neil was not. He had laughed and said, “But it was a list of acceptances I wanted—not refusals.” She had lifted her eyes to his, at that,—she was sitting at her desk and he had stopped by it as he passed through to his own office to say good morning—and they had been blank with a kind of subdued misery. But she had answered, “Clare tells me that you are coming, Doctor Pryne. The Allens. Dick. It is nice of _you_ to have accepted.”

“Don’t say that. I am looking forward to it very much. My dear, will you accept this present? I’ve been days finding it, and if you don’t like it I shall be terribly disconcerted.”

It was the detail from the Fra Angelico picture: angels dancing, and saints embracing in a flower-studded meadow. A very good print, framed in silver. Lewis had brought the cumbersome thing under his arm, done up in brown paper, just as it had been sent to him from the store. Lewis did not hope, of course, that Petra would ever know why he had hit upon this particular present. It seemed inappropriate, perhaps, for a twenty-year-old girl’s birthday present. But to Lewis it meant something they had once experienced together—a meeting of souls where language and explanations are no longer necessary, where all is unselfconscious joy, camaraderie and fluent communication between the saints in Paradise. That first sight of the June meadow behind Clare’s guest house, which Lewis had likened to this picture—and thought of Petra and himself as saints, without their crowns to be sure, and their presence there in the paradisiacal meadow purest accident—had remained all summer a poignant memory. He hoped that Petra would keep this picture all her life, wherever she lived, and that even not understanding anything of what it meant to him in the giving, she would remember him now and then in looking at it; and thus his memory would stay alive for her because of something which stood to him for their own one brief real meeting and recognition. Let that same quality of recognition never come again on this earth,—still it might yet come in heaven. Perhaps it only needed their crowns for the consummation of its promise.

An early frost had followed the unprecedentedly hot summer, and the trees all along the state highway to Meadowbrook had been stripped during the past few days of their flaming foliage. The fields and meadows stretched away brown and purple, barren too. But the clouds, like levitated mountain ranges, hung above the western horizon, blazing with autumn colors, red, gold, purple, buff. The day had had an Indian summer warmth over it and to-night the sky promised to be divinely clear with a full moon.

Lewis had sent Petra home from the office when she returned from her lunch. “Somehow you don’t look like a party to-day,” he had said. “Lie out in the sun on a blanket somewhere. It’s warm enough. Get rested. This has been a heavy week.” Miss Frazier was away on the vacation she had insisted on putting off until the book was actually in print and Petra really had been working up to the full capacity of her strength and ability.

If Lewis had not packed Petra off early, however, she would be beside him now in his rushing car, sharing the beauty of those levitated cloud-mountains along with him, and the bare tracery of tree branches against the mellowed fields. He had had a selfish impulse to keep her late just to make this drive together inevitable. And he would have succumbed to his selfishness, had he not a better plan. Neil was not to be there to-night. Whether Dick was absolutely out of the running or not Lewis did not actually know. But Lewis had reached his limit of passive endurance. He had accepted the invitation because in the very act of reading Clare’s note a few days ago, tending it, he had made up his mind that he would go with Petra by moonlight to the edge of that meadow (October now, not June, but in the moonlight it would still be Paradise) and tell her how he wanted her. If she was in love with Neil—and he knew, of course, that she was—it did not matter. He wanted Petra at last even if she came to him with a broken heart. It had taken Lewis weeks to reach this depth of humility. But now it was reached. He had struck bottom in his longing and suffering. If Petra in youth’s scorn of compromises said that she had nothing she could give him, let it be so. At least, he would have reached for his star. But if he did not touch the sky to-night, did not draw it down to him, he must find Petra another job at once. It was impossible to have her in his office, feeling as he felt, longer.

At its very least, Lewis’ proposal would have the advantage of making Petra see the necessity for her not going on at his office. She would understand and not be wounded. And he would find her something even better. In spite of the “depression” and Petra’s lack of business experience, he promised himself—and he would promise her—that she should not be the loser. In fact, all Lewis honestly hoped of this onrushing moonlight night was for an understanding between himself and Petra. A bitter understanding on his side—since she was going to tell him that she could not possibly marry him without loving him—but on hers illuminating. She would not go on, after to-night, so dangerously unconscious of the power of her young beauty and loveliness.

