Читать книгу The Lady is Dead - Patrick Laing - Страница 5

With Deirdre’s arm linked through mine to guide me, we hurried across the intervening stretch of lawn in the direction of the Fordyce property. As we reached it, a door at the rear of the house slammed, and Mark Fordyce shouted to us.

“Professor Laing, can you help me?” His voice was tight with fear that was verging on panic. “That explosion came from Dad’s laboratory, and he’s in there! Can you help me get him out in case—”

He didn’t stop to finish the sentence, and I heard his running footsteps pounding down the drive ahead of us.

“Does the place appear to be on fire, Derry?” I asked as we hurried after him. “If it is, you’d better run back to the house and call the fire department.”

“No,” she answered. “I don’t see any flames, and there’s no smell of smoke—” She broke off and released her pent-up breath in a sigh of relief. “There’s Dr. Fordyce now, standing in the doorway,” she told me. “And he doesn’t look as though he’d been hurt.”

“It’s all right, everybody,” Eric Fordyce’s quiet, almost coldly reserved voice called to us. “No damage has been done. At least no serious damage.”

Mark had reached his father’s side by that time. “Dad, what happened?” he demanded. Relief and a still lingering anxiety made his own voice not quite steady. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

“Positive, Mark.” There was a depth of genuine affection in Dr. Fordyce’s voice as he spoke to the boy. “Gas formed in a test tube that I was heating over a Bunsen burner, and it exploded. Against the surrounding stillness of the night, it probably sounded a lot worse than it actually was. Which means I’ll have to be more careful in future, or I’ll find myself being regarded as a neighborhood nuisance, if not a downright menace.” He gave a brief, half rueful laugh, which was evidently intended to dismiss the whole matter.

“There’s a cut on your left cheek, Dr. Fordyce,” Deirdre pointed out as we came up. “It’s bleeding.”

“Probably a scratch from a splinter of flying glass,” he said negligently. “I’ll put a bit of plaster on it as soon as I’ve cleaned up the mess in here. Sorry if I frightened you, my dear, with my extemporaneous fireworks—you, too, Laing. And now if you’ll both please excuse me . . .” He went back into the laboratory, and I heard the door close behind him.

“Well, I’m glad it was no worse than that,” I observed to Mark as Deirdre and I turned to go back to our own place; then, remembering my wife’s statement that the boy had called to see me earlier that evening, I added lest he should think I didn’t want to be bothered by him, “By the way, Mark, Derry tells me you had something you wanted to discuss with me.”

“I did have, Professor Laing,” he answered—still a little shakily, I noticed. “But after what just happened, or almost happened, I’m afraid I don’t feel up to talking about it tonight. So if you don’t mind, I’ll let it go until some time tomorrow morning, when we’ve both got a free period.”

I assured him that I didn’t mind in the least. “I’ll be in my office in the psychology department between ten and eleven,” I said. “You can drop around then.”

It was a few minutes after ten the following morning when he arrived at my office in College Hall. As Deirdre had suspected, the thing he wanted to talk to me about was the matter of his father and the Senior play.

“I don’t know what I ought to do, Professor Laing,” he said when he had told me all about it. “If I tell Dad now, he’ll forbid my accepting the part at all. If I don’t tell him and accept it without his knowledge, he’ll find out eventually from some other source, and then there’ll be one devil of a row. Either way, it looks as though I’m headed for trouble.”

“If I were in your place, Mark,” I told him, having already given the matter some thought before his arrival, “I’d tell him at once, and get it over with. If you don’t, he’ll blame you later not only for having done something which you knew would be contrary to his wishes, but for having been secretive about it as well. Besides, there’s always the chance that you may be able to overcome his opposition.”

“Do you honestly believe that last part?” he asked cynically.

I had no answer ready for him, knowing that actually, I did not.

“Last night when the explosion occurred in the laboratory and I was afraid at first that Dad might have been injured or even killed,” he went on after a little pause, “I felt as though I’d been a selfish heel even to consider taking part in the play when I knew what his feelings would be on the subject. That’s why I couldn’t discuss it with you afterwards; I’d have felt like a traitor to him if I had. But I realized this morning that that was only the emotionalism of the moment. I know now I’ve got to be in that play, regardless of everything. You see, Professor Barto told us a talent scout friend of his is coming down from New York to see it; and if he likes any of us, there may be just a chance . . .”

