Part 18

Lewis could not interpret the odd, quick look Neil gave him then. But that did not matter. What right had the man to sit there so victorious and exalted, speaking of Petra! Petra’s face had grown thin over night. There had been no exaltation and glow on its pallor this day. But Lewis was aware that Neil’s exaltation—if that was the word for the light in his face—was of a grave variety. Not blatant. It was refined of all dross, to the most casual eye. Gorgeousness had given place to something deeper, richer.... Lewis felt his own expression of countenance to be evil. It was as if he could feel a thin mask forming over his face,—particularly ugly around his mouth and eyes. He looked at Miss Frazier’s door knob. He dared not look at McCloud any more. But hate had not returned. Only the awful fear that it might return was stiffening his lips,—his eyelids. For if it did return, here while he faced McCloud, it would be hate of the killing sort. He would hurl himself at the man physically, destroy him if he could—or be destroyed.... He had better smoke. They had better both smoke.

Neil refused the cigarette. Well, the gods on Olympus didn’t smoke little white cigarettes. But Lewis had no nectar to proffer this young giant, face and body aglow with some sweet, secret victory, eyes sea-blue and steady, long-limbed, free-postured, at ease in the patients’ chair. What right had such a being to usurp the place where misery came, year in year out? _Why in God’s name was Neil here?_

“Has Petra told you anything about last night?” Neil asked. “I guess she hasn’t, or you wouldn’t have spoken about her having to keep hours as you did just now.”

Lewis shook his head. Then he trusted his voice. “No. I know nothing. Except that the child ran away from her birthday party last night,—said she was going to bed with a headache but ran out the front door instead, without a wrap, and got back at eight this morning, still in her party dress and fagged almost to the danger point. But she’s going to tell me. She wants to, I think. I am going out there to-night. Petra has let me assume a responsibility to her. And I might as well tell you, McCloud, that she is as precious to me—and her welfare as precious—as if she were my own flesh and blood. You’d better understand that. Now what are you here for?”

“That’s wonderful!” was the man’s surprising answer. “But I rather felt that all along, you know. What I can’t understand is Petra’s not feeling it, not trusting you before. But this is a grand time for her to begin. She may never need you again so much as she needs you right now, Doctor. She’s going to need steadying—and a lot of loving. I’m frightened for her, myself. She’s such a kid, really, in spite of the way she swells around with her _three_ jobs and keeps a stiff upper lip. You’d think she was made of iron! But she isn’t. She’s really just a tender-hearted, frightened kid. Teresa, you see, is mother, brother, sister, parents to her, as well as friend. Teresa is home to Petra. All the home she’s ever known. Sanctuary too. If—if anything happens—to—to Teresa—I shouldn’t wonder if Petra goes right off her head.”

Where was the exaltation now? This was just a boy, fighting back sobs.

Lewis got up. He went to the window and sat on the sill, staring at McCloud. But McCloud got control of himself quickly—and with it the exalted look returned. His eyes were blue fire and so terribly steady.

Lewis said, “Neil, I don’t know a thing. Petra has been secret with me. From the beginning—or almost from the beginning. I thought you and she were together last night. I’ve got it all wrong. What was it really? Something to do with Teresa Kerr?”

Neil got up then. He came and sat on Lewis’ desk, his feet in Lewis’ chair. He hadn’t taken in what Lewis meant about himself and Petra—at least not its implication. It simply passed him by.

“We _were_ together,” he said. “I was there. Teresa was terribly ill. It must have been about ten o’clock when it started. Janet got the doctor and Father Morris on the telephone. But I’m worried about that doctor. I don’t like him or trust him much. Clark’s his name. He has a general practice in Meadowbrook. He knows all about you, of course, but says you won’t know him. I told him I was coming to ask you to see Teresa and advise us. _He_ says Teresa’s got to go right off to a sanitarium. There’s one in New Mexico that he says is her only chance. He says she ought to start to-morrow. But I don’t take any stock in him. Neither does Janet Frazier. She says you are the one who will know what we ought to do. Janet is sure—”

But Lewis interrupted: “Neil McCloud! Start over, will you. I can’t seem to catch on to what all this is about. You were at Teresa Kerr’s last night? How does Miss Frazier come into it? Where does Teresa live?”

