Thunder and Roses (6 page)

“It does?”

“Yes, of course. Look, Peg, I can see what’s happening to me even if I am the patient. I wonder why so many doctors overlook that? You can play around with my metabolism and my psychology and ultimately affect such an abstract as my emotional maturity. But there’s one thing you can’t touch—and that is my own estimate of
the things I have learned. My sense of values. You can change my approach to these things, but not the things themselves. One such thing is that I have a violent reaction against sordidness, no matter how well justified the sordidness may have been when I did the sordid thing, whatever it was. In the past, primarily the justification has been the important thing. Now—and by ‘now’ I mean since I started these treatments—the reaction is more important. So I avoid sordidness because I don’t want to live through the reaction afterward, and not so much because I dislike doing a sordid thing.”

“That’s a symptom of maturity,” said Peg. “But what has it to do with me?”

“I was hungry,” he said simply. “So hungry I couldn’t see straight. And suddenly so full of horse sense that I wouldn’t reach for the pretty canapés until I could fully appreciate them. And now—sit down, Peg!”

“I … have to go,” she said in a throttled voice.

“Oh, you’re wrong,” he said, not moving. He spoke very quietly. “You don’t have to go. You haven’t been listening to me. You’re defensive when I’ve laid no siege. I have just said that I’m incapable of doing anything in bad taste—that is, anything which will taste bad to me, now or later. And you are behaving as if I had said the opposite. You are thinking with your emotions instead of your intellect.”

Slowly, she sank back into her chair. “You take a great deal for granted,” she said coldly.

“That, in effect, is what the bread and cheese and pimentos and olives told me when I told them about these trays,” he said. “Oh, Peg, let’s not quarrel. You know that all I’ve just said is true. I could candy-coat all my phrases, talk for twice as long, and say half as much; and if I did you’d resent it later; you know you would.”

“I rather resent it now.”

“Not really.” He met her gaze, and held it until she began to smile.

“Robin, you’re impossible!”

“Not impossible. Just highly unlikely.”

He sprang to pour coffee for her—and how did he know that she preferred coffee to tea? he had both—and he said, “Now we can talk about the other thing that’s bothering me. Mel.”

“What about Mel?” she said sharply.

He smiled at her tone. “I gather that it’s the other thing that’s been bothering you?”

She almost swore at him.

“Sorry,” he said with his quick grin, and was as quickly sober. “Warfield’s very much in love with you, Peg.”

“He—has said so.”

“Not to me,” said Robin. “I’m not intimating that he has poured out his soul to me. But he can’t conceal it. What he mostly does is avoid talking about you. Under the circumstances, that begins to be repetitious and—significant.” He shrugged. “Thing is, I have found myself a little worried from time to time. About myself.”

“Since when did you start worrying about yourself?”

“Perhaps it’s symptomatic. This induced maturity that I am beginning to be inflicted with has made me think carefully about a lot of things I used to pass off without a thought. No one can escape the basic urgencies of life—hunger, self-preservation, and so on. At my flightiest moments I was never completely unaware of hunger. The difference between a childish and a mature approach to such a basic seems to be that the child is preoccupied only with an immediate hunger. The adult directs most of his activities to overcoming tomorrow’s hunger.

“Self-preservation is another basic that used to worry me not at all as long as danger was invisible. I’d dodge an approaching taxi, but not an approaching winter. Along come a few gland-treatments, and I find myself feeling dangers, not emotionally, and now, but intellectually, and in the future.”

“A healthy sign,” nodded Peg.

“Perhaps so. Although that intellectual realization is a handy thing to have around to ward off personal catastrophes, it is also the raw material for an anxiety neurosis. I don’t think Mel Warfield is trying to kill me, but I think he has reason enough to.”

“What?”
Peg said, horrified.

“Certainly. He loves you. You—” he broke off, and smiled engagingly. She felt her color rising, as she watched his bright eyes, the round bland oval of his almost chinless face.

“Don’t say it, Robin,” she breathed.

