by Philip Wylie
That statement confused the girl. “What do you mean by that?”
“He was adopted.”
“Adopted! By whom?”
“By my mother and father.” The shaggy brows knit together. “No doubt you were never told. Or your mother. Natural under the circumstances—since my parents never told their foster son that he had not sprung from their loins. Sentimental, what? And just at this instant—inconvenient. I have no intention of embarrassing you—but every intention of presenting the facts. You come to me at an awkward time. You bring this sentimental letter. And you are no more relation to me than the British Royal family. Less, in fact.”
The girl’s eyes were dreary after he had finished. This was the end of a quest that she had started hopefully, excitedly. Here in a lonely house and far from her home she was being disowned. The courage she brought with her on the journey, leaking away mile by mile and almost totally exhausted in the black, cold night of her arrival, now deserted her entirely. The captious blow of fate that had fallen at the end reduced her to nothing—a human being alone in an inimical world with no possessions of value, no haven, no hope.
The man still talked to her and she answered, but without emotion, with a faint desire to stop, to let herself be swallowed back into the universe.
“Of course, you thought I was your uncle. That accounts for your coming here. Your mother thought the same thing. Which accounts for her letter. Why did you leave Dakota?”
Her voice was slow and dull. “We lived in Tree City. As long as my mother was alive, it was all right. Tree City used to be a wheat farmers’—resort. A gambling town. Now the bootleggers have it. There are no lines of occupation open to a girl in Tree City which I care to pursue.”
“I see. So you came here instantly——”
“No. I tried to find work in Chicago. I failed—except for one job waiting on table. They fired me. Then I inquired the fare here. When my money was down to the fare, I came.”
“You could have written.”
“I didn’t decide to come till day before yesterday. I was still looking for work.”
“Wired, then.”
“Yes. I could have wired. I knew your address.”
“How? I moved here only a year ago—less than that.”
“It’s in ‘Who’s Who.’ I didn’t wire because on the way to the telegraph office I passed a restaurant—and I had dinner instead.”
Carpenter now walked across the room to the kitchen table and sat down where Daryl had rested. His arms swung as he walked and his head was thrust forward. His knees bent like hinges. Daryl turned and faced him again. She knew that under ordinary circumstances this man would rouse a variety of emotions in her—a variety the most prominent of which would be awe. He would conjure up fantasies; he would set the mind running on thoughts of the unnaturalness of man. He would be a dreadful person to meet in the dark. Now, however, her brain was so depressed that he seemed less real than a motion picture. The facts of him recorded themselves automatically. Had her nervous condition been normal, it is doubtful if she would ever have observed him with the remote perspective of that night. He was not the sort of person to whom one could give a sane and minute critical inspection.
“You are hungry?”
“I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
“What do you think of me?”
This question stirred her. It did not belong in the category of the others. She said, “I don’t know.”
“What did your family say about me?”
“That you were rich and brilliant and——”
“Eccentric?”
“They didn’t use that word.”
“Did they tell you that I had the greatest mind in the western world to-day? One of the greatest since civilization began? Exceeded or, better, equalled only by that of Inisy in Switzerland and Rosoff in Siberia?”
“No.”
“The fact possibly escaped them. Sit down.” He pointed to the chair at the other end of the table. Mrs. Treadle had been listening to the conversation under the camouflage of performing small offices pertaining to her situation. He spoke to her. “Get some food ready at once for Miss Carpenter. Afterward you can prepare one of the bed rooms.”
It was then that Daryl began to cry. Once she had whimpered. Once she had very nearly fainted. That was when the world had closed itself to her. Now, with this first symptom of kindness, she cried, and since tears and sobbing were foreign to her, it was unpleasant and embarrassing to watch. Carpenter, however, sat in the chair and stared at her. He said nothing.
In a moment she lifted her face. She did not smile through the aftermath of weeping. She merely dried her eyes, shook with a final sob, and then took off her hat. The full, bright gold of her hair could not be suspected from the small privilege allowed by the hat. Carpenter rested the same curious gaze on her head.
She said, “I’m unstrung.”
“Naturally,” he answered. “The female mind is never superior to externals.”
“Since I’m a stranger, I appreciate even more your letting me stay here. I’ll go to-morrow.”
“We will discuss that later. I may be able to use you here—if you care to stay.”
“Here?”
“Not impossible. You will find the countryside desolate. I assure you that there would be no company. Mrs. Treadle would provide you with the chaperonage which society insists upon. There are no windows in my house; I am perhaps an irascible person—although not unduly so; I am not a native of the locality; I have provided myself with a number of pieces of apparatus which are uncommon in Sinkak. Those few facts have conspired to give me an unpleasant reputation in the vicinity and the fools who live around here are more than hostile. Against any offer I might make to you, all that should be balanced. But if you would care to work here——”
“What sort of work?”
He lifted one hand and dropped it inertly on the table-top. “I am a biochemical investigator. I need assistance in my work. But there has been too much effort to supervise my labors on the part of the townspeople already. Mrs. Treadle could tell you something about it. My helper does not need to be a chemist. A good bottle-washer and an orderly person. Particularly an uncommunicative person.”
