His sharp black glance darted around my office, then back into the corridor. His hairy nostrils sniffed the air as if he suspected escaping gas.
“Is somebody following you?” I said.
“I have no reason to think so.”
I had my coat off and my shirt unbuttoned. It was a hot afternoon at the start of the smog season. My visitor looked at me in a certain way that reminded me of schoolteachers. “Might you be Archer?”
“It’s a reasonable conclusion. Name’s on the door.”
“I can read, thank you.”
“Congratulations, but this is no talent agency.”
He stiffened, clutching his blue chin with a seal-ringed hand, and gave me a long, sad, hostile stare. Then he shrugged awkwardly, as though there was no help for it.
“Come in if you like,” I said. “Close it behind you. Don’t mind me, I get snappy in the heat.”
He shut the door violently, almost hard enough to crack the expensive one-way glass panel. He jumped at the noise it made, and apologized.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been under quite a strain.”
“You’re in trouble?”
“Not I. My sister…” He gave me one of his long looks. I assumed an air of bored discretion garnished with a sprig of innocence.
“Your sister,” I reminded him after a while. “Did she do something, or get something done to her?”
“Both, I’m afraid.” His teeth showed in a tortured little smile which drew down the corners of his mouth. “She and I maintain a school for girls in – in the vicinity of Chicago. I can’t emphasize too much the importance of keeping this matter profoundly secret.”
“You’re doing your part. Sit down, Mr.–”
He took a pinseal wallet out of his inside breast pocket, handling it with a kind of reverence, and produced a card. He hesitated with the card in his hand.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Don’t tell me. Does your name begin with a consonant or a vowel?”
He sat down with great caution, after inspecting the chair for concealed electrodes, and made me the gift of his card. It was engraved: “J. Reginald Harlan, M.A. The Harlan School.”
I read it out loud. He winced.
“All right, Mr. Harlan. Your sister’s in some kind of a jam. You run a girls’ school–”
“She’s headmistress. I’m registrar and bursar.”
“–which makes you vulnerable to scandal. Is it sexual trouble she’s in?”
He crossed his legs, and clasped his sharp knee with both hands. “Now how could you possibly know that?”
“Some of my best friends are sisters. I take it she’s younger than you.”
“A few years my junior, yes, but Maude’s no youngster. She’s a mature woman, at least I’d always supposed that she was mature. It’s her age, her age and position, that make this whole affair so incredible. For a woman of Maude’s social and professional standing, with a hundred virginal minds in her charge, suddenly to go mad over a man! Can you understand such behavior?”
“Yes. I’ve seen enough of it.”
“I can’t.” But a faint, attractive doubt softened his eyes for a moment. Perhaps he was wondering when some long overdue lightning might blast and illuminate him. “I’d always supposed that the teens were the dangerous age. Perhaps after all it’s the thirties.” One hand crawled up his chest like a pallid crab and fondled the purple tie.
“It depends on the person,” I said, “and the circumstances.”
“I suppose so.” He inverted the hat in his lap and gazed down into it. “Now that I come to think of it, Mother’s breakdown occurred when she was in her thirties. I wonder, could Maude be simply reverting to type, impelled by something unstable in her genes?”
“Did Mother have blue genes?”
Harlan smiled his tortured smile. “Indeed she did. You put it very aptly. But we won’t go into the case of Mother. It’s my sister I’m concerned with.”
“What did she do? Elope?”
“Yes, in the most scandalous and disrupting way, with a man she scarcely knew, a dreadful sort of man.”
“Tell me about him.”
He looked down into his hat again, as if its invisible contents fascinated and horrified him. “There’s very little to tell. I don’t even know his name. I saw him only once, last Friday – a week ago tomorrow. He drove up to the school in a battered old car, right in the midst of our Commencement exercises. Maude didn’t even introduce him to me. She introduced him to no one, and if you saw him you would understand why. He was an obvious roughneck, a big hairy brute of a fellow with a red beard, in filthy old slacks and a beret and a turtleneck sweater. She walked up to him in front of all the parents and took his arm and strolled away with him under the elms, completely hypnotized.”
“You mean she never came back?”
“Oh, she came back that night for a time, long enough to pack. I was out myself – I had a number of social duties to perform, Commencement night. When I got in, she was gone. She left me a brief note, and that was all.”
“You have it with you?”
His hand went into his breast pocket and tossed a sheet of folded stationery onto the desk. Its copybook handwriting said:
“Dear Reginald:
“I am going to be married. My total despair of making you understand forces me to leave as I am leaving. Do not worry about me, and above all do not try to interfere. If this seems cruel, bear in mind that I am fighting for life itself. My husband-to-be is a great and warm personality who has suffered in his time as I have suffered. He is waiting outside for me now.
“Be assured, dear Reginald, that a part of my affection will remain with you and the school. But I shall never return to either.
“Your sister.”
I pushed the note across the desk to Harlan. “Were you and your sister on good terms?”
“I’d always thought so. We had our little differences over the years, in carrying on Father’s work and interpreting the tradition of the School. But there was a deep mutual respect between Maude and me. You can see it in the note.”
“Yes.” I could see other things there, too. “What’s the suffering she refers to?”
“I have no idea.” He gave a cruel yank to the purple tie. “We’ve had a good life together, Maude and I, a rich life full of service to girlhood and young womanhood. We’ve been prosperous and happy. To have her turn on me like this – out of a clear sky! Suddenly, after eleven years of devotion, the School meant nothing to her. I meant nothing to her. Father’s memory meant nothing. I tell you, that brute has bewitched her. Her entire system of values has been subverted.”
“Maybe she’s just fallen in love. The older they are when it happens, the harder it hits them. Hell, maybe he’s even lovable.”
Harlan sniffed. “He’s a lewd rascal. I know a lewd rascal when I see one. He’s a womanizer and a drinker and probably worse.”
I glanced at my liquor cabinet. It was closed and innocent-looking. “Aren’t you a little prejudiced?”
“I know whereof I speak. The man’s a ruffian. Maude is a woman of sensibility who requires the gentlest conditions of life. He’ll pulverize her spirit, brutalize her body, waste her money. It’s Mother’s situation all over again, only worse, much worse. Maude is infinitely more vulnerable than Mother ever was.”
“What happened to your mother?”
“She divorced Father and ran away with a man, an art teacher at the School. He led her a merry life, I assure you, until he died of drink.” This seemed to give Harlan a certain satisfaction. “Mother is living in Los Angeles now. I haven’t seen her for nearly thirty years, but Maude came out to visit her during the Easter recesses. Against my expressed wishes, I may add.”