VIII
This two-thousand-dollar patient received the best of care. The superintendent did not fail to stop in each day and study the chart. The doctors, even those who had nothing to do with the case, stopped by to try out their bedside manner. The severe head nurse shepherded her flock and made sure they overlooked no duty. Each of the nurses, young or middle-aged, had her own career to think about, and no one of them overlooked what might be the chance of a lifetime. The story of the father’s offer was known; it was reported that the family was fabulously wealthy. Suffering had not destroyed the patient’s good looks, but had lent them a tender quality. The two passports also were talked about and it was taken for granted that the injuries had been incurred in the service of Britain and Nova Scotia. While Lanny lay unconscious the nurses stroked his forehead and prayed for him; when his consciousness returned they found him delightful, and prayed for him in a different sense of the words.
He was polite to everybody, but reticent, and soon they realized that he was tormented in mind. Asleep, he murmured a strange gibberish which nobody recognized, and sometimes he had nightmares, cried out, and struggled to lift his plaster legs. Something was preying on him, and the doctors feared that he might die of worry instead of shock. The superintendent, a man of experience, tried to probe his secret, but all he got was: “I have an urgent duty. How soon shall I be able to walk?” The superintendent could only reply: “You can delay your recovery by impatience.”
Matters got so bad that Robbie Budd came for another week-end. It was easy for him because, as he said, his place was lousy with planes. Budd-Erling was now making a two-seater pursuit job, and for these Halifax was practically in the backyard—a matter of a couple of hours’ flight. Robbie had had a talk with Charlie Alston over the telephone, and brought the message: “Tell your patient not to worry. We are sending somebody else.” All Lanny would answer was: “Oh, Robbie, it’s so important, and nobody else can do it! Anyhow it will take months to prepare!”
“But look, son,” the father pleaded. “You are setting yourself back. You can’t mend broken bones with tears.”
Lanny moved his head from side to side in helpless grief. “It ought not to have happened, Robbie! It’s like a death—it’s like thousands of deaths—millions of them!”
“You don’t want to tell me about it?”
“I can’t tell a word. I am on my honor.”
“Well, there’s nothing to keep me from trying to guess.”
“No, but whatever you guess, don’t say it here, don’t say it anywhere. People here know too much already. What happened to my passport?”
“They found two of them.”
“I feared they would. Did they find the capsule?”
“I didn’t hear about any capsule.”
“Well, forget it. Some day I’ll tell you the story. Has anything been in the papers?”
“They don’t publish much about the Ferry Command, Lanny. And certainly nothing about accidents to it.”
“Thank God for that! Don’t tell anybody whom you don’t have to. Understand, I’m not worrying about myself, Robbie, it’s the country.”
“Now is the one time when you ought to be thinking about yourself and nothing else. You know so much about auto-suggestion—why don’t you try it?”
“I’m doing my best. I’m fighting to reconcile myself to what has happened. It’s the hardest job I ever had.”
IX
The President of Budd-Erling went back to his own urgent tasks, and Lanny lay on his back—he could not turn over. It causes eyestrain if you read in chat position, so the kind Cousin Jennie read aloud in a slow inexpressive voice whatever he asked for: newspapers, magazines, any novel that he could be sure was proper. But fiction seemed empty and thin; all he wanted was the war news, and especially Russia, which the prim maiden lady considered slightly objectionable. The Germans had about surrounded Leningrad and were drawing inexorably nearer to Moscow; this two-thousand-mile battle was beyond the scope of human imagination.
Robbie had brought a radio set, which could be used in a hospital room if it was kept very low. The Canadian radio, government-owned, is free of commercials, which is a blessing to any man, sick or well. There was plenty of news, and Lanny fed on this. The trouble came when the impatient patient closed his eyes and tried to sleep; then his mind went over the duties he had planned, the schemes he had evolved—for Britain and for Germany; then he was like a wild lion in a cage, or a skylark beating itself to death against bars overhead.
Writing materials were brought, and with a pillow for support he managed to scribble notes on a pad. Mail out of Canada would be censored, he knew, so he wrote with caution. He doubted if a letter would go from Canada to Vichy France, so he had asked Robbie to write to his mother. To Rick he wrote: “I had an accident somewhat like your own, but at sea. I am going to be all right, but it will take time.” Almost a quarter of a century had passed since Rick had crashed, but he had surely not forgotten it. To Zoltan he wrote: “I met with a serious accident, but am getting well.” He wrote the same to Laurel Creston, and added the sentence: “Your fears were justified and I wish I had taken your advice.” He signed that one “Brother,” and hoped the censor wouldn’t take it for code. To Lizbeth he didn’t have to mention the accident, since Robbie had told her father about it. “Just a line to let you know I am getting along and will soon be all right. Excuse the scrawl. Best wishes.”
