Ethel Cook Eliot

“ Clare said, after a minute, “I see what you think! If only you were right! How happy that would make me, Doctor! But life isn’t like that. Life makes us suffer. What I am so tortured by now is the fear that in my blundering I may not only have failed to help Dick, but I may have involved Petra in something amounting almost to tragedy for her. If she cares for him, as she seems to lately—if she has given up Neil for Dick, and Dick fails her—all our hearts may break in the end. ”

“ Lewis sighed. Little he cared whether she heard the sigh. And she did hear it. He said, “If you were actually giving Dick to Petra so that he might get over his young, romantic infatuation for you, it would, of course, be calamitous, Mrs. Farwell. Calamitous for them both. Ghastly. But that won’t be the way of it. If they do marry, it will be because they have fallen healthily in love. You—and I—we are out of it. Clean out of it. Nothing to worry us.”
“You think Dick no longer cares for me, Doctor Pryne?” Her voice was sharper than she meant it to be. ”

“ Lewis said, “No, I don’t believe Dick has anything on his mind that has to do with Petra. Why do you put that idea into my head, Cynthia? If I had thought it was that—but it isn’t—I’d have gone alone. Cynthia, you are the world’s prize idiot. Do lay off prying and finish your coffee. It must be stone cold. How does Harry abide you! If you start crowing here, they’ll put you in jail as a disturber of the peace. No, you can’t have another cigarette. If I’m going in the morning, I’ve got to get back to work now. It’s fun getting you furious in a position where you have to consider your dignity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So he had a world to choose from. If only he had met Clare before Lowell Farwell met her! Cynthia had sighed this sigh to herself before to-night. Clare would have been perfect. But there were others. There must be. Lewis needn’t fall back on a Petra—a sullen, stodgy young beauty, who wasn’t even enough of a personality herself to appreciate personality in another, in Clare. If Lewis should be hypnotized by mere beauty and youth, and do anything so stupid,—how simply ironic that would be! ”

“ Over its head, a dark crucifix, tarnished silver, and about a foot high, was nailed against a supporting post.
Not a breath of change seemed to have passed over Teresa since that October day four years ago, when she had opened the door for Lewis in the Farwells’ Cambridge 305 apartment. She was fresh and vivid, with smiles rippling to light in brown-gold eyes, and an unselfish, lovely mouth, molded by gaiety and humor. And her voice, exactly as Lewis had remembered it through the years, bore out the smile in her eyes. Yes, Teresa was still all of one piece—spirit and body one. ”

“ She says that passionate friendship is actually more involving than passionate love. Because it absorbs and colors the imagination, you see. If we were lovers, she says—as the world understands the phrase, you know—why, we mightn’t mean nearly so much to each other as we do with things as they are with us. But she was ready to sacrifice this passionate friendship for my sake. She was afraid I might suffer too much, if it continued. You mustn’t think I am crazily conceited, Lewis, when I tell you that not seeing me any more would have meant sacrifice to Clare. ”

“ She would show him that Petra had no possible chance of being her, Clare Farwell’s, rival! After long weeks of fearing it, to-night Clare was faced with the fact that this Doctor Lewis Pryne was not to increase her roll of wonderful friendships. But one slight gratification she would yet wrest from the humiliating situation: the man might himself distrust, even dislike her; but he should see that Dick Wilder was still her slave. ”

“ Lewis had good hold of himself now. He said, “No one is bound to be disloyal to the truest thing in him. Any more than he’s bound to be loyal to it. We’re creatures of free will. But if McCloud does use his free will toward the destruction of his new-found integrated self, I hope that it won’t be Petra who is the instrument. I’m very fond of Petra, as it happens,—deeply fond of her; and to see her ruin any man’s life—I simply can’t, that’s all. No matter what tragedy this means for them both, I hope they don’t go so far as a marriage pretense. ”

