CHAPTER XXI
I
A gray kitten batted the tip end of a fern flowing green to the tiles of the sunroom’s floor, leaped three feet, killed an inch of fringe on the rug, toppled flat, waved coral set paws, and purred.
Dr. Elm snapped alluring fingers and said: “Puss? Puss? Puss? Look, Judy, I didn’t think you’d take it like this. I don’t think this is the right way for you to take it, my girl.”
Judith loosed tightened lips to tremble words. “Only—— I can’t believe it, Dr. Joe. I mean—— How could Neal possibly have forgotten?”
“It is easier to say, maybe, how could Neal, being Neal, possibly have remembered? Of course though, Judy, we aren’t dead certain and can’t be, for a while, that Neal did forget. That part of it was Miss MacDonald’s one and only piece of guesswork. Jehoshaphat, though, I hope she was right about it!”
“Yes. If she is right about—the other, I suppose we have to hope for that, too.”
“She is right, Judy. There is no getting away from what she called her footprints. They walk right through the letters, making a path so plain it looks to me, now, like nobody but a fool could have missed it. Lucy’s second letter to you makes the first track. Maybe it would take a crime analyst to discover it; but, in the third letter, the path starts off, good and deep, and follows straight along through Neal’s last letter to you—not a misstep, not a detour, not a doubt. Soon as we can find time, we’ll go through them, if you want to, and trace them along. I thought I could tell you all the points—but I must have missed some, if you aren’t convinced.”
“I am. I have to be. Except—Neal’s forgetting.”
“Look, Judy. I don’t need to tell you about the findings of modern psychology. You understand it better than I do. But would you like to kind of whittle through Neal’s case with me, the way Miss MacDonald explained it—smart as a whip, that girl is—to kind of refresh your memory and help you understand about Neal?”
“I wish we might, Dr. Joe. You are wrong about my understanding the new psychology. I don’t understand it very well. I never have.”
“No; and who does? I shouldn’t have said ‘understand’—I should have said ‘believe in,’ maybe, or some such thing. We don’t understand gravitation, or love, or sin, or electricity, or—much of anything. But we believe in them because we’ve been forced to.
“Well, to begin with, Miss MacDonald says that Neal is a supersentimentalist. That’s why he has always fought sentimentality to the last ditch, and derided it. He knew how extra-sentimental he was, and he was ashamed of it; hated it like he’d have hated a club-foot; inferiority complex right there, to use the jargon, to begin with. What Neal should have done was to have married real young, as Dick did. Then he’d have had a nice conventional outlet for his floods of sentiment—love of his wife and babies. That’s a lot different from loving his aunties and uncles and sisters. He didn’t marry. And, along in mid-adolescence, a doggone unfortunate thing happened.
“He got the idea of marriage muddled up in his mind with all the distress and fear and self-humiliation that had ever come to him. Never had a worry in his life—I mean a real, serious one—until Chris came home, and the woman Chris had married started all the distress about selling Q 2. Too sentimental, too loyal, to blame Chris—or even Chris’s wife—blame it on marriage. You know, Lucy quotes him as saying a blameless young man and a pleasant girl married will make a curse or a crime. Then, Chris and Irene were hugging and kissing and loving and being as sentimental, here, there, and everywhere, as they darned pleased. Neal was jealous—though he didn’t know it, of course—so that made him hate marriage (their liberty), and himself, worse than ever.
“Look. Who let him out of his locked room that night and directed him to Dick’s room, where he found Dick killed? The woman Chris had married. Who made a fool of him with her fake murder business? The woman Phineas had married. Further back: What caused his father to kill a man? (That went awful hard with Neal, and I knew it, at the time.) The man your Aunt Gracia was going to marry. Blame any of the folks? Same as I said before—too loyal, too sentimental. Lots easier to blame marriage. Marriage, you see this, Judy, mixed up with the dark experiences of his life; mixed up with murder, grief, despair, fear, self-disgust. Look—a firm resolve never to have any truck with marriage. Or, if you like it better, a marriage complex. About as easy for a loving, sentimental lad like Neal to endure, as a boil on the end of his nose.
