This is one of those stories that ought to begin by calling the hero “X” or “H—B—”—because there were so many people drawn into it that at least one of them will read this and claim to have been a leading character. And as for that current dodge “No reference to any living character is intended”—there’s no use even trying that.
Instead we come right out and state that the man in the case was Emmet Monsen, because that is (or almost is) his real name. Three months ago you could consult the pictorials and news magazines and discover that he was just returning from the Omigis on the S.S. Fuma-taki Nagursha and landing at the port of Los Angeles with notable information on tropical tides and fungi. He was in the pictorials because he was notably photogenic, being thirty-one, slender and darkly handsome, with the sort of expression that made photographers say:
“Mr. Monsen—could you manage to smile once more?”
—but I am going to take the modern privilege of starting a story twice, and begin again—at a medical laboratory in downtown Los Angeles forty-eight hours after Emmet Monsen left the dock.
A girl, a pretty girl (but not the leading girl) was talking to a young man whose business was developing electro-cardiograph or heart charts—automatic recordings of that organ which has never been famed as an instrument of precision.
“Eddie hasn’t phoned today,” she said.
“Excuse these tears,” he answered. “It’s my old sinus. And here’re the heart charts for your candid camera album.”
“Thanks—but don’t you think when a girl is going to be married in a month, or at least before Christmas, he could phone her every morning.”
“Listen—if he loses that job at Wadford Dunn Sons, you won’t be able to afford a Mexican marriage.”
The laboratory girl carefully wrote the name “Wadford Dunn Sons” at the top of the first heart chart, swore in a short but vicious California idiom, erased, and substituted the name of the patient.
“Maybe you better think about your job here,” added the laboratory man. “Those cardiographs are supposed to go out by—”
Telephones interrupted him—but they by no means bore a message from Eddie; it was two doctors, both very angry at once. The young lady was galvanized into frantic activity which landed her a few minutes later in a 1931 model, bound for one of those suburbs which make Los Angeles the most far-flung city in the world.
Her first destination was exciting for it was the country estate of young Carlos Davis, whom, so far, she had seen only in flicker form and once in Technicolor. Not that there was anything the matter with Carlos Davis’ heart—it worked the other way—but she was delivering the cardiograph to the tenant of a smaller house on his estate, originally built for his mother—and if Davis happened not to be at the studio she might glimpse him in passing.
She didn’t, and for the present—after she delivered the cardiograph at the proper door—she passes out of the story.
And at this point, as they say in picture making, the Camera Goes into the House, and we go with it.
The tenant was Emmet Monsen. At the moment he sat in an easy chair looking out into the sunny May-time garden, while Doctor Henry Cardiff opened the big envelope with his huge hands to examine the chart and the report that went with it.
“I stayed out there one year too long,” said Emmet, “and like a fool I drank water! Man I worked with had the idea—he hadn’t touched water in twenty years, only whiskey. He was a little dried up—skin like parchment—but no more than the average Englishman.”
The maid flashed darkly in the dining-room doorway and Emmet called to her.
“Marguerite? Have I got that name right?”
“Margerilla, Mist Monsen.”
“Margerilla, if Miss Elsa Halliday calls up, I’m at home to her. But to nobody else—not a soul. Remember that name—Miss Elsa Halliday.”
“Yes suh, I won’t be like to forget that. I seen her in the moving picture. Frank and I—”
“All right, Margerilla,” he interrupted politely. “Just remember I’m not home to anyone else.”
Dr. Cardiff, having finished his reading, arose in half a dozen gigantic sections and paced up and down meditatively, his chin alternately resting on his necktie or following his gaze toward the chandelier, as if he thought his eight years of training were lurking there like guardian angels, ready to fly down to his assistance. When Margerilla had gone he sat down in his chair, interlocking his hands in a way that to Emmet vaguely suggested the meeting of two spans of The Grand Coulee.
