“But I’m giving you your chance. If you can make her love you, make her happy, all right. It’s Laura that counts. But if in another month there’s still that haunted emptiness in her eyes—well, John, then it’s up to me.”
The two men stood facing each other for a moment. There were no more words. There was no possibility of words. Ingve Johansen turned and left the room.
If you can make her love you— Was this the limit to the power of the god of the Sentinel? You can’t print EDITOR’S WIFE LOVES EIIM. You can’t—or can you?
Numbly MacVeagh groped his way to the typewriter. His fingers fumbled out words.
“Women have a double task in this new peace time,” Mrs. John MacVeagh, president of the Volunteer Women Workers, stated when interviewed yesterday.
“Like all other citizens, women must take part in the tasks of reconstruction,” said the lovely Mrs. MacVeagh, nee Laura Hitchcock. “But woman’s prime job in reconstruction is assuring happiness in the home. A man’s usefulness to society must depend largely on the love of his wife. I feel that I am doing good work here with the VWW, but I consider the fact that I love my husband my most important contribution to Grover’s welfare.”
MacVeagh sat back and looked at it. His head ached and his mouth tasted foul. Neither a pipe nor a drink helped. He reread what he’d written. Was this the act of a god—or of a louse?
But it had to be. He knew Laura well enough to know that she’d never stand up under the scandal and ostracism that Johansen proposed, no matter how eagerly she might think she welcomed them. As Ingve had said, it’s Laura that counts.
It is so easy to find the most flattering motives for oneself.
He wrote a short item announcing I. L. Johansen’s resignation as manager of the Hitchcock plant and congratulating him on his appointment to the planning board of the new OPR, the Office of Peacetime Reconstruction. He was typing the notice of Philip Rogers’ departure for a sanitarium, phrased with euphemistic clarity, when Luke Sellers came back.
Luke had been gone an hour. Plenty had happened here in that hour, but more where Luke Sellers had been. The old printer had aged a seeming ten years.
He kept twitching at his little scraggle of white beard, and his eyes didn’t focus anywhere. His lips at first had no power to shape words. They twisted hopefully, but what came through them was just sound.
“Molly—” Luke said at last.
John MacVeagh stood up sharply. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Molly— Told you I was worried about her—”
“She— No! She hasn’t! She couldn’t!”
“Iodine. Gulped it down. Messy damned way. Doc Quillan hasn’t much hope—”
“But why? Why?”
“She can’t talk. Vocal cords— It eats, that iodine— Keeps trying to say something. I think it’s— Want to come?”
MacVeagh thought he understood a little. He saw things he should have seen before. How Molly felt about him. How, like Johansen with Laura, she could tolerate his marriage if he was happy, but when that marriage was breaking up and her loss became a pointless farce—
“Coming, Johnny?” Luke Sellers repeated.
“No,” said MacVeagh. “I’ve got to work. Molly’d want me to. And she’ll pull through all right, Luke. You’ll read about it in the Sentinel.”
It was the first time that this god had exercised the power of life and death.
VIII
The next morning, Laura looked lovelier than ever at breakfast as she glanced up from the paper and asked, “Did you like my interview?”
MacVeagh reached a hand across the table and touched hers. “What do you think?”
“I’m proud,” she said. “Proud to see it there in print. More coffee?”
“Thanks.”
She rose and filled his cup at the silver urn. “Isn’t it nice to have all the coffee we want again?” As she set the cup back at his place, she leaned over and kissed him. It was a light, tender kiss, and the first she had ever given him unprompted. He caught her hand and held it for a moment.
“Don’t stay too late at the office tonight, dear,” she said softly.
“Most amazing recovery I ever saw,” Doc Quillan mumbled. “Take a while for the throat tissues to heal; but she’ll be back at work in no time. Damned near tempted to call it a miracle, MacVeagh.”
“I guess this OPR appointment settles my part of what we were talking about,” Ingve Johansen said over the phone. “It’s a grand break for me—fine work that I’m anxious to do. So I won’t be around, but remember—I may come back.”
“Gather Phil made a fool of himself last night,” said H. A. Hitchcock. “Don’t worry. Shan’t happen again. Strain, overwork— He’ll be all right after a rest.”
Father Byrne dropped in that morning, happily flourishing a liberal journal which had nominated Grover as the nation’s model town for labor relations.
Chief Hanby dropped in out of pure boredom. The Grover crime rate had become so minute that he feared his occupation was all but gone. “The crooks are all faded,” he said. “ ‘The strangers shall fade away, and be afraid out of their close places.’ Psalms, eighteen, forty-five. Grover’s the Lord’s town now.”
John MacVeagh stood alone in his office, hearing the whir of presses and the rushing of feet outside. This was his, the greatest tool of good in the world’s history.
“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Genesis, as Chief Hanby would say, one, thirty-one.
He did not stay too late at the office that night.
John MacVeagh reached over to the night table for a cigarette. There are times when even a confirmed pipe smoker uses them. In the glow of the
