Part 9

It passed almost as suddenly as it had come. The thundering blood sank back to the unknown and unconscious rhythms of its usual courses. But as this was Petra’s second experience only of the alert separate mind of the body, she was left strangely shaken by it. It took some effort to return her attention to the shorthand textbook, and she was glad when the telephone finally began ringing in earnest and she could put aside her self-imposed and solitary work.

For a while everything went smoothly. Petra really seemed to have an instinct for discriminating between the important and unimportant and it is certain that her magnetic young voice won instant confidence from the unseen inquirers; they felt that she would remember their requests and do her best in getting Doctor Pryne’s attention for them the first minute possible. She wrote everything down in a tidy, self-conscious hand and filed what should be filed, all the while feeling effectual and important. If the few patients waiting their turns in the little room looked at her more than at the magazines and books they pretended to be reading, she was unaware of it.

The door into the outer hall was standing wide open in the interest of all the draft possible; and so since Petra’s shoulder was turned that way, and the latest comer wore rubber-soled sneakers, she was not aware of him until he came around her desk and stood over her. The little desk, as he stood before her, leaning on it, suddenly became spindly, a mere chip, he was so large and dynamic. He was looking at Petra in surprise that she was not Janet. So she read his expression. She noticed, even in her first startled glance up at him, how blue the eyes were in his bronzed face and how the black brows over them met in a straight line across his high, straight nose. She had never seen eyes of so intense and deep a blue, she thought. They were rather like her own, had she realized it, for it was a strange coincidence, but the girl at the desk and the man bending over it might have been brother and sister. Their coloring, their physiques and their vitality were all in the same key.

The surprise in the man’s face was perhaps more like anger than surprise, after all. A sort of tortured anger, Petra thought. The intense blue of his eyes burned down at her with angry questioning. But his fine, clean-cut lips were set in a defiant line as if he meant never to speak. The thought flashed through Petra’s mind that he might be an insane patient of Doctor Pryne’s who had broken loose from confinement and was seeking out the man who had consigned him to the asylum, to shoot him. But instantly she knew it wasn’t so; the fire in the intense blue eyes was fire of intelligence burning to an expression almost as articulate as speech.

“Do you want to see Doctor Pryne?” she asked. “I am sorry but—”

She got no farther. He had reached a swift hand and snatching a letter from the top of the pile the postman had only a minute ago deposited there, turned it over and, picking up a pencil, wrote on its back, “I am dumb. Neil McCloud. No appointment. Only want to see Pryne for a minute. Will wait till he can work me in.”

Dumb! This vital creature, radiating power and strength! Petra held out her hand for the pencil. But he did not give it to her. He wrote again, the strokes of his script swift and angry, “I’m not deaf. Speak!”

“Sit down,” she said. She could not talk to him while he towered like that. It was like standing under an avalanche of physical and mental force. There was a chair close to her desk. He took it. She felt that he might mind having the other patients, who had appointments, hear him being refused one, and so she leaned toward him and explained the situation almost in a whisper. Doctor Pryne had been out of town and as a consequence was extraordinarily busy to-day. He couldn’t possibly see people without appointments, even for a minute. But next week—She took up the appointment book. The minute McCloud had written his name Petra had placed him, for on Janet’s advice she had studied and learned the names of the regular patients by heart during her first day here. She fluttered the pages of her book and came to McCloud. He had an appointment for Saturday afternoon, to-morrow. That was odd. Janet had said that Doctor Pryne kept his weekends absolutely free for his writing. But here it was in Janet’s hand—McCloud, four o’clock, June 28.

She hesitated over it. Ought she to suggest that Mr. McCloud wait for Janet’s next appearance from the inner office? This was the first time to-day that Petra had felt so uncertain of her ground. But then she decided, “No. I’m in. I must swim. That is what both Doctor Pryne and Janet expect of me. McCloud’ll have to wait for his appointment like everybody else.”—She looked across at him. Blue eyes met blue eyes, his tormented and angry, hers cool but sorry. “I’m sorry—” she began, but again he snatched at the pencil. “OK,” he almost tore it into the envelope. And then he added, underlining it, “Don’t tell him I called. I’d rather you didn’t. Back Saturday.”