“It didn’t look so pretty, and he knew it. He stopped talking about it, soon as he got a little older, and hoped folks wouldn’t notice it. Before long, he stopped looking cross-eyed, so’s he could see it himself. He began to look—well, crooked, out of the sides of his eyes so’s he couldn’t see it at all. Got the habit of looking crooked. Forgot the boil; and it was a relief, you can bet on that. Here I am, though—that’s what always happens to me when I try to do fancy work with my words—with a boil on Neal’s nose, when I want a complex against marriage stored away in his mind’s dark chambers and forgotten. Stowed right next on the shelf to the secret he had to keep; the secret that smashed his life to chips for a while—the secret he’d like to forget, but couldn’t. So far so good, Judy?”
“Yes——”
“So far so bad would be more like it, I guess. Well, here on the ranch, giving his heart to it, giving his energy and his time to it, having you Quilter women to compare with the women he met, making them look pretty small, Neal didn’t have much of a fight with this marriage complex until Mrs. Ursula Thornton showed up. (Maybe I should have told you that Miss MacDonald went at all this a little differently from what I have. She began this analysis of Neal and his complexes about sixteen or seventeen years farther back than I have. Freud, you know. But that always seemed like drawing a pretty long bow, to me.) Anyway, Ursula wasn’t so much unlike your mother, Judy, nor so much unlike you girls. She came about as close to being a Quilter as she could come without having been born into the family: beautiful, smart, good—all the attributes. Neal loved her on the dot. She loved him. No use beating around the bush—that’s what happened.
“Fine and dandy? Look; not so you could notice. Here comes the marriage complex. Let’s turn it into the boil again on the end of his nose. Neal can’t see it any longer. Eyes are set for looking crooked, the other way. Neal has plumb forgot he had it. What’s the trouble then? It’s still there—that’s the trouble. It’s been there, all these years, growing bigger and meaner all the time.
“Marriage means to Neal, by this time, murder, disgrace, terror, humiliation. Will he accept it? He will not. Who would? Will he get around it? He will, if he can. Will he admit that he doesn’t want to marry the woman he loves? Lord bless us—he can’t. He doesn’t know it. You can’t admit something you don’t know. What’s he going to do, then?”
Judith said: “Make a substitution. Put an unreal reason for his refusal to marry in the place of the real reason?”
“That’s it. Next job for Neal is to find the substitute. Substitutes, in cases of this kind, aren’t always so doggone easy to find. Neal had his, right at hand. All he needed to do was to tinker it some, and it was in good shape for use. I mean the secret that had been burdening him, torturing the living soul out of him for years. He didn’t want that secret, Judy. He never had wanted it. Look, here’s what happened.
“Up bobs Mr. Modern Devil, alias repressions, and just as sly and wicked as the old-fashioned red one with horns and a tail. Up he comes from modern hell, our subconscious minds—just as black and rotten a region as the old brimstone-and-fire affair—and he says, ‘Leave it to me.’
“ ‘That secret,’ says Mr. Modern Devil, ‘isn’t any use to us. Turn it into a reason for your not marrying, and make it of some account.’
“Easy enough for Neal to do. He’d had the idea in his mind, anyway, since 1900. Look. Here we have it. ‘A man who murdered his own father is not fit to marry. I murdered my own father. I am not fit to marry.’ Slick? Good reason for avoiding marriage. And, Neal being Neal, the supersentimentalist, the secret revised into a form that seems, anyhow, a little easier to bear.
“Just one thing is the matter now. It is a nasty, poisonous mess, this work of Neal’s personal devil. A sane mind can’t function with a mess of that kind in it, any more than a healthy stomach could function, properly, with a dish of poisonous toadstools in its middle. But, thank the Lord—or, maybe, Miss MacDonald—we’ve got the antidote to feed Neal: The truth.”
“He won’t take it, Dr. Joe. He scorns, hates modern psychology.”
“Sure he does. Why wouldn’t he? He’s afraid of it—scared to death of it.”
“Yes, I know. But, if he won’t take it, what are we going to do?”
“Remember how the ads used to read in pre-prohibition days? ‘A few drops in his coffee. Taste not detectable.’ Look, Judy. I mean we can tell Neal the truth without labelling it psychology, can’t we? The truth is all he needs. Truth, in these cases, is the catharsis—the cure. Miss MacDonald kind of held out for an absolute verbal acknowledgment. She says that will be by a long shot the best. But I know, darn well, that, even if we can’t get the acknowledgment from him in words, it will be all right if we can get him to make it to himself. Yes, and there’s a lot of stuff about reëducation after freeing the repression. But I’ll bet you that, if Neal has the truth, Ursula will do for the reëducation.
