“Yeah?” prodded Bobby; for Tony had apparently changed his mind about the advisability of this confidence and had dismissed the rest of the sentence with a gesture. His red face crinkled with perplexity, and he rubbed the side of his bulbous nose with a corner of his apron. Nodding, jerkily, after the manner of an old man, he turned away, and was resuming his interest in the dishes.
“What then?” pursued Bobby—at his elbow.
“Doc say never tell nobody while I leeve.”
“You mean—you never tell about these fellows who come in here hungry and broke? … Listen! I’ll bet you a new fur-lined overcoat against a package of fags that that little account book, over there, on the case—and all these fellows who come in here hungry and broke—”
Tony interrupted. His face was very serious. He picked up his tray, and, as he straightened dignifiedly, he replied, in a thickening dialect significant that he was about to submerge and become incommunicable, “Ees eet dat you would make old Tony onhappy? Da leetle book! Eet ees for me to know! Doc Hudson—he say, ‘Tony—you tell nobody!’ For why he say that, I do not know; but—I tell nobody!”
“I’m sorry, Tony!” said Bobby contritely. “I had no right to intrude in your personal affairs. I beg your pardon.”
Tony smiled absently.
“Oh—eet ees all right,” he said reassuringly. “Gooda night, doc. Come again!”
VIII
Haggard from a sleepless night and the experience of more mental agony than he had suspected himself capable of, young Merrick sank dejectedly into a club chair on an early train for Detroit.
In response to the long and excited telegram he had sent her from the railroad station while en route to Tony’s, the night before (he heartily wished, two hours afterward, he had not sent it), Nancy Ashford had wired she would be waiting for him at the Michigan Central depot.
It was the picture of her, radiant with anticipation and bubbling with questions, that he dreaded most. Nancy must not be hurt.
As for himself, he would get over it. Somehow he would be able to accommodate himself to the utter abandonment of his cherished illusions about Doctor Hudson, and the hero-worship that had held him up in his dull, monotonous grind at the Medical School; though, now that the bottom had fallen out of everything, he wondered how he could go back and tread the mill again.
But, however difficult that might be, it was simple enough compared to the pending job of sitting down beside Nancy Ashford and hunting for pleasant words with which to tell her that her sainted Wayne Hudson, to whom she had unrequitedly given her full devotion, was crazy.
He was not even an interesting lunatic. A lunatic, often as not, was a brilliant mind that had blown up under compression—blown up splendidly, with a loud report, the neighbours hurrying with straps and stretchers to collect the debris and lug it off to the madhouse.
No, this man Hudson had not been good enough to himself to explode so that everybody could hear it and know what the big bang meant. He was just a plain nut! … Can you feature it? … Grown-up man … of good standing professionally, respected and admired … toiling interminably over the detailed report of what some wild-eyed crank had told him of impossible experiences, and then going to the enormous bother of concealing that hodgepodge of delusions in a code—a performance worthy the mind of a seventh grade schoolboy playing sleuth with a toy pistol.
Returned from Tony’s, wide awake and exultant, he had resolved, late as it was, to decode a few pages of the journal. He had read patiently at first, with a broad smile of anticipation. Presently he found himself wishing the eccentric author would soon have done with his commonplace preliminaries and settle to business in the disclosure of his big secret—for it would have to be a big one to justify all this elaborate hocus-pocus of the code.
Surely nothing was discoverable, so far as he had gone, that required any thick wall of secrecy. It might be difficult to induce the general public to read it, were it printed in English for free circulation; but to pretend it was a deep mystery was idiotic.
After awhile he had come upon a paragraph that drew down the corners of his mouth and dragged a bitter “What t’ell!” from an oversmoked throat. He pushed the little book aside contemptuously; rose, paced the floor, lighted his pipe, tossed it clatteringly upon the table; undressed and went to bed—but not to sleep.
His disappointment was the most serious jolt of his life.
Never until three months ago had he ever taken any stock in “big moments,” “crucial decisions,” “great renunciations,” “consecrations,” and the like. If people suddenly left off doing one thing and went galloping away in another direction, it was because they had sighted something more to their advantage. As for the legends of Saul and Saint Francis and Joan—well, if there was any substratum of truth in them, the psychiatrists could explain it.
Nor had he ever had any patience with that sticky confectionery of sentimentalism, that daintily perfumed moonshine, which effeminate visionaries referred to as “ideals.” He had always been willing that all such blather should be left to the exploitation of preachers, poets, and the sob sisters.
Lately he had changed his mind about that. The coincidence of his having been saved from the lake at the same hour a valuable life had been lost in it, and at the price of that life, had stampeded him into a grand orgy of sentiment. He could understand Saul and Joan … Hudson had become his ideal, his star, his sun, his totem-pole! … Now
