Experiment in Springtime

by Margaret Millar

  He should have kept on trying, of course, not to get her over her self-consciousness but to make her more conscious of herself as she really was. It struck him as ridiculous that what vanity she had was hung on qualities she hadn’t. She was perfectly willing to admit that she had a good brain and a strong character.

  “I don’t believe in physical beauty,” she told him. “It’s ephemeral.”

  He began to laugh, he couldn’t help himself.

  She was instantly suspicious. “What’s so funny?”

  “I don’t know. Everything, I suppose.”

  “That was the right word, wasn’t it? Ephemeral?”

  “Yes. Oh, Lord, yes.”

  “Well?”

  He couldn’t explain why he was laughing.

  She was at least consistent in her attitude. Her clothes were sober and functional, and when Laura entered college and began wearing the regulation baggy sweaters and saddle shoes, Martha approved. She said she thought the younger generation dressed more sensibly than her own.

  Though she wasn’t overtly affectionate toward Laura, she was very proud of her. Laura had brains; Laura was going to have all the opportunity that she, Martha, had never had; Laura was going to make a name for herself in the world (whether she wanted to or not, her tone implied).

  Amused and a little awed by her determination, Charles had talked it over with Laura.

  “Well, that’s all right,” Laura said. “I intend to, any­way. Be somebody, I mean.” She added casually, “I may as well, since I’m never going to get married.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, marriage makes people old. Look at you and Martha. I mean, what do you get out of it?”

  He intended to pass it off with a smile, but he found himself saying soberly, “I don’t quite know.”

  “I mean, you and Martha are certainly a Horrible Example. Of what happens when people get married.”

  “Are we? Go on.”

  “No, I won’t. You’re getting mad.”

  “I am not. I swear on my honor I am not mad!”

  She refused to talk about it anymore. She merely said, in her most bored voice, “You’re kind of a good egg, Charley.”

  He felt overwhelmingly flattered. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “Do you think, when I get older I mean, that I’ll be as pretty as Martha?”

  “I think it’s very likely.”

  “I don’t. I keep getting these ghastly ickies. One after another. It makes me sick to my very core.”

  “I presume my advanced age has affected my eyesight, but I can’t see any ickies.”

  “You would, if I washed my face. Naturally I don’t go around advertising them.”

  Charles smiled. “In spite of these grave obstacles in the path of beauty, I think you’ll do all right.”

  “Now you’re kidding me.”

  “No, I’m not. And I hope—well, I hope that some day you’ll be very happy as well as pretty.”

  She gaped up at him. “What a funny thing to say. As if you were on the verge of crying or something.”

  “I hope not,” he said.

  It was only a month or so after that, early in April, that he came home with an agonizing headache and went straight to bed.

  Martha came up to see him. “Brown told me you have one of your bad heads.”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “Why don’t you take the stuff the doctor gave you?”

  “It wouldn’t do any good.”

  He turned away and closed his eyes to indicate that he didn’t want to talk.

  She went on, anyway. “How can you tell, if you never try anything? Mother had some headache tablets but I know you wouldn’t take them. It’s just as if you enjoyed having

  a headache.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “Don’t swear. It’s so childish.”

  “All right, all right. You win.”

  She brought him a glass of water and two tablets, which he swallowed. She still didn’t go away, so he pretended he was asleep. She pulled the covers up to his shoulders and kissed him on the forehead.

  Then quite suddenly she jabbed him viciously in the stomach with her fist. He screamed and she threw sand in his mouth. He doubled up with pain and she thrust a knife between his shoulder blades. And all the time her face never changed expression. It was exquisitely gentle and remote, her voice was a love-whisper: “Oh, Charles, does it hurt? Oh, I’m sorry if it hurts, Charles. We’ll try this instead,” she said and slit his eyelids expertly with her thumbnail.

  “Wake up, Mr. Pearson,” Forbes said. “It’s time for lunch.”

  “I’ve been dreaming,” Charles said, but he wasn’t sure where the dream had begun.

  “You shouldn’t go to sleep in the sun without some­thing over your eyes, sir. It’s hard on them.”

  “I don’t think I’ve been asleep. I don’t think so.”

  The letter had fallen on the floor. He leaned over and picked it up with an odd feeling of pity and revulsion and love. My wife, he thought. Martha . . .

  Forbes moved the chair out of the sun and brought out Charles’s lunch on a tray. While he ate, Charles thought about Martha. The letter made her seem closer, and more real to him now than she had seemed all the time he was seeing her every minute of the day. Absurd as it was, he couldn’t help thinking that at any moment she might come out to the porch. She would walk right over to him and kiss him on the mouth. Her hair would be down her back, windblown and smelling of the sun. He would be indifferent, even brutal:

  “Beat it. Can’t you see I’m trying to eat?”

  “Oh, Charles, please! I’m afraid. I’ve been so lonely for you.”

  “Well, you’ll have to wait until I finish my lunch.”

  Pipe dream, he thought, a nonsensical little pipe dream. But he was breathing faster, and when Forbes came out again, Charles was surprised to find he’d eaten everything on the tray without knowing it.

