One of the planes straightened and flew away to the west, climbing as it went. Its rising drone became fainter. The other plane continued to bank and curve above. Presently, Will closed his eyes and tried to doze in the warm sunlight. It was no use. In the darkness of his mind revolved the same old maddening images, doubts, and questions. It was as if he had become entangled in a nightmare from which he could not awake.
The engine of the plane overhead suddenly stopped. He opened his eyes, but could not locate it for a moment.
Then he saw it against the sun, and it was falling swiftly in a tailspin. It fell out of the direct glare of the sun, and he saw it in detail, revolving as it plunged so that the wings glinted like a flashing heliograph. He realised with a shock that it was but a few hundred feet from the ground.
He scrambled to his feet, in an awful agitation.
“Joan!” he cried, hoarsely. ”Joan!”
The machine continued its fall steadily and inevitably, spun down past his eye-level, and fell into the centre of one of the green squares of the fields below. He started running down the hill even as it landed. As the sound of the crash reached him, he saw a rose of fire blossom like magic in that green square, and from it a wavering growth of black, oily smoke mounted into the heavens. The tears started from his eyes, and ran freely.
When he reached the scene, the inferno was past its worst, and as the flames died he saw that nothing was left, only black, shapeless, scattered things, unrecognisable as once human or once machine.
There was a squeal of brakes from the road. An ambulance had arrived from the flying club. Two men jumped out, burst through the hedge. It did not take them more than a few seconds to realise that there was no hope.
“Quick, Mr. Fredericks, jump in,” cried one of them, recognising Will. “We must go straight to the other one.”
The other one!
Before he could question them, Will was hustled between them into the driving cabin of the ambulance. The vehicle was quickly reversed, and sped off in the opposite direction.
“Did—did the other plane—” began Will, and the words stuck in his throat. The driver, with his eye on the road which was scudding under their wheels at sixty miles an hour, nodded grimly.
“Didn’t you see, sir? They both crashed at exactly the same time, in the same way—tailspin. A shocking accident—terrible. I can’t think how to express my sympathy, sir. I only pray that this one won’t turn out so bad.”
It was as if the ability to feel had left Will. His thoughts slowed up almost to a standstill. He sat there numbed. He dare not try to think. But, sluggishly, his thoughts went on. Joan and Doll had crashed at exactly the same time in exactly the same way. That was above coincidence. They must have both been thinking along the same lines again, and that meant they had crashed deliberately!
He saw now the whole irony of it, and groaned.
Joan and Doll had each tried to solve the problem in their own way, and each had reached the same conclusion without being aware what the other was thinking. They saw that one of them would have to step out of the picture if Will was ever to be happy. They knew that that one would have to step completely out, for life could no longer be tolerated by her if she had to lose Will. And, characteristically, they had each made up their minds to be the self-sacrificing one.
Doll felt that she was an intruder, wrecking the lives of a happily married pair. It was no fault of hers: she had not asked to be created full of love for a man she could never have.
But she felt that she was leading an unnecessary existence, and every moment of it was hurting the man she loved. So she decided to relinquish the gift of life. Joan’s reasoning was that she had been partly responsible for bringing Doll into this world, unasked, and with exactly similar feelings and longings as herself. Ever since she had expected, those feelings had been ungratified, cruelly crushed and thwarted. It wasn’t fair. Doll had as much right to happiness as she. Joan had enjoyed her period of happiness with Will. Now let Doll enjoy hers. So it was that two planes, a mile apart, went spinning into crashes that were meant to appear accidental—and did, except to one man, the one who most of all was intended never to know the truth.
The driver was speaking again.
“It was a ghastly dilemma for us at the club. We saw ’em come down on opposite sides and both catch fire. We have only one fire engine, one ambulance. Had to send the engine to one, and rush this ambulance to the other. The engine couldn’t have done any good at this end, as it happens. Hope it was in time where we’re going!”
Will’s dulled mind seemed to take this in quite detachedly. Who had been killed in the crash he saw? Joan or Doll? Joan or Doll?
Then suddenly it burst upon him that it was only the original Joan that he loved. That was the person whom he had known so long, around whom his affection had centred. The hair he had caressed, the lips he had pressed, the gay brown eyes which had smiled into his. He had never touched Doll in that way. Doll seemed but a shadow of all that. She may have had memories of those happenings, but she had never actually experienced them. They were only artificial memories. Yet they must have seemed real enough to her. The ambulance arrived at the scene of the second crash. The plane had flattened out a few feet from the ground, and not landed so disastrously as the other. It lay crumpled athwart a burned and blackened hedge. The fire engine had quenched the flames within a few minutes. And the pilot had been dragged clear, unconscious, badly knocked about and burned. They got her into the ambulance, and rushed her to a hospital. Will had been sitting by the bedside for three hours before the girl in the bed had opened her eyes.
