“Yes.”
“Are you still?”
It was a question I had not put to myself for a long time, and I was not sure of the answer. Helen’s image was fresh in a part of my mind, but it did not hurt to think about her any more. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge since the time when I used to dream about her. “No,” I told her finally, “I don’t think I am.”
“I should have thought Helen . . .” she began and then hesitated. “Why did she marry Uncle Julian instead of you?”
“Because she’d been married once before, I think.”
She looked puzzled. “I don’t quite see that.”
“Well, Ed Norton was a louse. He treated your sister like the dirt under his feet, once he had got her. And she married him when she was too young. So he took all the youth out of her, made her afraid of passion and of the future. The divorce hurt her a lot, too. Helen wasn’t the kind that could take a thing like that in her stride. What she wanted after that was something gentle and settled, and someone whom she could cherish, if you’ll forgive the old-fashioned word, without having to love the way I wanted to be loved. Julian was peace and security to her, and he needed her. Besides, she had you on her hands.” I grinned at her. “You were a handful, too.”
Anne nodded. “She was practically like a mother to me.” She nibbled the stem of grass. “To Uncle Julian, too, in a way.”
“In another way,” I agreed. “He was forty-five when he married her, and he’d never had anything like Helen in his whole life before. Everything he’d been suppressing up to then was fastened on her. He didn’t love her, he adored her.” God knows I had had ample opportunity to watch Julian’s happiness. I knew more about it than anyone else possibly could. “She gave Julian everything he’d never had—a whole new life beyond his work. She brought him out into the sun. She was beautiful and she was kind, and she made him happier than he’d ever been.”
“No wonder,” she said slowly, “that he’s so queer now. I never thought about it in quite the way you describe, but I can see you’re right.”
One word struck me sharply. “Queer?” I said. “What do you mean by queer?”
For a time she did not answer and there was hesitation in her silence. Finally she turned to me. “He’s obsessed in some way, Dick. Some way that isn’t natural. And it’s connected with Helen in his mind. The only times we’ve really talked since I came up here were all about her. It made me feel creepy. He never mentioned her as if she were dead. You know, he’d say ‘is’ instead of ‘was’ and so forth.”
I digested that for a time and the more I thought about it the more my heart sank. This visit was going to be a difficult one. The time before I had had no luck trying to argue Julian out of a preoccupation, and it sounded as if . . . well, as if he hadn’t forgotten anything. Still, I could not see just how a lot of the present facts were compatible with the unwelcome hypothesis that was forming in my mind. “What about this Mrs. Walters?” I inquired. “I don’t see what she’s doing here.”
Anne lay back on propped elbows and looked up at me with eyes squinted from the sun. “You don’t seem swept off your feet by the lady,” she observed.
“I’m not. And I don’t see what she’s doing here.” “When I first came I simply thought she was after Uncle Julian,” she remarked. “But I’m not so sure now. She’s been with him more than a year—or so I gather from things they’ve said—and she’s with him all day. Anything that woman couldn’t get in six months wouldn’t be worth going after with a vacuum cleaner. So it can’t be matrimony.”
“Money, perhaps?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Uncle Julian isn’t exactly rich and he’s been spending huge sums on all sorts of things for his laboratory, or whatever is in that room of his. I worry sometimes for fear he hasn’t any left.”
“How about yours?” I knew that Julian had been the trustee for Anne’s inheritance. She and Helen had divided the Conner estate equally, and Helen had left her half to Julian. It must have amounted to somewhere around seventy thousand dollars. Anne was to get her share outright when she came of age, and the idea that Julian could in any way have been false to that trust was too sickening to entertain. Still, I was relieved when she answered.
“Mine is all right. He turned it all over to me on my eighteenth birthday. Government bonds, it was in. I put them in a bank in New York.” She frowned and said, “He wanted to borrow some the other day.”
“Good God!” I said with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “How much?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“I suppose you gave it to him?”
“Not exactly. I told him he could have it if he’d tell me what was going on and why he needed so much.”
“You shouldn’t have promised even that. What did he say?”
She sat up again and kicked the bank hard with her heels. “He said he couldn’t tell me, but that he needed some more equipment, and that once his work was finished he thought he would be able to repay me. She heard about it and told me I was a fool—that I’d lost a chance at a fortune, and that he’d borrow it elsewhere. That was meant to make me feel bad,” she observed, “but I didn’t. I don’t care about the money. Uncle Julian could have it all as far as I’m concerned. But I tell you, Dick, I don’t want him to go on the way he’s going. He’s so sick and old! I don’t want her to have it, either, but I’m sure he didn’t want it for that. It really was for things he uses. Twice since I’ve been here a truck’s arrived with cases and cases of things. I don’t know what they were, but I think that he and she spend all their time up there working on something or other. In fact, I’m sure that’s all they do together. I don’t think Uncle Julian cares about her and I know she doesn’t even like him. They watch each other sometimes. You’ll see.”
“I should think you’d be relieved that there’s nothing more to it than that. You sound bothered.”