  He settled back in the chair once more. He thought, why couldn’t it happen? Why can’t I make it happen? I know her better now. I understand her. If I can keep hold of my nerves, if I can stop myself imagining things about her . . .

  He saw himself arriving home, very fit and strong again, secure in the knowledge that at last he understood her difficulties and her weaknesses and that his understanding meant he could control her. Her sense of guilt, of in­security, her self-consciousness, he would help her over­come them all. He would be harsh, if necessary, and tender; he would continue to love her but he would remain independent and detached.

  He realized now that Martha was a more simple person than he was, and that he had made an error in imagining into her nature the complexities of his own.

  When MacNeil came out again three days later he was amazed to see how well Charles was looking and how vigorously he moved around the cottage.

  He told him so, and Charles smiled and said, “It must be the fresh air.”

  “It must be,” MacNeil agreed. He was pleased but a little uneasy at the sudden change.

  Before he left, he spoke to Forbes alone. “Anything special happen around here?”

  “No,” Forbes said. “He’s just been sort of mooning around like this.”

  “Mooning?”

  “You know—as if he had a lot of nice things to think about and thought about them.”

  “Odd,” MacNeil said. It was more than odd, it was downright suspicious that Pearson, who was an incurable worrier, should suddenly forego his worries in favor of a lot of nice things to think about.

  “He said something about going home pretty soon,” Forbes said.

  “He’s only been here a week.”

  “And this morning he phoned his office and had a talk with his secretary. Business details.”

  M
acNeil thought of Mrs. Pearson’s letter. He would have given his right hand to read it, but he reminded him­self sternly that it was none of his business. Besides, Pearson might tell him about it eventually.

  When he had gone, Charles went down to the beach and lay on the sand. Martha went with him. She wore two dabs of cloth for a bathing suit and when she lay down beside him, she put her head on his shoulder. They stayed like that without moving or talking until he said, “Come on upstairs.”

  “But what will people . . . ?”

  “To hell with people. Come on upstairs.”

  So they went upstairs.

  How simple it was. How simple they were. Children of nature.

  I must not kid myself, he thought, becoming suddenly aware of the sand gritting against his shin and the cool wind blowing off the lake. I must not drug myself with fantasies.

  But the warning didn’t seem to mean much. The words were such cold, cruel words to use on such charming children of nature.

  During the night he awoke, wet with sweat and ex­hausted. Forbes heard him moving around and came to the door of his bedroom.

  “Anything the matter, Mr. Pearson?”

  “No,” Charles said. “I’d like a drink of water.”

  “Sure.” Forbes went and got the water. He was still dressed. Though it was after two, he hadn’t been to bed yet. He thought it was odd that Charles didn’t notice this and comment on it.

  But Charles didn’t appear to be noticing anything. His eyes were bright and empty-looking, and his face had an exalted gentleness about it that reminded Forbes of an uncle of his who had got religion. The uncle had seen the light and was always gazing at it, blind to anything that lay between it and himself.

  “Anything else, Mr. Pearson?”

  “What?” Charles blinked and his eyes came suddenly into focus again. “Good Lord, you haven’t been to bed. What time is it?”

  “Ten after two.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Not in the country. There’s too much noise.” Forbes hesitated. “No—human noise, I mean, that you can stop or reason with. In the city when you hear a streetcar, that’s all right. You know somebody’s running the streetcar, somebody human. But when I listen to that damn water . . .”

  Charles looked up in surprise. Forbes talked about him­self so seldom that it was difficult to consider him as an ordinary human being, with doubts and weaknesses. He seemed always the same—a sturdy, brown-skinned little man, impervious alike to change, weather and emotion. Built like the best watches, Charles thought, shockproof, water-resistant

  and anti-magnetic.

  “. . . when I listen to that damn water,” Forbes repeated, “it makes me think that I should be believing in some­thing—God or hell or the pixies.” He smiled but there was malice behind his eyes. “Do you, Mr. Pearson?”

  “I don’t quite know.”

  “It just struck me you did.” He edged toward the door. “Do you want your light out now?”

  “All right.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  “Good night.”

  Charles stayed awake in the dark. He tried to think of Martha but her image wouldn’t come so easily this time, and the noise of the lake began to bother him.

  I should be believing in something.

  12

  The next afternoon MacNeil called at the Pearson house. He could no longer restrain his curiosity. Every free minute that he had, he found himself speculating about the Pearsons. The sudden improvement in Charles worried him. Extreme and sudden changes were not un­usual in anaphylactic personalities, but the cause could generally be traced, and in Pearson’s case there didn’t seem to be a cause. His wife’s letter, perhaps. Or the fresh, pollen-free air. But neither of these was sufficient, MacNeil thought, to account for the almost psychopathic dreaminess in Pearson’s eyes. “He’s been sort of mooning around,” Forbes had said. Yet there was secretiveness, too, in Pear­son’s expression. MacNeil tried to remember where he had seen just such a look, and he finally placed it. It was when he’d come across one of his own sons in a dark corner of the tool shed attempting to button his trousers very quickly.

