The Breaking Point Read online

  XII

  DURING all the long night Dick sat by David's bedside. Earlier inthe evening there had been a consultation; David had suffered a lightstroke, but there was no paralysis, and the prognosis was good. For thistime, at least, David had escaped, but there must be no other time. Hewas to be kept quiet and free from worry, his diet was to be carefullyregulated, and with care he still had long years before him.

  David slept, his breathing heavy and slow. In the morning there wouldbe a nurse, but that night Dick, having sent Lucy to bed, himselfkept watch. On the walnut bed lay Doctor David's portly figure, dimlyoutlined by the shaded lamp, and on a chair drawn close sat Dick.

  He was wide-awake and very anxious, but as time went on and no untowardsymptoms appeared, as David's sleep seemed to grow easier and morenatural, Dick's thoughts wandered. They went to Elizabeth first, andthen on and on from that starting point, through the years ahead. He sawthe old house with Elizabeth waiting in it for his return; he saw boththeir lives united and flowing on together, with children, with smallcares, with the routine of daily living, and behind it all the two ofthem, hand in hand.

  Then his mind turned on himself. How often in the past ten years it haddone that! He had sat off, with a sort of professional detachment,and studied his own case. With the entrance into his world of the newscience of psycho-analysis he had made now and then small, not verysincere, attempts to penetrate the veil of his own unconscious devising.Not very sincere, for with the increase of his own knowledge of the mindhe had learned that behind such conditions as his lay generally,deeply hidden, the desire to forget. And that behind that there lay,acknowledged or not, fear.

  "But to forget what?" he used to say to David, when the first text-bookson the new science appeared, and he and David were learning thenew terminology, Dick eagerly and David with contemptuous snorts ofderision. "To forget what?"

  "You had plenty to forget," David would say, stolidly. "I think thisman's a fool, but at that--you'd had your father's death, for one thing.And you'd gone pretty close to the edge of eternity yourself. You'dfought single-handed the worst storm of ten years, you came out of itwith double pneumonia, and you lay alone in that cabin about fifty-sixhours. Forget! You had plenty to forget."

  It had never occurred to Dick to doubt David's story. It did not, evennow. He had accepted it unquestioningly from the first, supplemented theshadowy childish memories that remained to him with it, and graduallyco-ordinating the two had built out of them his house of the past.

  Thus, the elderly man whom he dimly remembered was not only his father;he was David's brother. And he had died. It was the shock of that death,according to David, that had sent him into the mountains, where Davidhad followed and nursed him back to health.

  It was quite simple, and even explicable by the new psychology. Not thathe had worried about the new psychology in those early days. He hadbeen profoundly lethargic, passive and incurious. It had been too muchtrouble even to think.

  True, he had brought over from those lost years certain instincts and afew mental pictures. He had had a certain impatience at first over therestrictions of comparative poverty; he had had to learn the value ofmoney. And the pictures he retained had had a certain opulence which thefacts appeared to contradict. Thus he remembered a large ranch house,and innumerable horses, grazing in meadows or milling in a corral. ButDavid had warned him early that there was no estate; that his futuredepended entirely on his own efforts.

  Then the new life had caught and held him. For the first time he hadmothering and love. Lucy was his mother, and David the pattern to whichhe meant to conform. He was happy and contented.

  Now and then, in the early days, he had been conscious of a desire to goback and try to reconstruct his past again. Later on he knew that ifhe were ever to fill up the gap in his life, it would be easier in thatenvironment of once familiar things. But in the first days he had beentotally dependent on David, and money was none too plentiful. Later on,as the new life took hold, as he went to medical college and worked atodd clerical jobs in vacations to help pay his way, there had beenno chance. Then the war came, and on his return there had been thepractice, and his knowledge that David's health was not what it shouldhave been.

  But as time went on he was more and more aware that there was in him apeculiar shrinking from going back, an almost apprehension. He knew moreof the mind than he had before, and he knew that not physical hardship,but mental stress, caused such lapses as his. But what mental stress hadbeen great enough for such a smash? His father's death?

  Strain and fear, said the new psychology. Fear? He had never foundhimself lacking in courage. Certainly he would have fought a man whocalled him a coward. But there was cowardice behind all such conditionsas his; a refusal of the mind to face reality. It was weak. Weak. Hehated himself for that past failure of his to face reality.

  But that night, sitting by David's bed, he faced reality with avengeance. He was in love, and he wanted the things that love shouldbring to a normal man. He felt normal. He felt, strengthened by love,that he could face whatever life had to bring, so long as also itbrought Elizabeth.

  Painfully he went back over his talk with David the preceding Sundaynight.