A great deal depended upon those letters—more than Lanny could have any idea of. First result was a telephone conversation. There were no phones in the rooms of this hospital, but for a two-thousand-dollar patient they would get a long cord and run it from the hall. This was Baltimore, Maryland, calling Halifax, Nova Scotia, and that might be assumed to be important. The voice of Reverdy Holdenhurst, as clear as if he had been in the room. “We are getting ready for our cruise, and don’t you want to change your mind and come along?”
“I’m afraid it’s going to be some time before I can do any traveling, Reverdy.” This from a man with legs that might have weighed fifty pounds apiece.
“We’ll wait for you if you’ll say yes. Nothing would give us more pleasure, and you’ll have a complete rest and change; everything will be warm where we are going.”
“Somehow or other I’ve lost my fondness for the sea, Reverdy. I don’t enjoy thinking about it.”
“A yacht isn’t an airplane, and we choose our route carefully. The hurricane season will be over where we are going, and there isn’t the slightest danger. We’ll have a physician on board to take care of you, and we’ll provide every comfort. We’ll get one of those surgical carts such as they have in hospitals; and as you know, we have an elevator on the Oriole. You can be taken from your cabin to the deck, and you can have sunshine or shade, whatever you prefer. If you stay where you are you’ll be indoors all the time. Just think, the Caribbean, and Panama, then the South Seas, Samoa and Tahiti, and then South China, and Bali and Java. When you are able to sit up we’ll have a wheel chair, and when you begin to walk we’ll have a man to help you. Think it over!”
It was hard to say no to such a proposal. The father didn’t mention that he had a daughter; if Lanny had any doubts whether Lizbeth would go, he could ask, but he didn’t. All he could say was: “You are too kind. They don’t give me any idea how long it will be before I can be out of these casts, and I couldn’t think of putting you to such inconvenience.”
“The casts don’t make a bit of difference. We have plenty of strong men on board the yacht, and they can move you. I’d offer to come to Halifax for you, but I don’t suppose they’d allow a yacht in those waters.”
“It would be far too dangerous.”
“Well, Robbie can have you flown, say to Miami. That’s a pleasant place, and I’d wait there as long as you wished. No trouble at all for anybody.”
It was a princely offer; the way the very rich treat their friends. Lanny knew exactly what it meant. The Baltimore capitalist was saying
: “Come and marry my daughter. Your wounds and damages don’t make any difference. Come and court her while we sail over warm tropic seas and marry her in any port you choose. Forget your cares and impossible duties, and come to the land of the Lotos-eaters!”
A land where all things always seem’d the same!
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
X
At other times Lanny had thought his friend’s importunities in bad taste, but now that he was a cripple and couldn’t expect to be an active man for some time, the offer became kindness not to be undervalued. Lanny could only plead: “I have duties, Reverdy, which I am not free to talk about. You expect to be gone six months, and I hope that I shall be fit for duty again in less time than that.”
“All right, if that happens, we won’t try to derail you. Whenever you feel that you are well enough, you can take a plane by way of Honolulu and San Francisco. I suppose you don’t expect to give up flying for the rest of your life. What I want to do is to help you to get well in the quickest and surest way.”
Lanny’s final word was; “I’ll think it over and let you know. I’ll have to ask the hospital people.”
He did this; and they told him he was free from fever, which meant that the knitting of his bones was proceeding satisfactorily. To move him in the casts would be difficult, but with care it could be done. In a week or two he should have enough strength to stand a journey. “That is,” added the head surgeon, “provided you stop having nightmares.” Lanny was doing his best, but it was a hard task to keep atomic formulas from racing through his mind.
This matter was so important that Robbie Budd took another weekend off. Said he: “Reverdy told me of his invitation, and we all think that’s the thing for you to do, Lanny. So much better than lying here indoors in winter weather. It gets cold as the devil up here; you can feel it in the air already.”
“Listen, Robbie,” replied the son, “there’s no use making any bones about it. Reverdy wants me to come because Lizbeth wants me to marry her; and if I take this trip, it practically means an engagement.”
“That’s an exaggeration, Lanny, no man has to marry unless he wants to, and I take it you haven’t committed yourself.”
“Surely not; but when a girl has set her cap the way Lizbeth has, it becomes damned uncomfortable, and I couldn’t have any pleasure on that yacht unless I meant to oblige both father and daughter.”
“Esther and I have talked about it a lot, Lanny, and we wish you would think about Lizbeth more seriously. We can’t imagine a girl who would make you a more suitable wife; and surely you have taken time enough to look around. Tell me once more, and frankly: Is there some other woman?”
“There are several women I know with whom I might be happy. Lizbeth is one, and Peggy is another. But I have a duty which I can’t reveal to any woman, and I couldn’t make any woman happy while hiding such a secret from her.”
“You haven’t got up-to-date in your thinking, son. The fact that you had two passports and are some sort of government agent is surely being whispered about this military and naval port. There are bound to be German spies here, and for you to go back into Germany after this has happened would be a form of suicide. Surely you have to bring yourself to realize that!”
“I have thought about it a lot, Robbie; but my assignment is so urgent that I shall have to take a chance. I simply cannot quit!”