I understood the thought which he had left unspoken. “The theater is really in your blood, isn’t it, Mark?” I asked.

He gave a brief, shaky laugh, the kind a man gives when he is recalling some unpleasant experience. “It’s odd you should use that particular expression, Professor Laing,” he remarked. “I said practically the same thing to Dad one day last fall when I wanted to enroll for Professor Barto’s course in dramatic interpretation. I’m not actually in any of his classes, you know.

“He gave me a look I won’t forget in a hurry—Dad, I mean—then he said that if he thought that was the case, he’d make me undergo one of those series of operations where they drain off every drop of blood in a man’s body and exchange it for new. I realized he didn’t mean that literally, of course; but I knew that what he did mean was that he’d resort to any measures, no matter how hard they were on either or both of us, to destroy my interest in the stage. In fact—” his voice dropped to an unsteady whisper “—I got the impression that before he’d permit me to become an actor, he’d rather see me dead.”

I tried to convince him that he’d been letting his imagination run away with him, and that his father could have had no such thought in mind, but I wasn’t too sure that I succeeded. He left then, promising to think over the advice I had given him; but I noticed that he made no promise to follow it.

The thought of him and his problem remained with me for a long time after he had gone. Although I realized that I had no right to interfere between father and son in a matter which was obviously none of my affair and which in addition possessed all the characteristics of potential dynamite, the fact that the boy had turned to me for help had created in me a feeling of responsibility for him which I found it impossible to shake off. Yet I knew it would be worse than useless to approach Eric Fordyce on the subject unless I was armed with some understanding of what lay behind his violent opposition to Mark’s pursuing a theatrical career.

The thought flashed across my mind that perhaps, like so many parents who were unsympathetic toward their children’s aspirations to the theater, he might feel that his son was merely stage-struck, and possessed of no genuine talent, and would therefore be wasting his time. Whether this was true or not, I didn’t know, but I decided it would be advisable to find out before aligning myself too definitely on Mark’s side. And the person best in a position to give me such information ought to be the man who was directing the play, Professor Antonio Barto.

Accordingly I cut my eleven o’clock lecture class—to the gratification, I had no doubt, of some hundred and fifty students in analytical psychology—and, having once heard Barto say that he had a free period at that time, went up to his office on the second floor of College Hall on the chance of finding him there.

My knock at his door was answered by his invitation to enter—given after an almost imperceptible hesitancy—and I pushed the door open. But before I had taken more than a step across the threshold I stopped, having discovered not only that he already had a visitor, but, from the breath of exotic perfume that seemed fairly to permeate the room, that his visitor was of the female gender.

“Sorry, Barto,” I apologized, preparing to withdraw again. “I didn’t realize you weren’t alone. I’ll come around some other time.”

“How did you—” he began, then checked himself, but his meaning was clear to me. He was wondering how I had known he had a visitor, forgetting, as do so many sighted people, that we who are blind have become accustomed to relying upon our other sensory perceptive faculties to tell us what the average man learns through his eyes. “Perhaps we can have lunch together, Professor Laing,” he suggested, affably enough, but with, I felt, a poorly concealed anxiety to be rid of me. “I will call for you at your office at—shall we say one o’clock?”

I agreed to this arrangement and withdrew, wondering a little just who his visitor had been. I was almost certain she was not one of his students there to see him upon some school matter, not only because that cloying perfume hadn’t been of the kind generally affected by our co-eds, but because, had she been, there would have been no reason for him to have become in any way discomfited by my unexpected intrusion. Neither, apparently, was she a personal friend to any appreciable degree, or he would have been having luncheon with her instead of being at liberty to make that arrangement with me. However, since the nature of Barto’s feminine callers appeared to be no concern of mine, I dismissed the little episode from my mind and returned to my own office to wait for him.

Over luncheon at one of the campus “hash houses” an hour or so later, I put to him my question regarding Mark Fordyce, and was surprised by the warmth of his response.