Remembering her letter to Dick two months ago down at Northeast—and when had Lewis forgotten it for a single hour!—he trusted Petra’s ability to face things squarely, once they were given her to face. She had a clear, honest mind. She had been clear and honest with Dick. Lewis would now, to-night, by moonlight, on the edge of the Paradise meadow, be equally clear and honest with her.

The car reached sixty-nine on the clear-ahead highway, and the lines of Petra’s brave letter streaked through Lewis’ mind with almost a like speed. He knew it by heart from the one reading—that brave, dear letter to another man:

Dear Dick:

I am deeply sorry about the way I treated you last night. I have gotten up before dawn, Dick, to tell you how miserably sorry I am. Or I suppose it is really dawn, for all the east is red and purple. I am writing on Father’s desk in the library. Everybody is asleep. But I haven’t slept. I have been sitting up in bed all night, thinking of my cruelty to you. You see, this is the way it was, Dick. When you kissed me like that, it was really just as if somebody passing me in the street had kissed me. I mean it was as unexpected as that. My only feeling was terror. That is why I struck out like that—just as you would in the dark, if something strange were striking at you. You’d strike back. Besides, no one has ever kissed me before. Not like that, I mean. No one has ever been in love with me before. And you see, anyway, I have thought right along—never thought anything else—that you came to Green Doors on Clare’s account. It was Clare you always talked to. I didn’t know you even looked at me. This may seem strange to you, Dick. Now I see that thinking that was pretty stupid. You have been shy with me—just as one _is_ toward somebody one really loves. Clare has explained it. She came out on the terrace right after you went. I was crying. She found out what was the matter. And she showed me how cruel and stupid I had been. I know now that it was a great honor you did me in asking me to marry you, Dick. To love somebody like that and tell them so and have them do what I did—strike out at you like a serpent—must have been too terrible. The blow on your face was nothing to the blow on your heart, I know. But now I am cool and all night I have been thinking. It isn’t just because Clare says so but now I _feel myself_ how I owe you a deep apology. And I am going to tell you why, even if I hadn’t hated your kissing me the way you did, I would still have _said_ the same thing, that I couldn’t feel toward you as you do toward me. You asked me, you know, if there was anybody else. If I was engaged. I told you no. Well, that was true. Of course I am not engaged. But now I am going to tell you something to prove how sorry I am I treated you as I did last night and to show you how I trust you—and how fond I am of you really, now that I see things about you and Clare in a truer light than I have been seeing them. It is this, Dick. I am not engaged, and I am not likely to be. But I love some one terribly. I love him the way you love me, I guess. But he doesn’t love me any more than I love you. So that makes things even between us, Dick, doesn’t it? Don’t tell Clare this, of course. Or any one. I have told you to even things up, and to make you see that if I have hurt your pride terribly, and been cruel to you, the same thing has been done to me. All I said to Clare last night was that I should write to you and apologize and beg you to go on being friends and not stop coming to Green Doors. Clare and Father will miss you, Dick, if you stay away, and believe it or not, I think I shall too. I don’t know how I ever behaved so brutally as I did last night, but I am always making mistakes and doing terrible things. Please burn this letter.

Affectionately—truly—Petra.

When Lewis looked up from that letter, Dick had said quickly, “It isn’t McCloud, Lewis! Don’t think it for a minute. Anybody can see how _he_ feels about Petra. She could have him if she wanted him. It’s written all over him. It’s you she means, Lewis. You. Nobody else.”

Lewis had said, “Damn you, Dick!” and then no more. He had held Dick to their bargain from that minute, not to discuss Petra or anybody at Green Doors ever again. He had seen to it that Dick did burn the letter as Petra had asked. And as it charred and went up in a hot blaze between the logs, Lewis had not reached his hand to rescue it. He had clenched his hands instead, while his heart burned to a white heat and then withered into charred nothingness with the letter. In that minute Lewis had hated Dick almost as much as Clare. What had they tried to do, between them, to this poor baffled child! Of course it was Neil she meant. Poor Petra! And of course Neil did want her every bit as much as she wanted him. But there was the man’s living faith—the faith neither Clare nor Dick could comprehend as a reality—which stood between him and Petra, forbidding them to each other.

Only now, after weeks of thinking and watching, had Lewis come to think that it would be best for both Neil and Petra if Petra could bring herself to accept half a loaf from life, and marry himself, if she could care for him even a little. For she was created and designed for giving—for motherhood, wifehood. And Lewis loved her with such utter abandonment! Mightn’t the strength and truth of his love ultimately force a response almost in kind?