The Breaking Point (2 page)

And Mrs. Crosby, without taking her eyes from the sermon, would nod.

Of late years, Doctor David Livingstone had been taking less and less
of the "Don't-look-for-me-until-you-see-me" cases, and Doctor Dick had
acquired a car, which would not freeze when left outside all night like
a forgotten dog, and a sense of philosophy about sleep. That is, that
eleven o'clock P.M. was bed-time to some people, but was just eleven
o'clock for him.

When he went to church he listened to the sermon, but rather often
he looked at Elizabeth Wheeler. When his eyes wandered, as the most
faithful eyes will now and then, they were apt to rest on the flag that
had hung, ever since the war, beside the altar. He had fought for his
country in a sea of mud, never nearer than two hundred miles to the
battle line, fought with a surgical kit instead of a gun, but he was
content. Not to all the high adventure.

Had he been asked, suddenly, the name of the tall blonde girl who sang
among the sopranos, he could not have told it.

The Sunday morning following Clare Rossiter's sentimental confession,
Elizabeth tried very hard to banish all worldly thoughts, as usual,
and to see the kneeling, rising and sitting congregation as there for
worship. But for the first time she wondered. Some of the faces were
blank, as though behind the steady gaze the mind had wandered far
afield, or slept. Some were intent, some even devout. But for the first
time she began to feel that people in the mass might be cruel, too.
How many of them, for instance, would sometime during the day pass on,
behind their hands, the gossip Clare had mentioned?

She changed her position, and glanced quickly over the church. The
Livingstone pew was fully occupied, and well up toward the front, Wallie
Sayre was steadfastly regarding her. She looked away quickly.

Came the end of the service. Came down the aisle the Courtney boy, clean
and shining and carrying high his glowing symbol. Came the choir, two by
two, the women first, sopranos, altos and Elizabeth. Came the men,
bass and tenor, neatly shaved for Sunday morning. Came the rector, Mr.
Oglethorpe, a trifle wistful, because always he fell so far below the
mark he had set. Came the benediction. Came the slow rising from its
knees of the congregation and its cheerful bustle of dispersal.

Doctor Dick Livingstone stood up and helped Doctor David into his
new spring overcoat. He was very content. It was May, and the sun was
shining. It was Sunday, and he would have an hour or two of leisure. And
he had made a resolution about a matter that had been in his mind for
some time. He was very content.

He looked around the church with what was almost a possessive eye. These
people were his friends. He knew them all, and they knew him. They had,
against his protest, put his name on the bronze tablet set in the wall
on the roll of honor. Small as it was, this was his world.

Half smiling, he glanced about. He did not realize that behind their
bows and greetings there was something new that day, something not so
much unkind as questioning.

Outside in the street he tucked his aunt, Mrs. Crosby, against the
spring wind, and waited at the wheel of the car while David entered with
the deliberation of a man accustomed to the sagging of his old side-bar
buggy under his weight. Long ago Dick had dropped the titular "uncle,"
and as David he now addressed him.

"You're going to play some golf this afternoon, David," he said firmly.
"Mike had me out this morning to look at your buggy springs."

David chuckled. He still stuck to his old horse, and to the ancient
vehicle which had been the signal of distress before so many doors for
forty years. "I can trust old Nettie," he would say. "She doesn't freeze
her radiator on cold nights, she doesn't skid, and if I drop asleep
she'll take me home and into my own barn, which is more than any
automobile would do."

"I'm going to sleep," he said comfortably. "Get Wallie Sayre—I see he's
back from some place again—or ask a nice girl. Ask Elizabeth Wheeler. I
don't think Lucy here expects to be the only woman in your life."

Dick stared into the windshield.

"I've been wondering about that, David," he said, "just how much
right—"

"Balderdash!" David snorted. "Don't get any fool notion in your head."

Followed a short silence with Dick driving automatically and thinking.
Finally he drew a long breath.

"All right," he said, "how about that golf—you need exercise. You're
putting on weight, and you know it. And you smoke too much. It's either
less tobacco or more walking, and you ought to know it."

