“That must be the igloo,” he thought. His mind had now transformed the object sought-for into North Arctic form; but as he reached deftly under the pillow beneath the boy’s hostile stare, and snatched a glance at the book in bringing it out he found it to be a faint blue volume entitled “EX-WHITE-SLAVER,”—the authorship being identified with touching modesty as “by a Man Who Still is one.”
He put it down coolly, as if it existed for him only in the sense that a copy of, say, My Forty Years in the Fountains of Tivoli can be said to exist in the memory of a guest, and remarked;
“Well, how’re you, young man?”
But the young man had long given up dealing with such palaver. He looked disgustedly at Bill, back at his sister, back at Bill: then treated them both to what, in the euphemistic tradition of their great-grandparents, might have been termed The Robin.
But Bill was of stern stuff; he seized the boy by his shoulder, lowered him firmly to the sheet and announced: “If you want to play that game you’ll find I’m bigger than you.”
The boy, reaching the surface of the sheet unresistingly, looked up at him with uncommunicative eyes and answered:
“What you goan do about it?”
This was a question. Bill was good at certain subjects but something told him this wasn’t one of them. He glanced at the girl, but he found in her glistening eyes the age-old look of one who says: “In a man-managed world I’ve got to be told where I am being led before I agree to go there or not.” Bill sat down beside the bed and descended to conversation which, marred by pauses, stammers and total stops would have been reported as follows by an adequate court stenographer.
“What do you like?”
“Me?”
Pause while boy looks over doctor.
“What do you lick?” the doctor asked again.
“I like books,” says the little boy in an unconvinced voice.
“I like books too.”
“If you don’t mind,” the girl interrupted as she saw the beginning of the tranquil and parental flow, “I’ll go about some things I must do.”
Bill felt that the door behind her shut rather quickly. He wished now that he had gone away when he discovered that Mrs. Brickster was out—he was no psychiatrist, nor was he a moralist—it was as a scientist that he considered himself. He had enough confidence to have dealt sensibly with a sick woman in an emergency—but with a glance at the patient some forgotten revulsion for boys of thirteen arose upon his head like the crest of a rooster and he thought angrily: and I’m not a detective either.
But he kept his temper and offered to the young man in the purest syrup:
“What games do you like?”
“Oh, all right.”
“No, but which ones?”
“Gangster’s the only game I like.”
“Well, that’s fun.”
Like Diamond Dick Bill thought, but something prompted him to ask: “Who do you like to win—the gangster or the police?”
The boy looked at him scornfully:
“Mobsmen, naturally. You half-witted?”
“Don’t get rude again!”
“What you goan do about it.”
“I’m going to—”
Another dream of his childhood recurred to Bill; this was just like being a pirate anyhow…
“What books do you read?” he kept the same control of his face as though he were going over the boy’s body with a stethoscope.
“I don’t know, now.”
“Do you see pictures?” He saw the boy’s face light as if he saw a way out, “Gangster pictures?”
“They don’t allow me much.” But the new tone was too smug to be convincing, “They don’t allow us and the other rich boys to go to anything except comedies and kidnapping and things like that. The comedies are the things I like.”
“Who? Chaplin?”
“Who?”
“Charlie Chaplin.”
Obviously the words failed to record.
“No, the—you know, the comedies.”
“Who do you lick?” Bill asked.
“Oh—” The boy considered, “Well, I like Garbo and Dietrich and Constance Bennett.”
“Their things are comedies?”
“They’re the funniest ones.”
“Funniest what?”
“Funniest comedies.”
“Why?”
“Oh, they try to do this passionate stuff all the time.”
“This what?”
“Oh, this looking around.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know. This uhm—like on Christmas.”
Bill started to delve into that but he remembered the still unsolved matter of the igloo and thought better of it. It seemed more prudent to return to books.
“What books have you got?” he asked.
The boy looked at him attentively.
“Hey, you’re not a heel, are you?”
Bill considered quickly whether he was or wasn’t a heel.
“No,” he conceded himself.