“So what?” Emmet asked. “Maybe it’s a growth? I swallowed a piece of fungi once—I thought it was a shrimp. Maybe it’s attached itself to me. You know—like women. I mean like women are supposed to do.”
“These,” said Dr. Cardiff in a kind voice—too kind, Emmet thought, “are not radio plates. This is the cardiograph. When I made you lie down yesterday and attached the wires to you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Emmet, “and forgot to slit my trousers—and get a last minute confession.”
“Huh-huh,” uttered the doctor, a laugh so mechanical that Emmet half rose from his chair, suggesting:
“Let’s open some windows.”
—but instantly the doctor’s great bulk loomed over him and forced him gently down.
“Mr. Monsen, I want you to sit absolutely in place. Later we’ll arrange a means of transportation.”
He gave a quick glance about, as if expecting a subway entrance, or at least a small personal derrick, to be in a corner of the room. Emmet watched him—many thoughts crowding swiftly across his mind. Much too young for the world war he had been brought up on tales of it, and most of his thirty-one years had been spent along the fringe of danger. He was one of those Americans who seem left over from the days when there was a frontier, and he had chosen to walk, ride or fly along that thin hair line which separates the unexplored and menacing from the safe, warm world. Or is there such a world—
Emmet Monsen sat immobile waiting for the doctor to speak, but the expression in his handsome eyes was alert and wide-awake.
“I knew on the boat I was running a fever—that’s why I’m laying up in California, but if this chart proves something serious I want to know about that too. Don’t worry—I’m not going to go to pieces.”
Dr. Cardiff decided to tell all.
“Your heart is apparently enlarged to a—to a—”
He hesitated.
“To a dangerous degree?” Emmet said.
“But not to a fatal degree,” answered Dr. Cardiff hastily.
“Obviously,” said Emmet, “since I can still hear my own voice. Come on Doctor, what is it? Is the heart quitting?”
“Oh, now!” protested Cardiff. “That’s no way to look at it. I’ve seen cases where I wouldn’t have given the man two hours—”
“Damn it, please get to the point,” Emmet exclaimed. “And I’m going to smoke”—as he saw the doctor’s eye follow his reaching hand. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but what’s the prognosis? I’m no child—I’ve taken people through typhoid and dysentery myself. What’s my chance—ten per-cent? One per-cent? When and under what conditions am I leaving this very beautiful scenery?”
“It depends, Mr. Monsen, to a great extent on yourself.”
“All right. I’ll do anything you say. Not much exercise I suppose, no highballs, stick around the house till we see what nature—”
The colored maid was in the doorway.
“Mist Monsen, that there Miss Halliday’s on the phone and it sure did thrill me down to my marrow—”
Emmet was up before the doctor could hoist himself from his chair and on his way to the phone in the butler’s pantry.
“Well, you did get a minute off,” he said.
“I’ve thought of you all morning, Emmet, and I’m coming out this afternoon. What did the doctor say?”
“He says I’m fine—little run down, wants me to take it easy a few days. What time are you coming out?”
A pause.<
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“Can I speak to the doctor?” Elsa asked.
“Sure you can. What? What do you want to speak to the doctor about?”
He said “Excuse me” as he realized that someone had brushed by him from behind and gone on into the living room; he caught a glimpse of a white starched uniform as he continued into the telephone:
“Sure you can. But he isn’t here now. Elsa, do you know that except for those few minutes at the dock I haven’t seen you for two years?”
“Two years is a long time, Emmet.”
“Don’t say it quite that way,” he objected. “Anyhow come as soon as you can.”
As he hung up the phone he realized that once more he was not alone in the pantry. There was the face of Margerilla and at her shoulder quite a different face that he stared at absently and abstractedly for a moment, as if it had no more reality than a magazine cover. It belonged to a girl wearing a powder-blue dress. Her face was roundish and her eyes were round—after all, not so astonishing—but the expression with which she regarded him was so full of a sort of beautiful attention, a fascinated and amused surprise that he wanted to say something back to it. It did not quite ask, “Can it be you?” like some girls’ faces do; rather it asked: “Are you having fun out of all this nonsense?” Or else it said, “We seem to be pardners for this dance,” adding: “—and this is the dance I’ve been waiting for all my life.”
