The Green Jacket/Chapter 5
V
"Will you sit down?" said Milly. She motioned to the chair by the desk.
He looked a little dubiously about the room, and then at the quiet figure that confronted him. "You are Miss Newberry?" he asked doubtingly.
"Yes." She smiled slightly.
He seated himself and drew a handful of papers from his pocket. From among them he selected a business-card and laid it on the desk.
"That is my name."
She glanced down at the minute script— "Dr. John Kingman, Serum Specialist, Room 136, Caxton Building." He was looking at her hopefully.
"You know my name?" he asked doubtingly.
A faint smile touched her lips. "I have heard it. Is there something I can do for you?" She pushed his card a little aside with her finger and looked at the man.
He twisted in his seat, and stared at the window. "I want evidence collected for me. You do that, don't you?" He turned to her brusquely.
"I do it sometimes—yes."
He glanced at her sharply. "I was told you are the best detective in the State—for difficult cases."
The flattery seemed to slip past the gray eyes. They were regarding him steadily.
"Is your case difficult?" she asked.
"Damned dif— I beg your pardon!" He chewed at a corner of his mustache—it had a short, cropped look as if it had been attacked in moments of perplexity.
The woman's hand reached the drawer beside her, and it slid softly open. "Would you mind if I knit?" she said.
He stared at her. "Knit! Oh!" His eye fell on the green wool with a condescending glance.
"Go ahead," he granted.
He laughed with a little masculine ease, and watched the needles as they moved swiftly in her fingers.
"Women like that sort of thing," he commended. . . . "I believe if my wife had knit things like that"—he moved his hand to the green wool—"I'd never be here!"
Her needles had come to the end of a row and they turned it deftly. She did not speak.
The man's face relaxed a little. "I want a divorce, you know!"
"Ye-s-s—" The word and the wool ran together in quiet assent, and the man stretched himself comfortably in his chair.
"My wife"
She lifted her eyes. "You had better not tell me about it," she said. "I don't handle divorce cases."
He stared, and sat up quickly. "You're too high-toned, I suppose!" It was a quick sneer.
"Not high enough," she returned. "I should be glad to handle them if I knew enough. I don't. They belong to a very high grade of work."
"You take murder cases, don't you?" he retorted.
"Sometimes."
"And you mean to tell me a divorce case is more difficult than a murder case?" He moved his hand cynically.
"Much more difficult—for me," she added. "Have you tried the Corbin Agency?"
"I don't want the Corbin Agency," he said brusquely.
He studied her face. "You needn't be afraid of this case," he said smoothly. "It will be perfectly respectable. I want it to be respectable. That's why I came to you. . . . If you will let me tell you"
She turned her knitting again. "I'd rather not, please. I should be sure to get interested."
"That's what I hoped!" he said quickly.
"Yes—but I don't want to get interested. It blurs my mind, takes off its edge for the cases I am pledged to carry. I will give you a piece of advice if you like."
"I am willing to pay well for it." He expanded.
"This is not for pay. . . . No matter what your wife has done—go home and do everything you can that will be for her good."
The man stared.
"Stop thinking about yourself and your wrongs. . . . I don't know what they are—I'd rather not know. Whatever they are, they are past. . . . If it is best for your wife to leave you, then help her do it. Stop thinking about yourself."
The man's narrow eyes widened a little as they studied the quiet face before him.
She nodded. "Help her to get away from you if you think she will be better off."
The man's eyes continued to regard her with a puzzled look.
"But I'd be pretty sure first, if I were you, that it's best for her to leave you. . . . It would be a silly sort of body, if its heart went wrong, that went to work planning to get rid of it—divorce it for good and all. That's a homely way of saying it. I'm a homely woman, and when people are married they seem to me one, just as truly as the body is all one. I don't divorce part of me—unless it's too bad to be made right. If it is, I go to a good surgeon and tell him to make quick work of it." She paused with a thoughtful look, and smiled. "But the best surgeons now, they tell me, don't believe in amputating. They bring their cases to a serum specialist—don't they?" She nodded toward the card on the desk. "And you find out what's wrong and give them some more of the same kind—only different, and they get well."
The look in the man's face darted and broke in a little laugh.
"You think I'd better give Rose serum treatment! Spiritual serum!" He chuckled. His face had cleared.
"I wonder what kind?" he said thoughtfully. His voice had the keen note of the scientist attacking a difficult problem.
"Some brand of human kindness, I should say," responded Milly dryly.
The man laughed and got up. "I believe you've been giving me serum treatment!" He held out his hand. "If there is ever anything I can do for you—" He motioned to the card.
She glanced down at it and her face lighted. "Some day I should like to come to you—to study," she said. "I want to know about this serum business. I think perhaps it would help me to understand human nature a little better."
He laughed out. "More likely you would tell me enough about people so I would understand my own serums better. I've been staring at my cultures for years—never suspecting what they might mean!" . . . He looked at her curiously. "Do you know, this is the first time in six months that I have laughed"
She returned the look quietly. "It's a pity your wife couldn't hear you." She said it in a matter-of-fact tone, and he laughed out again.
"I am going home," he said. "I came here with the idea that I was a desperate figure—a kind of modern Othello!—blighted life and so on, due to infidelity. . . . You've made me see I'm sick— a kind of spiritual invalid, that hasn't sense enough to take care of a common cold—just goes around suffering with it!" He paused a minute and looked at her thoughtfully.
"May I say that if divorce cases are difficult, they ought to be your specialty. You may not know enough to handle them, but you certainly have common sense!"
She shook her head. "Yes, I have common sense. But they require a higher kind of sense. Some day I hope to have a little of it. Only by that time"—she turned to him with a quick look—"marriage may be out of date!" She said it a little whimsically and motioned aside the check-book he had drawn from his pocket.
"No—I do not want your money. The advice may not be worth anything. Try it and see."
When he was gone she went to the window and threw it up, and stood looking off at the clouds. Her face had a tired look, and now and then she passed her hands quietly across her eyes and down her face, as if she were freeing herself from something.
When she resumed her knitting there was a little smile on her lips. . . . Her mind had run back to the days when she first began work—the mistakes she had made before she found herself and her work!
In those early days she had handled divorce cases. Yes—even after she set up business for herself, there had been one or two before she learned her lesson—that they were the most difficult work in the world for a detective who wanted what she wanted.
And all that she wanted grew with every day of work. . . . Her eyes followed the amber needles, and thoughts seemed to flow before them as if a pattern knitted itself in the green wool. . . . At first she had tried to take notes while clients talked, but she found they grew self-conscious and began to embroider facts, or they ran dry and stopped altogether. But the knitting seemed to relax tongues, and she had fallen into a way, when she wanted to remember a point or reconsider it, of purling a double stitch in her work. She even, as she grew more skilful, made what might be called a rough little pattern of the case in the stitches that slipped so smoothly through her fingers. Many of her plans were wrought in wool, and the knitting was always in her hands when she was talking with a new client or thinking out his case. But it was confined to the up-town office, where the most important business of the firm was transacted. Here, whenever possible, Milly received clients for the first time. Many of her clients did not even guess of the existence of the busier office with its rows of typewriters and swinging glass doors.