"How did he ever get hold of it?" the nurse frowned.
Paul told her. As Mr. Gibson listened, he began to know that Paul Townsend was projecting himself somehow and being quite skillfully charming to this most attractive little person. Mr. Gibson found himself curiously affronted.
He looked at Rosemary, dear Rosemary, who sat still between them with her hands clenched . . . whose resolution was their strength, who had begun this fight and fired them all from her own spirit and collected these valiant lieutenants.
He said, "What a fighter you are, Rosemary!"
"I am a rabbit," she said bitterly. "I was always a rabbit. I should have begun to fight long, long ago."
Paul turned and covered her tense hands with one of his. "Now, now, Rosie ... try to take it easy. You'll make yourself sick. Worry doesn't tiflp any, does it, Virginia?"
The nurse did not answer. The bus driver said, "She's getting a lot of mileage out of her worry. Hey, Rosemary?''
"Yes, thank you," said Rosemary, rather forlornly, collapsing a little from her rigidity. Paul took his hand away. "I'm worrying now," she said, "trying to imagine a wealthy
woman picking up a strange package on a public bus. I don't suppose she would."
"She might," said the nurse brightly. "By mistake, you see? Suppose she gathered it up with the other packages she was carrying. I didn't see her get off. I got off first. But who can say? And suppose she had things to eat in her own packages? She might dump them all in the kitchen. And she surely has servants. Her cook, for instance, wouldn't know. Her cook might think Mrs. Boat-right had meant to bring home some olive oil."
"A little bottle?" said Rosemary pathetically. "A very small quantity? What time is it?"
"Three thirty-seven," Paul told her.
"It's still early, anyhow," said Rosemary, with a desperate smile.
But Mr. Gibson thought, It's late. He thought of time gone by. Time enough for someone to have died already and very mysteriously, too. So that the news of the result might not yet have caught up with the cause. This fight might already have been lost, for all they knew.
"The Boatright kids are in their teens," said the nurse thoughtfully. "They certainly wouldn't be fed their supper this early."
"Olive oil?" said Rosemary. "What would a cook do with it?"
The nurse said, "Salad? Oh ... to moisten a sandwich filling . . . possibly for a snack . . ."
"Don't say that!" said Paul.
The nurse said, "I guess I'm helping her worry."
". . . Resembles thought," muttered the bus driver.
But Mr. Gibson was appalled. A child! Oh, if a child were to get the poison! He said aloud, "All of you ought to leave me. You are very good to trouble yourselves—"
"No trouble," said Virginia. Mr. Gibson discovered that he believed her. "I believe you," he said to her in surprise and she smiled.
"Don't worry," Paul began.
"Stop saying that," said Rosemary quietly. "It doesn't help, Paul."
"I told you, Rosie," he said rather crossly, "you ought to have talked to him, laid things on the line . . ."
"You did. You told me. You were right," said Rosemary, looking straight ahead. "Yes, Paul." Her hands twitched.
"You musta seen something brewing, Rosemary," the bus driver said sympathetically, not quite understanding. He hadn't the background. "A man doesn't decide in a day."
(But I did, mused Mr. Gibson, wonderingly. In a night. I seemed to.)
"Have you been ill, Mr. Gibson?" the nurse asked, "or taking drugs for pain? I see you limping."
Mr. Gibson was bewildered. (His heart hurt. He wasn't dead at all.) "A broken bone or two," he murmured. "Just an accident." Rosemary turned her face to look at his. He looked away.
"I only wondered," said Virginia gently. "There are illnesses that can be very depressing. And some drugs, too."
Mr. Gibson, gazing at a curb whizzing by, thought Doom, yes. Here comes doom, again.
"I was depressed," he said without spirit. "That's a name for it."
"If you had only seen a doctor," the nurse scolded him delicately, with her soft regret. "So often a doctor can help these depressed feelings."
"By a little tinkering in the machinery?" said Mr. Gibson rather bitterly.
"They do know how to help sometimes," the nurse said, rather mechanically. She seemed to be tasting, perhaps diagnosing this answer.
"You go for this psychosomatic stuff?" inquired the bus driver abruptly.
"Don't you?" she said.
"Long ago," he declaimed, "long ago I threw a whole bunch of arbitrary distinctions outa my head. Either—or. Body or mind. Matter or spirit. Hah! Now it turns out matter is less solid than spirit, far as I can figure what they're talking. Nothing's any more un-gross than the human body. Or a chair, either. Zillions of cells—atoms and subdivisions of same—whizzing around, and . . . they made outa what? Waves. Rhythms. Time itself, for all we know. Caution to the jaybirds," he concluded.
Virginia laughed out loud, delightedly.
But Mr. Gibson was on his way down for the second time. Doom, he said to himself, and aloud, "I suppose I was ill. At least that's a name for what I was."
''NowI' said Virginia. "Look, we are so ignorant."
"Yes, we are ignorantI' said Rosemary gladly.
"Anybody who knows anything at all about medical science—or any other, I guess—only begins to know how ignorant we are," said Virginia. She looked brightly back at Mr. Gibson. She expected him to be glad.
"Where there's life there's hope, you mean?" said PauL He seemed to think he was joining in.
The nurse frowned. Her small chin was almost resting upon the back of the front seat as she sat twisted around to talk to them. "I meant we know enough to know there's an awful lot more to be found out. We do know just a little bit about how to find it. Don't you see, Mr. Gibson? There are people looking for ways to help all the time and they've found some. I've seen. Nobody knows what they might find out by tomorrow morning. You should have asked for help," she chided.
"So should I," said Rosemary not very loudly.
Mr. Gibson didn't reply. He was busy perceiving something odd. It was hard to fit into the structure of doom. That was what was odd about it. Say the individual is depressed because of his internal chemistry, call it his machinery. Even so. He is not quite doomed . . . not if his fellow men, men who hold their minds open because they humbly know their ignorance . . . not if these have discovered even some helpful things to do for him. And this was strange, a strange weakness—wasn't it?—in the huge hard jaws of doom.
"That's funny," he said aloud.
Nobody asked him what he meant and he did not tell. The car slid up a tree-lined street and all the passengers were silent for a block.
Then Paul fidgeted. "I should have called home. I wonder if Jeanie got back . . . and Mama's O.K."
"It must be nearly four o'clock," said Rosemary. "Ethel will be home." She lifted her head; it was almost as if she tossed it haughtily.
Ethel! Gibson felt shocked. What would Ethel say? He couldn't even imagine. Absolutely nothing that had happened since eleven o'clock this morning had made Ethel's kind of sense.
"I don't think he was ill," the bus driver blurted. '7 think he was shook."
Virginia tilted her head to look at him respectfully.
"To his foundations," said the bus driver.
"But everybody loved him," said Rosemary, and raised her clenched hands like a desperate prayer.
"Why sure, everybody thought a hell of a lot of Gibson," said Paul indignantly, as if Mr. Gibson had offended un-pardonably.
"Everybody?" said the bus driver nmiinatively. "Now, let's not promise candy."
"Candy?" said the nurse with curiosity.
"He had something on his mind; it wasn't hardly just missing the brotherly love of his fellow man," said Lee. "Hey? And look, honeybunch," he said to his blonde, "we are now on Hathaway Drive, so where's this mansion?"