“It’s a little house between Meadowbrook and Green Doors. Off the road. You’ve never seen it, probably. Nobody does. It’s right off the road—in another world. The girls call it Mary’s Field. Teresa’s got a touch of consumption. That’s why she’s there this summer. So that she can live practically out of doors. On the porch. She was there, in the long chair, last night. Janet and I had got supper together. Janet’s spending her vacation there. We were talking, very gay. It was moonlight. Janet has a mandolin. She’s good on it, too. Finally, quite late, Janet went in to do the dishes. She wouldn’t let me come. So I stayed out with Teresa. I was going in a few minutes, anyway. Getting back to Boston. I was sitting there on the floor by Teresa’s chair. She was lying in the long chair—almost flat. That’s what she’s had to do lately—whenever she’s not sewing. She’s so terribly tired all the time! We weren’t talking any more. I thought she’d better rest. I was trying to make myself go home. Suddenly she sat up straight with a queer sound in her throat. I jumped up. She put out her hands. Blood came from her mouth. It was only moonlight but I knew it was blood. I thought—we both thought—she was dying. We said things we’d never have said if we hadn’t thought so. But that’s all right. God intended it, I guess. I called Janet. She got Doctor Clark on the telephone—and then Father Morris. Father Morris is pastor of St. Joseph’s in Meadowbrook. It’s been Teresa’s church all summer. Father Morris seemed to know more than the doctor what to do for Teresa. The doctor just stood around and scolded us about Teresa’s having worked so hard on Petra’s birthday dress. A good thing Petra wasn’t there then! It was Father Morris who told us Teresa wasn’t dying. He and Petra, when Petra came, had the coolest heads of us all. They managed everything. Petra and I stayed with Teresa on the porch all night. She couldn’t sleep and Father Morris advised against any drug. We just stayed there quiet. Close to her. At dawn she went to sleep and Janet made us eat breakfast. I took Petra back to Green Doors. We thought Teresa was all right then, you see. But early this afternoon, Doctor Pryne, she had another hemorrhage. That’s why I didn’t call Petra as I promised to. I didn’t want her to know until she got to Mary’s Field this afternoon and could see how really better Teresa seems, in spite of this second hemorrhage. She’s seemed so well all day—even strong! She even wanted to sit up, but we haven’t let her. Father Morris came to the house just before I did call you and said I’d better not wait for Petra’s consent to our asking you to see Teresa. He urged me to drive right in and bring you both out. He says Teresa is very seriously ill, now, in spite of her feeling so well, and he feels that we must do something as quickly as possible. He knows about you and your work and was sure you’d come for Petra’s sake. You will, won’t you?” Neil had told it all quickly, his eyes never leaving Lewis’.

“Of course, Neil. You don’t need to ask! But tell me more. Is this why money is so important to Petra? Had she been supporting Teresa with the allowance I was the cause of her losing? Of course. How blind I’ve been!”

“Teresa makes Petra’s clothes and Petra pays her for that. Teresa’s got the devil’s own pride. She insists on earning her money, even when she can’t hold up her head. So you can’t say Petra’s been exactly supporting Teresa. She went to Radcliffe, you know, on a scholarship and evenings making Petra’s clothes. The idea was that when Teresa got her degree and a job—perhaps one like Janet’s—Petra would kiss Clare good-by and live with Teresa and go to some business college herself. They had it all worked out. Teresa was so quick and worked so hard, she hoped to graduate in less than four years. Petra’s ‘job’ at Green Doors was to be merely temporary. That is how she has been able to stand it. But last spring, when everything was working out beautifully, the college doctor found that Teresa had T.B. and they wouldn’t let her take her exams. They said she must live in the country, out of doors, all this summer. Petra found the house. She furnished it—borrowed ahead on her allowance. The place belongs to a farmer named Murray and it’s always been called ‘Murray’s Field.’ But Teresa understood it ‘Mary’s Field’ and took it without seeing it on account of the name! It’s been easy to keep Teresa’s living there secret from Green Doors—it’s so out of the way. But that’s where Petra has been wrong. Teresa would think so too, if she knew. It’s like living a double life. All Petra’s excuses for being away from Green Doors, you know! Teresa has never guessed how Petra’s had to twist and turn. She’d never have let her! Teresa’s like truth itself. But sometimes I have to laugh when I picture how astonished Clare would be if she could see Petra Saturday afternoons, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor at Mary’s Field—until I came along, that is. I do the kitchen floor now on Saturdays!—Both the girls are death on dirt. But lately Teresa hasn’t been able even to wash the dishes and Petra’s done all the cleaning ever since they took the house.—What’s the matter, Pryne?”