XI
Robbie talked with the doctors and then went back to Newcastle and phoned to Charlie Alston. “Lanny won’t tell me what it is that is eating him up, but I am making a guess that you know something about it.”
“I might find out,” admitted the “fixer” cautiously.
“Well, here is the situation. It will be several months before he is able to be active again, and he is making it longer by his worrying. The doctors are having to give him sleeping drugs, and they don’t like that and neither do I. He has nightmares and cries in his sleep; he recites long formulas, as if it were chemistry or mathematics. Now he has an invitation to take a yachting trip to the South Seas, which will give him a complete rest and make him fit for work again. But he won’t go, because he insists that he has a duty and that he must get up—with both his legs still in plaster casts.”
“I’ll talk to him,” said Alston. “Perhaps I can help.”
So now it was Washington calling Halifax, and once again the telephone extension cord was plugged in. “Hello,” said a voice, “this is your Paris employer. Hard luck, old scout!”
“I’m soon going to be fit again—”
“What I called up to tell you, that assignment is dead. We have got the information. The other party found a way to get it to us, and everything is jake.”
“Oh, can that really be true, Professor?”
“I talked to the Boss and he says you have a furlough. You are to think about nothing but getting well. He won’t see you again for six months, unless it’s a purely social call.”
“I believe you are kidding!” exclaimed the P.A.
“I give you my word, I am repeating exactly what the Boss said. ‘Tell him to put everything out of his mind but getting his health back; and thanks a million for what he did.’ Those were his words.”
“Well, of course, that’s a great relief. If you really don’t need me—”
“Put your mind at rest. We are going to win, not the faintest doubt about it. And you have done your share. Take it easy!”
XII
So there was Lanny, on this bed from which he had not moved for more than a month; he looked at the bare white walls which had been his landscape and the ceiling which had been his sky for that period, and he thought how pleasant it would be to look at something—anything—else. Lying on your back can become an agony; you have to try it for a while to realize how loudly every muscle and nerve and bone cry out in protest. He lay there and stifled his groans. He exercised every muscle he could without moving from one spot. He counted the days which the doctors said must elapse before they would break off the casts and let him at least turn over on his side.
He recalled to mind the trim white yacht, the Oriole. Some of the happiest months of his life were associated with yachting trips; first on the Bluebird, namesake of Ezra Hackabury’s kitchen soap, and then on the Bessie Budd, brought into being by Johannes Robin’s speculations in German marks. On those two shining pleasure craft the grandson of Budd Gunmakers had visited all the Mediterranean shores, and those of the North Sea and the Baltic; he had sailed into the fjords of Norway, and crossed the Newfoundland and down to New York. But the farthest east he had ever traveled was Odessa and the farthest west was Hollywood. The places that Reverdy had named were strange to him, and certainly worth seeing. They would be warm—and Lanny found that he had the same dread of the cold as his would-be host, the skipper of the Oriole. Lanny couldn’t recall much about that dreadful night on a rubber raft, but he still felt the effects of it, and wanted never in his life to be cold again.
He thought of Lizbeth, and to an invalid she wore a different aspect from what she had worn to a well man. Here in his helplessness he decided that he had been brutal to her in his strength; he had humiliated her, and failed entirely to appreciate what she offered him. Just to be alive, to be taken care of, to be saved from pain—these were blessings he was able to appreciate for the first time in his life. If she was willing to help him, to take the chance of restoring him to normality, what more could he ask of love and life?
Little by little he began to realize the implications of what had happened here in Halifax, and of what Alston had told him over the phone. He was no longer a presidential agent. F.D. had put it tactfully—he was “on furlough”—but all the same, he could never go back to Hitler-land, at least not until he wanted to throw away his life. Some German agent in this British naval and military base would surely have passed the word to the Nazi sp
y center that was Yorkville, and from there it would have been cabled to Berlin. The Führer’s personal friend, Der Dicke’s art expert, had been revealed as a secret agent, traveling to Britain on two passports! The Nazis would surely blame him for the failure of Hess’s mission, the trapping of the Führer’s Deputy and most trusted friend. They would blame him for everything that had ever “leaked,” whether or not he had had anything to do with it. They would hate him above all other Americans—those who had never pretended to be friends.
So, he would have to find another job! And meantime he was free—to rest, to get well, to have a wife if he wanted one! So there revived the old question: what sort of wife did he want? Right now it appeared that Laurel Creston had faded into the background; she was an intellectual, and his mind had gone into a coma. What he wanted was to escape any more pain; and the thought of Lizbeth’s soft arms about him seemed the very height of bliss. He didn’t put it in that crude way, and might have resented it if anyone else had done so; he just drifted along in a sort of half daze. He was exhausted, and didn’t want to think; even the conversation of Cousin Jennie Budd didn’t bore him, because she didn’t try to make him think. And when he drifted to the island of the Lotos-eaters, it was Lizbeth who sat by his side and held his hand. She would comfort him, treat him like a sick child, help him to learn to walk again.