Thunder and Roses Page 5

  “Sorry,” he said with his quick grin, and was as quickly sober. “Warfield’s very much in love with you, Peg.”

  “He—has said so.”

  “Not to me,” said Robin. “I’m not intimating that he has poured out his soul to me. But he can’t conceal it. What he mostly does is avoid talking about you. Under the circumstances, that begins to be repetitious and—significant.” He shrugged. “Thing is, I have found myself a little worried from time to time. About myself.”

  “Since when did you start worrying about yourself?”

  “Perhaps it’s symptomatic. This induced maturity that I am beginning to be inflicted with has made me think carefully about a lot of things I used to pass off without a thought. No one can escape the basic urgencies of life—hunger, self-preservation, and so on. At my flightiest moments I was never completely unaware of hunger. The difference between a childish and a mature approach to such a basic seems to be that the child is preoccupied only with an immediate hunger. The adult directs most of his activities to overcoming tomorrow’s hunger.

  “Self-preservation is another basic that used to worry me not at all as long as danger was invisible. I’d dodge an approaching taxi, but not an approaching winter. Along come a few gland-treatments, and I find myself feeling dangers, not emotionally, and now, but intellectually, and in the future.”

  “A healthy sign,” nodded Peg.

  “Perhaps so. Although that intellectual realization is a handy thing to have around to ward off personal catastrophes, it is also the raw material for an anxiety neurosis. I don’t think Mel Warfield is trying to kill me, but I think he has reason enough to.”

  “What?” Peg said, horrified.

  “Certainly. He loves you. You—” he broke off, and smiled engagingly. She felt her color rising, as she watched his bright eyes, the round bland oval of his almost chinless face.

  “Don’t say it, Robin,” she breathed.

  “—you won’t marry him,” Robin finished easily. “Whom you love needn’t enter into the conversation.” He laughed. “What amounts of wind we use to avoid the utterance of a couple of syllables! Anyway, let it suffice that Mel, for his own reasons, regards me as a rival, or at least as a stumbling block.” His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I gather that he has also concluded that your chief objection to me has been my … ah … immaturity. No, Peg, don’t bother to answer. So if I am right—and I think I am—he has been put in the unenviable position of working like fury to remove his chief rival’s greatest drawback. His only drawback, if you’ll forgive the phrase, ma’am,” he added, with a twinkle and the tip of an imaginary hat. “No fun for him. And I don’t think that Brother Mel is so constituted that he can get any pleasure out of the great sacrifice act.”

  “I think you’re making a mountain out of—”

  “Peg, Peg, certainly you know enough about psychology to realize that I am not accusing Mel of being a potential murderer, or even of consciously wanting to hurt me. But the compulsions of the subconscious are not civilized. Your barely expressed annoyance at the man who jostles you in a crowded bus is the civilized outlet to an impulse for raw murder. Your conditioned reflexes keep you from transfixing him with the nearest nail file; but what about the impulses of a man engaged in the subtle complexities of a thing like the glandular overhaul I’m getting? In the bus, your factor of safety with your reactions can run from no visible reaction through a lifted eyebrow to an acid comment, before you reach the point where you give him a tap on the noggin and actually do damage. Whereas Mel’s little old subconscious just has to cause his hand to slip while doing a subcutaneous, or to cause his eye to misread a figure on the milligram scale, for me to be disposed of in any several of many horrible ways. Peg! What’s the matter?”

  Her voice quivering, she said quietly, “That is the most disgusting, conceited, cowardly drivel I have ever had to listen to. Mel Warfield may have the misfortune to be human, but he is one of the finest humans I have ever met. As a scientist, there is no one in this country—probably in the world—more skilled than he. He is also a gentleman, in the good old-fashioned meaning of the word—I will say it, no matter how much adolescent sneering you choose to do—and if he is engaged on a case, the case comes first.” She rose. “Robin, I have had to take a lot from you, because as a specialist I knew what an advanced condition I had to allow for. That is going to stop. You are going to find out that one of the prices you must pay for the privilege of becoming an adult is the control of the noises your mouth makes.”