“Young Marco!” he exclaimed, referring to the boy affectionately by the Spanish form of his name. “You ask me whether he possesses any genuine talent for acting? Genius would be a better and not inappropriate word in his case. He has the true fire of the real artist! Booth, Mansfield, Barrymore—he is of their class, or will be when he has properly matured. Even now, with the little training I have been privileged to give him in odd moments . . .” His words trailed away in an enthusiasm which was plainly beyond his powers of expression.

“You have been giving him private coaching, then?” I asked.

I sensed his Latin shrug, even though I was unable to see it.

“Hardly anything so formal,” he replied. “We have spent a few evenings together in my rooms discussing theater, and I have observed him at the university dramatic club, of which I am faculty advisor. But tell me, my friend.” His voice dropped to a more confidential level. “Although Marco has never said so to me in words, he has given me by his actions reason to believe that he receives little sympathy at home in his desire to become an actor. Is this the case?”

“I believe his father doesn’t entirely approve of a theatrical career for him,” I replied cautiously, and hoped Heaven would forgive me for this masterpiece of understatement.

“Then this disapproval must be either overcome or defied,” Barto declared with a determination which implied that he would brook no interference. “Acting is Marco’s natural heritage. To deny it to him would be as great a sin as to deny to the birds of the air their right to sing. And I, Antonio Barto, shall see to it that it is not denied, even if I have to—”

He broke off with the same self-conscious laugh he had given when we had walked across campus together the preceding evening and he had expressed himself so forcefully on the American attitude toward art and morality. “But I am permitting myself to be carried away again by my emotions,” he said apologetically. “There are two people you must never take too literally, Professor Laing—a Latin and an actor, and I am both. But I trust I have answered your question satisfactorily?”

“You have,” I told him with feeling.

As it developed, I was destined to have contact with the affairs of young Mark Fordyce that day from still another angle. When I returned home that afternoon after the close of classes, I found Lee Laurence, one of the girls in the Senior class, closeted with Deirdre. Although she was a frequent visitor at the house, having been a Freshman when Deirdre herself was a Senior at the university, and was on a familiar footing with both of us, she seemed a little disconcerted by my arrival, and left soon thereafter.

“What’s wrong with Lee?” I asked Deirdre after the girl had gone. “Don’t tell me she’s afraid of failing in psychology, and was here to ask you to plead her case for her.”

Deirdre laughed. “You flatter both yourself and your subject, Paddy,” she told me. “I’m afraid that what Lee came to see me about is a great deal more important from her standpoint than whether she passes or fails in psychology.” Then she sobered. “But I shouldn’t laugh at her,” she said contritely. “Affairs of the heart can be very painful to those concerned, even if they do sound a little amusing to other people.”

“Have she and Mark been having a lovers’ quarrel?” I inquired, knowing of the attachment that had existed between the girl and Mark Fordyce since the beginning of the school term the preceding fall.

“It’s much worse than that,” Deirdre replied. “Incredible as it may sound, it seems that recently Mark has become afflicted with what is known as the wandering eye. The—you should excuse the expression—lady involved,” she suppressed another giggle, “is, according to Lee, ‘a cheap, painted hussy who uses loud perfume and is old enough to be his mother.’ She wanted to know what I thought she ought to do about the situation.”

“What did you tell her?” I asked curiously.

“I told her that anything that was worth having was certainly worth fighting for.”

“How unladylike!”

Deirdre leaned over the back of my chair and pretended to pull my hair. “I seem to recall that I practically had to do the proposing because you had some ridiculous notion about not having the right to ask me to marry you,” she remarked, “and if you dare to imply that I’m not a lady, Patrick Laing . . .”

I surrendered unconditionally.

“A painted hussy who uses loud perfume,” I repeated, chuckling a little over Lee’s undoubtedly biased description of her rival. And then for no reason that I could account for logically, the memory of the exotic perfume worn by the woman who had been in Barto’s office flashed across my mind. I had no grounds for supposing there might be any connection between the two, yet the idea that there was, persisted, while behind it skulked the uneasy suspicion that such a connection was not good. I began to feel a vague and disquieting distrust of Antonio Barto and his influence upon young Mark Fordyce.