“It is good of you,” she said.
He stood up. “Good? Who knows? Good-night!”
He crossed the room. The door which led to the laboratory opened. When it shut, with the re-echoing din she had heard upon Carpenter’s first appearance, she realized that it was a steel portal.
For a moment the room seemed full of the memory of his vast, impersonal voice. It vanished gradually. No sound came from the chamber beyond the door. Mrs. Treadle brought a pan from the stove and served its contents on a plate. She gave a knife and fork to Daryl.
“I warmed over to-night’s stew.”
“Thank you.”
The woman leaned forward then and half whispered. “I got you a minute after you came in. But I don’t think he did.”
Daryl interrupted her fervent eating. “What?”
This time she did whisper. “You’re a detective!”
“What!”
“You can’t fool me! I been expecting something like this from the first.”
The blonde head shook. “Mm-mm,” she said. “Nothing like that.”
“All right, play your part if you must. But I want to tell you this much: anything I can do to help the law I’m ready to do. And I can give you a few pointers.”
Daryl continued to eat.
“He works all night—at things. He goes out at night sometimes and buries them. You could dig them up, if you wanted to. Me—I wouldn’t touch them.”
“What does he bury?”
“What does anybody bury?” Mrs. Treadle asked hoarsely.
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Bodies!”
“Bodies?”
“Corpses.”
Daryl put her fork on her plate and looked up. Life and sanity wer
e returning to her; sense was beginning to emerge from the strange termination of her journey. She had found her uncle’s house; she had learned that he was only a foster uncle. She had talked to him and he had seemed reasonable. She discounted his figure and his odd face even while the memory of it set quick worries in motion in her mind. Her ordinary calm resourcefulness carried her too far in the opposite direction; too far because in allaying her greatest troubles she discounted the strangeness of Carpenter with vehemence and she ignored the first small implications of his true nature and the nature of his experiments.
Orphaned at eighteen, beautiful, brave, eager, a conspiracy of life’s small circumstances had brought her to the most sinister house that raised its eyeless walls in the twentieth century’s matter-of-fact environment. What Mrs. Treadle conceived as fact was indubitably absurd. Carpenter was not a necrophile, not a ghoul. It would have been better if he had confined himself to mouldy vaults and medieval black arts. It would have been better if he had buried human remains beneath the brittle weeds of his frost-clutched yard. Instead, he placed in his hollow trenches the bodies of guinea pigs—even more often some corrosive chemical compound which he could not trust to the drainage pipes of his laboratory. These ordinarily inorganic funerals were omens of the course toward which he strove; as omens they held a single grim and breath-taking portent.
Mrs. Treadle saw a fact; she guessed at a conclusion. But into that guess went an instinct, an intuition that had accuracy. Carpenter had harmed no one; no evil could be hung upon his character. Still, he was feared and hated. In his face, in his soul, in his aura there dwelt the dimly sensible evidence of his malignant purpose. It was that, perhaps, which Daryl overlooked.
She laughed at Mrs. Treadle. “Are you sure it is corpses?” she asked.
“Why should he bury—whatever he buries?”
“It might be rats, for example. Scientists work with a number of animals. Rabbits. Or it might just be things he couldn’t dispose of in the laboratory. Chemicals.”
“It might be.” The housekeeper nodded toward the laboratory. “It might be. Nobody’s ever been there. Not inside—since the men from New York finished it. But there he stays at all hours, running his engines and talking to himself.”
“Talking to himself?”
“You can hear his voice muttering and muttering. About ‘them’.”
“‘Them’?”
“Whoever they are. Sometimes he says he’ll teach them. Sometimes he says things I don’t understand. But I know—I can feel it in my bones that he’s planning something. Something terrible.”
Daryl shook her head. “I think he’s probably all right. He certainly is unusual. And I’ve always heard that he was abnormal. But nobody ever believed him to be crazy—or dangerous.”
“That’s what you say.”
“My mother told me all she knew about him. His father—my foster grandfather—was a banker. My own father went to medical school and then moved West. He practiced in and around Tree City till he was killed. In an accident. When William”—the girl nodded toward the laboratory door—“was old enough he also went to medical school. He was supposed to be one of the most brilliant students they ever had. He stayed in college for years and years, going ahead with special work. You see, there was plenty of money for him. When his father—that is, the banker—died—William got all the money. My father and old Mister Carpenter had quarreled long ago.
“William left the medical studies he was making and went into the market. For a while he prospered. I believe he doubled his fortune several times. He became a really big financier. Then, suddenly, things went against him. He lost most of what he had. That was about a year ago—perhaps more. He sold the family home in Bloomfield, New Jersey—my mother has been there—and he bought this place. We heard that he had gone back to his research work. Mother made me promise to come to him after—after. And that’s all I know.” She seemed suddenly to realize that she had been talking for some time, discussing intimate matters with a strange person. The realization was accompanied by a knowledge of its cause: she was suffering a let-down from her harrowing evening. Abruptly she felt very tired.
“Could I go upstairs now?”
