Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 34

T was late on a very hot August afternoon when Bellsmith approached the office of Dr. MacVickar. The same nurse was at the same telephone-desk, and Bellsmith asked her not to announce him. Such a request upset, of course, her deepest instincts of office routine but, recognizing Bellsmith as a favored visitor, she consented. The doctor would be at liberty in about ten minutes, she admitted.

For a moment Bellsmith lingered idly beside her little telephone-desk and, exactly as he had done, nine months before, watched her begin immediately her endless writing on the little cards for the doctor's catalogue. Exactly, also, as he had done nine months before, he tried to be friendly.

"Don't you ever get tired of doing that?" he suggested. The nurse looked up with a rustle of surprised white crispness.

"It has to be done."

"But don't you ever get to the end? Are n't you ever through?"

"There are always new patients."

"I see," said Bellsmith.

In order that the doctor might not suspect his presence he walked out into the main hall of the building, went to a window, and stood looking down into the street. It was a street which had once been highly typical of Leicester hut was becoming less—or more—typical every day, just as one chose to look at it.

Jostled unhappily between tall buildings, two fine old houses still stood within range of Bellsmith's vision. One was of brick, painted red, the other of stucco, painted yellow, with white colonial pillars. Both had been houses where Bellsmith had dined in state but a very few years before. Now, from both of them the paint was peeling and the blinds sagging. On one of the pillars of the portico of the yellow house were nailed the signs of four dressmakers. In the basement of the red brick house a large show-window was being built in for a neighborhood grocery.

The door of the doctor's outer office opened quietly, and a woman, a lady, dressed in black and heavily veiled, came into the hallway. At seeing Bellsmith she started involuntarily and seemed on the point of speaking to him, but Bellsmith was unable to recognize her through her thick veils and, with an air almost furtive, she turned and passed down the hall to the elevator. Bellsmith watched her, puzzled and vaguely troubled. Some one out of his past life she must be, but he was never to know who she was.

It was rather depressing out there in the hall, and Bellsmith was relieved when the nurse, with a guilty smile, came out and beckoned him in.

"The doctor is alone now," she whispered. "I told him there was no one waiting."

She led him into the little corridor and pointed to the office door. Bellsmith silently pushed it open.

For a second the doctor apparently did not hear him; He sat there, drooped and languid, with his head bowed in his hands. Then he heard the latch snap on the door, looked up, and, like a flash, his whole attitude changed. A welcoming smile spread over his face and his shoulders straightened. Except for his summer clothes of immaculate white linen, he might have been welcoming Bellsmith on any one of his last winter's visits. But Bellsmith had had his moment of insight. Had the doctor, he wondered, always looked like that, drooped and weary, when not on parade to his patients?

The doctor, however, was already on his feet.

"Well, well, well!" he exclaimed, "you 're a nice one! I have n't heard from you in three months."

A blank look passed over Bellsmith's face.

"We 've been in Europe," he said, "at Deanville. Did n't you ever get our cables?"

"Oh, yes, I got those. Let's see, I got two—one when you landed there and one when you started back. But you might have written."

"I 've been too busy."

The doctor grinned. "Busy? Et tu, Bellsmith?"

He rolled up the familiar easy-chair. "Sit down and tell me all about it."

Bellsmith sat down and began to roll a cigarette. The doctor watched him with amusement.

"When did you learn to do that?"

"I have n't learned," replied Bellsmith, brushing a tablespoonful of spilled tobacco off his trousers. "I am still a mind in the makings. A man from the Argentine, on the boat, tried to teach me. Tilly is a wonder at it. Why did n't I think of this in the old days? I could have spent hours doing it."

"Why did n't you?" retorted the doctor. "Or crocheting?" An awkward silence fell, as it usually does between two persons who have been waiting impatiently for months to see each other. It was cool up there in the office, with the windows wide open and the tip of an elm-tree showing just outside them. As Bellsmith looked at the man at the desk in his crisp, starched linen, he reflected that Dr. MacVickar would probably succeed in making it seem cool wherever he might be, for, outside in the streets, waves of heat were rising from the soft asphalt pavements. As it was, even the doctor still showed little blue shadows under his eyes.

"You look tired," Bellsmith suggested.

The doctor shrugged. "It's been a hard summer."

"And it's not easy work shouldering other people's troubles all day long?"

The doctor looked at him with a twinkle. "Have you found that out, too?"

"Yes," confessed Bellsmith, "I had quite a dose of that last spring, after you cut me adrift."

"I want to hear all about it," repeated the doctor. "I saw by the papers last spring that you had gone into a big firm. What is it? Harcourt & Gay?"

"Yes," replied Bellsmith, "I went in because I could n't get out. I thought that I could but I did n't realize how deeply I was involved. If I had stopped short last spring it would have left a number of people up in the air. The affair was all tangled up. I got to the point where I had to go in

"To hold what you had gained," suggested the doctor.

"Well, hardly that," replied Bellsmith. "I did n't mean wholly money."

"Neither did I," said the doctor, "mean—wholly money."

Bellsmith flushed. "You score, doctor. I'm getting rusty.

"Well, anyway," he explained, "there I was. I was in so deep that I had to keep on going in. Was n't that your theory of my case?"

The doctor smiled ruefully. "My theory! My dear chap, it won't do you any harm now to tell you that my theory in your case was very much like that of a class in chemistry. The professor stands up before his pupils and performs a certain standard experiment. He does it to demonstrate the inevitability of immutable laws, but every time in his secret heart he is praying fervently that it will work."

Bellsmith laughed, but even he had felt a certain perfunctory quality in the heartiness of the doctor's talk. They had been apart too long to pick up the give and take of their old conversations. For his own part the doctor also seemed to recognize it.

"How is Mrs. Bellsmith?" he asked quietly. "Am I going to see her again?"

"You certainly are," replied Bellsmith heartily. "We must have you down at the house some night soon, although just at present the house is all torn to atoms. My wife has ideas on interior decoration. They run largely to lounges and divans—and shelves of new books."

The doctor laughed. "Then you intend to live there? Mrs. Bellsmith is going to give up her career?"

"For a time at least," replied Bellsmith. "I am the one who has got the career just at present. We are going to bring out a new show in Atlantic City next week. It will go to New York in September. But we shall be here, off and on. Mrs. MacVickar and you must certainly come down to dinner."

"Thank you," said the doctor absently. "We have a cottage at the shore until the first of October. You two must spend a week-end with us."

"We should be delighted," replied Bellsmith.

But both of them were merely going through the formalities that men do go through on such occasions, sketching out future meetings up to eternity, both of them knowing that none of those meetings would ever take place. They would never see much of each other again. It had been their business that had brought them together, and now their business was done.

The doctor picked up his fountain-pen and thoughtfully screwed on the top. It was the same old familiar mannerism, the same unconscious hint of dismissal. Bellsmith rose to his feet with a sudden vigorous air.

"Well, doctor, remember that we expect you some night soon."

"Fine!" said the doctor, "and don't forget about that week-end."

They shook hands.

"Good-by."

"Good-by."