Chapter Fifteen

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_ "Where away?" With the question, Dolph Dennison flung himself into step at Olive Keltridge's side, one morning in late January. Two inches of snow crackling under foot and a coating of hoarfrost on all the elm trees was answering as a fair substitute for winter; and the blood of both young people was tingling with even that unwonted sting. Nevertheless, though walking briskly, Olive had been lost in a brown study, and she started, as Dolph's genial hail fell on her ears. Then she nodded gayly. "Ditto. Why aren't you in class?" she demanded. "It's low-minded to be eternally talking shop," he told her. "Why can't you for once let me delude myself into the belief that I'm like a lily of the field, without a spinning wheel in sight?" "A lily in a fur-lined coat!" Olive's accent was disdainful. "You ought to be ashamed to be rolled up like this, this splendid morning." Dolph eyed her seal jacket accusingly. "I am," he confessed. "I'm immensely proud of my fur lining, and I hate like thunder to go out, buttoned up. One might as well be lined with quilted farmer satin, with an imitation-mink shawl collar, for all the glory he gets out of winter. That's where you women score; you wear your wool outside." "Yes; but we don't turn up our collars, a day like this," Olive mocked him. "Really, Dolph, you're growing soft. But you haven't answered my question. Why aren't you at a class?" "You're so beastly insistent, Olive. What's the use? If you must know, I've given the dear children a cut, this morning. One of them came prowling into class, all broken out with mumps; that is, if you can call it broken out, when there is only one of it and as large as a camel's hump. Anyhow, I freely offered them a cut, and advised them all to go to their homes and to disinfect themselves with due discretion." "And you?" Olive inquired. "Me? I'm immune. I haven't cheek enough to begin to swell up like that. Accordingly, I am merely taking a walk, while I cultivate my muse." "And I'm to be the muse's understudy?" Olive laughed. "Thank you, I'm otherwise engaged." "You looked it, when I met you. What's doing?" "Household economics. I'm going the rounds of the basement bargain counters, hunting dish towelling." "What's the use?" "To dry the dishes," Olive told him literally. "One doesn't want to eat things in a puddle." Dolph stuck his hands into the pockets of his coat. Then he turned to face her rebukefully. "What a concrete mind you do have, Olive! I wish you'd come into my classes; I'd teach you how to generalize, and give you some much-needed lessons in beauty of diction. You mean well; but you certainly do talk like a housemaid, and--Good morning, Mr. Brenton. Jolly sort of morning, too!" Then Dolph digressed. "What in thunder is the matter with that fellow, Olive?" "Matter?" Olive tried her best to look surprised at the question. "No use shamming. You are perfectly aware that something has gone wrong with the dominie, and he's on his nerves," Dolph told her coolly. "Besides, why should you be denying it? One only tells fibs about one's own responsibilities, and you aren't responsible for Brenton, as far as I know." "Heaven forbid!" Olive replied, with hasty piety. "I have all the responsibility I can endure, with you and Reed." "Best cut out Opdyke, then, and focus it all on me," Dolph advised her genially. "I need it, and I shall repay your effort, seven-fold." Then he digressed again, this time without a trace of humour. "Olive, for a fact, how is Opdyke?" he inquired. "Haven't you seen him lately?" "Yes, of course." Dolph spoke with some impatience. "That's the reason I am asking. I go in there, as often as I can spend the time and stand the strain." Olive edged a trifle nearer to the fur-lined elbow. "You feel it, too, Dolph?" "Good Lord, yes! How could anybody help it, anybody with a nerve in his composition? It takes it out of one tremendously, Olive," Dolph frowned intently; "and it's a curious fact that it takes it out of me worse on his good days than on his bad ones." Olive glanced up sharply. "I didn't know he had any bad ones; at least, not to show them out." Dolph shook his head at the street in general. "That's the woman of you, Olive; the woman in you, I mean. Opdyke is morally bound to hold it all in, when you're in sight and hearing. No man that's half a man will squeak before a woman, and Opdyke's all man, fast enough. Yes, poor devil, he does have his bad days, like all the rest of us. However, the rest of us can arise and lick somebody, if the spirit moves us; and poor old Opdyke has to lie still and take it out in swearing. He does swear, too; and now and then his temper is positively vitriolic." "Reed's?" Olive's voice betrayed indignation, incredulity. "Rather." Dolph laughed. "On one or two occasions, it has risen to that level." Then he sobered. "Don't begrudge him the relief of it, Olive. It's his one salvation, his one road of escape from something that easily might be madness. Have you thought about the change it's made for him?" "Dolph! Do any of us ever think of anything else?" For an instant, he eyed her keenly, apparently seeking to discover what underlay her words. Then,-- "Not when we are with him, I fancy," he assented. "And, of course, I never knew him much till now, so even I can't take it all in, the way you do. Still, I can imagine it a little, imagine what it must be, to an out-door man like him, to be shut up in that