  “Good God,” MacNeil said, and pressed the front door­bell long and viciously.

  He hadn’t considered this angle recently because he’d become accustomed to thinking of Pearson as a sick man. Yet, the very fact of his sickness might be, MacNeil de­cided, the basis for his present state. Pearson, as an invalid, had had no relations with his wife for some time. Now that he was getting stronger, he wanted to have. He couldn’t, of course, go to bed with a woman who, he believed, had tried to kill him, so his mind made the necessary adjustment. She hadn’t tried to kill him, she was innocent, he had wronged her. Pearson had, in fact, changed the sets for a new scene.

  The door was opened by Mrs. Pearson herself.

  They exchanged polite but wary greetings. She told him she was just on her way out to visit a friend, but she’d be very glad if he’d come in.

  “I won’t stay a minute,” he said. “I was just passing and thought I’d drop in.”

  She went into the sitting room and he followed her. She was jumpy, but he noticed with professional interest that she looked very well. Her eyes were bright and clear and there was a good color in her cheeks, though she seemed to have lost weight in the past week. He wondered whether it was diet or worry over Pearson or the effect of the dress she was wearing. He didn’t ordinarily pay attention to women’s clothes, but he was so used to Mrs. Pearson’s dowdy black suits that the dress struck his eye immediately. It was some soft, honey-colored material with a wide red belt and bands of red around the shoulders.

  “How is he?” she asked directly.

  “I saw him yesterday,” MacNeil said. “He’s getting along fine. You haven’t anything to worry about.”

  “Did he get my letter?”

  “I gave it to him.”

  “And he didn’t say anything?”

  “No.”

  She appeared to be relieved at that. “I wrote him a rather hysterical letter. I’m glad he didn’t pay any attention to it. I was feeling depressed that day.”

  “You had reason to. If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  “Oh, no. I’m all right now, thanks.”

  He smiled. “That’s understatement. You look amaz­ingly well.”

  “I do?” Her hand jerked up to her throat.

  “A bit nervy, perhaps,” he said. “I could order you a sedative, if you like.”

  “I never use drugs. I’m perfectly healthy.”

  She looked it, too. There was good sturdy stock in her, MacNeil thought. It would be part of her appeal to the aesthetic Pearson, and perhaps part of the antagonism between them.

  “Besides,” she added, “you came here to talk about Charles, didn’t you?”

  “So I did.” He was embarrassed by the rebuke. “But you’re important, too, you know. There are usually two people involved in a marriage.”

  “Our marriage is no concern of yours.”

  “It is, as it affects your husband. In addition to being my patient, he asked my advice.”

  “Charles and I are both intelligent people. If there’s anything wrong between us, we’ll work it out for our­selves.”

  She stood up. She was half a head taller than he was, and he looked up at her with pleasure. On the purely physical level, she was a magnificent woman. What a shame that she was wasted on Pearson, just as Pearson was, in another sense, wasted on her.

  “I hope you do work it out,” he said, ignoring her obvious wish that he leave. “I had a case last week which is similar to Mr. Pearson’s. Perhaps if I told you about it, you’d understand your husband’s difficulties more fully.”

  “Tell me then.”

  He began to pace up and down the room. “The patie
nt is a woman about your age, an only child, unmarried, lives with her father and mother. One night last week her father brought a young man home to dinner. The girl became violently ill when she drank her coffee. Though she has a long allergy history, she never had any reaction to coffee previous to this. Now she can’t even bear the smell of it. I questioned her about it; she’s intelligent and tries to help. The only explanation she could give was that she took an immediate and intense dislike to the young man her father had brought home. That’s all right as far as it goes. But why the dislike? And if it was immediate, why didn’t she react to something served at the beginning of the meal? Why, in fact, was it necessary to react to any­thing? Of course, I can theorize. She wanted attention, for one thing. She was attracted by the young man and tried perhaps to attract him in turn. Unsuccessful in using ordinary measures, she resorted to extraordinary ones—she became ill.

  “But the explanation may be much more complex than that. The girl’s abnormally sensitive and self-critical. When she failed to interest the young man, her vanity was wounded and she may suddenly have loathed herself for trying. ‘I dislike you’ so frequently means, ‘You make me dislike myself.’ Her reaction to the coffee would then be an expression of self-hate and a mild form of self-destruc­tion. So there are three levels of explanation. The first, she had a simple allergic reaction. The second, she wanted to attract the young man’s attention. At the third and deepest level, she killed herself.”

  “It sounds far-fetched to me,” Martha said.

  “Any interpretation may be wrong, or far-fetched, as you call it. But the death wish is a fact; it’s very strong in some people.”

  “Do you mean Charles?”

  “It seems probable, don’t you agree? It’s been nearly two months now since he went into anaphylactic shock after the aspirins. These things don’t usually linger on. Anaphylactic shock is quick; either it kills or it disappears rapidly. There’s nothing organically wrong with your husband. Even his sterility, as far as we’ve been able to ascertain, doesn’t seem to have a physical cause. If we could find one, we’d have an easy and pat explanation for his mental problems—that they are the result of his sterility.