“Well—” The boy rose in bed, “I got two kina kinds. I got that one about the four girls named Meg who fall down the rabbit hole and that—and I got a lot like that.” He hesitated. “And I got some books of my own.”
“Can I see them?”
The boy considered.
“What you goan do about it?”
For the third time Bill considered, and finally answered:
“Nothing.”
“Lift up the end of the mattress then.”
Bill lifted. Afterwards he debated with himself whether he counted ten or twenty. The ones he remembered were: The Facts of Love; War and Peace, Volume I; Prize Short Stories of 1926; Psychiatry, its Permutations in Eighty Years; Fifty Popular Secret Stories of the World’s Fair of 1876.
The boy’s voice cut soft and sharp over Bill’s meditation upon the cache—“You a heel maybe then. You’ve seen them. What you goan do about it?”
“Take out your tonsils probably,” said Bill; he ducked out of the way as the mattress slammed down, the event being obviously prompted by approaching footsteps.
“It’s all right with me, old boy,” Bill said, “I haven’t—”
“Old stuff—”
He stopped at the appearance of his sister, to whom he was unused and who vaguely frightened him.
“Mother and father arc home,” she announced to Bill, “you want to see them downstairs?”
“You’d make a good doctor’s assistant,” he said.
“I lived with a doctor for three months.”
Bill breathed deeply, as she continued, “His wife became very ill. You know not gravement but chronicqument. I like doctors.”
The little boy was concentrated upon whether or not he had been betrayed as Bill followed her out of the room, looking backward and beginning two trial sentences; but on a last glance at the boy’s incorrigible expression he finished with: “I won’t give you away but I’d like to talk to you some more,” adding at the door: “At least I won’t tell any of your friends that you talked to me confidentially.”
He had done his best but he had never felt clumsier than in the minute of following Miss Mason through the long hall and down the stairs. At their ending he bucked up for he was projected into the scene he had imagined.
An obviously silly, but not quite persecutable, woman stood at the entrance to the main room, for which no adequate name has yet been found in the Republic; she stood there waving him breezily into a study; there they displaced a husband who was being signalled to go away by that hand which was not occupied at the moment in encouraging Bill forward.
“I knew who you were,” said Mrs. Brickster, “I recognized you from Dr. Hines’ prescriptions. He describes everything so well. This movie tonight, he could have described it as well as a reviewer.” He relaxed as he refused her proffered highball and said in a professional voice:
“Now, Mrs. Brickster, what seems to be the trouble?”
She began:
“Of course the thing commenced with a twitching…“
And she ended two hours later with:
“…probably you’re right, it was just the strain of my daughter coming home.”
She had worn out the false force of her nervous fatigue suddenly and she turned against him.
“And as you’re leaving, Doctor, could I beg you to remind Dr. Hines that when it’s him I want it’s him I want.” The telephone rang and, still talking, she picked it up. “—in future I expect the principal not the assistant—yes, he’s here … at 6632 Beaming Avenue … very personal and urgent and mention Ellis S. to him.” She pronounced the words as individual discoveries of villainy and said as she rang up: “I hope you discover no more trouble there, Doctor, than you have found here.”
And as the door closed in back of him a few minutes later Bill wondered indeed it he was now to confront difficulties more sinister than those he had left behind.
He rested a minute on the verandah—resting his eyes on a big honey suckle that cut across a low sickle moon—then as he started down the steps his abstracted glance fell upon a trailer from it sleeping in the moonlight.
She was the girl from foreign places; she was so asleep that you could see the dream of those places in the faint lift of her forehead. The doctor took out his watch—it was after three. He walked with practiced dexterity across the wooden verandah but he struck the inevitable creaky strip and promptly the map of wonderland written on the surface of women’s eyebrows creased into invisibility.
“I was asleep,” she said. “I slept.”
As if he had told her to wait here for him. Or as if the hair that had brushed his forehead had said stay to him; but she seemed too young to play with so he picked up his satchel and said, “Well, I must—” and left, remembering that he had been a long time in the house and that all the time the girl had been asleep.
II
He drove rapidly for he had far