“ In those early days it had been, usually, the closing note in some argument between brother and sister, where Cynthia had been proven the winner; and now, if ever, she knew herself right.
“You lose! I win!” she laughed, dropping her wings. “What good does it do you to be a psychiatrist? And a famous one? Petra and truth! That girl would as soon tell an out-and-out lie as wink. Clare never knows where she is with her when it’s a question of fact.” ”

“ Neil and Petra.... “My God!” said Lewis into the dark. “Neil and Petra! Was it foreordained?” He felt a powerful impulse to communicate further with Him of whom he had so spontaneously asked the bitter question. He turned over and buried his face in his crossed arms. But he did not know how to go on with the Contact—did not know how to pray. Lewis had been born into the tradition that formal prayers which one has by heart have no functioning quality. One must make up one’s own prayers, for originality is the only guarantee of His creatures’ sincerity the Omniscient will recognize. ”

“ Then he left timelessness, passed through a door into a ceilinged, four-walled 19 space, and took a chair facing an emotional, pretty woman who lay relaxed among cushions on a chaise-longue; and at once, quite as if he had never passed through the sound of Teresa’s laugh and the sight of Petra’s attentive, innocent gaze to reach this meeting, he gave his complete attention to Mrs. Farwell and her woes. ”

“ Loving them beyond others with a sure, contented love. Dying finally to save one of them from death. Ministered to in the act of dying by Christians who took it for granted that the martyr to friendship was one of themselves. Marius hungering for Christianity but never attaining communion with it until the instant of his death—and then attaining it by affinity and accident rather than conviction! But how had Petra seen Lewis in all this? ”

“ But, do you know, now I’ve seen Petra, that indifference seems perfectly healthy to me? She is, after all, not a child. She’s a woman. Let her learn a profession and be independent! Why not?”
Mrs. Farwell was growing wider and wider eyed. Then suddenly Lewis knew what he should have guessed: Clare had never really believed that Petra was antagonistic to her. She had thought her indifference and reticence merely temperamental idiosyncrasies. In fact, she had in all sincerity thought Petra what she had made Cynthia think her, a girl deficient in sensibility. ”

“ If Clare were just any silly woman, ‘out for the men,’ you’d laugh at her and find her, possibly, rather touchingly human. You might even like her. But it’s precisely because she isn’t a silly, superficial creature that the cruelty and ugliness in her seems such wretched cruelty, such wretched ugliness. She is an exquisite person—has exquisite perceptions, anyway. There’s only that one unpleasant spot, her vanity in the admiration she excites in every one around her. ”

“ If you really use your brain, really concentrate, heat—even city heat—is nothing. The human brain, and the will back of it, cut through discomfort like a knife. Well, perhaps that was all that Clare meant, when she always said that hot days exhilarated her. Overcoming the wretchedness of stifling heat, being superior to it, was the exhilaration. Indeed, Petra found herself exhilarated at this moment. ”

“ Lewis got up hastily, leaving his letters where they were on the arm of the chair, and went out onto the piazza. The fog sucked up to him, enveloped him. He coughed, choked sharply. These Mount Desert fogs were like no others in the world, he thought, and for once, it occurred to him that he ought to possess himself of an automatic cigarette lighter: you couldn’t strike a match successfully out here in this insidious fog. But cigarette or not, he would not return to the warm fire-cheered room until Dick had done with that letter and put it away out of sight. ”

“ Lewis did look at her and see. But Clare could not wait for the fabrication, whatever it was to be. She went on: “But Doctor Pryne has convinced me of one thing, Petra. He has made me ashamed, not for you, for myself. Your two thousand dollars’ allowance is absurd. With people hungry right in Boston. When you spend it only for clothes! It ought to be one thousand, darling. And the other thousand you can give, yourself, any way you like to do it, to charity.”
Petra’s cigarette was burning itself away in an ashtray between herself and Clare. Its smoke ascended in thick violet ribbons. ”

