Short Fiction

and yours only, would be implanted in her. I could tell you how to do it and you would find the occupation ideal. For you would be fashioning a nature in consonance with your own, molding a heart in your own heart’s image.”

“But,” Ketletas protested, “she might die of the fever.”

Cally laughed. “People never die of fever. They die of idiots, of apothecaries, of imbeciles who call themselves M.D.’s. But of fever⁠—never!”

“I never heard such rot.”

Cally put down the crop. “It is a bountiful Providence that has enabled us to despise whatever we do not understand. But to get back to our muttons, or rather to my bacilli. At some time or other every man has cause, or thinks he has cause, to complain of his wife. Against the best of women, the best of husbands will, at sometime or other, have a grievance. That is the law of matrimony. From that law my bacilli can exempt you. What do you say?”

Ketletas sprang to his feet. “I say that if I cannot win my wife by fair means, I won’t win her by foul. Damn it, Cally, you are more devilish than the old wizard in Gautier’s ‘Avatar.’ ”

Cally caressed his chin. “Since you wish to be complimentary, you might call me, not more devilish, but more modern. Flatter me, you know.”

“It amounts to the same thing,” Ketletas, making for the door, threw back. “I’ll disinfect myself of you in the Park.”

Cally saw him go and, as it happened, saw to him later. For in the Park Ketletas’ horse when going full tilt, shied widely and slipped, and Ketletas who, at the moment, was inattentively intent on his wife, came a crumpler.

Carted to his house and put on a lounge in the drawing room, it was there that Cally, summoned by Helen, saw to him.

Quickly but methodically the physician examined, diagnosed and pronounced: “Fracture of the skull.”

Helen twisted her hands. “Will he die?”

Darkly Cally surveyed her. “Call your men. Have him put to bed. I’ll attend to the rest.”

He was as good as his word. But later, as he was leaving, Helen, intercepting him, timorously repeated that question.

“Will he die?”

Cally who was fumbling with a glove, balefully turned on her. “It is not your fault, if he doesn’t. He told me today how happy you make him! The fracture is the result.”

With that lie for knife, there and then he operated on her. Beneath it she shrank and shriveled. One hand went to her head, the other to her throat.

But Cally had not finished. “In exchange for the confidence, I told him to pay no attention to you and to interest himself elsewhere. But he could not, he is too honest. Then I offered to make you plastic, the servant of his will. It would have necessitated a preliminary illness on your part, and that I was prepared to induce. Another man⁠—less honest⁠—would have accepted. He reviled me and went off⁠—to that!”

Helen’s head was bent. From her eyes two great tears fell perpendicularly without touching the cheek. Cally, his glove in the air, watched them. Then, with a shrug, he was gone.

Thereafter for a while it was as though Ketletas were dead, drowned rather, sunk into depths where nothing can follow, into those deepest depths where life is without movement, without impulse, without sensation of any kind. But ultimately, death, loosening its hold, retreated; life beckoned, calling him from where he lay, and imperceptibly, little by little, after infinite hesitations, relapses, retrievals, drifting upward from those depths he awoke to the light of day.

The first thing that he saw was Helen⁠—or else a vision.

In a delicious torpor he closed his eyes. But had he dreamed it? When he again awoke, beside him was a strapping nurse, flanked by Cally who told him that he was better.

Ketletas did not need to be told. It was long though before he was up, longer still before he was about. But finally he was both, and one day, when he was feeling rather fit, a great event occurred, for he heard someone coming and, turning, rebeheld the vision.

At the entrance she hesitated, looked at him, moved to where he stood and, though her face spoke for her, she too was speaking, and at once he was drinking words that made his mouth champagne.

“I have been wrong,” he heard her saying. “But for your accident, but for something too that Cally told me, something else that I discovered, I might not have known it ever.” How good it tasted!

“Since then,” she added. “I have had so long to think it over. Can you forgive me?” And what vintage was there that could compare with that!

In the intoxication of it, tactlessly he took her hand. But that hand, instead of drawing away, drew him nearer, until actually his arms were about her, and there was no protest at being mussed.

So do miracles occur.

The marvel of it she increased. “Can you forgive me?” she repeated. “Oh,” she ran on, “that night you broke the chair, do you remember? You looked so wretched that I should have asked you then. But afterward, if you had tried any of Cally’s methods I never could have. You found a better way. You made me sorry for you. I could not have told you that before. I did not know it. I did not know what love was, either. It was you that taught me, and you found the only way to do it, for love, real love, all love is pity.”

She looked up at him. “Don’t you think so?”

“No, I don’t,” thought Ketletas. But he did not say it. He said nothing. He did better. Drawing her closer, he kissed her and he kissed her. That there are other ways of answering a lady, he knew. But that was his way, his only way, and it did not seem to him that it could be improved.

An Old-Fashioned Man

Again Claire looked at