To these questions or statements hinted at in the girl’s smile, Emmet made a response which he later decided was not brilliant.
“What can I do for you?” he enquired.
“It’s the other way, Mr. Monsen.” She had a somewhat breathless voice. “What can I do for you? I was sent here by Rusty’s Secretarial Bureau.”
It is well known that we seldom take out our annoyances upon the objects that inspire them; Emmet repeated the words: “Secretarial Bureau!” in a tone which made the place into a day nursery for gun molls, an immediate field of investigation for Messrs. Dewey and Hoover.
“I’m Miss Trainor and I’m answering the call you made this morning. I have a reference from Mr. Rachoff, the musician. I worked for him till he went to Europe last week—”
She held a letter toward him—but Emmet was still in a mood.
“Never heard of him,” he announced pontifically, then corrected himself, “Yes, I have. But I never believe in references. Anybody can fake references.”
He looked at her closely, even accusingly, but her smile had come back—and seemed to agree with him that all references were nonsense and she’d thought so for years—only she was glad to hear it said at last.
It seemed quite a while to have been in the pantry; Emmet got up.
“That downstairs room will be your typing office. Margerilla will show you.”
He nodded and returned to the living room, where he was increasingly conscious that the doctor was waiting.
But not alone. He was in grave and secret conference with the figure in white who had brushed by Emmet in the pantry. So intense was their confluence that even Emmet did not interrupt it—it flowed on in a sort of sustained mumble for some time after Emmet settled in his chair.
“Sorry I was so long. People kept coming in. They told me it would be quiet out here—this Davis even had guards and all to keep his admirers away.”
“This is Miss Hapgood, your day nurse,” said Dr. Cardiff.
An unconfident bell-shaped lady smiled and then appraised Emmet with the expression of a fur-trader looking at a marten pelt.
“I’ve told her everything—” continued the doctor.
The nurse confirmed this by holding up a pad covered with writing.
“—and I’ve asked her to call me several times during the day—four, wasn’t it?”
“Four, Doctor.”
“So you can be sure you’re being well looked after. Huh-huh.”
The nurse echoed his laugh. Emmet wondered if he had missed a joke.
The doctor then “ran along”—a process which consisted of picking up his bag several times, setting it down, writing a last minute prescription, sending the nurse on a goose-chase for his stethoscope—and eventually blocking out the living room door with his bulky figure. But by this time, Emmet who had no stop-watch, had concluded that “running along” was merely a figure of sick room speech. In any case, he was distracted by the sight of Miss Hapgood flat on the floor where she had tripped over the threshold. Before he could rise she was by his side, firmly clinging to his right wrist.
“Mr. Moppet, I suppose we ought to begin by getting acquainted.”
Emmet was about to begin by supplying his real name when she added:
“One thing I think you ought to know is I happen to be very clumsy. Know what I mean?”
Having travelled widely Emmet had been asked questions in languages he did not understand and often been able to answer by signs—but this time he was stumped. “I’m sorry” did not seem to have the right ring, nor did “What a pity!” In fact he was about to blurt cruelly “Isn’t there something you can do about it?” when the nurse answered the question by releasing his wrist, rising suddenly and in the same gesture toppling over a brass topped table bearing a twelve piece silver tea-service which Emmet had conceived as being placed a long way across the room.
Then, as if the sound of many gongs being struck were a cue in a motion picture, he saw the young face of Carlos Davis in the doorway and beside him the Trainor girl. Carlos Davis was a Dakota small town boy, with none of the affectations ascribed to him—it was no fault of his that he had been born with a small gift of mimicry and an extraordinary personal beauty.
Emmet stood up—trying not to crush a small cream pot under his foot.
“Hello there, Mr. Davis.”