one room, packed in with all the frilly duds Mrs. Opdyke has stuffed in around him. Really, I'd feel exactly like a mutton chop in a tissue-paper flounce, myself. The frills add to the ignominy. Why can't she let him have the good of all the bare, empty space he can get, even if it isn't much?" Olive interrupted. "Dolph, you're not the dunce you might be. That's a good idea." He nodded. "It's common sense. Fancy, Olive, if you were laid low, which heaven forfend, and had to live mainly on the fruits of your imagination, wouldn't you grow more of those fruits on a bit of blank, sunny wall than on a perfect trellis work of messy little pictures and ruffled lace and calico hangings? It's worth your while to think it over, and then to summon Mrs. Opdyke to think it over with you. We men want space, not gimcracks. But, about his temper, do be discreet and forget that I told tales. I supposed of course you knew it, knew it was bound to come out now and then. He's got to have some sort of escape valve; now all the more, since your father has shut down upon his smoking. Really, Olive, that was beastly mean of him, I must say." Dolph turned on her accusingly. "I didn't know he had. Reed always has smoked, I know." "It was only day before yesterday. I suppose you'd set him down a baby, if I hinted that the water came into his eyes, while he was telling me. Olive," Dolph flung out the question with a certain desperation; "for God's sake, how long has this thing got to go on?" "Dolph, I don't know." "Doesn't your father ever say things?" "Not of that sort. He never does. Besides, seeing Reed, as I do, almost every day, it's better that I shouldn't know." "But you must think," he urged. "Really, Olive, the thing is going on all our nerves; anyhow, on mine. I can't see that great, strong fellow lie there, all these eight months, and keep steady as he does, and come to know him as I'm doing, know he has been, and is, more of a man than most of us are ever likely to be: I can't watch him, I tell you, and keep my grip on my sense of humour. I like Opdyke better than I like most men; I'd miss him more than most. Still, Olive," and the face above the fur-lined coat was suddenly grown grim; "watching him as I do, I can't help feeling that it would have been a mercy, if only he had been killed outright." "Hush!" Olive turned upon him sternly; sternly she spoke. "That's not for us to say, Dolph. There's a plan back of things, you know, and Reed is only part of the plan." There came a short silence. Then Dolph spoke, not angrily, yet with decision. "Olive, I think I am just a little bit ashamed of you for that. I'm willing to be a fatalist, and say it was ordained from the beginning that Opdyke must be flayed and hung up for the crows of time to pick; but as for saying in a hushed voice that he is the especial object of some wholly beneficent and divine plan, I can't do it, and I won't. A thing like that would be enough to leave a trail of beastliness over the whole mass of revealed religion; in the end it would turn one to a veritable pagan. Is this the entrance to your bargain counter? Good bye, then. And, for heaven's sake, remember that sometimes the personal hurt of a thing may blind a man to the ultimate and underlying beneficence of the plan that knocked him over. Watch Opdyke, not when he is swearing picturesquely, but when his mouth shuts and gets white around the corners with the mental pain, not the physical; and then you will take in what I mean." And Dolph, his face uncommonly grave and overcast, nodded shortly and went on his way, his fists stuffed into his pockets and his grim face half buried in his cavernous collar. And, meanwhile, the poor "puffic' fibbous" lay and fidgetted uneasily, while he wondered why Olive Keltridge had chosen that day, of all days, to delay her customary call. She was not ill. Ramsdell, his nurse, had seen her pass the house, that morning, walking with the swift, alert step which Opdyke knew so well, the step that, in the old days, had accompanied his boyish explorations of every by-path in the region. No; something had detained her. She would surely be in later; and Reed strained his ears, hour after hour, to listen for the buzz of the front-door bell. At last it buzzed, and the long form relaxed its stiffening. Half past five! That meant the shortest possible time for talk. Still, it would be better than nothing; the half-loaf would keep him from going hungry to bed. His eyes were eager, as he watched the door. Then the eagerness went out of them. The door swung open. Not Olive, but Prather, the fussy little novelist, came in. Opdyke's lean fingers shut savagely upon the rug that covered him. It would have been a relief if he could have torn it into tatters. Later, that night, after Ramsdell had shunted him back into bed, and had covered him up as carefully as one covers a six-months baby, and had put the room in order for the night, and then had uttered his nightly query if that was "really hall, sir," left to himself, Reed Opdyke set out to become very philosophical as concerned his predicament. He merely succeeded in becoming very conscious of his utter, aching loneliness, the loneliness which only comes to those suddenly deprived of action. Of course, he acknowledged to himself, a man of his training and experience ought to have untold possibilities of interest inherent in himself. He ought to be able to dip a bucket into his brain, and pull it up, dripping with all sorts of new