Part 2

She had these violent headaches. Weeks on end she could not sleep and then for other weeks she slept too much, could do nothing else but sleep. Her nerves needed either a stimulant or a sedative, constantly. But Doctor MacKay did not approve of drugs, not in the quantities her case demanded. Doctor MacKay said, “Exercise!” But she had this nervous heart. He admitted the nervous heart and yet insisted on the exercise. Imagine! Besides, how could she exercise? Riding was out of the question. Couldn’t afford it. And golf bored her. Terribly! And what other exercise is there, besides golf and riding? They hadn’t even a car. If they had, she might at least get some fresh air each day. But perhaps Doctor Pryne knew for himself—she was looking at his ready-made tweed suit—that fame did not pay in dollars and cents. Her husband’s novels were only for the discriminating few. The better the review, she noticed, the smaller the royalties always.... And noises—cooped up in a cheap little apartment like this—noises were a sort of crucifixion!

A laugh, muffled by the closed door, but audible enough for demonstration, coincidentally bore her out. Or so she imagined. She winced, becomingly, but genuinely enough.

“If only Petra could go away to school! She is my husband’s daughter, you know. But we can’t even afford a camp for her. And big girls like that are so noisy, so all over you! If she were a boy, she wouldn’t be always at home. It would be easier then. If Doctor MacKay ever thinks I am strong enough to have a baby I do hope it will be a boy!”

Lewis listened to all of this and much more with attention. And not until Mrs. Farwell had worn herself out with the emotion which accompanied her eager, fluent explanations of her nervous condition, did he venture a few tentative suggestions. But it appeared that Doctor MacKay had made the very same suggestions dozens of times already,—and none of them were any good.

“Well then—?” But it was only a mental question, a mental shrug. Lewis was grave and interested up till the very last. Doctor MacKay, however, had not had the slightest excuse for calling in a psychiatrist. It was an old story, but as disheartening and ridiculous as if it were the first occasion on which Lewis had wasted his time like this.

As it happened, the laugh which had penetrated Mrs. Farwell’s closed door, with its crucifying effect on one of its hearers, was Lewis’ last touch with Teresa and Petra. When he came out of Mrs. Farwell’s bedroom into the living room, they were gone. In their stead, a new individual—younger than Mrs. Farwell, older than the girls—was lying in wait for him. She had usurped Petra’s place in the open blue window, but she quickly left it and came forward.

“I am Mrs. Tom Otis, Doctor Pryne. A friend of the Farwells. Mr. Farwell has commissioned me to see you in his place. He is at a critical point in the new novel, and if he leaves it, he’s lost. You know how that is, since you write yourself. He is working in my house,—has his study there. He wants you to tell me your ‘findings’ here—if that’s the word—and then, when he comes to earth again, I’m to report to him. Do you see?”

Mrs. Otis had spoken in a lowered voice in spite of Mrs. Farwell’s closed door, and now she found a chair for herself with the obviously gracious intention of permitting Lewis to do the same. She appeared so altogether ingenuous a person that Lewis was fain to divert his irritation over the stupidity of the situation to the absent Lowell Farwell. Meanwhile he tried to get away from this Mrs. Otis as promptly and tactfully as possible.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m glad Mr. Farwell didn’t interrupt his work. There’s no reason why he should. Doctor MacKay will get in touch with me to-morrow and he’ll give Mr. Farwell my ‘findings’ such as they are, I suppose.”

He was looking for his hat, but wondering about Petra and Teresa. Why had they had to go away? He had meant to ask them where they had found the gentians.

“Here it is,” Mrs. Otis moved aside, so that he saw the dish of gentians, and then his hat beside them. “But please don’t go right away. Mr. Farwell will think I have failed him if you go without telling me what you think about Marian. It was stupid of me, perhaps, not to have explained myself more fully before I asked you to tell me. You couldn’t understand, of course. You couldn’t know how very close I am to these people. Why, it was I who persuaded them to get you. I couldn’t bear the way things were going. Something had to be done. Doctor MacKay is so tiresomely conservative. Any wise, up-to-date doctor would have seen long ago that Marian Farwell ought to go right away—to a sanitarium—abroad—anywhere—but _away_. It isn’t fair to let neurotics inflict their nerves on people who are perfectly sane and healthy. And it’s all the worse when an extremely sensitive artist like Lowell Farwell is the victim! You think so too, don’t you?”

