The Innocent Flower Page 12

  Of course, Mitch, by accident, as she’d said, had wiped the other bottle. The importance of fingerprints, he thought, would be apparent to Dinny, to Paul, to Alfie. But would the little ones have even heard of fingerprints? Surely not. Not enough to handle with gloves that guilty bottle. Or would Mitch? On the borderline of grownup knowledge.

  Mary’s children. All hers, as Eve had said of herself. Denis Moriarity had given them up and gone.

  How far, though? Where was he? Mary’s husband, Taffy’s father, Professor Moriarity, the smell in Denmark, the joker in the woodpile, the insect in the ointment, the thorn in Duff’s flesh!

  After lunch, Duff went downtown.

  CHAPTER 11

  But, of course,” said Miss Constance Avery, “what you do is get rid of the imperfect. You have to be absolutely ruthless. You can’t possibly make any progress until you’re convinced of that.”

  She sat gracefully erect in one of the two chairs on Mary’s terrace that had no footrest, so that her narrow left foot in a well-cut brown and white spectator shoe rested flat on the stones and the right ankle lay gracefully across it She wore a pale green linen dress and a short white jacket Around her neck a yellow scarf. was smartly careless.

  “I don’t see how you can do it,” Eve Meredith blurted. “I should think you couldn’t help loving them all.” She had one leg wound around the other until her feet crossed each other pigeon-toed, and she huddled against the arm of her chair as if she were cold, although the late afternoon was balmy with June.

  The doctor, with a footrest, lay and sipped his drink and looked up at the leaves. He seemed to be relaxing.

  Duff stayed where he was a moment, in the garden door from the house, behind them. Mary, he noticed, was drawn a little away from the others, on her knees at the edge of the terrace, her fingers busy among the little plants there. She was looking down.

  “Oh, no,” said Constance brightly, “you soon learn to care most for the perfect puppies. After all, you must remember what you are trying to do. Once you let yourself love them just because they are alive …” She moved her shoulders. “Of course, it does seem cruel and harsh, but don’t you see that it’s really just a way of hurrying along the natural process? Sooner or later, nature eliminates the weak. Or so we hope. Very well, then. If we can understand and encourage the process, we ought to do it Some day,” she said firmly, “we will begin to apply what we have learned about animals to the breeding of humans. And then we shall speed up the progress of the world.”

  “You don’t mean that!” said Eve explosively.

  Mary looked up quickly, saw Duff, smiled and said gaily, “Hello. Come and have a drink.” She waved toward the tray with earth-stained fingers. “Fix Mr. Duff a drink, Norry, please. As usual, I’ve got myself filthy.”

  Duff strolled into the group and took himself a place. The doctor said, “Say when,” and Duff said, “When.” Eve was looking at him with a furrowed brow as if she would like to know what he had been up to. But Miss Avery’s gray gaze passed him over coolly.

  The doctor climbed clumsily back into his chair. Duff settled down like a stretching cat “What doesn’t she mean?” he said lazily, prompting them to continue.

  Mary was disappointed in him. Somehow, he read that in the turning away of her face.

  “I was speaking of my work with dogs,” said Constance, as to a rather dull pupil. “I happen to believe rather thoroughly in the application of the principles of eugenics. I should like to see some of the things we know so well applied to the betterment of the human race.”

  “What race, Miss Avery?”

  “All races,” she snapped. “It’s a great deal more simple than you think. A question of preventing the unfit from reproducing themselves.” She shrugged daintily again, a tiny movement of her linen-covered shoulders.

  “It is simple if you think of humans in the mass,” Duff said.

  “Of course.”

  “But the mass only exists by a great oversimplification. Once you try to saw yourself off a piece of mass with which to, let us say, experiment, you find it dissolves like mist Or like matter, it’s full of holes.”

  Constance bent on him an animated look. “You are sentimental,” she said pityingly. “You’re an individualist.”

  Duff said, “I am an individual. I can’t help it. Neither can you. It’s our human trait and our difference.”

