He heard Charles Hume coming in, but he reserved his news about the catalyst while they concentrated upon the water. It was noon before he had occasion to turn to his notes—realized with a shock that he had no notes. The back of the schedule on which he had taken them was astonishingly, inexplicably blank; it was as if he had written in vanishing ink or under the spell of an illusion. Then he saw what had happened—he had made the notes on Noël’s schedule and she had taken it to school. When Aquilla’s brother arrived with a registered package, he dispatched him to the school with the schedule to make the exchange. The data he had observed seemed irreplaceable, the more so as—despite his hopeful “Look! Look! Come here, Charles, now, and look!”—the catalyst failed entirely to act up.
He wondered what was delaying Aquilla’s brother and felt a touch of anxiety as he and Charles walked up to Main Street for lunch. Afterward Charles left, to jack up a chemistry-supply firm in town.
“Don’t worry too hard,” he said. “Open the windows—the room’s full of nitrogen-chloride.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Well——” Charles hesitated. “I didn’t agree with Dolores’ attitude the other day, but I think you’re trying to do too much.”
“Not at all,” René protested. “Only, I am anxious to get possession of my notes again. It might be months or never, before I would blunder on that same set of conditions again.”
He was hardly alone before a small voice on the telephone developed as Noël calling up from school:
“Daddy?”
“Yes, baby.”
“Can you understand French or English better on the phone?”
“What? I can understand anything.”
“Well, it’s about my schedule.”
“I am quite aware of that. You took away my schedule. How do you explain that?”
Noël’s voice was hesitant: “But I didn’t, daddy. You handed me your schedule with a whole lot of dumb things on the back.”
“They are not dumb things!” he exclaimed. “They are very valuable things. That is why I sent Aquilla’s brother to exchange the schedules. Has that been done?”
“I was gone to French when he came, so he went away—I guess on account of that day he was so dumb and waited. So I haven’t got any schedule and I don’t know whether Becky is coming for me after play hour or whether I’m to ride out with the Sheridans and walk home from there.”
“You haven’t got any schedule at all?” he demanded, his world breaking up around him.
“I don’t know what became of it. Maybe I left it in the car.”
“Maybe you left it in the car?”
“It wasn’t mine.”
He set down the receiver because he needed both hands now for the gesture he was under compulsion to make. He threw them up so high that it seemed as if they left his wrists and were caught again on their descent. Then he seized the phone again.
“——because school closes at four o’clock, and if I wait for Becky and she doesn’t come, then I’ll have to be locked out.”
“Listen,” said René. “Can you hear? Do you want me to speak in English or French?”
“Either one, daddy.”
“Well, listen to me: Good-by.”
He hung up. Regretting for the first time the lack of a phone at home, he ran up to Main Street and found a taxi, which he urged, with his foot on an imaginary back-seat accelerator, in the direction of home.
The house was locked; the car was gone; the maid was gone; Becky was gone. Where she was gone he had no idea, and the Slocums could give him no information… The notes might be anywhere now, kicked carelessly into the street, crumpled and flung away.
“But Becky will recognize it as a schedule,” he consoled himself. “She would not be so formidable as to throw away our schedule.”
He was by no means sure that it was in the car. On a chance, he had the taxi drive him into the colored district with the idea that he might get some sort of orientation from Aquilla’s brother. René had never before searched for a colored man in the Negro residential quarter of an American city. He had no idea at first of what he was attempting, but after half an hour the problem assumed respectable dimensions.
“Do you know”—so he would call to dark and puzzled men on the sidewalks—“where I can find the house of Aquilla’s brother, or of Aquilla’s sister—either one?”
“I don’t even know who Aquilla is, boss.”
René tried to think whether it was a first or a last name, and gave up as he realized that he never had known. As time passed, he had more and more a sense that he was pursuing a phantom; it began to shame him to ask the whereabouts of such ghostly, blatantly immaterial lodgings as the house of Aquilla’s brother. When he had stated his mission a dozen times, sometimes varying it with hypocritical pleas as to the whereabouts of Aquilla’s sister, he began to feel a little crazy.
It was colder. There was a threat of first winter snow in the air, and at the thought of his notes being kicked out into it, buried beneath it, René abandoned his quest and told the taxi man to drive home, in the hope that Becky had returned. But the house was deserted and cold. With the taxi throbbing outside, he threw coal into the furnace and then drove back into the center of town. It seemed to him that if he stayed on Main Street he would sooner or later run into Becky and the car—there were not an unlimited number of places to pass an afternoon in a regimented community of seven thousand people. Becky had no friends here—it was the first time he had ever thought of that. Literally there was almost no place where she could be.
Aimless, feeling almost as intangible as Aquilla’s brother, he wandered along, glancing into every drug store and eating shop. Young people were always eating. He could not really inquire of anyone if they had seen her, for even Becky was only a shadow here, a person hidden and unknown, a someone to whom he had not yet given reality. Only two things were real—his schedule, for the lack of which he was utterly lost and helpless, and the notes written on its back.
It was colder, minute by minute; a blast of real winter, sweeping out of the walks beside College Hall, made him wonder suddenly if Becky was going to pick up Noël. What had Noël said about being locked out when the school was closed? Not in weather like this. With sudden concern and self-reproach, René took another taxi and drove to the school, but it was closed and dark inside.
“Then, perhaps, she is lost too,” he thought. “Quite possibly she tried to walk herself home by herself and was kidnaped, or got a big chill, or was run over.”
He considered quite seriously stopping at the police station, and only decided against it when he was unable to think what he could possibly report to them with any shred of dignity.
“——that a man of science, has managed, in one afternoon, in this one little town, to lose everything.”
III
Meanwhile, Becky was thoroughly enjoying herself. When Aquilla’s brother returned with the car at noon, he handed over Noël’s schedule with no comment save that he had not been able to give it to Noël because he could not find her. He was finished with European culture for the day, and was already crossing the Mediterranean in his mind while Becky tried to pump further information out of him.
A girl she had met through tennis had wangled the use of one of the club squash courts for the early hours of the afternoon. The squash was good; Becky soaked and sweated in the strange, rather awesome atmosphere of masculinity, and afterward, feeling fine and cool, took out her own schedule to check up on her duties of the afternoon. The schedule said to call for Noël, and Becky set out with all her thoughts in proportion—the one about herself and tennis; the one about Noël, whom she had come to love and learn with the evenings when René was late at the laboratory; the one about René, in whom she recognized the curious secret of power. But when she arrived at the school and found Noël’s penciled note on the gatepost, an epidemic of revolt surged suddenly over her.
Dear Becky:
Had daddy’s schedule and lost it and do not know if you are coming or not. Mrs. Hume told me I could wait at her house, so please pick me up there if you get this?
Noël
If there was one person Becky had no intention of encountering, it was Mrs. Dolores Hume. She knew this very fiercely and she didn’t see how she should be expected to go to Mrs. Hume’s house. She had by no means been drawn to the lady who had inspected her so hostilely in the bathtub—to put it mildly, she was not particular about ever seeing her again.
Her resentment turned against René. Looked at in any light, her position was that of a person of whom he was ashamed. One side of her understood the complications of his position, but in her fine glow of health after exercise, it seemed outrageous that anyone should have the opportunity to think of her in a belittling way. René’s theories were very well, but she would have