But Mrs. Otis had not waited for Lewis’ answer. She took his agreement for granted and hurried on. “Doctor Pryne, see here. I am so eager—and more important, perhaps—_able_ to help. Did you think I was merely curious and officious? That would be too hateful of me, if it were true. But it isn’t. This affair is almost as much mine as it is Lowell’s—theirs, the Farwells’, I mean. I got Mr. Farwell to call you in, I am paying your fees, and I will send Marian abroad, anywhere, _to-morrow_, if you will only say the word. We—Society—owe to first-rate artists their chance for good working conditions. Well, you and I between us can manage things for this particular artist right now. He won’t let me give Marian the money for Europe as things are, just for my urging it. But if _you_ say she _must_ go— Don’t you see?”

Mrs. Otis had seemed to Lewis at the time a rather delightful person. A magnetic smile and an air of almost naïve simplicity had robbed what she said, and implied, of too much stupidity. And she went on to speak of her wealth with simplicity. “What use is all this money,” she asked, eyes shining and wide, “if I can’t do some ordinary human good with it outside of organized charity, and without fuss? What I can’t spend myself—spend beautifully, I mean—certainly belongs to the next person who needs it. And Marian, poor darling, is really and truly my next person. It’s as simple as that.”

But Mrs. Farwell, to Lewis’ mind, was neither mentally nor physically ill. She was a “happiness hound,” nothing else in the world, and he could not honestly prescribe Europe or a sanitarium as a cure for a deeply rooted perversion in human character. Yet getting away without committing himself to coöperation in Mrs. Otis’ naïve philanthropic schemes was difficult, the more so since he could not, of course, tell her his “findings.” But Lewis managed it at last and Dick’s errand here just now seemed to indicate that she had not stayed permanently resentful, however she had felt at the time.

And then, before anything of his call at the Cambridge apartment had had time to fade from Lewis’ memory, the papers were full of the divorce of Lowell and Marian Farwell. A little while more and two marriages were front-page news, Lowell Farwell to Mrs. Clare Otis _née_ Fay, and Mrs. Marian Farwell, _née_ Dodge to—somebody or other. The name hardly mattered since it was merely her recent connection with the celebrated novelist which gave the happiness hound’s new marriage its ephemeral public interest. And now, less than three years after that so simple solution of their problems—and a wonder Mrs. Clare had not hit on it sooner and had ever bothered to try plotting with a psychiatrist!—she had Lewis again marked down as a fellow conspirator.

What did she want to buy from him this time, Lewis asked himself. Her stepdaughter’s affection, according to Dick. But that would be only part of it. With three years for perspective, Lewis was more than a little doubtful of “Clare’s” simplicity. But he could not guess what she might be wanting. It would be interesting to see, possibly. And in any case, there would be Petra. And Teresa Kerr. Who was Teresa Kerr, anyway, and where was she now, Lewis wondered. Well, Petra could tell him that. He would ask her on Saturday, the first thing.

To-day was only Wednesday. Three days, then, to go until he should see Petra. It seemed an unconscionably long time to wait. But why, then, had he let three years go past without inquiring from Cynthia, or the dozen other people who could certainly have told him, what had become of Petra since Farwell’s last marriage, and who was Teresa Kerr?

He turned sharply around, as if startled away from the window by astonishment at himself for this strangely belated impatience.

_Chapter Three_

Green Doors lay a few miles beyond Meadowbrook, well away from the main highway on a meandering country road of its own. The new house had been built on the site of the old farmhouse which it had replaced, with its front door only a few paces from the road. In a general way the new house followed the contours of the old. The long, low lines of the sheds and the high, gabled lines of the barn—all house now—gave the place, as one came on it, a casual air of simplicity. It melted into the landscape as if it were painted on it. The white walls, shadowed by old, gnarled apple trees, were friendly with the dusty white country road, while the entire landscape of meadows and fields, with stretches of brook-cooled woodland, cradled the new dwelling as no changeling but its own child, in a peaceful lap. So Lewis at any rate felt as he arrived with Dick, in Dick’s car, at tea time on that Saturday afternoon which had come, at last.