  "Don't be a fool," David had said. "Go ahead and take her, if she'llhave you. And don't be too long about it. I'm not as young as I used tobe."

  "What I feel," he had replied, "is this: I don't know, of course, if shecares." David had grunted. "I do know I'm going to try to make her care,if it--if it's humanly possible. But I'd like to go back to the ranchagain, David, before things go any further."

  "Why?"

  "I'd like to fill the gap. Attempt it anyhow."

  What he was thinking about, as he sat by David's bedside, was David'sattitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it,offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, adogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear.David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whoseeyes never wavered, nor his courage!

  "You let well enough alone, Dick," he had finished. "You've goteverything you want. And a medical man can't afford to go gadding about.When people want him they want him."

  But he had noticed that David had been different, since. He had taken tofollowing him with his faded old eyes, had even spoken once of retiringand turning all the work over to him. Was it possible that David did notwant him to go back to Norada?

  He bent over and felt the sick man's pulse. It was stronger, not sorapid. The mechanical act took him back to his first memory of David.

  He had been lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David,beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling hispulse. He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now that hehad been very ill. The cabin had been a small and lonely one, withsnow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold. During the daya woman kept up the fire. Her name was Maggie, and she moved about thecabin like a thin ghost. At night she slept in a lean-to shed and Davidkept the fire going. A man who seemed to know him well--John Donaldson,he learned, was his name--was Maggie's husband, and every so often hecame, about dawn, and brought food and supplies.

  After a long time, as he grew stronger, Maggie had gone away, and Davidhad fried the bacon and heated the canned tomatoes or the beans. Beforeshe left she had written out a recipe for biscuits, and David wouldstudy over it painstakingly, and then produce a panfull of burned andblackened lumps, over which he would groan and agonize.

  He himself had been totally incurious. He had lived a sort of animallife of food and sleep, and later on of small tentative excursionsaround the room on legs that shook when he walked. The snows came andalmost covered the cabin, and David had read a great deal, and talked atintervals. David had tried to fill up the gap in his mind. That was howhe learned that David was his father's brother, and that his father hadrecently died.

  Going over it all now, it had certain elements that were not clear. Theyhad, for instan
ce, never gone back to the ranch at all. With the firstclearing of the snow in the spring John Donaldson had appeared again,leading two saddled horses and driving a pack animal, and they hadstarted off, leaving him standing in the clearing and gazing after them.But they had not followed Donaldson's trail. They had started West, overthe mountains, and David did not know the country. Once they were lostfor three days.

  He looked at the figure on the bed. Only ten years, and yet at that timeDavid had been vigorous, seemed almost young. He had aged in that tenyears. On the bed he was an old man, a tired old man at that. On thatlong ride he had been tireless. He had taken the burden of the nightlycamps, and had hacked a trail with his hatchet across snow fields whileDick, still weak but furiously protesting, had been compelled to standand watch.

  Now, with the perspective of time behind him, and with the clearlydefined issue of David's protest against his return to the West, he wentagain over the details of that winter and spring. Why had they not takenDonaldson's trail? Or gone back to the ranch? Why, since Donaldsoncould make it, had not other visitors come? Another doctor, the nighthe almost died, and David sat under the lamp behind the close-screenedwindows, and read the very pocket prayer-book that now lay on the standbeside the bed? Why had they burned his clothes, and Donaldson broughta new outfit? Why did Donaldson, for all his requests, never bring arazor, so that when they struck the railroad, miles from anywhere, theywere both full bearded?

  He brought himself up sharply. He had allowed his imagination to runaway with him. He had been depicting a flight and no one who knew Davidcould imagine him in flight.

  Nevertheless he was conscious of a new uneasiness and anxiety. WhenDavid recovered sufficiently he would go to Norada, as he had toldElizabeth, and there he would find the Donaldsons, and clear up thethings that bothered him. After that--

  He thought of Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity. He remembered herat the theater the evening before, lost in its fictitious emotions, itscounterfeit drama. He had felt moved to comfort her, when he found heron the verge of tears.

  "Just remember, they're only acting," he had said.

  "Yes. But life does do things like that to people."

  "Not often. The theater deals in the dramatic exceptions to life. Youand I, plain bread and butter people, come to see these things becausewe get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them."

  "Doesn't anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?"

  "A little jam, sometimes. Or perhaps they drop it, butter side down, onthe carpet."

  "But that is tragedy, isn't it?"

  He had had to acknowledge that it might be. But he had been quiteemphatic over the fact that most people didn't drop it.

  After a long time he slept in his chair. The spring wind came in throughthe opened window, and fluttered the leaves of the old prayer-book onthe stand.