and amusing thoughts which should keep him brilliant company for hours and hours. He ought to be able to lose the consciousness of the narrow present in the wide sweep of his past memories. He ought to be able to blockade his mind to any speculations as concerned his future usefulness by raising up a perfect barricade of past memories, and then by sitting down on top of the barricade and gloating because it was a little higher than that upbuilt by the next man. Moreover, when those purely personal interests failed him, if purely personal interests did ever fail a man, he had only to summon Ramsdell and set him to reading aloud to him. To be sure, Ramsdell had a trick of chopping up his sentences into separate words, as the primary-school child spells its words by separate letters. Still, if it destroyed somewhat of the sense, it at least increased the interest, since only the most profound attention could discover the pith of any paragraph, when every syllable in that paragraph was uttered with the same deliberate stress. And then there was his father. To Opdyke's certain knowledge, the good professor curtailed by hours and hours and hours his more congenial occupations for the sake of helping his son to work out the chess problems in which they both were taking a perfunctory delight. Reed did unfeignedly enjoy his father's company; but that was no reason he should reduce him to a captivity akin to his own. How long had it lasted, anyhow? May, June--nine months. And, in all that time, Olive never had missed, until to-day. Opdyke made a wry face at the darkness. So he had come back to that, after all the fuss. What a kid he was, despite his six-feet three, and the time he had gone under the knife, unwincing, but fully conscious, because his heart was weak just then and the doctors were afraid of anæsthetics! Afterwards, when the affair was safely over, they had said things about his pluck. And now here he was, bewailing his fate because Olive had, just the once, failed to put in her appearance for her daily call. Pluck be hanged! And Olive had been wonderfully loyal, all these months. Knowing her popularity abroad and her busy life at home, he could not fail to be aware, when he stopped to think about it, that she must have given up any amount of pleasanter engagements, for the simple sake of coming to see him. What made her do it, anyway? Liking? Conscience? Opdyke gritted his teeth. One accepts liking with all due gratitude, however far it may be removed from any sentiment. It is a wholly different thing to feel one's self the object of a conscientious visitation. In the latter case, one longs to throw a whiskbroom at the head of the entering guest, longs to have it hit him, brush end on. Moreover, it is a peculiarity of self-communion in the watches of the night, to have the least lovely theory strike one as the more unassailable. Therefore, without delay, Reed Opdyke adopted the belief in Olive's conscientious devotedness to his welfare. Indeed, between the pangs where the points of his new theory pricked him sorely, he found plenty of room to wonder why the idea had not occurred to him till then. What an insufferable ass he was, to have been thinking that her frequent calls had been due to any other motive! He had been looking upon himself, in spite of his flatness, as being to all intents and purposes her social equal. Now, without warning, he was driven to relegate himself to the lower levels of a sort of all-year Lenten penance. All-year! Yes, that was it. That was the secret of her failure to come in, that day. Or, rather, for Opdyke was nothing, if not accurate, the day before. It was to-morrow now. The clock had struck one, long ago. Or was it half-past? He always did lose count, in those three successive ones. Anyway, Olive's benevolent zeal had flagged a little, before the demands made by a chronic case. Opdyke gritted his teeth anew, as he acknowledged to himself that he was fast becoming desperately chronic. Then his breath caught at the word. The worst of his forecastings had never hit on anything so bad as that. And all the others knew it; perhaps they had known it for some time. That was the reason, of course, that the number of his calls had been falling off a good deal lately; their charitable courage had ebbed and then ended before so permanent a proposition. Olive had known it, too; her father would have told her first of all. And, until now, her loyalty had still held good. Dolph, too, would know it. Indeed, they all of them had known it, all with the sole exception of himself, the victim. They had known it and had talked it over together, had talked him over, him, Reed Opdyke, late consulting engineer for the Colorado Limited-- And then, across the stillness of the dusky room, there came a sound, husky, strangled, a sound strangely like a sob. Next morning, Opdyke faced the doctor, wan, but plucky. "Doctor," he said; "I want those fellows to come up from New York again, to look me over." The doctor stared at him, a moment. "What's the use?" he said then. Reed's smile was grim. "That's what I want to know. It's time that they found out, if they're ever going to." The doctor's glasses fell off with a click, and then hung, swinging, from their thick black cord. When their oscillation had all ended,-- "What has started up your curiosity just now, Reed?" "Signs of the times, I suppose," Reed answered crisply. "What's more, doctor, I don't quite like them." Bending forward, the doctor laid