“That’s Clare’s guest house,” Dick explained of a small one-story doll-house-like place directly across the way from the big house. “It used to be the cow sheds. We found it amusing, having the estate cut in two by the public road, and we have used the road in our landscaping—up to the hilt. Autos almost never come this way, and the hay carts and occasional cows that do only add to the flavor. Isn’t it jolly!”

“Very!” Lewis agreed. “And infinitely peaceful. Does Farwell write here at Green Doors?” He was contrasting the novelist’s Cambridge home with this latest one and thinking that Clare appeared, at least on the surface, to have been successful in giving this particular artist an ideal environment for his creative ventures.

“Oh, yes. But in a little studio off in the woods. He made us build it according to his own ideas and Farwell’s genius doesn’t work along the lines of architecture. But such as it is, it’s his own, and that’s charm enough, I suppose. We’ve laughed over it quite a lot, Clare and I, but it’s well out of sight and it doesn’t matter what it looks like so very much, just so long as it serves its purpose. And it does that. The man practically lives there.”

Lewis could not help thinking of his own books written in snatched minutes at his office, on trains, in hotel bedrooms in the dead of night with the call to sleep like a fire-engine siren shrieking a warning in his brain. But Farwell’s was creative writing and that was a different sort altogether, necessitating leisure and solitude, at any price—possibly! But there Lewis pulled himself up. “Lord! This matter of price is none of my business! They may be quite decent people at heart, really, and even happy!”

The front door had its step—a big, flat slate stone—a little below the level of the road. The hall into which one entered after so unpretentious an approach was almost startling in its palatial proportions. It was the height of the old barn, and the floor and the walls—with a balcony running around the second story on three sides—were made of composition which gave the effect of stone. In its own right, this great hall was a work of art; but on such a day as this, with the whole farther end opened to the New England countryside, it became merely a neutral frame for the garden, which, a mass of passionate color, cut a flaming swathe through a wooded valley to orchard-draped hills beyond.

The maid who had opened the door for them said, “Mrs. Farwell would like you to go through into the garden. She is under the elm.”

The terrace, as they came to it, was merely an unroofed continuation of the floor of the great hall. It ended with wide slabs of flower-rimmed stone shelving down into grassy sweeps of hot June color. Off at one side, in a distant corner of the lawn, some Chinese garden chairs were grouped around a rustic table in the shade of a perfect wineglass elm. A little beyond, in the same shade, a woman in a white dress lay stretched in a long chair, her back to the house. A big garden hat, brilliant orange, was tossed on the grass beside her.

But Mrs. Farwell was not asleep, for she heard their voices, and jumping up, came several steps out beyond the shade in her eagerness to welcome them.

“Petra and I were to play tennis. She was to have joined me here—oh—ages ago—and she hasn’t, and I’ve just stayed on waiting all afternoon, and never dreamed it was tea time. Look at me!”—Mrs. Farwell meant apology for her crumpled, sleeveless frock, for her ankle socks on suntanned bare legs, for rather shabby sneakers. “I meant to change, of course. But the afternoon is a dream and I have been dreaming with it, since Petra never came. The child must not forget her tea date, though, and I don’t think she will. She remembered you perfectly, Doctor Pryne, and seemed actually _pleased_ that you were coming.—Yes, Richard! Petra _showed pleasure_. Doesn’t that sound propitious?”

She stood for another minute out in the glare where she had met her guests, looking hopefully toward the house, as if half expecting Petra’s arrival to coincide with theirs. “Lowell too!” she murmured. “My husband was terribly pleased you were coming, Doctor Pryne. But time doesn’t exist for him when he is working. He will be sure to turn up, though. He has no intention of missing you—this time.”

Then she shaded her brow with her palm and, turning suddenly to Dick, smiled deliberately and sweetly into his eyes. Lewis wished he had been looking somewhere else when this happened. She led them back to the chairs and herself took the one nearest the tea table.

