“No; does it offer a clue to these queer performances of his?”
“Not at all … at least, it offers no clue to me. Perhaps … to a psychologist, which I am not … But, I think I’d like to tell you … It’s no secret.
“You see, Wayne’s parents were very poor. They lived on a farm upstate somewhere. He had to look out for himself, early. As a boy he had wanted to be a surgeon. He came to Detroit, at fifteen, to enter high school, and worked in the home of a Doctor Cummings …”
“And married his daughter! I knew that much.”
“You’re going too fast … In the Cummings home, Wayne Hudson was errand boy, hostler, accountant, and, on occasion, nurse, cook, private secretary, and rescue squad.”
“Rescue? How’s that?”
Helen hesitated.
“This Doctor Cummings was a very capable man, with a large practice; but unfortunately he drank too much … periodically. At intervals of anywhere from three weeks to two months, he would disappear for days. It was Wayne’s duty to track him down, clean him up, bring him home, and meantime invent excuses for his absence and serve as a shock-absorber between the doctor and all his interests—the hospitals, the patients, the family.”
“Not a very pleasant occupation for a high school boy.”
“No,” agreed Helen, “but calculated to mature him early. And it was not by any means a thankless task. Doctor Cummings was of course deeply appreciative and in his repentant moments assured him of his lasting gratitude. He sent Wayne to college later, and guaranteed his medical training with a life insurance policy, which, strangely enough, became accessible exactly when he had most need of it, for Doctor Cummings died when Wayne was a senior in college.”
“Perhaps that helps to explain Doctor Hudson’s marriage while he was still a medic,” commented Masterson. “Doubtless the girl was fond of him. He felt under heavy obligations to the family. That … and the propinquity … so he married her.”
“Not quite that,” corrected Helen. “He was very fond of her; had given up everything to be in Arizona with her until she died. For more than four years, she was his chief concern. Naturally, he couldn’t give proper attention to his work. He told me he had days of depression, while in the medical school, fearing he had mistaken his vocation, after all. His studies were hard, and he had much difficulty keeping up with them.”
“One would hardly think that Doctor Hudson had ever found his studies difficult.”
“He continued to find them so, for fully a year after his wife’s death. Then, something happened! No; I do not know what it was. He did not tell me, and I did not insist; but something happened! One day he became conscious of a new attitude towards his books, his profession. He worked whole nights in the hospital laboratory, without fatigue. Then, soon after, through an odd circumstance, he was obliged to do a difficult operation at three o’clock one morning on an emergency case—a head injury. It attracted much attention. From then on he specialized in brain surgery. You know how well he succeeded.”
Masterson closed one eye, and considered her thoughtfully.
“I can see,” he said, measuring his words, “that it’s somehow in the back of your head that this rather remarkable change in him … this quite sudden step-up from depression … sense of failure … halfway notion to quit medicine and sell bonds or something … into prompt recognition and success … I think you suspect that it’s all tied around this—this funny business of his charities? Am I right?”
She nodded.
“Mostly however because here are two mysteries about him. I suppose I have tried to relate them … unconsciously, perhaps. They may have no association, at all … Maybe he would have told me all about it, had he lived … But—we’ve talked enough about mysteries, Tommy. Let’s go and look at the asters.”
Masterson followed her through the garden, admiring her childish enthusiasm over the autumn flowers. It was as if she caressed them. He knew she expected him to go now, and toyed with his keys.
“Don’t stay in too closely,” he admonished. “These people will wear you out.”
“I’m taking a few days off … going up into the country tomorrow, to see Martha, our caretaker’s sister. She’s not very well … dreadfully broken up, you know; and I haven’t seen her since it all happened.”
“Might I drive you up? I should like to!”
“Thanks; but I shall want my car while I am there.”
“We might tow it!”
“Oh—do you really want to go up there so badly as that? I’ll tell you what you may do; drive Joyce up to Flintridge, Sunday afternoon. Probably I’ll be lonesome by that time.”
They strolled together to the gate.
“How fine it is that you and Joyce still have each other!”
“Yes; isn’t it?”
He stepped into his car, waved a hand, and disappeared around the corner. Slowly Helen retraced her steps to the garden, sauntered along the narrow path, stooped to cup her pink palms around a garish dahlia. How fine it was that she and Joyce still had each other … Or had they?
IV
As old Nicholas arose from the table that Saturday night, he said, no more to his tall grandson than to himself, “I am glad I could live until now!”
The past eight years had been dreadfully unhappy for him. It was not that there had been fresh reasons for unhappiness, but leisure to realize how much of life’s solider satisfactions he had missed.
From his ’teens until his retirement from the business he had organized, Merrick’s consuming passion had been concerned with the development of a great industry; an enterprise singularly difficult in that it lacked the natural guidance of established precedents. There were rules to be made for it, but none to be followed. It was a business without an ancestry.
Men who dealt with any product in the field of ceramics had thousands of years of good tradition back of them. Weavers, tanners, jewellers, masons; builders of houses, ships, cathedrals; growers of grain, fruit,