“Look, though, Judy. We’ll have to be real delicate about feeding him the truth. I’d suggest sort of oozing it into him. We don’t want to gag him with it, and choke him to death. I told Miss MacDonald not to worry about that for a minute. Tact, I told her, was your middle name. I knew you could manage it fine.”
“I?”—a mouse of a word, caught in a trap and squeaking.
“How do you mean, Judy?”
“Dr. Joe, dear Dr. Joe—I can’t. Won’t you?”
“Oh, now, bless my soul to glory, Judy——”
“Please, Dr. Joe? You’re a man, you’re——”
“Hold on there, Judy! Yes? Look. Just about a minute you’d have been talking baby talk, or worse, if I hadn’t stopped you. I never trust a woman when she starts by telling me I’m a man. Flatterer. No, but, Judy, I’ll try this, if you want me to. Sure I will. I think you’d do it better than I would; but, if you don’t think so, I’ll try—— Hezekiah and the egg, you know.”
“Dr. Joe— Dr. Joe, you’re—you’re——”
“Don’t say it, Judy. Don’t you do it.”
“Divine.”
“All right. Just for that, now, I’m going to send you a bill.”
II
Dr. Elm gave a stiffening shake to the newspaper, and reread the recipe for hot-water pie crust. The clock on the mantel spun three cool, silver threads, and a black and red spark from the fire beneath them spit out on the polished floor. Dr. Elm rose, kicked the spark to the hearth, fumbled in his pocket for a cigar, bit the end of it, and returned it to his pocket.
“ ’Lo, Neal.”
“Hel‑lo, Dr. Joe! This is fine. I didn’t know you’d come. Judy just now ’phoned down to me, and I rode right up. Great to see you here again. Did you have a pleasant trip to San Francisco?”
“No. Not so very. I went for my health, you know.”
“I didn’t know! What’s the trouble, man?”
“I’m getting along, Neal. Getting pretty old. I’ve been thinking, here lately, that I’ll likely be shuffling along and out of here before many months.”
“Rubbish, Dr. Joe! You’re fit as a fiddle. How come?”
Dr. Elm returned to the wing chair and sank heavily into it with a slow, showy sigh. Neal curved an arm on the mantel and frowned at the fire.
“Sit down, boy. You’ll burn your clothes—that fire is popping like corn. Besides, if you can spare me a few minutes, I’d like to have a little talk with you. I’ve got to ask kind of a favour of you, Neal. I hate it worse than hell—but I can’t see any way out of it.”
“Yes, you bet. But you couldn’t ask a favour of me, Dr. Joe—not to save your life. Anything I could do for you would be a favour to me, and you know it. So cut the favour stuff, and go ahead from there.”
“That’s nice of you, Neal. I certainly appreciate it a lot. But—— Well, no matter now. Anything I’ve got to say will hold over all right. Kind of a shame to bother you—— I expect you’d like to hear about my trip? We’ll let the other ride, for the present——”
“Dr. Joe! For the love of Pete, what did I say? See here, man—put it any way you care to put it. But, for God’s sake, if I can help you——”
“That’s all right. That’s all right, boy. You didn’t say anything. No—just changed my old fool mind, that’s all.”
“But you can’t do it, Dr. Joe. You can’t get away with it—not with me. What is it? Money? You’ve attended this entire family for half a century, and you’ve never seen the colour of Quilter money yet——”
“No, no, Neal. Not money. No, it’s more serious than that. Funny, how precious our old, miserable, tag-end years get to us, when we feel the last of them approaching.”
“See here, Dr. Joe. You’re the best friend I have on earth—the best friend any Quilter has. Now, a minute ago, you began to tell me what I could do—what you’d allow me to do. Then I made some cursed, damn-fool break and spoiled it all. I’m not going to sleep to-night until you and I get this thing straight.”