  She said angrily, “You are sentimental. Most people are. But I, myself, do not believe, for instance, that I have the right to mate myself with a blood line that would tend to degenerate the race. I think it is everyone’s moral duty to consider these things.”

  Mary said, “Have another drink, Constance,” rather dryly.

  Duff said gently, “You are too sure of your facts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we do not know enough to guarantee that we could plan our own breeding better than nature does.”

  “Nature,” said Constance scornfully. “I suppose you mean by that falling in love? That sort of thing? Don’t you see it simply isn’t necessary to fall in love with the wrong person?”

  “Dear me,” said Duff.

  “You can’t,” said Constance with a ladylike snarl, “fall in love with people with whom you do not associate.”

  “But if you have, let us say, an emotional accident?” Duff could feel that there was tension on the terrace, that Eve and the doctor and Mary were disturbed, that they wished this argument would not go on. Eve twitched. Mary’s hands flew among the plants with an effect of agitation. The doctor’s glass sloped in his hand, and he cleared his throat twice, as if in warning.

  “Then you must deplore it,” said Constance airily, “and give it up. It is your duty to give it up. Furthermore, we ought to sterilize the insane, the feeble ones, the ones without the moral stamina to mate wisely or not at all Weed them out Get rid of them. It wouldn’t take so many generations,”

  “How do you know?”

  “Why, everybody knows …”

  “Indeed? On what basis would you do the weeding?”

  “It could be done by trained people,” she snapped.

  “Trained by whom?”

  “By those who understand these things better than you seem to.”

  Eve’s hands were hidden in the pockets of her skirt, but the fingers were twisting and her eyes cast dark glances, angry looks. The doctor’s face was flushed. He sat up a little straighten He wanted to stop this and didn’t know how. Mary’s hands were moving more slowly. She tweaked out a tiny weed, delicately, and her fingers moulded and patted the soil. She kept her head down. Constance said, as if this were very handsome of her, “I’m sorry to seem rude, Mr. Duff, but I have no patience with your attitude.”

  Duff said, “I know. You believe in mass slashes, big, broad strokes, let the knife slice where it may. Whereas I believe, alas, in individual justice. Although I do not know, yet, where it can be infallibly found. But I wish it were more firmly our ideal. I wish all our prejudices, which consist of judging people in a mass, could be dissolved in the ideal of judging the individual for what he is, no matter with what handicap or so-called handicap he started.”

  Constance laughed. “It’s rather a large handicap to start with bad blood,” she jeered, “and I don’t think you can call it a prejudice to wish to have nothing to do with such people.”

  “You must make your individual choice,” Duff told her. “But I don’t give you the right to make mine for me. I suspect you would breed out some things I, on the contrary, should value and wish to develop. I simply don’t think”—he smiled suddenly, softening his words—”that you know enough.”

  Constance’s lips closed in a hard line. Eve wiggled out of her chair. “Excuse me,” she said hoarsely, “but I’ve got to go.”

  “Good-by, Eve.” The doctor caught her hand as she was about to brush him by. She pulled it away. Her somber eyes seemed to brood on his face a moment. Then her voice went into its high gear. “Good-by, al
l,” she said shrilly. “Thanks so much, Mary. I’ll see you all again. Good-by.”

  Constance said, breaking the silence Eve left behind her, “Wasn’t that rather rude?”

  Mary got up from her knees and went quietly, without saying anything, to the house door and vanished.

  The doctor looked very much distressed. He turned his eyeglasses toward Constance, on whose face the eyebrows were arched in pretty amazement “What on earth …?” she said.

  “You dropped a brick,” he told her, quite shortly. I’m afraid I ought to have kicked you in the ankle.”

  “Well … really!” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Duff said warmly.

  “But it was simply a discussion,” Constance said, “If people can’t understand that things ae being said quite objectively …”

  “It isn’t very pleasant …” Dr. Christenson stopped himself and got up. “Shall we run along, darling?”

  Constance looked a little bewildered, but she got up, too.

  “Mr. Duff,”—the doctor turned—”I meant to ask you before this. Look here, do you plan to stay over tonight again?” Duff let polite surprise show on his face. “I thought perhaps … There’s a room at my house and you are very welcome to it.”