Halfway to the door he swung around and came back to Petra. She handed him the pencil. He wrote—but this time in small, scrupulously clear characters—“You’re a damned beautiful girl.” She had read it easily upside down as he wrote but he was gone before the color flamed in her face.

A few minutes later, when Janet came out of the inner sanctum, trailing a patient, and went over to Petra’s desk, Petra showed her the envelope; but she had erased McCloud’s last remark. The secretary frowned. It worried her, for some reason or other. That was obvious. After a minute of brooding over it, she whispered, “I’m sorry you let him go, Petra. The doctor would have made a point of seeing Mr. McCloud. It must be something very special he wanted, really special, I mean. But you couldn’t know.... I think we’d better do what he asks and not say anything about it now to the doctor. It would bother him. I’m sorry I wasn’t here. He must have hated explaining to you about his speech. He’s morbidly sensitive about it. It was hard enough the first time he came and wrote it all down for me—but to have to do it all over again—”

So it was as bad as that! Janet’s expression even more than the words she said told Petra how serious a blunder she had made in sending McCloud away. It was so serious, in fact, that Janet wanted to protect Doctor Pryne from knowing that it had happened at all. But as to the man’s embarrassment, Petra was skeptical, remembering the sentence she had read upside down!

“But look here, Petra, don’t let this one first mistake discourage you,” Janet murmured quickly, as the doctor’s buzzer summoned her to bring in the next patient. “Go on swimming. Don’t get self-mistrustful. It’s like riding. After a spill you must get right up and mount again, or you’re queered. Better luck next time.”

At lunch Dick Wilder found Petra more bafflingly uncommunicative than usual, even, and she ate almost nothing of the very expensive and knowing meal he had ordered for her. What use was it for him to chatter on about Green Doors—and incidentally, of course, Clare—with some one who murmured back mere Yeses and Noes! The only consolation that Dick got from that luncheon hour was the overt admiration he saw in surrounding faces for his companion. These men and women had no way of knowing that his companion was as completely uninteresting as she was completely beautiful. They probably thought him much to be envied, extraordinarily lucky.

“Look here,” he said rather desperately, when he opened the door of his car to let her out in front of her office building, “let me drive you out to-night, Petra. It will be beastly going in the train in this heat.”

“Clare is giving that big dinner party to-night,” Petra reminded him. “She won’t have a minute for you. Some other night.”

But Dick persisted. He was ready to take his chances. When they got to Green Doors he would go in with Petra for a few minutes and stay talking. Clare might be around somewhere. They could exchange one word at least, one look. It would be little Sophia’s bedtime. He might be invited up to the nursery to join with little Sophia’s nurse in her role of enchanted chorus to the nightly repeated scene—the cherub’s supper hour. But he said nothing of his real designs to Petra. He merely exclaimed, “What has Clare to do with it? You’re a funny girl! It’s you I’m asking. I’ll be down here at the door at four.”

Janet’s door, the doctor’s door, the door into the public hall were all wide open when Petra got back. Janet heard her come in and sang out from the dressing room, “I’m just off for lunch, Petra. Won’t be gone twenty minutes. Too hot to eat.” Then, as Petra came up behind her, she turned from the mirror where she had been adjusting her hat and her voice changed. “You poor child! What is the matter?”

“Nothing. What should be?” Petra put away her hat and got out her compact. But Janet would not accept the nonchalant denial. “I know what’s wrong. That McCloud business. But cheer up. For months after I began this job I averaged about half a dozen mistakes a week. Nobody’s infallible. And anyway, I’ve reconsidered it. There is no real reason why that young man should consider himself an exception and come around without appointments. He did the same thing last week. And Doctor Pryne saw him and was over an hour late in leaving the office as a consequence. To-day he would probably have gone without his lunch. It’s really rather cheeky. To-day may make him see it. I myself wouldn’t have dared send him off, because I know how the doctor feels, but you didn’t know, and he only got what he deserves. So cheer up. You’re in charge now till I return. The doctor won’t be back before half-past two, probably.”

