The Breaking Point Part 6

"You treat him like a dog," she said. "Oh, I know you're civil to him, but if any man looked at me the way Wallie looks at you--I don't know, though," she added, thoughtfully. "It may be that that is why he is so keen. It may be good tactics. Most girls fall for him with a crash."

But when she glanced at Elizabeth she saw that she had not heard. Her eyes were fixed on something on the street beyond the window. Nina looked out. With a considerable rattle of loose joints and four extraordinarily worn tires the Livingstone car was going by.

IV

David did not sleep well that night. He had not had his golf after all, for the Homer baby had sent out his advance notice early in the afternoon, and had himself arrived on Sunday evening, at the hour when Minnie was winding her clock and preparing to retire early for the Monday washing, and the Sayre butler was announcing dinner. d.i.c.k had come in at ten o'clock weary and triumphant, to announce that Richard Livingstone Homer, s.e.x male, color white, weight nine pounds, had been safely delivered into this vale of tears.

David lay in the great walnut bed which had been his mother's, and read his prayer book by the light of his evening lamp. He read the Evening Prayer and the Litany, and then at last he resorted to the thirty-nine articles, which usually had a soporific effect on him. But it was no good.

He got up and took to pacing his room, a portly, solid old figure in striped pajamas and the pair of knitted bedroom slippers which were always Mrs. Morgan's Christmas offering. "To Doctor David, with love and a merry Xmas, from Angeline Morgan."

At last he got his keys from his trousers pocket and padded softly down the stairs and into his office, where he drew the shade and turned on the lights. Around him was the acc.u.mulated professional impedimenta of many years; the old-fashioned surgical chair; the corner closet which had been designed for china, and which held his instruments; the bookcase; his framed diplomas on the wall, their signatures faded, their seals a little dingy; his desk, from which d.i.c.k had removed the old ledger which had held those erratic records from which, when he needed money, he had been wont--and reluctant--to make out his bills.

Through an open door was d.i.c.k's office, a neat place of shining linoleum and small gla.s.s stands, highly modern and business-like. Beyond the office and opening from it was his laboratory, which had been the fruit closet once, and into which d.i.c.k on occasion retired to fuss with slides and tubes and stains and a microscope.

Sometimes he called David in, and talked at length and with enthusiasm about such human interest things as the Staphylococcus pyogenes aureus, and the Friedlander bacillus. The older man would listen, but his eyes were oftener on d.i.c.k than on the microscope or the slide.

David went to the bookcase and got down a large book, much worn, and carried it to his desk.

An hour or so later he heard footsteps in the hall and closed the book hastily. It was Lucy, a wadded dressing gown over her nightdress and a gla.s.s of hot milk in her hand.

"You drink this and come to bed, David," she said peremptorily. "I've been lying upstairs waiting for you to come up, and I need some sleep."

He had no sort of hope that she would not notice the book.

"I just got to thinking things over, Lucy," he explained, his tone apologetic. "There's no use pretending I'm not worried. I am."

"Well, it's in G.o.d's hands," she said, quite simply. "Take this up and drink it slowly. If you gulp it down it makes a lump in your stomach."

She stood by while he replaced the book in the bookcase and put out the lights. Then in the darkness she preceded him up the stairs.

"You'd better take the milk yourself, Lucy," he said. "You're not sleeping either."

"I've had some. Good-night."

He went in and sitting on the side of his bed sipped at his milk. Lucy was right. It was not in their hands. He had the feeling all at once of having relinquished a great burden. He crawled into bed and was almost instantly asleep.

So sometime after midnight found David sleeping, and Lucy on her knees.

It found Elizabeth dreamlessly unconscious in her white bed, and d.i.c.k Livingstone asleep also, but in his clothing, and in a chair by the window. In the light from a street lamp his face showed lines of fatigue and nervous stress, lines only revealed when during sleep a man casts off the mask with which he protects his soul against even friendly eyes.

But midnight found others awake. It found Nina, for instance, in her draped French bed, consulting her jeweled watch and listening for Leslie's return from the country club. An angry and rather heart-sick Nina. And it found the night editor of one of the morning papers drinking a cup of coffee that a boy had brought in, and running through a ma.s.s of copy on his desk. He picked up several sheets of paper, with a photograph clamped to them, and ran through them quickly. A man in a soft hat, sitting on the desk, watched him idly.

"Beverly Carlysle," commented the night editor. "Back with bells on!" He took up the photograph. "Doesn't look much older, does she? It's a queer world."