Mrs. Treadle checked the questions she was preparing. “Why—I guess so.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“You—you aren’t a detective then?”
“No. I’m not. And from all I’ve seen, I think you people here in Sinkak are all worked up over nothing. I never saw a person exactly like my uncle. I believe he’s suffering a good deal on account of his appearance. But I think he’s perfectly all right. At least—he was nice to me to-night, wasn’t he?”
The housekeeper grunted.
Daryl’s bed room was spacious. Its furniture evidently derived from the Mortland occupation of the house—rag rugs and heavy chairs, flowered wall paper, a walnut bed from which a canopy had been removed. The bathroom which adjoined it was a sharp contrast—modern and white-tiled. Fatigue gained rapidly upon her, overcoming interest. She locked the door to the hall, turned out the electric light, stared momentarily toward the window and saw an old moon coming over a black fringe of treetops. She slept.
Once, during the night, she woke suddenly and groped into a consciousness of her whereabouts. Somewhere down stairs a motor had been started; its revolution was accelerated until it produced a high whine. The noise became hypnotic and she slept again.
When Mrs. Treadle knocked on her door it was broad daylight. The morning sun shone over the earth. In some places the ground had commenced to thaw. Daryl looked out of the window as she dressed. The house was surrounded with an uncultivated field in which small cedars were already growing. At a distance of fifty yards, the woods began and in their midst she caught glimpses of a slow-running river. She could also see the corner of a garage and the beginning of the driveway which led to the country road.
Breakfast had been laid on the kitchen table. Carpenter was already there. He had waited for her. By the light of day they made fresh inventories of each other. She was able now to see his eyes. Pale blue eyes that had nevertheless a sharp focus. She liked his eyes less than she had his ungainly mass, his awkward motions. They had the expression of an entomologist staring at a specimen and they had the impersonality and cruel materialism of the eyes of the insect itself.
Again the heavy and throbbing quality of his voice startled her. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
“You slept well?”
“Yes. Thanks to you.”
“Breakfast is ready.”
They sat down. She had made up her mind to try to borrow from him enough money so that she could go to New York and look for work. She had no desire to remain with him; no fear prompted the determination but a feeling that work in his laboratory would be tedious and unpleasant.
He altered the decision at once. “I’ve been thinking about you. What education have you had?”
“High School and two years in Normal School.”
“I see. Despite the fact that there is a superfluity of teachers.”
“What else could I do?”
“Anything. Everything. What do you know about chemistry?”
“I had a year in High School.”
“Excellent. You know practically nothing. I suppose you are aware that you might have to wait a year for employment as a teacher in New York?”
“I didn’t know it.”
“Are you a stenographer?”
“No.”
He swallowed his coffee—a cupful, it seemed, in one audible gulp. Again he dropped his huge hand limply on the table. “Well. You haven’t what we might call a bright commercial future. However, I will make this proposition to you. One hundred dollars a month, room and board, to keep my laboratory in order. Easy work a few hours a day. No conditions except that you remain absolutely silent about any work you may see in progress.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“Well?”
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br /> “I don’t know——”
“You do know. This is unemployment year. The government and the industrialists have milked the public to a point where some of their card houses have crashed. Result: capital holds out on labor. Chronic malady. No jobs. I could support you indefinitely in town and will if you insist. But you could be a useful, working unit right here and you could, I may add, be an instrument in one of the most remarkable biochemical procedures that will take place on this globe in the next five thousand years.”
Carpenter pounded on the table with his fist. Mrs. Treadle seemed to understand the gesture because she instantly refilled his coffee cup and he continued without glancing at her. “There will be a fourth member of this party in a day or so. A man I’ve hired to be my assistant. A wealthy loafer who happens to be one of the best chemists alive to-day and wastes his time shooting game. Name of Baxter. Bromwell Baxter. Complete ass. I’ll probably go crazy. But he’s done things in the colloids that I should have done myself if I could have spared them the time. We four will go ahead with my work.”
Daryl felt her mind changing. She asked her question bluntly. “What is your work?”
“If you knew, you wouldn’t believe it. And you won’t know until I am ready.”
She could not determine the precise cause of her mental reversal. Some of it lay in the portrait Carpenter had sketched of the assistant he expected. Some of it in a curiosity about his work. Some in her position of solitude: Carpenter was her one link with the whole world. She perceived that he intended in any case to give her the aid she required; that was the first definitely favorable act she had witnessed and it was a very moving act.
Heredity had made her bold and calm. The circumstances in which she had lived had made her self-reliant to a high degree. Few girls could have emerged as undisturbed as she from the night through which she had passed.
“Could I try it—and would you try me—for a month?”
“Good,” Carpenter said. He raised his fist and Mrs. Treadle came hurriedly with the coffee pot. He did not converse again until the meal was ended.
“We’ll go to the laboratory.”
Daryl caught sight of the housekeeper’s face as they rose from the table. Her expression was one of fear; it passed through the girl’s mind that the other woman half-expected never to see her again. But Daryl was in sympathy with Carpenter. She followed him through the metal door. He switched on the lights.