“Why didn’t you trust me? Why did you all leave me out so long?”

“We did trust you. We do. Absolutely. Janet and I, at least. But Petra’s been so afraid all the time! Afraid you wouldn’t keep it from Clare. She says you belong to Green Doors—not Mary’s Field. Petra’s a grand kid but she’s stubborn.”

“Well—let’s get going.”

“To Mary’s Field?”

“Where else? Petra’s bound to be there, I should think. And I’d better see Teresa for myself before taking a specialist to her. You shut the windows, Neil, while I just write up this card for the files. I’ll have to cut out the calls I was making, for Father Morris may be right, that quick action is needed. Meadowbrook may not be the place for Teresa to stay,—but I hardly think we’ll send her so far as New Mexico—”

All the while Lewis talked, he was outlining his recent interview with the idiot boy’s parents in illegible characters on a fresh white card. His heart was shaken to its depths but his head and hand were steady.

_Chapter Twenty-Four_

“It’s the next turn to the right now. Go slow or you’ll miss it. It looks like a cart road—a wood road.... Here ’tis. Yes, it’s all right. My car’s gone over it hundreds of times.”

It was the roughest sort of track, cut through a beech wood, up a hill. They had driven out in Lewis’ car, leaving Neil’s parked in Marlboro Street. A quarter of a mile of rough going, a turn, and suddenly Lewis saw the farmhouse through lacings of bare branches straight ahead. It was set halfway up a sloping meadow with an orchard at its back. The little old clapboarded dwelling was the color of the branches through which Lewis was seeing it, silver-gray-black-violet. In some lights, particularly after summer rains, the clapboards would be opal.

Neil suggested that they leave the car at the bottom of the meadow and walk up. “Teresa may be sleeping. She won’t be expecting to hear a car at this time of day, anyway, and it might startle her. The milkman brings the groceries along with his milk once a day and that’s the only car except mine that ever comes. We didn’t tell her I was bringing you. We didn’t know you could get away. We thought we’d wait to explain—”

The doorstep, a flat stone, had beguiled the doorsill to follow its own smooth sunken curve. The door stood open into a passage which appeared nothing but transition to clearer, finer country, for it was open at its farther end onto long rows of crooked old bare apple trees twisted by many years of bearing into mysterious contours of beauty. And through the orchard one saw the rounded, mellow slope of the hilltop, outlining a horizon.

There is an orchard, old and rare,— I cannot tell you where,— With green doors opening to the sun.

Green doors! This was the green doors that Clare had hoped to hymn—and missed the note. “_I cannot tell you where!_” Cannot because there is no telling it. In this moment of remembering the lines which had given Clare her inspiration for Green Doors, and which she often quoted, Lewis’ antipathy for Clare was transmuted into unalloyed pity. Clare wanted the beautiful and good in her life. Sincerely wanted it. But she thought it was necessary to spin it out of herself somehow,—industriously, cleverly spin, spin, spin. It never occurred to her to search for the Beautiful Good, or to love It for Itself in Its objective reality. She was too busy, all times, manufacturing its semblance out of fancy.

Yes. As Lewis stepped over the sill into the little old passage to the crooked, beautiful orchard, a kaleidoscope shift took place in his sympathy. And at the same moment the experience of the early morning was upon him again; _he had been through all this before. He knew this passage, that orchard, by heart._ He knew, too, that grief (he had been wrong in this much of the morning’s prevision: it was grief but never tragedy) was waiting him here at the real Green Doors.