“Greetings!” said Davis, adding reassuringly, “And don’t think I’m the ‘looking-in’ kind of landlord. It happened I ran into the Doc and I wanted to ask if there’s anything I can do.”
“Well—that’s very kind of you.”
Davis’ eyes swept fractionally aside to where Miss Hapgood was having some vague traffic with the silverware—which could not accurately be described as “picking it up,” for the gong sound continued at intervals throughout the conversation.
“I just want you to know I’m at your service, and that I’ll leave my private phone number with your—your—” His eyes completed the Trainor girl with visible appreciation—“your secretary. It’s not in the book, but she’s got it.” He paused. “I mean she’s got the number. Then I’ll go along—one of these broadcasts! Cripes!”
He did a short melancholy head-shake, bade farewell in a wave-salute, vaguely reminiscent of Queen Elizabeth arriving in Canada, and departed with what developed, as he reached the hall, into a series of long athletes’ leaps.
Emmet sat down and spoke to Miss Trainor.
“I don’t see your lips moving,” he said, “and there goes the maiden’s prayer.”
“I tried to keep him out,” she answered coolly. “It was physically impossible. Is there anything special you want from me at this moment?”
“Sure. Sit down and I’ll give you an idea of what the job will be.”
She reminded him of a girl for whom he had suffered deeply at the age of seven—except that instead of pigtails she wore her russet, yellow-streaked hair at shoulder length, and that her smile with its very special queries and promises was like nothing he had ever encountered.
“I’ve written a sort of scientific book. It’s in the kitchen—the delivery man left the box from the publishers there. It’s being published tomorrow and nobody’s going to read it.” He looked at her suddenly. “Do you get all flustered about ocean changes and the genesis of tidal waves?”
The girl looked at him, as if considering.
“Why not?”
“I mean: would you buy a book about that?”
“Well—” A pause “—under certain circumstances I would.”
“Diplomat, eh?”
“
Frankly I wouldn’t if I thought I had a chance for an autographed copy.”
“Diplomat,” he grunted. “I should have said ‘Ambassador.’ Anyhow this book will go into the geographic sections of libraries and gather termites till somebody new comes along with the same quirk I had. Meanwhile I’ve got a hunch for an adventure book—might interest boys. Fun to have somebody actually read what you wrote. I’ve taken thousands of notes—will you see if there’s a brief case in the hall.”
“Mr. Mop—” began his nurse in a tone of disapproval but Emmet said:
“Just a minute, Miss Hapgood.” When the Trainor girl returned with the brief case he continued: “The stuff checked with a red crayon ought to be typed up so I can take a look at it. It’ll be clear enough. Now the question of hours. I don’t think the doctor’ll let me work very much—say five or six hours a day.”
She nodded.
“So you can meet your admirers in time for dinner,” he continued.
She did not smile and Emmet felt as if he had been a little fresh, and wondered if she were engaged or married.
“Are you from somewhere near Boston?” he asked quickly.
“Why—yes. I guess I still talk like it.”
“I was born in New Hampshire.”
They looked at each other, both suddenly at ease, their minds far away across the republic.
Perhaps Miss Hapgood misinterpreted their expressions, or else remembered that this was a crucial case, for she asserted her presence with a sudden up-tilt of a bridge-lamp.
“Mr. Moppet—I have these instructions and we want to begin the treatment before anything.”
She threw a glance at the door and the Trainor girl, realizing that she stood for “anything,” picked up the brief case and withdrew.
“First we’ll get to bed,” said Miss Hapgood.
In spite of the wording of this sentence Emmet’s thoughts could have been printed in the Youth’s Companion as he arose and followed her toward the stairs.
“I’m not going to try to help you Mr. Mom—Mister—because of this clumsiness, but the doctor would like you to walk up slowly, clasping the bannister rail like this.”
Emmet once on the stairs did not look around but he was conscious of a sudden screech of wood followed by a short deprecatory laugh.
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