Louis Ba.s.sett, star reporter and feature writer of the Times-Republican, smiled reminiscently.

"She was a wonder," he said. "I interviewed her once, and I was crazy about her. She had the stage set for me, all right. The papers had been full of the incident of Jud Clark and the night he lined up fifteen Johnnies in the lobby, each with a bouquet as big as a tub, all of them in top hats and Inverness coats, and standing in a row. So she played up the heavy domestic for me; knitting or sewing, I forget."

"Fell for her, did you?"

"Did I? That was ten years ago, and I'm not sure I'm over it yet."

"Probably that's the reason," said the city editor, drily. "Go and see her, and get over it. Get her views on the flapper and bobbed hair, for next Sunday. Smith would be crazy about it."

He finished his coffee.

"You might ask, too, what she thinks has become of Judson Clark," he added. "I have an idea she knows, if any one does." Ba.s.sett stared at him.

"You're joking, aren't you?"

"Yes. But it would make a darned good story."

V

When he finished medical college d.i.c.k Livingstone had found, like other men, that the two paths of ambition and duty were parallel and did not meet. Along one lay his desire to focus all his energy in one direction, to follow disease into the laboratory instead of the sick room, and there to fight its unsung battles. And win. He felt that he would win.

Along the other lay David.

It was not until he had completed his course and had come home that he had realized that David was growing old. Even then he might have felt that, by the time David was compelled to relinquish his hold on his practice, he himself would be sufficiently established in his specialty to take over the support of the household. But here there was interposed a new element, one he had not counted on. David was fiercely jealous of his practice; the thought that it might pa.s.s into new and alien hands was bitter to him. To hand it down to his adopted son was one thing; to pa.s.s it over to "some young whipper-snapper" was another.

Nor were David's motives selfish or unworthy. His patients were his friends. He had a sense of responsibility to them, and very little faith in the new modern methods. He thought there was a great deal of tomfoolery about them, and he viewed the gradual loss of faith in drugs with alarm. When d.i.c.k wore rubber gloves during their first obstetric case together he snorted.

"I've delivered about half the population of this town," he said, "and slapped 'em to make 'em breathe with my own bare hands. And I'm still here and so are they."

For by that time d.i.c.k had made his decision. He could not abandon David. For him then and hereafter the routine of a general practice in a suburban town, the long hours, the varied responsibilities, the feeling he had sometimes that by doing many things pa.s.sably he was doing none of them well. But for compensation he had old David's content and greater leisure, and Lucy Crosby's grat.i.tude and love.

Now and then he chafed a little when he read some article in a medical journal by one of his fellow enthusiasts, or when, in France, he saw men younger than himself obtaining an experience in their several specialties that would enable them to reach wide fields at home. But mostly he was content, or at least resigned. He was building up the Livingstone practice, and his one anxiety was lest the time should come when more patients asked for Doctor d.i.c.k than for Doctor David. He did not want David hurt.

After ten years the strangeness of his situation had ceased to be strange. Always he meant some time to go back to Norada, and there to clear up certain things, but it was a long journey, and he had very little time. And, as the years went on, the past seemed unimportant compared with the present. He gave little thought to the future.

Then, suddenly, his entire attention became focused on the future.

Just when he had fallen in love with Elizabeth Wheeler he did not know.

He had gone away to the war, leaving her a little girl, apparently, and he had come back to find her, a woman. He did not even know he was in love, at first. It was when, one day, he found himself driving past the Wheeler house without occasion that he began to grow uneasy.

The future at once became extraordinarily important and so also, but somewhat less vitally, the past. Had he the right to marry, if he could make her care for him?

He sat in his chair by the window the night after the Homer baby's arrival, and faced his situation. Marriage meant many things. It meant love and companionship, but it also meant, should mean, children. Had he the right to go ahead and live his life fully and happily? Was there any chance that, out of the years behind him, there would come some forgotten thing, some taint or incident, to spoil the carefully woven fabric of his life?

Not his life. Hers.

On the Monday night after he had asked Elizabeth to go to the theater he went into David's office and closed the door. Lucy, alive to every movement in the old house, heard him go in and, rocking in her chair overhead, her hands idle in her lap, waited in tense anxiety for the interview to end. She thought she knew what d.i.c.k would ask, and what David would answer. And, in a way, David would be right. d.i.c.k, fine, lovable, upstanding d.i.c.k, had a right to the things other men had, to love and a home of his own, to children, to his own full life.