Starr found himself up against as complete a frustration here, as earlier in his office. The ripe old wisdom of Madam Tuffman recurred to him, and he thought how clearly she had cut to the matter’s root when she had remarked that Bertha’s love for Ernest had surpassed all affectionate or mere biological bounds, and that it was swamped in devotional seas of the more notably classical sorts.
He could understand this very well, under a fabled twist of a mouse being courted and wedded by a handsome lion: a state of affairs that was bound to upset not only the mouse’s head but her entire emotional fabric too. She would try every song in her meager repertory to make last, for a little longer, that strange initial enchantment, while living in the most desperate sort of fear that her melodies would be recognized in their true categories as mouselike squeaks.
He said absently: “It is not always good to love so much.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know you don’t. You can’t help it.”
“I’ll never try to hold him.”
“You have a good deal of wisdom, Mrs. Tuffman.”
“And you have a lot of understanding, Doctor. I couldn’t be more commonplace, for anyone like Ernest, and still he chose me. He chose me literally, Doctor, from all the world.” She thought this over broodingly for a moment, and then she said: “I suppose the Islands helped.”
“The general setting? Romance? No, I think he must have known plenty of that. I imagine he’s pretty well dulled to pale moons and the scents of strange flowers.”
She said fiercely: “Sometimes I lie up there in that travesty and wonder.”
“Travesty?”
“Our room. Its walls mock me. Every vivid painted leaf on them seems to cry out: ‘But for me, but for me, you never would have got him.’ There are such things as obsessions, Doctor?”
“Plenty of them. They’re easily got rid of.”
“I’ve torn at it. Torn at that wallpaper with my fingernails — and then found myself doing it, and stopped doing it!”
He said to her earnestly: “Will you grant me permission to give you a more complete examination than I did today? I sha’n’t suggest hospitalization again, believe me. Just in my office.”
Bertha’s voice, after a frightened second, was explosive in its sharpness: “No.”
It was impossible to efface her from his thoughts. Starr drove more slowly, then more slowly still. He felt compelled to return to her and have it out. To use force, if need be, if there were no end in persuasion. He turned the car back toward the Bucklands’. He saw the roadster leaving their entrance gates as he neared them. He recognized Bertha in the driving-seat, alone.
She did not go in the direction of the Tuffman estate, but headed north along the highway with a speed which Starr clocked at seventy. Seven miles out of town, she forked toward the right onto a country road which led to the river. Starr decreased his distance and forked too. A half mile of abominable ruts through a copse of white oak opened suddenly on a clearing, at the farther edge of which a dilapidated inn sat on weary haunches by the river-bank. Bertha’s roadster was parked near the door.
Starr was dimly aware of having heard of the place: a late-at-night rendezvous of somewhat indifferent character. He thought that someone had once told him that you could go there and they didn’t bother you, about names, about who was with you, about anything at all like that. Also (it was coming back) a small public dining-room was rarely used. More intimate rooms-for-two were, among other things, a solace for the inn’s general inaccessibility.
It was intensely quiet; and curtained windows stared across the clearing at Starr blankly. The rendezvous (if it were a rendezvous) was the last thing in the world which he had expected. Still, there was no other car, and Bertha had been alone. More than anything else, this circumstance added a note to the case which absorbed him, and frightened him too. From the speed with which Bertha had driven here, Starr expected another car momentarily, with that other member without whom no rendezvous can be complete.
Fifteen minutes passed, but no other car came. The hush continued with only the faint sound of the river and the whispered stirring of restless insects. Starr crossed the clearing on foot and opened the inn’s front door. An empty foyer of the dreariest nature faced him, with shut doors to right and left, and a steep narrow stairway leading to the floor above. He opened doors, and found an empty dining-room, and a taproom where a moth-eaten deer’s head above the bar alone suggested life.
He went up the narrow stairs. Doors lined either side of a hall, all closed but the farthest on the left, which stood ajar. He walked to it.
Bertha, seated at a table, was eating steak. Almost with the ferocity of a starving animal, she was lifting it from the plate to her mouth: large pieces of the red meat. No bread, no vegetables, nothing else at all on the table, except a pitcher of rich milk.
Starr’s throat constricted harshly as he watched her, and as he thought: “She’s stuffing herself, alone in this dismal place, believing herself loveless, loving so much, in the face of a death at the hands of the one whom she loves, or of his mother — far from home, savoring nothing, just filling her stomach up in order to be with him for a little longer.”
Starr stood it for a moment, that wolf-like, desperately urgent quality in the way she ate, then he entered the room.
“All this is ended, Mrs. Tuffman.”
Her reaction was instinctive, clouded by the depths into which she had fallen.
“I must get back before he misses me.”
“Mrs. Tuffman! We are going back together. Ernest will come with us.”
Bertha saw him now, and said fiercely: “Why do you persecute me? Why won’t you leave me alone?”
“Come with me, please.”
Bertha stood up, and her frailness seemed to stiffen into steel, strengthening her into a replica in miniature of the magnificent animal who had married her.
“Doctor Starr, if you say anything about having found me here, I shall call you a liar.”
“You are making this very difficult.”
“You know the character of this place, Doctor. If you voice your conclusions to anyone — anyone — I shall say I have never been here.”
Starr went to her and placed his hands upon her shoulders, feeling their stiffness, the faint shivering trembles that ran through them.
“You have fought enough. Your rendezvous here was with food. Steak is no antidote for poison.”
The word was out. Stark between them. Stripped of further conjecture or evasions. Bertha’s strength had a bubble quality about its swift collapse, and she was limp. Starr could scarcely hear her as she said: “Doctor — what shall I do—”
He still held her, warming her coldness, her sudden utter indifference to anything left in living. A cough was coughed discreetly behind them in the doorway; and a voice, surprisingly soft when you realized the hulk that it came from, said: “Excuse me, lady. Just consider ’at I di’n’t come.” The waiter, like a gentle gorilla, closed the door.
Starr smiled down at her and said: “I can promise you again, Mrs. Tuffman, that all this is ended. We must return at once to the house. There is a certain thing which I must know.”
Bertha refused to smile back.
“No matter which one it is, no matter if it’s Ernest’s mother, Doctor, I don’t want to live.”
“That decision is no longer in your hands.”
He refused to let Bertha drive alone; he left his car parked at the inn and got into her roadster, taking the wheel. He wanted to say to Bertha definitely, to say it now: “Here is what I think. Here is this damnable thought that has always been in the back of my mind, and which has just crystallized into a possible fact. Let me tell you of a waiting murderer, who slept, and who waited for your coming to wake up.” But he dared not — not until he was sure. For always, in the back of his head, was Madam Tuffman’s dictum: “You never could tell about Ernest.”