His hostess was not nearly so pretty as Lewis remembered her. But she was much more than pretty! Yes—sitting upright against the fantastic high back of the Chinese chair, in her sleeveless white frock, her hair black as the lacquer of the wickerwork, her very long, curving lashes black, tipped in gold, and dimples subtly hinted in her thin cheeks—she was vital and engaging.

But specious!—Lewis quickly added. Before, when he had thought her rather beautiful and certainly naïvely ingenuous, he had been looking at her through the beginning of twilight in a city apartment. But this second time her background was an elm and the light was of broad day. That changed things somewhat. Lewis did not particularly enjoy his present skepticism. But he could not help himself. And his next unhallowed thought was “Poor Dick!” For the latest Mrs. Farwell’s particular variety of predatoriness was of the sort that relishes a spiritual flavor to its meat; so Lewis, at any rate, hazarded. The bodies, even the hearts of men, would not be enough: Clare Farwell would demand the soul before all.

“Pretty selfish of Petra to waste your afternoon for you like this!” Dick exclaimed. He turned to Lewis. “You can see for yourself how it is. You’ve run right onto it, first thing, without our showing you. It’s always like this. This is the way Petra treats Clare.”

“Oh, Richard! Please! How horrid that sounds. It’s a little unjust as well. This time I am almost certain she really and genuinely forgot I was waiting for her. Her offering to play with me at all was generous. Petra is a hum-dinger at tennis, Doctor Pryne, and I am only fairish. So it’s not much fun for her, playing with me. This is probably the truth of it: Petra wanted to be nice, then her subconscious mind got busy making her forget and so saved her from having to be nice. Doctor Pryne will tell you, Richard, that the hardest things not to forget are the duties which bore us.” She was laughing but in spite of that she meant them to believe her serious.

Clare _would_ call Dick “Richard.” Given her type, it was almost inevitable. Lewis wondered why it had taken him so unaware and why it need so irritate him. And it was also inevitable—but for this he had been totally unprepared—that she would overtly exonerate the slandered Petra and in the very act make it look worse for the child. For she was a person who could have her cake and eat it too, every time. It was a trick act, peculiar to the type.... But Lewis liked his own critical self less and less in exact ratio as he found himself liking Petra’s stepmother less and less. He wished he had never had to see her by daylight.

“Subconscious mind nothing!” Dick scoffed. “Clare, you’re always making excuses for everybody, but most of all for Petra. Couldn’t she _see_ you waiting out here all afternoon from every window in the house? Wouldn’t that circumvent her subconscious forgettery mechanisms?”

“Oh yes, if she were in the house, my dear Richard. But she may have gone for a walk. Now, though, she’ll be back, dressing for this party of ours. _I_ should have!”

“Well, I only wish I had known you were just waiting around here for nothing!” Dick was thoroughly upset. “I’ve been spoiling for exercise all afternoon. Cynthia insisted it was too hot to play, Harry stuck at his bank, and Lewis couldn’t be torn from Marlboro Street one minute ahead of time. But I’m sleeping at the Allens’ to-night, after Petra’s dance. How about a game tomorrow morning?”

“But my dear boy, to-morrow is Sunday,” Clare reminded him. Then, to Lewis, she explained, almost with a blush, “Don’t be shocked, Doctor Pryne. I never impose my religious idiosyncrasies on others, not even on my family. One doesn’t! And I don’t even carry my peculiarity to the point of going to church—do I, Richard? Oh, yes, I do really, only not”—she laughed—“the Meadowbrook Congregational Church! Green Doors is my church.

“I know an orchard, old and rare, I will not tell you where, With green doors opening to the sun, And the sky children gather there—

“I can slip away, with a volume of essays or poetry, stretch out anywhere in the grass and sun on one of those slopes up there, and feel God nearer than He would ever come to me in the four walls of any church on earth, even the most beautiful cathedral. My husband says that that’s pagan. Perhaps it is. I am pagan, I think. But words for one’s religion don’t matter, do they! _I know what I know, and I feel what I feel, and it is—beautiful._”

Then, laughing again, she asked, “What church do you go to, on Sundays, Doctor Pryne? Not one built by men, any more than I, I’m sure. You too are beyond that kindergarten point in evolution. You see, I know you much better than you can even begin to know me, for I have read your books!”

