But it was only a truck, and he got out of its way in time to avoid being run over.
LUNCH. And Charlie was definitely getting into a state of jitters. His hand shook so that he could scarcely pick up his coffee without slopping it over the edge of the cup.
Because a horrible thought was dawning in his mind. If something was wrong with him, was it fair to Jane Pemberton for him to go ahead and marry her? Is it fair to saddle the girl one loves with a husband who might go to the icebox to get a bottle of milk and find-God knows what?
And he was deeply, madly in love with Jane.
So he sat there, an unbitten sandwich on the plate before him, and alternated between hope and despair as he tried to make sense out of the three things that had happened to him within the past week.
Hallucination?
But the attendant, too, had seen the duck!
How comforting it had been—it seemed to him now—that, after seeing the angelic angleworm, he had been able to tell himself it had been an hallucination. Only an hallucination.
But wait. Maybe—
Could not the museum attendant, too, have been part of the same hallucination as the duck? Granted that he, Charlie, could have seen a duck that wasn’t there, couldn’t he also have included in the same category a museum attendant who professed to see the duck? Why not? A duck and an attendant who sees it—the combination could he as illusory as the duck alone.
And Charlie felt so encouraged that he took a bite out of his sandwich.
But the burn? Whose hallucination was that? Or was there some sort of a natural physical ailment that could produce a sudden skin condition approximating mild sunburn? But, if there were such a thing, then evidently Doc Palmer didn’t know about it.
Suddenly Charlie caught a glimpse of the clock on the wall, and it was one o’clock, and he almost strangled on that bite of sandwich when he realized that he was over half an hour late, and must have been sitting in the restaurant almost an hour.
He got up and ran back to the office.
But all was well; Old Man Hapworth wasn’t there. And the copy for the rush circular was late and got there just as Charlie arrived.
He said “Whew!” at the narrowness of his escape, and concentrated hard on getting that circular through the plant. He rushed it to the Linotypes and read proof on it himself, then watched make-up over the compositor’s shoulder. He knew he was making a nuisance of himself, but it killed the afternoon.
And he thought, “Only one more day to work after today, and then my vacation, and on Wednesday-” Wedding on Wednesday.
But—
If—
The Pest came out of the proofroom in a green smock and looked at him. “Charlie,” she said, “you look like something no self-respecting cat would drag in. Say… what’s wrong with you? Really?”
“Ph…nothing. Say, Paula, will you tell Jane when you get home that I may be a bit late this evening? I got to stick here till these handbills are off the press.”
“Sure, Charlie. But tell me-“
“Nix. Run along, will you? I’m busy.”
She shrugged her shoulders, and went back into the proofroom.
The machinist tapped Charlie’s shoulder. “Say, we got that new Linotype set up. Want to take a look?”
Charlie nodded and followed. He looked over the installation, and then slid into the operator’s chair in front of the machine. “How does she run?”
“Sweet. Those Blue Streak models are honeys. Try it.”
Charlie let his fingers play over the keys, setting words without paying any attention to what they were. He sent in three lines to cast, then picked the slugs out of the stick. And found that he had set: “For men have died and worms have eaten them and ascendeth unto Heaven where it sitteth upon the right hand-“
“Gaw!” said Charlie. And that reminded him of—
JANE NOTICED that there was something wrong. She couldn’t have helped noticing. But instead of asking questions, she was unusually nice to him that evening.
And Charlie, who had gone to see her with the resolution to tell her the whole story, found himself weakening. As men always weaken when they are with the women they love and the parlor lamp is turned low.
But she did ask: “Charles-you do want to marry me, don’t y? I mean, if there’s any doubt in your mind and that’s what has been worrying you, we can postpone the wedding till you’re sure whether you love me enough-“
“Love you?” Charlie was aghast. “Why-“
And he proved it pretty satisfactorily.
So satisfactorily, in fact, that he completely forgot his original intention to suggest that very postponement. But never for the reason she suggested. With his arms around Jane-well, the poor chap was only human.
A man in love is a drunken man, and you can’t exactly blame a drunkard for what he does under the influence of alcohol. You can blame him, of course, for getting drunk in the first place; but you can’t put even that much blame on a man in love. In all probability, he fell through no fault of his own. In all probability his original intentions were strictly dishonorable; then, when those intentions met resistance, the subtle chemistry of sublimation converted them into the stuff that stars are made of.
Probably that was why he didn’t go to see an alienist the next day. He was a bit afraid of what an alienist might tell him. He weakened and decided to wait and see if anything else happened.
Maybe nothing else would happen.
There was a comforting popular superstition that things went in groups of three, and three things had happened already.
Sure, that was it. From now on, he’d be all right. After all, there wasn’t anything basically wrong; there couldn’t be. He was in good health. Aside from Tuesday, he hadn’t missed a day’s work at the print shop in two years.
And-well, by now it was Friday noon and nothing had happened for a full twenty-four hours, and nothing was going to happen again.
It didn’t, Friday, but he read something that jolted him out of his precarious complacency.
A newspaper account.
He sat down in the restaurant at a table at which a previous diner had left a morning paper. Charlie read it while he was waiting for his order to be taken. He finished scanning the front page before the waitress came, and the comic section while he was eating his soup, and then turned idly to the local page.
GUARD AT MUSEUM IS SUSPENDED
Curator Orders Investigation
And the cold spot in his stomach got larger and colder as he read, for there it was in black and white.
The wild duck had really been in the showcase. No one could figure out how it had been put there. They’d had to take the showcase apart to get it out, and the showcase showed no indication of having been tampered with. It had been puttied up air-tight to keep out dust, and the putty had not been damaged.
A guard, for reasons not clearly given in the article, had been given a three-day suspension. One gathered from the wording of the story that the curator of the museum had felt the necessity of doing something about the matter.
Nothing of value was missing from the case. One Chinese coin with a hole in the middle, a haikwan tad, made of silver, had not been findable after the affair; but it wasn’t worth much. There was some doubt as to whether it had been stolen by one of the workmen who had disassembled the showcase or whether it had been accidentally thrown out with the debris of old putty.