But Petra was not much comforted. Her confidence in her own adequacy had been so high only so few hours ago! And ever since the McCloud incident she had felt dashed. But how was she to know who was important, of the people who came to the office or called on the telephone, as long as they remained merely names to her in her appointment book and in the bare files in her desk. Janet, of course, knew the intimate details of all the cases. She took their “histories” down in shorthand, and even some of the conferences later, and filed them in the big steel cases in the inner office. If Petra, now, had known something of Mr. McCloud’s “history,” she might have known what to do with him this morning. But Janet, in initiating her into the work, had told her absolutely nothing of the personalities she would so soon be dealing with. Her information had confined itself strictly to names and ages. It was too great a handicap!

Besides, Petra was interested on her own account in this McCloud now. Very much so! Any one would be.... His tormented impatient look.... The way his very black brows met in a straight line over his straight high nose. She had never seen brows like that. It gave a look of dominance, of strength.... His hands were the hands of a workman, stained with oil or grease, and the fingernails were cut very short where they were not broken. Yet strangely, those hands were as expressive and impatient as his face.... And the upside-down sentence—well—that was a touch of mere deviltry. His eyes had mocked, as he pushed the envelope toward her—and was gone!

The heat in the reception office was stifling. Holding your wrists under water really didn’t help, except for the minute you were doing it. As for getting out the shorthand textbook in this lull between the morning and afternoon appointments, Petra simply couldn’t. She was smothered, dismayed by the heat. It was really a kind of drowning, this airlessness. Janet had looked so cool and superior to it. She had said, “It’s torrid, isn’t it!” but she hadn’t minded it really. She had created the effect, even as she mentioned it, of brushing mere physical discomfort from her clear, cool self as if it were a fly.

There was, however, a slight breeze coming through from Doctor Pryne’s big windows. A paper on his desk rustled intermittently. It might blow off. Petra decided to go in there and put a book or an inkwell, some solid object, on it. But when she had secured the object—a package of Luckies, as it happened—she turned away from the desk to the steel filing case across the room and stood looking at it curiously. She could read the letters on the faces of the boxes from where she stood.

_Chapter Twelve_

Petra was pulling out the drawer marked in small black letters Mc. She pulled it slowly, as one might open a door onto an unknown landscape. She herself thought of Alice. “It might be the rabbit hole and here am I on the verge of tumbling down it.” Indeed, she felt herself a second Alice and as if this deep drawer held a wonderland into which she was about to escape from the stifling hot afternoon of the upper world. Could she have known what it held for her, how different her hesitation in going on pulling out the drawer would have been, how much faster her heart would have beat!

She ran her fingers over the tops of the stiff white cards and came to those marked at the upper right-hand corners, “Neil McCloud.” There were dozens of them in McCloud’s own handwriting—the handwriting, at least, of that one last sentence of his which she had read upside down. Petra lifted them out, removing first the metal clip that held them together. Leaving the Mc drawer open, she leaned against other closed drawers and started to read.

_Neil McCloud. Age twenty-six. Irish-American. Catholic. No known insanity in family._

It read as if it had been written in answer to questions put to him by Doctor Pryne. Ordinarily the patient would have answered vocally, and Janet, or Doctor Pryne, taken it all down; but in this case, since McCloud could not speak, the answers were written by the patient himself. It seemed that the small, scrupulous script of the upside-down sentence was his ordinary writing when he was not furious....