  Robin looked a little startled. “It would be a little dishonest of me to think these things without expressing them.”

  She went on as if she hadn’t heard. “The kind of control I mean has to go back further than the antrums. All of us have mean, cowardly thoughts from time to time. Apparently the maturity you’re getting is normal enough that you’re developing a man-sized inferiority complex along with it. You are beginning to recognize that Mel is a better man than you’ll ever be, and the only way you can rationalize that is to try to make him small enough to be taking advantage of you.”

  “Holy cow,” breathed Robin. “Put down that knout, Peg! I’m not going to make a hobby of taking cracks at Mel Warfield behind his back. I’m just handing it to you straight, the way I see it, for just one reason—to explain why I am discontinuing the course of treatment.”

  She was halfway to the door as he spoke, and she brought up sharply as if she had been tied by a ten-foot rope. “Robin! You’re not going to do anything of the kind!”

  “I’m going to do exactly that,” said Robin. “I’m not used to lying awake nights worrying about what someone else is likely to do. I’m doing all right. I’ve come as far in this thing as I intend to go. I’m producing more than I ever did in my life before, and I can live adequately on what I’m getting and will get for this music and these patents and plays and poems, to live for the rest of my life if I quit working tomorrow—and I’m not likely to quit working tomorrow.”

  “Robin! You’re half hysterical! You don’t know what you’re talking about! In your present condition you can’t depend on the biochemical balance of your glandular svstem. It can only be kept balanced artificially, until it gradually adjusts itself to operation without the thymus. In addition, the enormous but balanced overdoses of other gland extracts we have had to give you must be equalized as they recede to normalcy. You simply can’t stop now!”

  “I simply will stop now,” he said, mimicking her tone. “I took the chance of starting with this treatment, and I’ll take the chance of quitting. Don’t worry; no matter what happens your beloved Mel’s nose is clean, because of that release I signed. I’m not going to sue anybody.”

  She looked at him wonderingly. “You’re really trying to be as offensive as you possibly can, aren’t you? I wonder why?”

  “It seems the only way for me to put over a point to you,” he said irritably. “If you must know, there’s another reason. The stuff I’m producing now is good, if I can believe what I read in the papers. It has occurred to me that whatever creativeness I have is largely compounded of the very immaturity you are trying to get rid of. Why should I cut off the supply of irrationality that produces a work of art like my musical comedy? Why should I continue a course of treatment that will ultimately lead me to producing nothing creative? I’m putting my art before my course, that’s all.”

  “A good pun, Robin,” said Peg stonily, “but a bad time for it. I think we’ll let you stew in your own juice for a while. Watch your diet and your hours, and when you need professional help, get in touch with me and I’ll see what I can do about getting Mel to take you on again.”

  “Nice of you. Why bother?”

  “Partly sheer stubbornness; you make it so obvious you want nothing of the kind. Partly professional ethics, a thing which I wouldn’t expect a child, however precocious, to understand fully.”

  He went slowly past her and opened the door. “Goodbye, Dr. Wenzell.”

  “
Goodbye, Robin. And good luck.”

  Later, in her office at the hospital, Peg’s phone rang.

  “Yes?”

  “Peg! I’ve just received a note, by messenger, from Robin English.”

  “Mel! What did he say?”

  “He enclosed a check for just twice what I billed him for, and he says that he won’t be back.”

  “Mel, is it safe?”

  “Of course it’s not safe! The pituitary reactions are absolutely unpredictable—you know that. I can’t prognosticate anything at all without the seventy-two-hour check-ups. He might be all right; I really wouldn’t know. He’s strong and healthy and tremendously resilient. But to stop treatment now is taking unfair advantage of his metabolism. Can’t you do anything about it?”

  “Can’t I do anything?”

  “He’ll listen to you, Peg. Try, won’t you? I … well, in some ways I’m glad to have him off my neck, frankly. It’s been … but anyway, I’ll lose sleep over it, I know I will. Will you see if you can do anything with him?”