Miss Frazier came through a door halfway down the passage and met them. She said in a lowered voice, “You’ve come! Everything will be all right now. I knew you’d come. Go into the living room, please, and I’ll explain to Teresa. Or Neil, you come with me. You will be better than I. We haven’t told her Neil was bringing you, you see, Doctor.”

“Where’s Petra?” Lewis asked quickly.

“She took a rug and her coat and went up into the orchard to sleep. She took your sedative first. But she wants to know when you come. I promised. She wouldn’t have rested unless. She doesn’t know about the second hemorrhage, or what Father Morris has said. She thinks Teresa is better.”

Lewis went into the living room. And even before his eyes began assembling details, he knew, with a start, that everything was here that he had looked to find this morning in Petra’s bedroom at Green Doors. This was her environment, her sanctuary, her own place in the sun. He felt Petra’s heart beating in this little room, no matter if they said she was up in the orchard, sleeping. The wide old boards of the floor slanted and dipped as the doorsill had slanted and dipped—fluid—one with the flow of life and time. And there, across the room, between two low-silled windows was the birthday present, his own Fra Angelico picture—perfectly hung. So Petra had brought it here, not to Green Doors. But of course. And under the Fra Angelico there were flowers growing in a dish. Fringed, blue gentians. A big, living clump of them. Planted in dark earth. It is impossible to gather them without the roots, Lewis knew, hence the replanting. On the table, beside the gentians, lay a book, open and face down.

Lewis, with an instinct to save any book, no matter what it was, from abuse, crossed the floor; he would find a marker and close the volume kindly. But when he had it in his hand, it defended its owner with dumb sweetness. It was a Modern Library publication, made for easy usage; the only value it set on itself the value of its word,—spirit not flesh. Lewis glanced at the title: “Marius the Epicurean.” Memory stirred. This was the book—wasn’t it?—Petra had claimed to have been reading when she did not come to play tennis with Clare that day Lewis first went to Green Doors! The identical volume. He was sure of it. So Clare had been wrong—as, poor creature, she was ever in peril of being: Petra had been reading “Marius” that afternoon. She had been lying out there in the orchard, near the horizon, side by side with Teresa. They had lain supported by their elbows, turn and turn about, reading “Marius” together. Lewis knew all about that afternoon now, as well as if he had been here himself, in the golden orchard with green doors opening to the sun, sharing “Marius” with them!

And he was glad to know! Then, that June Saturday, he had told himself it was nothing if Petra wanted to impress Clare with reading she had never done. It didn’t matter. It was a trivial schoolgirl variety of deception. But now he knew that it had mattered. He had cared more than a little, deep down in his heart. It had left a mark, a tiny wound, but still tender enough to feel the healing in this moment of discovery.

A paper fluttered from “Marius,” held open and face down in Lewis’ hand. He rescued it from the floor and stood staring. It was his own picture, cut from the rotogravure section of the _New York Times_,—a photograph of the head that young Italian artist, Ponini, had made when Lewis was in New York last spring, testifying in the Spalding murder case. Ponini had been one of the State’s witnesses. He had introduced himself to Lewis outside the courtroom and persuaded him to sit for him a few times during that tedious week of the trial. Ponini had won surprising acclaim for this particular work, and photographs of the head had been published endlessly, till Lewis was sick of opening magazine or paper and seeing it. But Petra! She had chanced on it, cut it out and preserved it. She must have done this before that Saturday when they met again at Green Doors. This was Petra’s writing, in the narrow white margin. She had written “Marius.”

But this was carrying things beyond strangeness—into truth itself, which cannot be strange or startling! Years ago, in college, Lewis had identified himself with Marius. A peculiarly poignant identification it had been.—Marius, born on the fringes of Christianity but never amalgamated into it. Always wistful, speculative, skeptical. Infinitely skeptical—but passionately searching. Drawn poignantly toward Christians whenever they came into his life. Loving them beyond others with a sure, contented love. Dying finally to save one of them from death. Ministered to in the act of dying by Christians who took it for granted that the martyr to friendship was one of themselves. Marius hungering for Christianity but never attaining communion with it until the instant of his death—and then attaining it by affinity and accident rather than conviction! But how had Petra seen Lewis in all this? How had Petra known!