“No, Neal, you didn’t make any break. I just looked at you, and I thought you didn’t look so well yourself. And this—this request of mine wasn’t going to be pleasant for you, boy. I just thought I’d better let up on it, maybe, till you got a little more fit yourself. Look. It will keep——”
“Not on your life it won’t keep. I was never sounder than I am right now. Of course, I’ve been a little worried here of late—one thing and another, you know how it goes—but physically I’m as tough and healthy as a Q 2 heifer.”
“That’s what I meant, Neal. I thought you looked kind of worried, or something. No time to be bothering you with my troubles——”
“Only that I suppose the knowledge that you are in trouble, and that you won’t give me a chance to help you—if I could—would be a more serious trouble, worry, than any other I could have.”
“Well, of course, if you put it that way, Neal. Look. What do you know about this new-fangled psychology stuff?”
“Not a doggone thing. And I’d like to know less. Chris shoves it at me, now and then: conscious, subconscious, complexes, dreams. Dreams, if you please. Rot, all of it, from beginning to end!”
“Yes? Well, I expect you’re right. It always had a phoney sound to me. But what I was wondering about it, was this: Could worry, kind of linked up with a guilty conscience, just sort of get the best of a man of my age? That’s the way I feel, boy. Bless my soul to glory, I feel like if I couldn’t rid myself of this eternal load of worry, get things straightened out for myself, and get away from under it, I feel like it would pound me right down into my grave. I can’t sleep any more. I can’t eat. I can’t get anything out of a good cigar. I thought maybe a trip away would fix me up a little. Got worse. Just now, Neal, you said I couldn’t ask a favour of you to save my life. Well, that’s about what I’m doing. Look. I’m asking this favour, hoping that it will give me a new lease on life. I wouldn’t ask you, Neal, if I knew anyone else on God’s green footstool to ask——”
“Wouldn’t? Well, if you say it, I guess I deserve it.”
“No, no. You got me wrong there. I’d sooner ask help of you than of any other living man, except—about this one thing. It is the most painful thing in your life, boy. That’s the damn trouble about bringing it up to you.”
“You must mean, then, that it has something to do with—1900.”
“That’s about the size of it, Neal. I killed Dick.”
“That’s a damn lie! And you know it!”
“Take it easy, boy, if you can. I’m sorry. I knew I shouldn’t unburden on you. We’ll drop it. Let well enough alone. Pull the bell there, will you? I’d like a glass of water. I get these kind of rushing, dizzy spells———”
“Dr. Joe, listen. I——”
“That’s all right, boy. I knew better than to tell you, but——”
“In the name of God, where did you get this mad idea? You weren’t here on the ranch. You were in Portland, more than two hundred miles away.”
“That’s what I said at the time. I had to say it. Neal, listen a minute, if you can, before you jump down my throat. It wasn’t cold-blooded murder. It was——I did it for Dick. I did it because he begged and prayed me to. I did it because he threatened, a threat he meant to keep and I knew it, that if I wouldn’t do it for him, he’d ask—well, somebody else, who would.”
Neal said, “A pitcher of water, please,” to two white-trousered legs, and they vanished.
“You see, my boy, your father’s ailment was cancer. He knew it, and I knew it. He took my promise not to tell. When he was shot, he had maybe three months of life ahead of him—maybe not so long. Three months of slow agony. He wasn’t afraid of them. No. He was afraid of losing Q 2 for his family and his children and their children. He wouldn’t have been afraid of that, either—not the way he was afraid—if he had been going to live to see you all through. But he wasn’t going to live; and there were old people, and his sister, and his three children and an invalid boy all going to be left to shift for themselves, and nothing to shift with. He gave into Chris about selling, not because of any false pride—never knew a Quilter yet who had an ounce of it—but because he knew he wouldn’t be alive another six months to keep Chris from selling. Chris was a good boy, and he’s been getting better ever since; but, right then, anybody with a lick of sense knew that it was a question of now or later with Chris. Dick knew; but he had to be certain sure of it. You’re right, this weather is——”
Neal said, “All right, Gee Sing. Thanks. Skip.”
“Yes, as I was saying, Dick needed to know, and he found out—if Chris didn’t sell in October, he’d sell in December.