She shook her head. “After you’ve been here a day you’ll be bothered, too. I hate that house. I loathe the people in the town, and the way they look at us. You’d think we were gangsters in a hide-out.” There was defiance in her voice.
“Well,” I told her, “it isn’t for long. Summer’s almost over.”
“Yes,” she replied, but not as if the thought made her particularly happy.
We sat there in the grass for a long time, talking about ourselves. She told me about the years since I had last seen her, most of them spent abroad. Behind her words it was easy to see that she had been lonely but unwilling to come home to Julian, whom she had never understood or loved without reservation. The fact that she called him “Uncle Julian” and always had since Helen married him was an indication of the way she felt toward him. And he, I suppose, was glad enough to have her take over the responsibility of her own life, leaving him free.
She seemed to have done a good job of it, and a notably mature one. The allowance from her money had enabled her to travel modestly and study what she felt like, so she had gone first to London and then to Paris, looking into the things that interested her and doing a good deal of hard work, too. She told me she’d had a job in the export office of a French textile company, for one thing, and another as assistant to a woman in charge of the entertainments on a Mediterranean cruise ship. Then she had studied drawing and fashions, working bitterly long hours for almost nothing in a Paris couturier’s shop until she thought she had something to offer in the way of experience. A buyer from one of the New York department stores had been impressed with her when she decided to look for an American job, and the upshot was that she was back in her own country with a position waiting for her on the first of October.
She told her story with no sense of bravado and I could see that what she had done suited her perfectly, however unlike the conventional thing it had been. It gave me a sense of satisfaction to know she was going to be in New York.
When she asked me what I had been doing, I could not find anything to match her own account. A certain qu
antity of work performed, two promotions in academic rank, a few published articles, a couple of camping trips. That about summed up the five years. But it seemed to interest her; when I admitted that I was now an associate professor and in line to become a department head in a few years, she nodded as if she were satisfied.
“You always did work hard,” she observed. “I can remember that.” She looked at me and grinned again. “But really you aren’t much the way I remembered after all. I expected to find you wearing a beard by now.”
I rubbed my chin. “If I don’t manage to get a shave pretty soon, I’ll be wearing one all right.”
She stood up. “Well, you’ll find the house pretty primitive, but I guess the shaving can be managed. We don’t have a tub though, and if you want a bath you’ll have to take it in the river. I’m going in now.” She made a grimace. “Swimming is absolutely the only entertainment we have to offer, and I’ve been doing a lot of it; twice a day, when it doesn’t rain. Even Mrs. Walters swims.” After a pause she added, “She swims well, too. You’d be surprised.”
“I don’t like to think of her in a bathing suit.”
Anne laughed. “It’s quite a sight.” She pulled the yellow sweater up over her head, which disconcerted me until I saw that she had a bathing suit on underneath her clothes. “There’s a clump of willows over there where you can undress,” she observed when her head emerged from the seawater. “But look out for bees. I got stung once.”
I went over to the willows and got into my trunks, thinking about how warm and brown her shoulders had looked, and how fantastic it would have seemed to me yesterday to be told that at ten the following morning I should be thinking about a girl’s skin and the sun on her hair.
When I returned to the crescent of sand, Anne was already out in the water, swimming with an easy steadiness. I went in after her; the first shock of the plunge was breath-taking because the water was frost-cold, but after that it felt fine. The blood began to race under my skin and I could feel the grubbiness of the train disappear in the swift rush of water along my body.
I caught up with Anne a couple of hundred yards off-shore, and we stopped to tread water and look around us. It was amazing how low the shores looked from where we were, and how distant. We were in a level world of blue which sparkled as we turned to face the sun. Anne shook the water swiftly out of her eyes and said, “Don’t you like it?”
“It’s superb.”
Anne turned on her back and began to kick gently with her feet. “Nothing matters when you’re out here,” she said. “Everything’s clean and . . .” she paused slightly, “real.” Then she said, “I’m glad you’re here,” turned over and began to swim toward the middle of the bay.
I followed her, wondering why she had paused before she said “real.” Then I stopped thinking at all and we raced until we were winded. By that time the shore was perceptibly remote and I began to notice the chill in the water. Anne had stopped too, and I looked at her, panting and laughing, with her head mounted on the flat water like John the Baptist’s on a plate. “This water is pretty cold,” I observed.
“I’m used to it now,” she answered, “but I’ll have had enough in a few minutes. Let’s swim back slowly.”
So we did. I watched the flash and lift of her arm as it came out of the water, and the arc of ripples that pushed along in front of her bathing cap. The sun caught the wet rubber and made a point of fire on it. I found myself matching my strokes to hers, so that we were swimming beside each other in the same rhythm, sliding through the water like parts of a single entity. The patch of fire on her cap held my eyes until I was half hypnotized without knowing it, and only the grating of my fingers on the beach sand snapped the spell.
We stood up then and looked at each other. Drops of water fell from her body like fragments of light, and for an instant it seemed to me that there had been nothing whatever prior to this moment, that we had swum up out of some infinite reservoir of being until we stranded on the shore of the world. It is impossible to describe such an experience in the vocabulary of psychology, or any other, for that matter. It simply was. We stood there looking at each other, half smiling, not conscious of things but of everything fused into one universal sensation which vibrated in me to the tune of our swimming. I saw that Anne was lovely, smoothly and strongly made, but it was inevitable that she should be so. A sense of enormous contentment and satisfaction flooded through me.