Good Lord! What had Lewis’ books to say of his religion? They were austerely psychological, made up of the findings and the theories of a practising psychiatrist. The philosophical humility in all his writing was Lewis’ pride. But he was saved the trouble of defending his pride just then, even if he had thought it worth the trouble, for Clare’s stepdaughter, Petra, had come down the terrace steps and was hurrying across the lawn.

“Imagine Clare calling herself the mother of that!” Dick laughed—and Lewis, somehow, knew that the remark and its accompanying mirth was probably as familiar at this tea table as was Clare’s explanation of her individualistic out-of-doors worship.

Clare murmured hurriedly, softly—her fingers just touching Lewis’ coat sleeve as she leaned toward him—“Richard is only teasing me. He knows perfectly well that I’m not flattered. I am thirty years old and have no ambition to compete with Petra’s _lovely youth_. What I long to be is a mother to her, a real one. How I long for it! But I need your help, Doctor Pryne. You will see how I need it....”

Petra, when she reached the shade of the elm, was constrained and even a little awkward. But that was hardly surprising. All three of them had watched her approach from the instant that she had come down the terrace steps, and she might very well have felt that Clare’s murmurings in Lewis’ ear, and even more, Dick’s laugh, concerned herself.

“Darling!” Clare exclaimed, smiling up at her through her really fascinating lashes. “What a perfectly enchanting frock! It’s new! And you never showed it to me! And look at me! I haven’t even changed!—This is my daughter, grown up, since you saw her, Doctor Pryne. Sit down quickly, darling. It’s too hot to keep the men standing. And here’s the tea. Draw your chairs to the table.—You needn’t stay to pass things, Elise.” She threw a warm, grateful smile to the maid who had brought out the tray. The look she won in return was humbly idolizing.

Lewis held a chair out for Petra, and when she took it, drew his own along beside it.

The gawky schoolgirl body had rounded into selfconscious maturity. Otherwise Petra was exactly the girl of Lewis’, in this case strangely explicit, memory ... until she turned from him and the intense gentian blue of her eyes no longer blurred his power for deeper perception. Then he saw that the attentive fairy-tale gaze was quite gone; or if there was attentiveness there now, it was not bent on a happy, mystery-brimmed world before the girl’s face, but on a realm within. Childlike receptiveness was transformed to a look of reserve made vivid. The utter beauty of the remembered child face was there—intact—but it no longer took one’s breath; it was protected by this vivid reserve as by a sword, on guard.

But Lewis was not sorry for the sword. He saw that it would, at any rate, keep her safe from Clare. He knew that Youth often has need of its seeming hardness until years give it some chance to acquire a little subtlety in its denials, if it is to protect with any success the inner, personal development of its own integrity.

Lewis took the teacup and saucer Clare handed him. He helped himself to toast and strawberry jam. He laughed, amusedly, at some remark or other of “Richard’s,” and could even have repeated the witticism word for word if it had been required of him. But in spite of all this overt conformity to the social requirements of those first minutes since Petra’s arrival under the elm and his holding her chair for her, he was conscious of one thing only, the young girl’s living, breathing, _still_ self, there at his side.

_Chapter Four_

It was Dick who brought up the broken tennis date, not Clare. Petra came out of her stillness to show a mild surprise. “But I thought it wasn’t definite,” she turned to Clare. “I thought we were to play if we felt like it when the time came. And then it was so hot!”

The breath of silence which Clare allowed to follow this and the expression which crossed her face spoke an acute surprise on her part; but it was quickly followed by a seeming desire to shield Petra from anybody’s criticism, even her own. Tactfully she changed the subject to ask, “What did you do all afternoon, darling? It has been deliciously hot.” And then to Lewis, “I’m like Shelley. I adore hot summer days and am more alive then than ever.”—But she repeated her question to Petra: “What did you do with yourself all afternoon, darling?”

Petra answered, after a momentary hesitation, as if she needed the pause in which to choose between several possible replies, “After lunch I took a book and went off in the woods, where it was cool—and read.”

“That was nice. What book, darling?”

“‘Marius, the Epicurean.’”