  Duff’s eyes slid to Constance’s face. It was looking rather smug now.

  “I don’t know that I had decided,” he drawled. “I’ve been busy. That’s very kind of you, sir.”

  “Then you will come?” The doctor sighed with relief and looked at Constance, too.

  That one stood very straight and slender, her white coat jutting out smartly, her rosy fingers busy with the inevitable gloves.

  “May I let you know?” Duff said. “It may be that I will be obliged to go into town. I’m not sure.”

  “Of course. Any time.” The doctor began to shoulder Constance along.

  Duff said smoothly, although he wanted to jab, “By the way, Miss Avery, you do use nicotine in connection with your chickens … do you not?”

  She tilted her head. The hands stopped working on the gloves and froze in a position of attention. “Why, yes,” she said.

  “Then you have it on hand, of course.”

  “Usually,” she admitted. “But as a matter of fact”—her words began to patter out in a “quick rippling—”I didn’t happen to have any, did I, Norris? I must remember …”

  “You didn’t happen to have any, when?” purred Duff.

  “Yesterday,” she said. “That is to say, Saturday. Over the week end.” She smoothed the thumb of her glove. “I used all I had,” she added serenely. The butter-colored head tilted again. “Did you want some, Mr. Duff? For what purpose?”

  “That’s what Brownie died of,” growled the doctor. His eyes shot lightning.

  “Oh?” said Constance. “Did she really?”

  Mary met them in the hall and said good-by. Duff could hear, from where he remained, the cadences of leave-taking. He took a turn or two across the flagstones, floor. pacing in the best tradition. He bit his thumb. He went indoors after they had gone.

  Mary made an effort to smile at him. “Eve’s asked them to tea tomorrow,” she murmured absent-mindedly. “I wonder if she’ll go.”

  “Miss Avery?”

  “Our Miss Avery!” said Mary contemptuously. Then her blue eyes clouded with anger, met his. “She annoyed me.”

  “I should think she would annoy nearly every one,” Duff said mildly, hiding his panic, hiding his fear. “Do you know anything,” he went on, “about this little plan for me? I understand I am invited to the doctor’s.”

  Mary didn’t smile. “You know you could stay here for all of me,” she said soberly. “It was Constance’s idea. I don’t see why …”

  “Propriety?”

  “Of course.” Mary’s breathing was angry now. “I’d just as lief defy her and her propriety.”

  “But I think we won’t defy her,” Duff said. He wanted to add, “Don’t let me do you any more harm!” He added instead, clutching at any excuse to give to Mary, “There’s a chap staying with the doctor. I—er—I’d like to see a little more of him.”

  “Mr. O’Leary?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Why, I’ve seen him,” she said, with an odd little turn to her voice. Curiosity, perhaps. “But you will stay for dinner?” she added warmly.

  “I’d like to.”

  “Good. It’ll be another hour.” She fluttered toward the kitchen.

  “I’ll go talk to Taffy, if I may,” he said, smiling his very best, keeping the panic down.

  So he went upstairs, alone, and found Taffy sitting in a broth of toys that boiled and bubbled over the bed and onto the floor on all sides. She didn’t look sick at all. She was coloring a picture. Her little fingers worked precisely. She held her tongue at the corner of her pretty mouth. She was purpling a cow.

  Duff said he’d never seen a purple cow.

  Taffy pointed with her crayon. “Well,” she said. Her terminal 1’s were all 0’s. “There’s one!” She gave out two notes of laughter. “Wouldn’t it be silly if the milk was purple?”

  “Have you got a chocolate-colored crayon?”

  Taffy’s face lit with delight.

  Oh, Lord, none of them were stupid! These strange, big and little people. These new mixtures, reshuffled chromosomes or whatever, these individuals, different from all others.

  On whose toes, cried Duff’s fear to his listening anxiety, on whose toes fell the brick that Constance dropped? On Mary’s? If so, then these children, who were only half Mary’s, might have in their heritage what Constance called bad blood.