“ The rarest sort of laughter in the world. Not amusement. Not embarrassment. Mere self-unknown joy.
“No. I am Teresa Kerr. This is Petra.”
The novelist’s daughter was sitting on the sill of an open window, her background wall-less—a sea of blue October air and light. She was a schoolgirl then, in a navy blue jersey schoolgirl dress. Her attentive, innocent eyes, set wide in a grave young brow, were the precise color of the gentians. That repetition of color 18 and the eyes’ innocent attentiveness stabbed Lewis like some too pure, too perfect note in music. ”

“ He would hurl himself at the man physically, destroy him if he could—or be destroyed.... He had better smoke. They had better both smoke.
Neil refused the cigarette. Well, the gods on Olympus didn’t smoke little white cigarettes. But Lewis had no nectar to proffer this young giant, face and body aglow with some sweet, secret victory, eyes sea-blue and steady, long-limbed, free-postured, at ease in the patients’ chair. What right had such a being to usurp the place where misery came, year in year out? Why in God’s name was Neil here?
“Has Petra told you anything about last night?” Neil asked. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The skies came down, the sea came up, and the doorsill was solid sunlight. Sometimes I really can’t believe it isn’t here, it was so real to me then. But I went farther than architecture in that first venture. I peopled that house, created a family to live in it. You needn’t believe me, Lewis. I don’t expect you will. But the mother of that family was quite extraordinarily like Clare Farwell. Looked like her, I mean. When I first saw Clare, years after, I recognized her as the woman of my early imagination—the mother in that first house of mine. ”

“ She had sent the young man back to the party peremptorily and with some excitement the instant the older and more eminent visitor appeared.
“Aren’t they precious!” she exclaimed, her fingers just touching Lewis’ arm. “All of them! But my Petra in particular? In that frosty gown!—Come to the library. We can’t talk against this racket. Lowell’s in town speaking to a meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club, otherwise he would be hiding in the library himself. He detests jazz. Except when your brother-in-law plays it. Harry’s jazz is superb. He makes it art!” ”

“ The wide old boards of the floor slanted and dipped as the doorsill had slanted and dipped—fluid—one with the flow of life and time. And there, across the room, between two low-silled windows was the birthday present, his own Fra Angelico picture—perfectly hung. So Petra had brought it here, not to Green Doors. But of course. And under the Fra Angelico there were flowers growing in a dish. Fringed, blue gentians. A big, living clump of them. Planted in dark earth. It is impossible to gather them without the roots, Lewis knew, hence the replanting. ”

“ How could an ordinary person like himself love as the saints love? Well, Neil was no saint and he had said it. But the Little Flower herself had helped Neil. She wasn’t helping Lewis. And why should she? Lord have mercy on him, a sinner!
Lewis lifted his head from his hands. He must get to work, anyway. That meant he must begin to use his mind—stop writhing! That was all his mind had done ever since he had seen that hot blush spread over Petra’s face. He and Petra had scarcely spoken to each other on 272 the twenty-mile drive which had been made in less time than Lewis cared to remember now. ”

“ She said, miserably, “I told Teresa. I told her every word. I’d forgotten. But that doesn’t count as telling. It’s like telling one’s self. She is so safe.... I told her that McCloud was Edyth’s husband. She had known her in Cambridge. And all about the flying accident. I told her that. And his mother’s dying. I told her, too, how McCloud had only seen his baby at the hospital. Less than two weeks. That seemed so unjust—so cruel! Oh, yes, I guess I told Teresa everything. You see—You see, I thought she might help.”
“Petra! You are terrible!” Lewis groaned. “You’re impossible!” ”

“ In this moment of remembering the lines which had given Clare her inspiration for Green Doors, and which she often quoted, Lewis’ antipathy for Clare was transmuted into unalloyed pity. Clare wanted the beautiful and good in her life. Sincerely wanted it. But she thought it was necessary to spin it out of herself somehow,—industriously, cleverly spin, spin, spin. It never occurred to her to search for the Beautiful Good, or to love It for Itself in Its objective reality. ”

“ 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.” ”