Blank, brown eyes they were, which looked at him, then at the hospital ward, without the faintest change of expression.
“Joan!” he whispered, clasping her free arm—the other was in a splint. There was no response of any sort. She lay back gazing unseeingly at the ceiling. He licked his dry lips. It couldn’t be Joan after all.
“Doll!” he tried. “Do you feel all right?”
Still no response.
“I know that expression,” said the doctor, who was standing by. “She’s lost her memory.”
“For good, do you think?” asked Will, perturbed.
The doctor pursed his lips indicating he didn’t know.
“Good lord! Is there no way of finding out whether she is my wife or my sister-in-law?”
“If you don’t know, no one does, Mr. Fredericks,” replied the doctor. “We can’t tell which plane who was in. We can’t tell anything from her clothes, for they were burned in the crash, and destroyed before we realized their importance. We’ve often remarked their uncanny resemblance. Certainly you can tell them apart.”
“I can’t!” answered Will, in anguish. “There is no way.”
The next day, the patient had largely recovered her senses, and was able to sit up and talk. But a whole tract of her memory had been obliterated. She remembered nothing of her twin, and in fact nothing at all of the events after the duplication experiment.
Lying on the couch in the laboratory, preparing herself under the direction of Bill, was the last scene she remembered.
The hospital psychologist said that the shock of the crash had caused her to unconsciously repress a part of her life which she did not want to remember. She could not remember now if she wanted to. He said she might discover the truth from her eventually, but if he did, it would take months—maybe even years. But naturally her memories of Will, and their marriage, were intact, and she loved him as strongly as ever.
Was she Joan or Doll?
Will spent a sleepless night, turning the matter over. Did it really matter? There was only one left now—why not assume she was Joan, and carry on? But he knew that as long as doubt and uncertainty existed, he would never be able to recover the old free life he had had with Joan.
It seemed that he would have to surrender her to the psychologist, and that would bring to light all sorts of details which neither he, Joan, nor Bill had ever
wished to be revealed.
But the next day something turned up which changed the face of things. While he was sitting at the bedside, conversing with the girl who might or might not be Joan, a nurse told him a man was waiting outside to see him. He went, and found a police officer standing there.
Ever since the catastrophe which had wrecked Bill’s laboratory, the police had been looking around that locality, searching for any possible clues. Buried in the ground they had found a safe, burst and broken. Inside were the charred remains of books, papers, and letters. They had examined them, without gleaning much, and now the officer wished to know if Will could gather anything from them.
Will took the bundle and went through it. There was a packet of purely personal letters, and some old tradesmen’s accounts, paid and receipted. These with the officer’s consent, were destroyed. But also there were the burnt remains of three of Bill’s experimental notebooks.
They were written in Bill’s system of shorthand, which Will understood. The first two were old, and of no particular interest: The last, however—unfortunately the most badly charred of the three—was an account of Bill’s attempts to infuse life into his replicas of living creatures.
The last pages were about the experiment of creating another Joan, and the last recognisable entry read:
This clumsy business of pumping through pipes, in the manner of a blood transfusion left a small scar at the base of Doll’s neck, the only flaw in an otherwise perfect copy of Joan. I resented…
The rest was burned away.
To the astonishment of the police inspector, Will turned without saying a word and hurried back into the ward.
“Let me examine your neck, dear, I want to see if you’ve been biting yourself,” he said, with a false lightness.
Wondering, the girl allowed herself to be examined. There was not the slightest sign of a scar anywhere on her neck.
“You are Joan,” he said, and embraced her as satisfactorily as her injuries would permit.
“I am Joan,” she repeated. kissing and hugging him back. And at last they knew again the blessedness of peace of mind.
For once, Fate, which had used them so hardly, showed mercy, and they never knew that in the packet of Bill’s receipted accounts, which Will had destroyed, was one from a plastic surgeon, which began:
“For removing operation scar from neck, and two days’ nursing and attention.”
—«»—«»—«»—
[found floating in cyberspace]
[rtf to html conversion with DL WordMagus and HTMLBookfixer. A few errors that appear to have been part of the orginal publication have been left alone.]
[Sept 16, 2005—v1 html]
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Four-Sided Triangle Page 3