Lewis replaced the marker in the book, and the book face down, open at the place he had found it, beside the gentians. Thin October late afternoon sunlight slanted through the little, low-ceiled room, casting a transparency over the white, old paneled walls and the wine-colored floorboards. It was a blest light. There was a blessing on this place. And the blessing, for Lewis, suddenly seemed flowing in one direction and coming to form and color in the clump of blue gentians under the Fra Angelico.

_Chapter Twenty-Five_

Teresa’s bed was on the porch off the dining room. Miss Frazier took Lewis as far as the door and left him to go out alone. But Neil was there, sitting on the foot of Teresa’s bed. There was room for no more than Teresa’s narrow cot, her long chair, a table and one other little wicker chair. Yet Lewis, who had a penchant for spaciousness, had no sense of crowding here. On the contrary, he felt that coming onto Teresa’s little porch was like coming out onto deck at sea. The disused farmlands rolled wavelike away on every side, with no glimpse of dwelling or human being anywhere; all was soft, long sweep of meadow and field, climbing waves of woodland, and over all the flowing sky. Teresa’s cot stood against the outer edge of the porch, protected above by deep eaves. Over its head, a dark crucifix, tarnished silver, and about a foot high, was nailed against a supporting post.

Not a breath of change seemed to have passed over Teresa since that October day four years ago, when she had opened the door for Lewis in the Farwells’ Cambridge apartment. She was fresh and vivid, with smiles rippling to light in brown-gold eyes, and an unselfish, lovely mouth, molded by gaiety and humor. And her voice, exactly as Lewis had remembered it through the years, bore out the smile in her eyes. Yes, Teresa was still all of one piece—spirit and body one. Lewis saw an almost palpable bloom upon her—not the bloom of health, since she was emaciated and flushed with fever—but a bloom, all the same, of freshness and well-being.

Neil pushed the wicker chair a few inches nearer the side of the bed for Lewis’ benefit. Lewis, taking the chair, was moved by the effect the dark crucifix, bathed in afternoon light from New England earth and sky, produced on his mood. For, out of doors like this, superimposed against New England fields and sky, the crucifix threw new proportions, as it were, athwart Lewis’ concepts. It produced space for infinities and eternities of joyful well-being. Without analyzing it—indeed scarcely noting it—Lewis accepted the shifting of proportions, the touch of sweetness his passing glance at the cross had brought, with simple gratitude: an unuttered thank-you to the Savior.

Neil was saying, “I’ll be within call, Doctor, if you want anything.” As Neil spoke, he came around past Lewis’ shoulder and adjusted Teresa’s pillow, his arm for an instant back of it, under her shoulders. “Isn’t that better? Is it all right, Teresa?”

The look that passed between the boy and the girl then was one that Lewis charged his heart to remember. It was love, of course. And love between a man and a woman. Complete recognition of all that such love implies. Yet, although this recognition was no new thing with them, they had kissed each other only when both thought Teresa was dying, and in farewell. And beyond this, not even in farewell—since they were forewarned, having “fallen” once—their lips would never touch again this side of Paradise. Lewis knew. If Neil had not confided in him on the drive here, by silences and broken words, Lewis would still have seen the definiteness of their renunciation in the light of the smiling glance that had passed between them as Neil adjusted the pillow, and known that their love held no flaw of possible betrayal in it. These two were at peace with their Faith and everything of both agony and joy that it entailed for them. But this was not renunciation as religionless moralists think of it. It was simplicity, the simplicity of spiritual health.

When Neil had gone, leaving Lewis and the sick girl alone, Lewis was suddenly shy of Teresa. It was she who should measure his health, not he hers. For it is not the whole but the sick who need a physician. Yet he took Teresa’s wrist, lying there on her counterpane, and started counting her pulse.

Then Teresa laughed—putting him off, making him lose the count. “I thought you never made an examination without Janet to take down notes,” she protested. “She’s here, quite handy. Sha’n’t we call her?”