  A long pause.

  “Hello, Peg—are you still there?”

  “Yes, Mel … let him go. It’s what he wants.”

  “Peg! You … you mean you won’t see him?”

  “N-no, I—can’t, Mel, I won’t. Don’t ask me to.”

  “I hardly know what to say. Peg, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. I won’t see him, that’s all, and if I did it wouldn’t do any good. I don’t care what hap—Oh, Mel, do watch him! Don’t let anything … I mean, he’s got to be all right. Read his stuff, Mel. Go see his plays. You’ll be able to f-find out that way.”

  “And if I don’t like the looks of what I find out, what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Call me up whenever you find out anything, Mel.”

  “I will, Peg. I’m—sorry. I didn’t realize that you … I mean, I knew it, but I didn’t know you felt so—”

  “Goodbye, Mel.”

  She hung up and sat and cried without hiding her face.

  Robin’s first novel was published five months later, while his musical, Too Humorous to Mention, was eight weeks old and just at the brilliant beginning of its incredible run, while The Cellophane Chalice, his little, forgotten book of verse, went into its sixth printing, and while three new songs from Too Humorous were changing places like the shells in the old army game on the Hit Parade in the one-two-three spots. The title of one of them, “Born Tomorrow,” had been bought at an astonishing figure by Hollywood, and royalties were beginning to roll in for Robin’s self-tapping back-out drill bits.

  The novel was a strange and compelling volume called Festoon. The ravings of the three critics who were fortunate enough to read it in manuscript made the title hit the top of the bestseller lists and stay there like a masthead. Robin English was made an honorary doctor of law by a college in Iowa, a Kentucky Colonel, a member of the Lambs Club, and a technical advisor to the American Society of Basement Inventors. He dazedly declined a projected nomination to the State Senate which was backed by a colossal petition; wrote a careful letter of thanks to the municipality of Enumclaw, Washington, for the baroque golden key to the city it sent him because of the fact that early in his life he had been born there; was photographed for the “Young Men of the Month” page of Pic, and bought himself a startlingly functional mansion in Westchester County. He wrote a skillful novella which was sold in Boston and banned in Paris, recorded a collection of muezzin calls, won a pie-eating contest at the Bucks County Fair, and made a radio address on the evolution of modern poetry which was called one of the most magnificent compositions in the history of the language. He bought a towboat and had a barge built in the most luxurious pleasure-yacht style and turned them over to the city hospital for pleasure cruises to Coney Island for invalid children. Then he disappeared.

  He was a legend by then, and there was plenty of copy about him for the columnists and the press agents to run, so that in spite of his prominence, his absence was only gradually felt. But gradually the questions asked in the niteries and on the graveyard shifts at newspaper offices began to tell. Too often reporters came back empty-handed when assigned to a new R. E. story—any new R. E. story. An item in the “Man About Town” column led to a few reader’s letters, mostly from women, asking his whereabouts; and then there was a landslide of queries. It was worth a stick or two on the front pages, and then it suddenly disappeared from the papers when all the editors were told in a mimeographed letter that Mr. English’s business would be handled by his law firm, which had on proud exhibition a complete power of attorney—and which would answer no queries. All business mail was photostated and returned, bearing Robin’s rubber-stamped signature and the name of his lawyers. All fan mail was filed.

  The categories of men who can disappear in New York are extreme. The very poor can manage it. The very rich can manage it, with care. Robin did it. And then the rumors started. The rôle of “Billy-buffoon” which he had taken in his musical was a mask-and-wig part, and it was said that his understudy didn’t work at every performance. English was reported to have been seen in Hollywood; in Russia; dead; and once even on Flatbush Avenue. Robin’s extraordinary talents, in the gentle hands of idle rumor, took on fantastic proportions. He was advisor to three cabinet members. He had invented a space drive and was at the moment circling Mars. He was painting a mural in the City Morgue. He was working on an epic novel. He had stumbled on a method for refining U-235 in the average well-equipped kitchen, and was going crazy in trying to conceal that he knew it. He was the author of every anonymous pamphlet cranked out to the public everywhere, from lurid tracts through political apassionatae to out-and-out pornography. And of course murders and robberies were accredited to his capacious reputation. All of these things remained as engagingly fictional as his real activities had been; but since they had nothing like books and plays and inventions to perpetuate them, they faded from the press and from conversation.