“Now your father, Neal, was your grandfather’s own son. He’d been brought up on your grandfather’s philosophy. Schiller, you know, and his realistic pantheism; his insistence on sacrificing the individual to the species. (Seems to me that I remember your grandfather was making a new translation of Schiller, just about that time.) And Hume, with his insistence that no act that was useful could possibly be criminal. Dick believed these principles with all his soul. His death, by accident, would be useful—damn useful. It would give his folks money to hold on to Q 2, and to provide, not only for them, but for all future generations of Quilters. If Chris had sold Q 2 in 1900, he’d have sold a lot more than the ranch. Some of the folks here said that, at the time. Dick hated like thunder to think of the old people in poverty; he hated to think of you as a farm hand; of Greg and Judy having to surrender in Colorado; of Lucy’s genius winding up by ringing a school bell at nine every morning.
“These, and other things—including whether or not the Quilter family was worth saving—were the things he had to balance against cheating an insurance company that had cheated him. (He didn’t balance his death. He was dying, and a quick, easy death was a mercy and a blessing.) Greatest good for the greatest number—that weighed heavily. It was a shyster company, cheating right and left, wherever it could. Dick decided to sacrifice the company’s exchequer—you know how impersonal companies seem—to the good of the species, Quilter.
“Of course I know that some men would rather see their families sink into want, would rather die a lingering, suffering death and leave their old folks on the grater of poverty, and their children’s futures unprovided for, than to work a graft on a darn rotten insurance company. Some men would. I don’t honestly know whether or not I’m glad that Dick, Thaddeus Quilter’s son, wouldn’t. But it is true, anyway. He wouldn’t. And he believed, ‘No act that is useful can possibly be criminal.’
“Thinking the thing over and over, as I have, sometimes I’ve wondered if the old gentleman could, maybe, have anyway guessed the truth. You know how fine and flip he kept up through it all. Olympe’s fake play bowled him over, for a few minutes, but he was up again and at it within the hour. Right at the head of things, managing, like he always had. Yes, fine and flip until your Uncle Phineas came home with the money for the mine. Took to his bed that night, and never got up again. It almost seemed as if that was what knocked him out—the uselessness of Dick’s and my planning; the uselessness of what we’d done. Like the uselessness of it, maybe, had turned it into a crime.
“Planning? We certainly planned. Yes, but here I’m putting myself into it too soon. Before he ever said a word to me about it, Dick tried to arrange an accidental death for himself. You remember—when the wagon tongue broke while he was driving a skittish team over Quilter Mountain? Scared the living pie out of him when he got home and found that, if he had succeeded, you’d been blamed and would have blamed yourself to your dying day. He made up his mind, then and there, that he’d play safe with the next attempt. It wasn’t as easy to do as you might think. Drowning, for instance? Suicide for sure. No, he had to have it fixed so that the death could be proved, positively, to have been accidental. Neal? Neal, my boy, are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening.”
“Excuse me. I kind of thought you’d dropped off to sleep, or something. Mind if I keep along with the story? Well, after the Quilter Mountain accident, Dick found, too, how your Aunt Gracia was going to feel about his dying in sin—or not in a state of grace, I guess she put it. He knew that a sudden shocking death was going to be pretty hard on the family for a while. If he could make it even a mite easier for any one of you, he was going to do it. He did. Went and got himself baptized as a Siloamite. You know, without my telling you, what that meant to your auntie, especially those last weeks before she died.
“Well, Dick planned alone, and we planned together. By Gad, Neal, but we tried. We thought that we had everything fixed slick from beginning to end. Every single member of the family locked tight in their rooms. Dick got the keys that afternoon, and did the locking himself that night. (Damn hard luck about Irene being locked out. Jehoshaphat, but that was a bad one!) He left all the other doors in the house unlocked to make getting in and out seem easy. But he thought that the rope was the best bet of all to prove an outsider. Dick fixed the rope himself, and moved the bed, so’s it would look for certain that the criminal had got out of the window, down the rope and clean away.
“He thought that Chris would climb out of the window in his room, sooner or later, and come along the roof, and get into his room and see the keys—Dick had put them there in plain sight—and let the others out of their locked rooms.
“When Irene, instead of Chris, came running into his room, Dick used his last breath to save me—and the family. He looked toward the open window and said, or tried to, that a man wearing a red mask had got away. I’ve wondered how he happened to say red. Maybe the colour on his nightshirt made him think of it. Maybe he thought some poor devil might be found with a black mask—but a red mask never would be found. I don’t know.