David grunted, but he turned to Lucy Crosby, in the rear seat:

"Lucy, d'you know where my clubs are?"

"You loaned them to Jim Wheeler last fall. If you get three of them back
you're lucky." Mrs. Crosby's voice was faintly tart. Long ago she
had learned that her brother's belongings were his only by right of
purchase, and were by way of being community property. When, early
in her widowhood and her return to his home, she had found that her
protests resulted only in a sort of clandestine giving or lending, she
had exacted a promise from him. "I ask only one thing, David," she
had said. "Tell me where the things go. There wasn't a blanket for the
guest-room bed at the time of the Diocesan Convention."

"I'll run around to the Wheelers' and get them," Dick observed, in a
carefully casual voice. "I'll see the Carter baby, too, David, and that
clears the afternoon. Any message?"

Lucy glanced at him, but David moved toward the house.

"Give Elizabeth a kiss for me," he called over his shoulder, and went
chuckling up the path.

Mrs. Crosby stood on the pavement, gazing after the car as it moved off.
She had not her brother's simplicity nor his optimism. Her married years
had taken her away from the environment which had enabled him to live
his busy, uncomplicated life; where, the only medical man in a growing
community, he had learned to form his own sturdy decisions and then to
abide by them.

Black and white, right and wrong, the proper course and the improper
course—he lived in a sort of two-dimensional ethical world. But to Lucy
Crosby, between black and white there was a gray no-man's land of doubt
and indecision; a half-way house of compromise, and sometimes David
frightened her. He was so sure.

She passed the open door into the waiting-room, where sat two or three
patient and silent figures, and went back to the kitchen. Minnie, the
elderly servant, sat by the table reading, amid the odor of roasting
chicken; outside the door on the kitchen porch was the freezer
containing the dinner ice-cream. An orderly Sunday peace was in the air,
a gesture of homely comfort, order and security.

Minnie got up.

"I'll unpin your veil for you," she offered, obligingly. "You've got
time to lie down about ten minutes. Mrs. Morgan said she's got to have
her ears treated."

"I hope she doesn't sit and talk for an hour."

"She'll talk, all right," Minnie observed, her mouth full of pins.
"She'd be talking to me yet if I'd stood there. She's got her nerve,
too, that woman."

"I don't like to hear you speak so of the patients who come to the
house, Minnie."

"Well, I don't like their asking me questions about the family either,"
said Minnie, truculently. "She wanted to know who was Doctor Dick's
mother. Said she had had a woman here from Wyoming, and she thought
she'd known his people."

Mrs. Crosby stood very still.

"I think she should bring her questions to the family," she said, after
a silence. "Thank you, Minnie."

Bonnet in hand, she moved toward the stairs, climbed them and went into
her room. Recently life had been growing increasingly calm and less
beset with doubts. For the first time, with Dick's coming to live with
them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had found a vicarious
maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had been very happy. The war
was over and he was safely back; again she could sew on his buttons and
darn his socks, and turn down his bed at night. He filled the old house
with cheer and with vitality. And, as David gave up more and more of
the work, he took it on his broad shoulders, efficient, tireless, and
increasingly popular.

She put her bonnet away in its box, and suddenly there rose in her frail
old body a fierce and unexpected resentment against David. He had chosen
a course and abided by it. He had even now no doubt or falterings. Just
as in the first anxious days there had been no doubt in him as to the
essential rightness of what he was doing. And now—This was what came of
taking a life and moulding it in accordance with a predetermined plan.
That was for God to do, not man.

She sat down near her window and rocked slowly, to calm herself. Outside
the Sunday movement of the little suburban town went by: the older
Wheeler girl, Nina, who had recently married Leslie Ward, in her smart
little car; Harrison Miller, the cynical bachelor who lived next door,
on his way to the station news stand for the New York papers; young
couples taking small babies for the air in a perambulator; younger
couples, their eyes on each other and on the future.