“—you won’t marry him,” Robin finished easily. “Whom you love needn’t enter into the conversation.” He laughed. “What amounts of wind we use to avoid the utterance of a couple of syllables! Anyway, let it suffice that Mel, for his own reasons, regards me as a rival, or at least as a stumbling block.” His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I gather that he has also concluded that your chief objection to me has been my … ah … immaturity. No, Peg, don’t bother to answer. So if I am right—and I think I am—he has been put in the unenviable position of working like fury to remove his chief rival’s greatest drawback. His only drawback, if you’ll forgive the phrase, ma’am,” he added, with a twinkle and the tip of an imaginary hat. “No fun for him. And I don’t think that Brother Mel is so constituted that he can get any pleasure out of the great sacrifice act.”

“I think you’re making a mountain out of—”

“Peg, Peg, certainly you know enough about psychology to realize that I am not accusing Mel of being a potential murderer, or even of consciously wanting to hurt me. But the compulsions of the subconscious are not civilized. Your barely expressed annoyance at the man who jostles you in a crowded bus is the civilized outlet to an impulse for raw murder. Your conditioned reflexes keep you from transfixing him with the nearest nail file; but what about the impulses of a man engaged in the subtle complexities of a thing like the glandular overhaul I’m getting? In the bus, your factor of safety with your reactions can run from no visible reaction through a lifted eyebrow to an acid comment, before you reach the point where you give him a tap on the noggin and actually do damage. Whereas Mel’s little old subconscious just has to cause his hand to slip while doing a subcutaneous, or to cause his eye to misread a figure on the milligram scale, for me to be disposed of in any several of many horrible ways. Peg! What’s the matter?”

Her voice quivering, she said quietly, “That is the most disgusting, conceited, cowardly drivel I have ever had to listen to. Mel Warfield may have the misfortune to be human, but he is one of the finest humans I have ever met. As a scientist, there is no one in this country—probably in the world—more skilled than he. He is also a gentleman,
in the good old-fashioned meaning of the word—I
will
say it, no matter how much adolescent sneering you choose to do—and if he is engaged on a case, the case comes first.” She rose. “Robin, I have had to take a lot from you, because as a specialist I knew what an advanced condition I had to allow for. That is going to stop. You are going to find out that one of the prices you must pay for the privilege of becoming an adult is the control of the noises your mouth makes.”

Robin looked a little startled. “It would be a little dishonest of me to think these things without expressing them.”

She went on as if she hadn’t heard. “The kind of control I mean has to go back further than the antrums. All of us have mean, cowardly thoughts from time to time. Apparently the maturity you’re getting is normal enough that you’re developing a man-sized inferiority complex along with it. You are beginning to recognize that Mel is a better man than you’ll ever be, and the only way you can rationalize that is to try to make him small enough to be taking advantage of you.”

“Holy cow,” breathed Robin. “Put down that knout, Peg! I’m not going to make a hobby of taking cracks at Mel Warfield behind his back. I’m just handing it to you straight, the way I see it, for just one reason—to explain why I am discontinuing the course of treatment.”

She was halfway to the door as he spoke, and she brought up sharply as if she had been tied by a ten-foot rope. “Robin! You’re not going to do anything of the kind!”

“I’m going to do exactly that,” said Robin. “I’m not used to lying awake nights worrying about what someone else is likely to do. I’m doing all right. I’ve come as far in this thing as I intend to go. I’m producing more than I ever did in my life before, and I can live adequately on what I’m getting and will get for this music and these patents and plays and poems, to live for the rest of my life if I quit working tomorrow—and I’m not likely to quit working tomorrow.”

“Robin! You’re half hysterical! You don’t know what you’re talking about! In your present condition you can’t depend on the biochemical balance of your glandular svstem. It can only be kept balanced artificially, until it gradually adjusts itself to operation without the thymus. In addition, the enormous but balanced overdoses
of other gland extracts we have had to give you must be equalized as they recede to normalcy. You simply
can’t
stop now!”

“I simply
will
stop now,” he said, mimicking her tone. “I took the chance of starting with this treatment, and I’ll take the chance of quitting. Don’t worry; no matter what happens your beloved Mel’s nose is clean, because of that release I signed. I’m not going to sue anybody.”

She looked at him wonderingly. “You’re really trying to be as offensive as you possibly can, aren’t you? I wonder why?”

