"No, just a scientific observation."
"Well, it don't make you any Einstein."
"You mean because it is not true that we have a lot in common or because it is so obviously true that doesn't take Einstein's brain to figure it out?"
"I mean I don't give a damn," she said sourly. And added, "And I don't give a damn about having you in here either."
I stayed in the chair and studied her. "It's Saturday night," I said. "Why aren't you out painting the town?"
"To hell with this town." She fished a cigarette out of the desk and lighted it. The flare of the match jerked the face out of the shadow. She whipped the match flame out with a snapping motion of her arm, then spewed the first gulp of smoke out over the full, curled-down lower lip. That done, she looked at me, and said, "And to hell with you." She swept her damning gaze around the office as though it were full of forms and faces, and spewed the gray smoke out of her lungs and said, "And to hell with all of them. To hell with this place."
Her eyes came back to rest on me, and she said, "I'm going to get out of here."
"Here?" I questioned "This whole place," she affirmed, and swung her arm wide with the cigarette tip glowing with the swiftness of the motion, "this place, this town."
"Stick around and you'll get rich," I said.
"I could have been rich a long time back," she said, "paddling in this muck. If I had wanted to."
She could have, all right. But she hadn't. At least as far as I knew.
"Yeah–" she jabbed out the cigarette in the tray on the desk–"I'm getting out of here." She lifted her eyes to mine, as though daring me to say something.
I didn't say anything, but I shook my head.
"You think I won't?" she demanded.
"I think you won't."
"I'll show you, damn you."
"No," I said, and shook my head again, "you won't. You've got a talent for this, just like a fish for swimming. And you can't expect a fish not to swim."
She started to say something, but didn't. We sat there in the dimness for a couple of minutes. "Stop staring at me," he ordered. Then, "Didn't I tell you to get out of here? Why don't you get out and go home?"
"I'm waiting for the Boss," I said matter-of-factly, "he's–" Then I remembered. "Didn't you hear what happened?"
"What?"
"Tom Stark."
"Somebody ought to kick his teeth down his throat."
"Somebody did," I said.
"They ought to done it long back."
"Well, they did a pretty good job this afternoon. The last I heard he was unconscious. They called the Boss to the field house."
"How bad was it?" she asked. "Was it bad?" She leaned forward at me.
"He was unconscious. That's all I know. I reckon they took him to the hospital."
"Didn't they say how bad? Didn't they tell the Boss?" she demanded, leaning forward.
"What the hell's it to you? You said somebody ought to kick his teeth down his throat, and now they did it you act like you loved him."
"Hah," she said, "that's a laugh."
I looked at my watch. "The Boss is late. I reckon he must be at the hospital with the triple threat."
She was silent for a moment, looking down at the desk top again and gnawing the lip. Then, all at once, she got up, went across to the rack, put her coat on and jerked on her hat, and went out to the door. I swung my head around to watch her. At the door she hesitated, throwing the latch, and said, "I'm leaving, and I want to lock up. I don't see why you can't sit in your own office, anyway."
I got up and went out into the reception room. She slammed her door, and without a word to me moved, pretty fast, across the place and out into the corridor. I stood there and listened to the rapid, diminishing staccato of her heels on the marble of the corridor..
When it had died away, I went into my own office and sat down by the window and looked down at the river mist which was fingering in over the roofs.
I wasn't, however, looking out over the mist-veiled, romantic, crepuscular city, but was bent over my nice, tidy, comforting tax figures, under a green-shaded light, when the telephone rang. It was Sadie. She said that she was at the University hospital, and that Tom Stark was still unconscious. The Boss was there but she hadn't seen him. But she understood he had asked for me.
So Sadie had gone over there. To lurk in the antiseptic shadows.
I left the tidy, comforting tax figures and went out. I had a sandwich at a hamburger stand and a cup of coffee and drove to the hospital. I found the Boss alone in a waiting room. He was looking a little grim. I asked how tom was, and learned that he was then in the X-ray room and that they didn't know much. Dr. Stanton was on the case, and some other specialist was flying in by special plane from Baltimore for a consultation.
Then he said, "I want you to go out and get Lucy. She ought to be here. Out there in the country I guess she hasn't seen the paper yet."
I said I would go, and started out the door.
"Jack," he called, and I turned. "Sort of break it to her easy," he said. "you know–sort of build her up for it."
I said I would, and left. It sounded pretty bad if Lucy had to have all that build-up. And as I drove along the highway, against the lights of the Saturday-night incoming traffic, I thought how much fun it was going to be to build Lucy up for the news. And I thought the same thing as I walked up the anachronistic patch of concrete walk toward the dimly lighted white house. Then as I stood in the parlor surrounded by the walnut and red plush and the cards for the stereoscope and the malarial crayon portrait on the easel, and built Lucy up for the news, it was definitely not fun.
But she took it. It hit her where she lived, but she took it. "Oh, God," she said, not loud, "oh, God," but the remark was not addressed to me. I presumed that she was praying, for she had gone to the little Baptist college way back in the red clay where they had been long on praying, and maybe the habit had stuck.
And it wasn't fun, either, when I led her into the waiting room where the Boss was. He turned his face heavily to her from the midst of the floral design on the chintz-covered, overstuffed, high-backed chair in which he sat, and looked at her as a stranger. She stood in the middle of the floor, not going toward him, and asked, "How is he?"
At her question the light flared up in the Boss's eyes, and he rose violently from the chair. "Look here," he said, "he's all right–he's going to be all right. You understand that!"
"How is he? She repeated.
"I told you–I told you he's going to be all right," he said with a grating voice.
"You say it," she said, "but what do the doctors say?"
The blood apoplectically flushed his face and I heard the snatch of his breathing before he said, "You wanted it this way. You said you did. You said you had rather see him dead at your feet. You wanted it this way. But–" and he stepped toward her–"he'll fool you. He's all right. Do you hear? He will be all right."
"God grant it," she said quietly.
"Grant it, grant it!" he burst out. "He's all right, right now. That boy is tough, he can take it."
She made no answer to that, but stood and looked at him while the blood subsided in his face and his frame seemed to sag with the weight of the flesh on it. The she asked, "Can I see him?"
Before answering, the Boss stepped back to the chair and sank into it. Then he looked at me. "Take her down to Room 305," he directed. He spoke dully, and apparently without interest now, as though in a railway waiting room answering foolish questions about the schedule for some traveler.
So I took her down to Room 305, where the body lay like a log under the white sheet and the breath labored through the gaping mouth. At first, she did not approach the bed. She stood just inside the door, looking across at it. I thought she was going to keel over, and put my arm out to prop her, but she stayed on her legs. Then she moved to the bed and reached down with a timid motion to touch the body there. She laid her hand on the right leg, just above the ankle, and let it test there as though she could draw, or communicate, some force by the contact. Meanwhile, the nurse, who stood on the other side of the bed, leaned down to wipe from the brow of the patient the drops of moisture which gathered there. Lucy Stark took a step or two up the bed, and, looking at the nurse, reached out her hand. The nurse put the cloth into it, and Lucy finished the job of wiping the brow and temples. Then she handed the cloth back to the nurse. "Thank you," she whispered. The nurse gave a sort smile of professional understanding out of her plain, good, anonymous, middle-aged face, like a light flicked on momentarily in a comfortable, shabby living room.