There was a silence.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“What could I do?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing, except make a few soothing noises and advise him to go to bed. Tomorrow he’d discover that it had all been a huge mistake. Then, on the pretext of getting him his hot milk, I hurried off to the kitchen. Beulah was in her rocking chair, reading a small book about the Second Coming. I told her that Dr. Maartens wasn’t feeling so good. She listened, nodded meaningfully as though she had expected it, then shut her eyes and, in silence, but with moving lips, prayed for a long time. After that she gave a sigh and said, ‘Empty, swept and garnished.’ Those were the words that had been given to her. And though it seemed an odd thing to say about a man who had more in his head than any six ordinary intellectuals, the phrase turned out, on second thought, to be an exact description of poor old Henry.
Empty of God, swept clean of common manhood and garnished like a Christmas tree, with glittering notions. And seven other devils, worse even than stupidity and sentimentality, had moved in and taken possession. But meanwhile the milk was steaming. I poured it into a thermos and went upstairs. For a moment, as I entered the bedroom, I thought Henry had given me the slip. Then, from behind the catafalque, came a sound of movement. In the recess between the draped chintz of the four-poster and the window, Henry was standing before the open door of a small safe, let into the wall and ordinarily concealed from view by the half-length portrait of Katy in her wedding dress, which covered it. ‘Here’s your milk,’ I began in a tone of hypocritical cheerfulness.
But then I noticed that the thing he had taken out of the recesses of the strongbox was a revolver; my heart missed a beat. I remembered suddenly that there was a midnight train for Chicago. Visions of the day after tomorrow’s headlines crowded in on me. FAMOUS SCIENTIST SHOOTS WIFE, SELF. Or, alternately, NOBEL PRIZE MAN HELD IN DOUBLE SLAYING. Or even MOTHER OF TWO DIES IN FLAMING LOVE NEST. I put down the thermos and, bracing myself to knock him out, if necessary, with a left to the jaw, or a short sharp jab in the solar plexus, I walked over to him. ‘If you don’t mind, Dr. Maartens,’ I said respectfully. There was no struggle, hardly so much as a conscious effort on his part to keep the revolver. Five seconds later the thing was safely in my pocket. ‘I was just looking at it,’ he said in a small flat voice.
And then, after a little pause, he added, ‘It’s a funny thing, when you think of it.’ And when I asked, ‘What?’ he said, ‘Death.’ And that was the full extent of the great man’s contribution to the sum of human wisdom. Death was a funny thing when you thought of it. That was why he never thought of it—except on occasions like the present, when suffering had made him feel the need for the self-infliction of more suffering. Murder? Suicide? The ideas had not even occurred to him. All he demanded from the instrument of death was a sensation of negative sensuality—a painful reminder, in the midst of all his other pains, that someday, a long long time hence, he too would have to die.
“‘Can we shut this up again?’ I asked. He nodded. On a little table beside the bed lay the objects he had taken out of the safe while looking for the revolver. These I now replaced—Katy’s jewel box, half a dozen cases containing the gold medals presented to the great man by various learned societies, several Manila envelopes bulging with papers. And finally there were those books—all six volumes of the Studies in the Psychology of Sex, a copy of Felicia by Andrea de Nerciat and, published in Brussels, an anonymous work with illustrations, entitled Miss Floggy’s Finishing School. ‘Well, that’s that,’
I said in my jolliest bedside manner as I locked the safe door and returned him the key. Picking up the portrait I hung it again on its appointed hook. Behind the white satin and the orange blossom, behind the Madonna lilies and a face whose radiance even the ineptitude of a fifth-rate painter could not obscure, who could have divined the presence of that strangely assorted treasure—Felicia and the stock certificates, Miss Floggy and the golden symbols with which a not very grateful society rewards its men of genius?
“Half an hour later I left him and went to my room—with what a blessed sense of having escaped, of being free at last from an oppressive nightmare! But even in my room there was no security. The first thing I saw, when I switched on the light, was an envelope pinned to my pillow. I opened it and unfolded two sheets of mauve paper. It was a love poem from Ruth. This time yearning rhymed with spurning. Love confessed had caused the beloved to detest her something or other breast. It was too much for one evening. Genius kept pornography in the safe; Beatrice had been to school at Miss Floggy’s; childish innocence painted its face, addressed impassioned twaddle to young men and, if I didn’t lock my door, would soon be yearning and burning its way out of bad literature into worse reality.
“The next morning I overslept and, when I came down to breakfast, the children were already halfway through their cereal. ‘Your mother isn’t coming home, after all,’ I announced. Timmy was genuinely sorry; but though she uttered appropriate words of regret, the sudden brightening of Ruth’s eyes betrayed her; she was delighted. Anger made me cruel. I took her poem out of my pocket and laid it on the tablecloth beside the Grapenuts. ‘It’s lousy,’ I said brutally. Then without looking at her I left the room and went upstairs again to see what had happened to Henry. He had a lecture at nine-thirty and would be late unless I routed him out of bed. But when I knocked at his door a feeble voice announced that he was ill. I went in. On the catafalque lay what looked already like a dead man.
I took his temperature. It was over a hundred and one. What was to be done? I ran downstairs to the kitchen to consult with Beulah. The old woman sighed and shook her head. ‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘He’ll make her come home.’ And she told me the story of what had happened, two years before, when Katy went to France to visit her brother’s grave in one of the war cemeteries. She had hardly been gone a month when Henry took sick—so sick that they had to send a cable summoning her home.
Nine days later, when Katy got back to St. Louis, he was all but dead. She entered the sick room, she laid a hand on his forehead. ‘I tell you,’ said Beulah dramatically, ‘it was just like the raising of Lazarus. Down to the doors of death and then, whoosh! all the way up again, like he was in an elevator. Three days later he was eating fried chicken and talking his head off. And he’ll do the same this time. He’ll make her come home, even if it means going to death’s door to get what he wants.’ And that,” Rivers added, “was precisely where he went—to death’s door.”
“You mean it was genuine? He wasn’t putting on an act?”
“As if the second alternative excluded the first! Of course he was putting on an act; but he put it on so successfully that he very nearly died of pneumonia. However, that was something I didn’t clearly recognize at the time. In that respect Beulah was a great deal more scientific in her approach than I. I had the exclusive superstition of germs; she believed in psychosomatic medicine. Well, I telephoned the doctor and then went back to the dining room.
The children had finished their breakfast and were gone. I didn’t see them again for the best part of two weeks; for when I got home from the laboratory that evening, I found that Beulah had packed them off, on the doctor’s advice, to stay with a friendly neighbor. No more poems, no further need to lock my door. It was a great relief. I phoned to Katy on Monday night and again, with the news that we had had to engage a nurse and hire an oxygen tent, on Tuesday.
Next day Henry was worse; but so, when I telephoned to Chicago, was poor Mrs. Hanbury. ‘I can’t leave her,’ Katy kept repeating in an anguish. ‘I can’t!’ To Henry, who had been counting on her return, the news was almost mortal. Within two hours his temperature had risen a whole degree and he was delirious. ‘It’s his life or Mrs. Hanbury’s,’ said Beulah, and she went to her room to pray for guidance. In about twenty-five minutes it came. Mrs. Hanbury was going to die whatever happened; but Henry would be all right if Katy came home. So she must come home. It was the doctor who finally persuaded her.