“It seems the only way for me to put over a point to you,” he said irritably. “If you must know, there’s another reason. The stuff I’m producing now is good, if I can believe what I read in the papers. It has occurred to me that whatever creativeness I have is largely compounded of the very immaturity you are trying to get rid of. Why should I cut off the supply of irrationality that produces a work of art like my musical comedy? Why should I continue a course of treatment that will ultimately lead me to producing nothing creative? I’m putting my art before my course, that’s all.”

“A good pun, Robin,” said Peg stonily, “but a bad time for it. I think we’ll let you stew in your own juice for a while. Watch your diet and your hours, and when you need professional help, get in touch with me and I’ll see what I can do about getting Mel to take you on again.”

“Nice of you. Why bother?”

“Partly sheer stubbornness; you make it so obvious you want nothing of the kind. Partly professional ethics, a thing which I wouldn’t expect a child, however precocious, to understand fully.”

He went slowly past her and opened the door. “Goodbye, Dr. Wenzell.”

“Goodbye, Robin. And
good
luck.”

Later, in her office at the hospital, Peg’s phone rang.

“Yes?”

“Peg! I’ve just received a note, by messenger, from Robin English.”

“Mel! What did he say?”

“He enclosed a check for just twice what I billed him for, and he says that he won’t be back.”

“Mel, is it safe?”

“Of course it’s not safe! The pituitary reactions are absolutely unpredictable—you know that. I can’t prognosticate anything at all without the seventy-two-hour check-ups. He might be all right; I really wouldn’t know. He’s strong and healthy and tremendously resilient. But to stop treatment now is taking unfair advantage of his metabolism. Can’t you do anything about it?”

“Can’t
I
do anything?”

“He’ll listen to you, Peg. Try, won’t you? I … well, in some ways I’m glad to have him off my neck, frankly. It’s been … but anyway, I’ll lose sleep over it, I know I will. Will you see if you can do anything with him?”

A long pause.

“Hello, Peg—are you still there?”

“Yes, Mel … let him go. It’s what he wants.”

“Peg! You … you mean you won’t see him?”

“N-no, I—can’t, Mel, I won’t. Don’t ask me to.”

“I hardly know what to say. Peg, what’s the matter?”

“
Nothing
’s the matter. I won’t see him, that’s all, and if I did it wouldn’t do any good. I don’t care what hap—Oh, Mel, do watch him! Don’t let anything … I mean, he’s
got
to be all right. Read his stuff, Mel. Go see his plays. You’ll be able to f-find out that way.”

“And if I don’t like the looks of what I find out, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Call me up whenever you find out anything, Mel.”

“I will, Peg. I’m—sorry. I didn’t realize that you … I mean, I knew it, but I didn’t know you felt so—”

“Goodbye, Mel.”

She hung up and sat and cried without hiding her face.

Robin’s first novel was published five months later, while his musical,
Too Humorous to Mention
, was eight weeks old and just at the brilliant beginning of its incredible run, while
The Cellophane Chalice
, his little, forgotten book of verse, went into its sixth printing, and while three new songs from
Too Humorous
were changing places
like the shells in the old army game on the Hit Parade in the one-two-three spots. The title of one of them, “Born Tomorrow,” had been bought at an astonishing figure by Hollywood, and royalties were beginning to roll in for Robin’s self-tapping back-out drill bits.

The novel was a strange and compelling volume called
Festoon
. The ravings of the three critics who were fortunate enough to read it in manuscript made the title hit the top of the bestseller lists and stay there like a masthead. Robin English was made an honorary doctor of law by a college in Iowa, a Kentucky Colonel, a member of the Lambs Club, and a technical advisor to the American Society of Basement Inventors. He dazedly declined a projected nomination to the State Senate which was backed by a colossal petition; wrote a careful letter of thanks to the municipality of Enumclaw, Washington, for the baroque golden key to the city it sent him because of the fact that early in his life he had been born there; was photographed for the “Young Men of the Month” page of
Pic
, and bought himself a startlingly functional mansion in Westchester County. He wrote a skillful novella which was sold in Boston and banned in Paris, recorded a collection of
muezzin
calls, won a pie-eating contest at the Bucks County Fair, and made a radio address on the evolution of modern poetry which was called one of the most magnificent compositions in the history of the language. He bought a towboat and had a barge built in the most luxurious pleasure-yacht style and turned them over to the city hospital for pleasure cruises to Coney Island for invalid children. Then he disappeared.