  But not from the thoughts of a few people. Drs. Wenzell and Warfield compiled and annotated Robin English’s case history with as close a psychological analysis as they could manage. Ostensibly, the work was purely one of professional interest; and yet if it led to a rational conclusion as to where he was and what he was doing, who could say that such a conclusion was not the reason for the work? In any case, the book was not published, but rested neatly in the active files of Mel Warfield’s case records, and grew. Here a flash of fantasy was a sure sign of suprarenal imbalance, there a line of sober thought was post-pituitary equilibrium. One couldn’t know—but then, so little could be known.…

  Dr. Mellett Warfield was called, late one night, to the hospital, on a hormone case. It was one of the sedative and psychology sessions which he had always found so wearing; this one, however, was worse than usual. The consultation room was just down the corridor from Peg’s office—the office into which he used to drop for a chat any time he was nearby. He had not seen the inside of it for three months now; he had not been forbidden to come in, nor had he been invited. Since Robin disappeared, a stretched and silent barrier had existed between the doctors.

  And tonight, Mel Warfield had a bad time of it. It wasn’t the patient—a tricky case, but not unusual. It was that silent office down the hall, empty now, and dark, empty and dark like Peg’s telephone voice these days, like her eyes … inside the office it would be empty and dark, but there would be a pencil from her hand, a place on the blotter where she put her elbow when she paused to think of—of whatever she thought, these distant days.

  Efficient and hurried, he rid himself of his patient and, leaving the last details to a night nurse, he escaped down the corridor. He was deeply annoyed with himself; that room had been more with him than his patient. That wouldn’t do. Realizing this, he also recognized the fact that his recent isolation in his own laboratory had been just as bad, just as much preoccupation, for all the work he had done. “Overcompensation,” he mutte
red to himself, and then wanted to kick himself; here he was dragging out labels to stick on his troubles like a damned parlor psychologist. He opened the half-glazed door and stepped into Peg’s office.

  He leaned back against the closed door and closed his eyes to accustom them to the dark. Peg seldom used scent, but somehow this room was full of her. He opened his eyes slowly. There was the heavy bookcase, with its prim rows of esoterica, green and gold, black and gold; some twin books, some triplets, some cousins to each other, but all of the same concise family, all pretending to be Fact in spite of having been written by human beings.… He shook himself impatiently.

  The clock at the end of the desk sent him its dicrotic whisper, and glowed as faintly as it spoke. Half-past three … in twelve hours it would be like that again, only Peg would be sitting there, perhaps bowed forward, her chin on one hand, sadly pensive, thinking of—oh, a line of poetry and a ductless gland, a phrase from a song and a great, corrosive worry. If he opened his eyes wide to the desk in the darkness, he could all but see—

  She sobbed, and it shocked him so that he cried out, and saw flames.

  “Peg!”

  Her shock was probably as great, but she made no sound.

  “Peg! What is it? Why are you—it’s half-past—what are you—” He moved.

  “Don’t turn on the light,” she said grayly.

  He went round to her, held out his hands. He thought she shook her head. He let his hands fall and stood stupidly for a moment. Then he knew, somehow, that she was trembling. He dropped on his knees beside her chair and held her close to him. She cried, then.

  “You’ve seen him.”

  She nodded, moving her wet cheek against his neck. He thought, something has happened, and I’ve got to know what it it is—I’ll go out of my mind if I have to guess. “Peg, what happened?”

  She cried. It was hurtful crying, the crying which granulates the eyelids and wrenches the neck-tendons with its sawtoothed, shameless squeaks.