Thunder and Roses (10 page)

“Come in!” grated a voice. There was no one standing in the
doorway at all. She hesitated. Then she saw that someone was peering through the crack at the hinge side of the door.

“Come in, Peg!” said the voice. It was used gently now, though it was still gravelly. She stepped through and into the room. The door closed behind her. Robin was there. “Peg! It’s
so
good to see you!”

“Hello, Robin,” she whispered. Just what gesture she was about to make she would never know for she became suddenly conscious of someone else in the room. She wheeled. There was a girl on the davenport, who rose as Peg faced her. The girl didn’t look, somehow, like a person. She looked like too many colors.

“Janice,” said Robin. It wasn’t an introduction. Robin just said the one word and moved his head slightly. The girl came slowly across the room toward him, passed him, went to the hall closet and took out a coat and hat and a handbag with a long strap. She draped the coat over her arm and opened the door; and then she paused and shot Peg a look of such utter hatred that Peg gasped. The door closed and she was alone with Robin English.

“Is
that
the best you can do,” she said, without trying to keep the loathing out of her voice.

“The very best,” said Robin equably. “Janice has no conversation. What else she has to recommend her, you can see. She is a great convenience.”

A silly, colorful little thought crept into Peg’s mind. She looked around the room.

“You’re looking for a smörgasbord tray,” chuckled Robin, sinking into an easy-chair and regarding her with amusement. “Why won’t you look at me?”

Finally, she did.

He was taller, a very little. He was much handsomer. She saw that, and it was as if something festering within her had been lanced. There was pain—but oh! the blessed relief of pressure! His face was—
Oh yes
, said Dr. Wenzell to herself,
pre-pituitary. Acromegaly
. She said, “Let me see your hands.”

He raised his eyebrows, and put his hands in his pockets. He shook his head.

Peg turned on her heel and went to the hall closet. She dipped into the pockets of an overcoat, and then into a topcoat, until she found a pair of gloves. She came back into the room, examining them carefully. Robin got to his feet.

“As I thought,” she said. She held up the left glove. The seam between the index and second finger was split. And they were new gloves. She threw them aside.

“So you know about that. You would, of course.”

“Robin, I don’t think this would have happened if you had continued your treatments.”

He slowly took out his hands and stared at them. They were lumpy, and the fingers were too long, and a little crooked. “A phenomenal hypertrophy of the bony processes, according to the books,” he said. “A development that generally takes years.”

“There’s nothing normal about this case. There never was,” said Peg, her voice thick with pity. “Why did you let it go like this?”

“I got interested in what I was doing.” Suddenly he got to his feet and began to stride restlessly about the room. She tried not to look at him, at his altered face, with the heavy, coarse jaw. She strained to catch the remnants of his mellow voice through the harshness she heard now.

“What is it, Robin—Mel? Are you still afraid of Mel Warfield?”

“Hm? Mel … oh! Mel. I’d almost forgotten. No, Peg, not any more. That was a long time ago. I’ve been so busy.”

“With what?”

He squinted at her, then resumed his pacing. She realized that he was here, and not here. “My mind is working on two levels,” he said. “Maybe more.”

“Wh—are you telepathic?”

“I don’t know. No. I’m—it’s too slowly to say it.”

“Too hard to say it?”

“Too slowly. It isn’t a thing you can say piece by piece. It’s a whole picture; you see it all at once and it means something.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” he said.

“Do you have any palsy, Robin?”

He held up his misshapen hands. They were quite steady. “It isn’t Parkinson’s disease,” he said, again speaking her thought. “My mind is very clear, but only to me. My brain isn’t softening. It’s—deepening. A Klein bottle has only one surface but can contain a liquid because it has a contiguity through a fourth direction; my mind has five surfaces, so how many different liquids can it contain at once?”

“Robin!”

He made some inner effort that twisted his heavy face. “I’ve found out what maturity is, Peg,” he said.

“Sit down, Robin,” she said gently, “and tell me.”