“You see, boy, how it was? Planned and planned for, everything fixed. And then the damn snow came and ruined it all, ruined the whole works from beginning to end. First time in a quarter century that Quilter County had had snow in October. Snow isn’t noisy. Dick in his bed, I in my hiding place—we had no notion of the snow. We’d planned it all for earlier, too; but Dick would have it that we wait until the missionaries and Dong Lee were out of the house. Suspicion wouldn’t touch a Quilter. But a religious fanatic, or a Chinaman, they’d be something else again.
“That’s the end of it, I guess, Neal. No matter, much, about things from then on. This is what is killing me, boy. That all these years I’ve been coming a coward and a hypocrite among you folks, taking your friendship, and all that, and never daring to own up. Of course, I’m bound to stick up for myself and say that, sometimes, it still seems to me that I didn’t do such an awful thing. It was hard, Neal—it was damn, damn hard; but Dick begged and prayed me to. And, of course, as the movies say, I’ve paid. Yes, I’ve paid—paid through the teeth. And now, when I’m getting old——”
“Dr. Joe, would you mind a lot, just—keeping still for a minute or two? Sorry. I’ve got to think. I’ve got to think.”
In the hall a door banged, and an oak log in the fire broke down into its coals. A rill of laughter came coursing through the room, pursued by a little girl with red cheeks and a green frock. She caught her step and dipped to a courtesy. “How-do-you-do, Dr. Joe? I didn’t know that you were here. I’m very glad to see you. I was looking for Mother, Uncle Neal.”
Neal said, “I haven’t seen Lucy for two hours.”
“It is rather important. Baby Thad keeps saying, ‘Wee’ and it sounds as if he were speaking French.”
Dr. Elm said, “Have you told your father?”
“Father is engrossed, enraptured. It was he who sent me for Mother. Oh, there’s Christopher, home from Quilterville so soon. Coo‑ee—— Chris?”
A sleek, yellow-haired boy parted the curtains. “What-ho, child? Why, how-do-you-do, Dr. Joe? Glad to see you. Did you drive over in your new Chaptler? Dad is going to give me a sport model Ford for my birthday. I’ve left off smoking. Makes me hungry all the time. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll raid the kitchen. You’re invited, Delidah. Coming?”
“By Gad, Neal,” Dr. Elm said, when another door had trapped the chatter and the laughter, “I can’t even enjoy the kids, any more. It is killing me, and I wish it would—if it would make haste about it. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep——”
“Wait a minute. Shall we go up to my room? Would you as soon? It’s more private there. I—— I’ve something to tell you, Dr. Joe. Explain. Shall we go up?”
The hall was full of sunshine. Out from the living room, the first bars of Schumann’s Abendlied came softly, but with certainty.
Neal paused for a moment on the stairway. “That’s Judy,” he said. “She plays Schumann well. Ursula plays him better.”
III
Dr. Elm pressed his elbows into the table and rubbed his smooth pink baldness in the palms of his hands. He said: “That’s good of you, Neal. It’s mighty good of you, and I appreciate it. But, of course, you couldn’t expect me to believe that I’d up and—forget, or whatever you call it, about the most tragic experience of my life. No. Men lie to themselves; but they lie in their own favour. They don’t make mistakes, as you’ve been saying—not about whether or not they killed a friend.”
“Listen, man! I’ve listened to you. You’ve got to listen to me. Yes, you’ve got to do a damn sight more than listen. You’ve got to believe me. I know. And I’ll tell you how I know.
“In a way it makes it more incredible; but, get this, Dr. Joe, I’m under oath. I’m telling you God’s own truth. I am swearing to you that, for the past two years or more, until about half an hour ago—somewhere along in your talk to me—I have thought exactly the same thing about myself. I am swearing to you, Dr. Joe—swearing, remember—that I’ve done what you’ve done, and what you declare it is impossible for men to do. I have forgotten; that is, I’ve got things all twisted. I thought, and I believed—as you believe about yourself—that I killed Father; I myself. If it is necessary, to convince you, I’ll drag Judy into this. I’d rather not; but I will, to get you straightened out. I told Judy, here about two weeks ago, that I had killed Father.”