That, too, she reflected bitterly! Dick was in love. She had not watched
him for that very thing for so long without being fairly sure now. She
had caught, as simple David with his celibate heart could never have
caught, the tone in Dick's voice when he mentioned the Wheelers. She had
watched him for the past few months in church on Sunday mornings, and
she knew that as she watched him, so he looked at Elizabeth.

And David was so sure! So sure.

The office door closed and Mrs. Morgan went out, a knitted scarf
wrapping her ears against the wind, and following her exit came the slow
ascent of David as he climbed the stairs to wash for dinner.

She stopped rocking.

"David!" she called sharply.

He opened the door and came in, a bulky figure, still faintly aromatic
of drugs, cheerful and serene.

"D'you call me?" he inquired.

"Yes. Shut the door and come in. I want to talk to you." He closed the
door and went to the hearth-rug. There was a photograph of Dick on the
mantel, taken in his uniform, and he looked at it for a moment. Then he
turned. "All right, my dear. Let's have it."

"Did Mrs. Morgan have anything to say?" He stared at her.

"She usually has," he said. "I never knew you considered it worth
repeating. No. Nothing in particular."

The very fact that Mrs. Morgan had limited her inquiry to Minnie
confirmed her suspicions. But somehow, face to face with David, she
could not see his contentment turned to anxiety.

"I want to talk to you about Dick."

"Yes?"

"I think he's in love, David."

David's heavy body straightened, but his face remained serene.

"We had to expect that, Lucy. Is it Elizabeth Wheeler, do you think?"

"Yes."

For a moment there was silence. The canary in its cage hopped about, a
beady inquisitive eye now on one, now on the other of them.

"She's a good girl, Lucy."

"That's not the point, is it?"

"Do you think she cares for him?"

"I don't know. There's some talk of Wallie Sayre. He's there a good
bit."

"Wallie Sayre!" snorted David. "He's never done a day's work in his
life and never will." He reflected on that with growing indignation. "He
doesn't hold a candle to Dick. Of course, if the girl's a fool—"

Hands thrust deep into his pockets David took a turn about the room.
Lucy watched him. At last:

"You're evading the real issue, David, aren't you?"

"Perhaps I am," he admitted. "I'd better talk to him. I think he's got
an idea he shouldn't marry. That's nonsense."

"I don't mean that, exactly," Lucy persisted. "I mean, won't he want a
good many things cleared up before he marries? Isn't he likely to want
to go back to Norada?"

Some of the ruddy color left David's face. He stood still, staring at
her and silent.

"You know he meant to go three years ago, but the war came, and—"

Her voice trailed off. She could not even now easily recall those days
when Dick was drilling on the golf links, and that later period of
separation.

"If he does go back—"

"Donaldson is dead," David broke in, almost roughly.

"Maggie Donaldson is still living."

"What if she is? She's loyal to the core, in the first place. In the
second, she's criminally liable. As liable as I am."

"There is one thing, David, I ought to know. What has become of the
Carlysle girl?"

"She left the stage. There was a sort of general conviction she was
implicated and—I don't know, Lucy. Sometimes I think she was." He
sighed. "I read something about her coming back, some months ago, in
'The Valley.' That was the thing she was playing the spring before
it happened." He turned on her. "Don't get that in your head with the
rest."

"I wonder, sometimes."

"I know it."

Outside the slamming of an automobile door announced Dick's return, and
almost immediately Minnie rang the old fashioned gong which hung in the
lower hall. Mrs. Crosby got up and placed a leaf of lettuce between the
bars of the bird cage.

"Dinner time, Caruso," she said absently. Caruso was the name Dick had
given the bird. And to David: "She must be in her thirties now."

"Probably." Then his anger and anxiety burst out. "What difference can
it make about her? About Donaldson's wife? About any hang-over from that
rotten time? They're gone, all of them. He's here. He's safe and happy.
He's strong and fine. That's gone."

In the lower hall Dick was taking off his overcoat.

"Smell's like chicken, Minnie," he said, into the dining room.

"Chicken and biscuits, Mr. Dick."

"Hi, up there!" he called lustily. "Come and feed a starving man. I'm
going to muffle the door-bell!"