“I won’t sit down!” he said. He took a turn around the room, and in quite a different voice, said, “What made it so hard to find out was the haziness of the word, and the ambivalence of the human animal. You said that maturity, in a plant, is death. Laurence Manning said that a plant isn’t a plant, and a man isn’t a man; they are conspiracies of millions of separate cell animals with thousands of separate specialties. Cells mature and die, singly and in great masses; sometimes they reach a full function that is maturity of another kind, and perform it for a long time—microseconds or years … so maturity is and isn’t, all the time, within a man. The unit man, as an animal, has a maturity that can only be an approximation—that would be when most of the specialized cells were doing their cooperative best—not their best, but their cooperative best, within him. And that’s maturity in man, but only in man the animal. Man is another thing too. Call it mind, keep it simple.…” He paused for a long time, stopped, opened and closed his hands. Peg resisted the impulse to interrupt.

At last Robin said, “Mind is different. When the old man in the Huxley book ate carp-guts and lived for centuries, the mind part died, and he wasn’t a mature thing. The mind part does not mature because it can’t. It doesn’t complete a life with a culminating death like a plant cell, because it doesn’t simply exchange nourishment for the performance of a specialty like that. Mind—not brain; mind—works and doesn’t work. Some of it has to do with physical living, but most of it does
—other
work. And there’s no necessity for this work, no reason to start it, within the animal; and there’s no end to
it when it does work, no place it cannot go. When is it mature? How high is up?

“But mind leads to wisdoms—precepts for mature conduct within any framework. These are the wisdoms which can produce a mature Democrat or Protestant or stock-broker or husband. And I’ve found the simple statement of maturity within the largest framework any ordinary human being can know. It is simple—all the wisdoms are simple, because, for their fields, they are basic. I’ll tell you—”

He stopped, his great head up, listening. Peg heard nothing. “—later,” Robin finished. The door-buzzer shrilled.

“Come in!”

“Peg!” Mel Warfield all but ran in. “Are you all right?”

“Hello, Mel.”

Warfield spun. The change from frantic male to absorbed physician was so swift it would have been comic anywhere else. “Robin!” His eyes flickered to the face, the hands, the feet, which were in cut slippers. “You know what that condition is?”

“He knows,” said Peg.

“Saving no one’s presence,” said Mel Warfield. “There are three damned fools in this room. English, we might be able to arrest that condition; we might even—well, I can’t promise too much, you understand, but if you’ll only start treatment again, we might at least—”

He was interrupted by quite the most horrible sound Peg had ever heard—a burst of thunderous laughter from Robin’s distorted throat. “Sure, Mel, sure. Glad to.”

“Robin!” cried Peg. “You will?”

He laughed again. “Of course I will. I’m—mature enough to know what to do. Not today, though. Tomorrow all right?”

“Fine, fine,” said Mel. He looked as if some great burden had been lifted from him—something that had been strapped to his whole body. “Ten o’clock at my place—I’ll have everything ready. We’ll run the most exhaustive set of tests on you that can be found this side of the Mayo Clinic.”

“I can’t be sure about the time.” Robin went to the desk in the corner. “My number’s unlisted,” he said, writing rapidly on a sheet
of note-paper. He folded it, folded it again. “Call me tonight or in the morning, just to make sure.” He chuckled again. “I feel better already. Arrest the condition? It will be easy … you’ve never had a mature patient before.” He slipped the paper into Peg’s envelope hand-bag, and laughed again.

“Is there a joke?” Peg asked painfully.

“Sorry … no, it isn’t a joke. But the huge relief … I see an end at last to a thing that seemed to have none, a final adjustment of the two factors I mentioned, one of which is an approximation, and the other a thing with no upper limits. Why do you hate each other?”

Warfield sucked in his breath and looked at Peg. Peg looked at her feet.

“I have been my own damnation,” said Robin, “like most damned souls. There isn’t a thing you could have done to prevent it. Mel once made an honest mistake, and it wasn’t even a serious one. Peg, you have no right to assume that it was made through a single motive, and that a base one. Nature never shows one motive or one law at a time, unaffected by any other. And Mel—to hate Peg because of the things she has felt is like hating a man for moving when a tornado has taken him away. I—want to say something like ‘Bless you, my children.’ Now get out of here. You’ll see me soon enough.”