The enchantment began to dissolve. She gave a laugh and splashed through the shallow water to the beach. I followed, and we sat on a log together in the sun, without speaking. The heat began to take the water chill out of our bodies and we relaxed. Anne stretched her legs ahead of her and dug her toes into the sand. “You see why I like to come here,” she said.
“Yes.”
“This was special, though,” she said, half to herself, and I was glad because I didn’t want it to have been that fine every time before.
After a while we got cigarettes and smoked until we were dry and warm. The sun was high and I began to remember why I had come to Barsham Harbor. “Julian must be up by now,” I said. “Probably I ought to be getting back to the house.”
“All right,” Anne replied and there was regret in her tone.
We pulled on our clothes and I had to be diplomatic about that because she was right about the bees. There were a dozen of them buzzing in the willow alcove where I dressed. Afterwards we walked back across the meadow, not saying much. Halfway to the house I said, “I’ll let you know what Julian has to say and then we can have another talk.”
“Yes.” Then she added earnestly, “Try to see him alone. Don’t let her be there when you talk to him or you’ll never learn anything.”
“All right. But don’t take her too much to heart. She’s not the companion for a summer vacation, I admit, but there’s no point in resenting her.”
She looked at me steadily. “I don’t resent her,” she answered. “I’m afraid of her.”
“Nonsense.”
She said nothing to that and we walked on to the house. The magic had gone and we were just two people again, each wrapped in our own thoughts. We walked slowly.
6.
FIVE YEARS can change a man considerably, and Anne had warned me that I should find Julian unlike my memory of him. Even so, it hurt when I walked into the living room and saw what he had become. He was sitting in a sagging armchair with his back to the windows and the light, but even at first glance I saw that he was old. His narrow, angular face had never had much color in it, but now the skin was parchment tight and stiff over his cheekbones and his lips were bleached to a thick gray, as if there was almost no blood left in him. My second glance showed me he had lost something else, too—the sense of discipline which had always been characteristic of him. I remembered him as a neat man, controlled in his movements and meticulous about his clothes. This haggard figure in the shabby living room of the old house was another man, some sort of senile changeling. His clothes were not only rumpled but dirty. There was a triangular tear in the knee of one trouser leg. His shirt looked as if he had slept in it, and he was not wearing a tie.
For a moment he sat there motionless, looking at me, and then he pushed himself up by the arms of the chair and rose to meet me. As he stood there I saw that he was trembling almost imperceptibly. A sudden feeling of pity rose in my throat, and I went across the room quickly and took his hand. “Julian! It’s grand to see you!” I said and hoped my voice did not betray what I was thinking and feeling.
Seen at close range, his face was not as lifeless as it had appeared at first. The eyes were alive and burning with the same eagerness that they had when he was working in the second-floor lab of McCann Hall in the old days. Only there was another quality there now, an intensity which was more than eagerness. Their brightness struck me as more than normal and I looked away from them after a second.
His hand when it took mine was dry and cold, but the pressure of his fingers was strong. “Richard
,” he said, “it is generous of you to have come so promptly.” He looked at me appraisingly. “You seem to be keeping fit and you don’t look a day older.”
“I’m fine, Julian. What about you?”
He smiled then, a curious smile which did not match his words. “As you see. I have only a little time left, but enough . . . enough.” He gestured to a chair. “Sit down. Good. We can talk, in comfort. I suppose you’ve seen Anne already?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“She reminds me of her sister,” he said and gave me the same quick, inappropriate smile. “Don’t you think so?”
“In some ways.”
“Well, I hope she will help to entertain you in the intervals when I am working.”
I filled a pipe, not because I wanted to smoke but to give an air of casualness to what I was saying. “It’s fine to hear you’re working again, Julian. We’ve all missed you. I suppose you know that you can have your chair back any time you want it. Arthur Wallace has arranged for that.”
“A good man. And thank you. I expect you had something to do with that, Richard, as well as he. But my work is here. And it is almost done. Afterwards I shall . . . retire.” He paused before he used that last word and I did not like that hesitation. He must have seen me look at him sharply, because he went on in a stronger voice. “As a matter of fact, Richard, my strength is failing me rather alarmingly. That is why I sent for you in such a hurry. I must finish my work quickly or not at all.”
“You’ve got plenty of years left, Julian. What you need is a rest. You’ve been at it too hard.”
He shook his head. “It’s the other way round, my boy. The work keeps me alive. Without it I should have died long ago.” He smiled again and this time it was all right. “But this is morbid and unimportant. I must tell you wherein I think you can help me.” His eyes fastened on me and he spoke more rapidly. “I venture to think that this errand on which I have called you is important. Even, perhaps, the most important thing in the whole world, not only for me but for every living person. I’m on the threshold of an enormous advance in human knowledge—the most enormous advance you can conceive of.”
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