Petra turned the card over and read on: “Oldest of five. Father a garage proprietor in Springfield, Mass. I graduated from High School tenth in class of ninety. My mother wanted me to go to college but I wouldn’t. Went to work for my father as a stop-gap. Wanted to get with airplanes. Father paid me a skilled mechanic’s wages because I was by that time a skilled mechanic,—grew up with the engines, so to speak. Machinery interested me more than books. Except aeronautics books. Read all of those the library had and bought all I could find. I got in with the fellow who runs the Ocean Road Airport. Spent all my spare time there. Took flying lessons by moonlight. Bought a second-hand plane on savings and credit and began taking people up for hire. Father against it. Wouldn’t let me live at home unless I worked for him.... One day my kid brother turned up at the field. He was the baby. Eleven years old. I knew the folks had forbidden him to go up with me. All the kids were forbidden. But he had hooked a ride out, skipped school, and said he would tell father when he got home, and take his licking. He hated lickings as much as anybody, but it would be worth it to fly. I agreed with him it would. He was captain of his grade football team, a great little kid. After my mother, I guess he meant more to me than anybody living. Anyway, I took him up. We had a grand ride, all afternoon, over four States. Then, making the landing in the field, the propeller broke and we hit the ground wrong. The kid was killed. Broken neck. He died in my arms without the sacraments. I never saw my mother again. They wouldn’t let me into the house. Dad wouldn’t. I don’t think mother ever knew I came. She died that fall. She had been poorly ever since Stephen was born, the kid—that was killed.

“Came to Boston. Got job. Chauffeur for Malcolm Dayton, banker. Eloped with his daughter. We were married by a justice of the peace but Edyth suspected I mightn’t feel really married unless a priest blessed us. She looked up the priest of our parish and I went to him. No, hadn’t gone to the Funeral Mass for the kid even, and never to confession since the smash. The priest made me ashamed but agreed to get the dispensations. He talked to Edyth and assured himself she was old enough to know her own mind and really wanted to be my wife. She is ten years older than me. So I confessed and was taken back and received communion, and we were married again in the rectory before the housekeeper and janitor. Edyth was to take instruction. I could have lived alone outside the Church all right, but couldn’t have rested easy with my wife outside it. So I was glad Edyth insisted, I guess. Remembered my mother too well! Couldn’t imagine the mother of my children not a Catholic!

“Dayton went crazy when we told him. He wrote that he would buy a divorce for Edyth any time she asked him to, but until then to keep away from him. We had a baby the first year. A boy. I got a job selling the new Ajax cars. I thought we were pretty well off, but Edyth didn’t. We had a nice apartment and a maid. My mother never had a maid. Edyth’s friends stuck to her. They were fine. Some of them I liked a lot. But she was never really mine. Somehow she was her father’s girl. The baby was born at the Lying-In. The day they were coming home, I had to give a driving lesson in Arlington, but a girl friend of Edyth’s was bringing them and would help the nurse and the maid fix them up comfortably. But I came home and found nobody but the nurse. Called the hospital and they told me that Dayton had come for his daughter and grandson. Called the house. Got Dayton himself. Sorry—can’t remember a word he said. But I knew that Edyth and the baby were with him and weren’t coming home. And the next day he sent a lawyer around who told me that the old man had had me watched and that they had a clear case for a divorce. They had one framed, all right—but no use going into that. I had not been unfaithful. No, I told you, I can’t remember a single word he said on the ’phone.

“No—I didn’t say a word to the nurse who had stood staring at me while I ’phoned. Found I couldn’t. But I thought it was because I was crying. The baby and his mother not coming home, you know. Thought it was tears in my throat. I thought so then, I mean. I walked out of the apartment, got into the car, drove all night. At dawn I was back in Boston. I don’t remember where I drove or anything about it.

“Yes, I stopped for gasoline once or twice during the night. I held up my fingers to show how many gallons and didn’t say a word. But I didn’t realize it was because I couldn’t speak until I got back to the apartment in the morning. The nurse had slept there and was waiting for her money. Yes, my throat closes up whenever I try to speak. It’s like tears—or a sob. Don’t like to try any more. No, haven’t been to Mass since the Sunday before Edyth and the boy were coming home from the hospital. No—don’t want to see a priest. I’ve lost my faith, I think. No, my family know nothing about me. They won’t, either.