“Now, now, Neal. You and Judy——”
“Damn it! I’m not a liar. We won’t get any place if you keep this up. I’ve known for years that my mind and my senses played tricks on me. You must have had similar experiences? Try to remember. Haven’t you been fooled, by yourself, before this, on less important matters?”
“Yes. Yes, I have. I imagine most men have. But that’s everyday, come-along business.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I know this. My case was a lot worse than yours is. I had had all the facts, the same as you had them, and from the same source—I’m positive of that. You remembered most of the facts. I had forgotten every last one of them. I’d forgotten that Father planned his own death. I was in a lot worse condition than yours, because I’d got so addled that I thought I stepped into Father’s room that night and shot him—just as any other brute of a murderer might have done—to gain something for myself. I’d forgotten that Father had cancer. I’d forgotten every damn thing, but that Monday night and Irene—with blood on her wrapper.
“Do I know how to sympathize with you? Say! Do I? I’ve been living in hell here, for the last few years. I’ve been getting worse all the time. Lord, but it’s queer—the things men’s minds will do! Night after night I’ve walked this floor fighting suicide. You remembered the extenuations. I forgot every damn thing. If this hadn’t come up to-day—I don’t know. I was about as near crazy as a man could get, and stay sane.”
Dr. Elm puffed out a long-drawn breath. “Hot,” he said, “up here. Too hot. Bless my soul to glory if I can understand you, Neal. You thought you’d done it, you say, until I told you that I had. Look. Now you seem to be saying that you know I didn’t. No. No, you’re too deep for me.”
“I thought I had done it—I’m a fool with words—I thought I had done it until you talked to me. Until I heard you explaining—much as I had had it explained to me twenty-eight years ago. I could hear the very words I had heard before; see the gestures; feel the—horror? shock? Well, whatever I felt, then, it was pretty bad. Word for word this afternoon, all of it over again: Father’s illness; his plan to save the ranch and the family; his accident; the change of rooms on account of distance; his baptism; the waiting for the missionaries to leave—— I’d heard it all before, Dr. Joe, as you’d heard it and at about the same time, twenty-eight years ago. The rope to mislead us. All of us locked in our rooms. The mistake about Irene. And then—I guess the real tragedy—the snow. Good God, what the sight of that impossible October snow must have meant! How, in the name of suffering, could I have forgotten? How could I have heard it all explained—and forgotten it! But I did. I had. That’s that. And so have you.”
“Look, Neal. I’m wondering whether there could be something in this new psychology, after all? If we could dig the explanations of our tricky minds, as you say, out of it, maybe?”
“Lord, no! Nothing like that. It is altogether different—sexy stuff, dreams, gosh knows what all; offensive and silly. No, this is plain common sense. All this amounts to, I guess, is a lapse of memory. The strangest part of it is that both of us, you and I, should have had the same lapse—brain storm used to be the word. But we have had it—that’s evident. And, again, that’s that. After all, it is another proof of how even the best friends can be strangers. Here we’ve been, living in hells of our own devising, when any time in the past years, if we’d got together and talked, we’d probably have set each other free—got the truth, as we have to-day.
“You mean—— You think you have the truth, Neal?”
“Think? I know I have. Gosh, I can’t get over it. Queerest experience I have ever heard of a man having. And then, on top of that, discovering that my best friend has had exactly the same experience.”
“Do you mean, when you say you have the truth, that you know who killed Dick? You say you know I didn’t do it. All right. If I didn’t do it, who did?”
“Look at it this way. Father made his plan. He needed help. He had to have sure, competent help. He needed a cool head and a steady hand. He needed a pile of courage—before and after. He needed self-command and discretion. He needed someone who was willing to sacrifice his peace of mind for all his remaining years, and to sacrifice a problematical eternity, for the sake of the Quilter family He needed all the virtues, and one small saving grace of sin. Who, then, would he have told of his cancer, and have turned to for his help?”
“Your Aunt Gracia?”
“No. I hoped you’d see it. You haven’t? That puts it up to me. He’d want me to tell you. He wasn’t afraid to load his gun and carry it next door into Father’s room that night and—back again to his own room. He wasn’t afraid, at the end, to tell me. I mean, Dr. Joe—Grandfather.”
The End