  Duff’s spirit was sick. Was this why Mary worried so? Had these six lovely children a doubt behind them, a flaw, something possibly wrong, something to be watched for, something that might come out, a reason why she couldn’t prophesy? Could Taffy, who looked perfect, with her clear intelligence in her beautiful little body, carry, nevertheless, the seeds of madness or the seeds of crime?

  Duff felt angry. It could not be so. And yet, what if it were so? He felt he would rather believe MacDougal Duff was mad.

  Taffy said, “Davey’s getting so he doesn’t go outside the lines, either. He’s getting good. See what he did?”

  Duff saw and admired. Was it a new coloring book?

  “Pretty new,” Taffy told him. “Brownie brang it to me.” She looked up, a shrewd, swift look. “Brownie died, didn’t she?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I thought you had to be a hundred,” said Taffy, back at work.

  Duff’s heart lightened. “Did you, Taffy? No, people sometimes don’t wait that long to die.”

  “That’s what Mommy said. Mommy said, and sometimes they’re more than a hundred. Are you a hundred?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m seven. Mommy’s thirty-seven.”

  Duff swallowed. He could say now, if he could, “Taffy, did you put anything in a wine bottle yesterday? Before you got sick? Remember?” But the trouble was that he couldn’t. He could not ask her. He told himself, hastily, that he, must not put such a nasty thought into her little mind, lest she be innocent He told himself she’d had a fever. She wouldn’t remember. Would never remember. He looked down at the pretty little paw guiding the crayon so carefully within the lines, and he groaned.

  “Have you got a headache?” said Taffy.

  “Maybe a little one.” He smiled at her. He put a finger on her smooth cheek, as one would pet a kitten. “When’s your birthday?” said MacDougal Duff with stiff, cowardly lips.

  Taffy immediately invited him to her birthday. It was, she explained, customary to bring a present. “But you don’t haf to.” Then she invited him to read her a story.

  So Duff sat back against the headboard and read aloud the trials and tribulations and triumphs of one Cinderella, with the little creature beside him listening, close against him, just as if the plot hadn’t been much fresher to him than it was to her.

  Mary found t
hem, like that, when she brought a tray for Taffy and told Duff his dinner was ready.

  Duff went downstairs beside her, walking on clouds with a pink sunset in his head. He did not feel like deducing anything.

  CHAPTER 12

  Dr. Norris Christenson lived in a small detached house, one wing of which was his office. The room that served him for both living and dining quarters was by no means as cool and airy as Mary’s house, this warm June evening. Duff came in at about nine o’clock. Mr. Oliver O’Leary was ensconced there, in a leather chair beside the window. He was reading a large and unfrivolous-looking book and wore horn-rimmed glasses whch he seemed to need for this purpose. From time to time he shifted on the leather, with the faintest of ripping sounds, as if he were sticking to it and moved to unstick himself.

  The doctor greeted Duff with great cordiality and offered him cool alcoholic refreshment. He acted like a man who lived well in a comfortable, not elegant, middle-class kind of way. His house had no decorative coherence. It was a bachelor’s house, and basically conventional. The doctor settled with his guest across the room from O’Leary, who paid them no mind, but went on reading his book.

  The doctor searched Duff’s long, melancholy face and began to speak lightly of the weather and one thing and another of equal unimportance.

  Duff was sunk. Sunk in the chair, sunk in thought, sunk in spirits. The dread was back and the worry, and the fear that he was doing wrong. “Your county medical examiner is a jolly fellow,” he said at last.

  Dr. Christenson smiled and fingered his mustache.

  “Very jolly,” Duff repeated, “and gay, in that blunt manly manner. Oh, I talked with him this afternoon.”

  “Oh, you did?”

  “He as much as told me, in his merry way,”—Duff was seldom sarcastic; this was a bad sign—”that if I hadn’t come around and poked my nose into this business … my unfortunately too celebrated nose … he would have blithely assumed accidental death. He says he’s afraid … afraid,” Duff repeated with bitterness, “that he would have thought it absurd to suppose Mrs. Moriarity or any of her family or friends, either, would have gone to work and poisoned a guest so blatantly. Blatantly, he says.”