a steady hand upon the lean wrist beside him. As he had supposed, the pulse was leaping with a furious unsteadiness. "Who taught a mere engineer like you to read the signs?" he demanded. The pulse raced a little faster. Then Reed replied,-- "My inherent common sense." "Your inherent self-conceit, you'd better say," the doctor retorted curtly. "What's more, you lay awake to read them? Three quarters of the night? Yes? I thought so. Next time, though, I'll trouble you to let your signs alone. You've got to learn their alphabet straight, before you go to work to get much meaning out of them. Anyway, they are my care, not yours." Then, as the pulse steadied down a little, the doctor spoke more gently. "Boy, what is it that you need to know?" Under the strong, heedful fingers, the pulse gave one great leap, stopped, then fell to pounding madly. Meanwhile, there came a tightening of Opdyke's lips. Then he said, with a voice devoid of any intonation,-- "Doctor, I think it has come to where I need to know the outcome of all this." "Reed boy, I thought so." The doctor's hand, leaving the wrist, came to rest upon the nearer shoulder with a grip which was like a benediction. "It has been a fearful time of waiting. I wish I could tell you what the end will be; but--Reed, I can't." "You mean you won't," Opdyke corrected him a little sharply. But Doctor Keltridge forgave the sharpness, as his eyes rested on the drawn, white face. "I mean I can't," he iterated. "Reed, that's the damned cruelty of the whole position, for you and for us who care for you. It would have been any amount easier to have accepted things at their worst, months ago, than to keep on in this grilling indecision, fearing everything and yet hanging on to every vestige of hope for something better. Don't think I haven't been realizing that, my boy, ever since they brought you in and tucked you up in that infernal bed. It wouldn't have been one half so hard for you, then, or since, if you'd known that you'd step down and out of it at any given time, or even that you were there to stay for ever. It's the uncertainty that kills. And that--" "Well?" Reed asked him steadily. "Is just as great as ever." "You mean?" The doctor straightened in his chair, stiffening himself to administer the bitter draught. "That the dozen best surgeons in the country never could agree on it, whether you will come out of this thing, or not. All we can do is to grip our courage, and leave the matter--" "On the knees of Allah?" Reed asked a little bitterly. The doctor's reply was grave. "Yes, Reed. Upon the knees of Allah and within the hands of modern science. They are bound to work together, in a case like this." The grip upon Reed's shoulder tightened for a minute. Then it fell away, and again the supple fingers shut upon Reed's wrist. "It's no especial use to preach to you about keeping up your courage, Reed. You're bound to do that, being you. I only wish I could have given you a squarer answer to your question; but--I can't. Now, about the surgeons: you'd like to have them come up again?" Reed shook his head, and the gesture was a weary one. "No use, doctor. I believe you--now. I had thought you were putting me off, out of a mistaken sense of friendship, and that I'd be able to worm the facts of the case from them. However, now you admit that the present uncertainty is the worst thing of all, I'm ready to take your word--only--it hurts! All night, I've been bracing myself to take it, and now nobody knows when it will come, or how." For a little while, he lay quite still; and the doctor sat still beside him, waiting. At last, Reed looked up with a forced alertness. "How is Olive?" he inquired, quite in his ordinary tone. Instantly the doctor's face changed, lost its look of waiting strain, grew frankly worried. "Reed, I wish I knew," he said. "Is she ill?" Opdyke's voice sharpened. "No; she's all right, only something has upset her. Didn't she come here, yesterday? No? I thought she was in here, every day; and maybe that--" The doctor checked himself abruptly. A ghost of a smile flitted across Reed's face, although the hair still lay damp upon his temples. "That we had been fighting, doctor?" he inquired. "Your fatherly fears misled you. I haven't seen her for two days." "Queer!" It was evident that Doctor Keltridge, as he rose, was thinking things out loud. "She was all right at breakfast, jolly as you please. Then she went out on some errands. I was out for luncheon, and so missed her. When she came down to dinner, she hadn't any appetite and was very feverish. What's more, if it had been anybody but Olive, I'd have vowed she'd cried her eyes out, all the afternoon." "And this morning?" Reed's accent showed that he was profoundly worried. Tears, indeed, were out of all harmony with his experience of Olive Keltridge. The doctor's reply came crisply. "Apparently, she'd cried them in again." Then once more he bent above the couch where Opdyke lay. "Hang on to the tail of every sort of hope, Reed," he bade him cheerily. "It's not an especially amusing occupation; but it is about the only thing for us to do at present. I'll look in on you, in the morning, to make sure how you slept. By the way," he tossed the last words back across the threshold; "as long as you haven't much else upon your hands, I think I'll order Olive to come down here, and let you cheer her up a little." And, before Reed could answer, he was gone. _

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