“The Ajax people kept me on as a mechanic. It’s charity, really. They’re as hard hit as all the rest by the depression. They really can’t afford a mechanic who can’t talk to the people who drive in. The boss sent me to you. I make thirty a week. Can pay you ten. Ten a week goes to the smashed plane debt. If you don’t cure me quickly, I’ll disappear. The boss is risking his own job, keeping me on. Yes, the boy is fine. When I saw him at the hospital he looked like my kid brother. The kid would have been his uncle.”

There the history proper ended and Janet’s typing began. It was a report of the physical condition of the patient. Doctor Pryne had, apparently, passed McCloud on to various specialists. Petra skipped all this. It was technical and dull but as much as she took in appeared to rate McCloud’s physical condition as excellent. All the remaining cards in the pile, a dozen or more, written on both sides, in Doctor Pryne’s illegible hand, might as well have been inscribed in Chinese for all Petra could read of them. They appeared to record the experiments in treatment Doctor Pryne had tried on the case, and would have been fascinating, Petra thought, if only she could have read three consecutive words.

But one sentence was clear,—and underlined: “_Must find out what Malcolm Dayton said to him on the telephone._”

As she read this, Petra heard some one breathe.... She had not noticed the step in the reception office nor in this room, but she heard the breath, soft as it was. She looked up from the card she was studying and saw Janet. It was the secretary’s sharply indrawn breath that had so startled Petra. But when she woke to the expression on her new friend’s face, her very blood ran cold. This was not Janet, the intelligent, the kind, the clever Janet. What had happened to her? What was the matter?

“Petra Farwell! What are you doing with those files?”

“Reading about McCloud. I wanted to learn....” But her explanation died stillborn. Suddenly, like a thunderclap, Petra knew what a fool she had been, what a terrible thing she had done. She knew now why Janet looked as if she had come upon a murderer, his hands dripping blood. Petra put her hand up to her mouth. It was dry and her tongue was dry.

Janet said “You are stark crazy—or else you are a plain fool. It isn’t just the sneakiness of it—reading private records. It’s the cruelty. It’s violating another person’s rights to his own secrets. Petra, how _could you_? _Are_ you crazy?”

She must be. Petra thought so herself now. It was worse than reading other people’s letters, reading a doctor’s records of cases. Any one who wasn’t crazy would know that. Even young children knew better than to open drawers in other people’s houses. She _was_ crazy, crazy, crazy! She was ready to die!

“Why weren’t the files locked, Miss Frazier? How did this happen? How was it possible?” Doctor Pryne had come in without either of them noticing. His voice was hard—cold too—like ice. There was a white area around his lips.

“You went off with the key, Doctor. You were writing up the Fountain dope. I knew the files weren’t locked but I was leaving Miss Farwell in charge, you see. I was gone only a few minutes. I never dreamed that she herself would open the files. How could I?”

The secretary had nothing more to say, nothing more to look. Her face was paper white—white with anger at Petra, at herself, at Doctor Pryne. She went into her own little office and shut the door behind her with something approximating a slam. In another second the racket of an angry typewriter came in from her office by way of the doctor’s open windows.

“Better put those cards away now. Are they in their right order?”

Petra looked down from Doctor Pryne’s cold face to her hands and what they were all unconsciously still holding. She put the cards back into the drawer with careful quickness. “Yes, they are in their right order.” She almost whispered it. Her throat felt thick. Perhaps she was going to lose her speech as McCloud had lost his, or it might be tears.

“Petra! Why _did_ you?”

“I wanted to know about this Neil McCloud. I was terribly interested.”

“Why?” And then with sudden sick suspicion Lewis asked, “Do you know his wife? Is that why you were interested?”

Petra nodded. “I do know Edyth, of course. She’s one of Clare’s friends. And I knew her before that, in Cambridge. But I didn’t know she was like this—cruel....”

“Petra, this is impossible. I simply can’t take it in, what you’ve done!” He was feeling in various pockets with quick exasperated motions as he spoke, but his eyes had not left her face. “Lord! Miss Frazier was right. Here’s the key. That lets her out.” He added, “And us in—you and me in deep together. We both ought to go to jail.”