He herded them toward the door. Mel, feeling that there was something unsaid, something important, unable to think clearly because of the sudden rush, tried to gain a moment. “When would be the best time to call?”

“You’ll know. Hurry, now. I have things to do.”

Through the closing door, Peg got a last glimpse of Robin’s face, distorted and handsome, slipping into an inward-turning relaxation as he let go the concentration that he had assumed shortly after she had arrived.
Like a man leaving children
, she thought.

In the elevator, with wonder in his voice, Mel said, “He thinks he’s mature. He’s just—just sick. Sick and old.”

“I don’t know what he is,” Peg said wearily. “Some of what he said sounded like a delirium. And yet—I suppose a discussion of the Döppler shift would sound fairly delirious to a fourth-grade child.
I don’t know, Mel, I just don’t know. I can’t think.… He seems—quite sure.…”

“We’ll do what we can,” said Mel. The doors slid open. “Peg—”

“Shh.” She took his arm.

Robin English had talents and, lately, skills.

His will divided a large fortune between Drs. Wenzell and Warfield. His body and his brain were a mystery and a treasure to the institute to which he donated them. The mystery lay in the cause of death; the body was aberrated but still healthy, and it had simply stopped. A skill … Robin English was not the first man in the world to have that power, nor the only one. All men have it to a degree; the will to live is its complement, and daily works greater miracles than this simple thing of saying “Stop.”

There was a terrible time when Peg and Mel burst back into the apartment on Riverside Drive, and after. But when enough time had gone by, it was all part of the many things they shared, and sharing is good. They shared their pain and their pleasure in their memories of him, as they shared an ineradicable sense of guilt. In due season they shared an understanding of Robin’s death; it came to them that his decision to die had been made with his frightening burst of laughter, that day. Later still they understood his reason, though that took longer, in spite of the fact that he had written it on the paper he had tucked into Peg’s handbag.

And they share, now, the simple wisdom he wrote; not a definition of maturity, but a delineation of the Grail in which it is contained:

“Enough is maturity—”

S
HE
had
TO
find out about Tiny—
everything
about Tiny.

They were bound to call him Tiny. The name was good for a laugh when he was a pup, and many times afterward.

He was a Great Dane, unfashionable with his long tail, smooth and glossy in the brown coat which fit so snugly over his heavily muscled shoulders and chest. His eyes were big and brown and his feet were big and black; he had a voice like thunder and a heart ten times his own great size.

He was born in the Virgin Islands, on St. Croix, which is a land of palm trees and sugar, of soft winds and luxuriant undergrowth whispering with the stealthy passage of pheasant and mongoose. There were rats in the ruins of the ancient estate houses that stood among the foothills—ruins with slave-built walls forty inches thick and great arches of weathered stone. There was pasture land where the field mice ran, and brooks asparkle with gaudy blue minnows.

But where in St. Croix had he learned to be so strange?

When Tiny was a puppy, all feet and ears, he learned many things. Most of these things were kinds of respect. He learned to respect that swift, vengeful piece of utter engineering called a scorpion when one of them whipped its barbed tail into his inquiring nose. He learned to respect the heavy deadness of the air about him that preceded a hurricane, for he knew that it meant hurry and hammering and utmost obedience from every creature on the estate. He learned to respect the justice of sharing, for he was pulled from the teat and from the trough when he crowded the others of his litter. He was the largest.

These things, all of them, he learned as respects. He was never struck, and although he learned caution he never learned fear. The pain he suffered from the scorpion—it happened only once—the
strong but gentle hands which curbed his greed, the frightful violence of the hurricane that followed the tense preparations—all these things and many more taught him the justice of respect. He half understood a basic ethic: namely, that he would never be asked to do something, or to refrain from doing something, unless there was a good reason for it. His obedience, then, was a thing implicit, for it was half reasoned; and since it was not based on fear, but on justice, it could not interfere with his resourcefulness.

All of which, along with his blood, explained why he was such a splendid animal. It did not explain how he learned to read. It did not explain why Alec was compelled to sell him—not only to sell him but to search out Alistair Forsythe and sell him to her.