Kerry (10 page)

And then her mind came back to the evening and the silver sea, and her brief talk with the gray-eyed man who talked about a trumpet and a coming Christ. What did he mean? Was he just talking poetry or was it something real in his life? If she ever had another opportunity she would ask him, for it seemed as if there must have been a meaning behind it, a meaning that might ease the awful hunger of her soul.

And then she fell asleep.

When Kerry awoke the next morning she could not tell where she was. At first she thought she had been dreaming, and that she lay in her little hard bed in the cheap hotel in London, with a fog outside, a burden on her heart, and a day of perplexity before her.

Then the monotonous lash of the waves, and the motion of the boat made themselves real to her dreamy senses, and she had the whole sad story of the last two days to go over again. She experienced once more the shock she had first felt.

So does sorrow undo the work of sleep by one sharp thrust with the first waking breath, when one is passing through the valley.

Kerry opened her eyes and saw a gull sweep by her porthole; saw the interminable passing of the sea outside lit with sunlight sharply gray and blue, yet felt its beauty was not for her. There could be no joy in sky or sea or journey, for she was all alone, and the world was full of sadness. Why did she have to live? Oh, Mother! Oh, Father! Why was such a heartbreaking thing as life ever brought about?

By and by she conquered the awful sorrow that kept swelling into her throat, stinging tears into her eyes, and crept from her berth.

A breath of sea air from her porthole brought a sudden longing to get outside and drink in the beauty and the brightness, and throw off this gloom that was upon her for a while. But she resisted it. For there was that unpleasant person with the bold black eyes and his insistence for a “conference,” whatever that might mean. And there was her work that she must do.

So she dressed quickly and let the stewardess bring her a tray. After eating her breakfast she took a few long breaths at her open porthole and then sat down to her typewriter, working diligently until her head began to swim, and the back of her neck ached.

She put her papers carefully away, stowing the briefcase in which she kept it far back in a drawer of the wardrobe, made one or two little changes in her simple outfit, and throwing her coat over her arm opened her door into the corridor.

As she did so a paper fluttered past her from under a chair and rustled out ahead of her. Kerry, recognizing it as one of the sheets she had just copied, sprang to catch it but the draught from the open porthole wafted it on, and it fluttered a step or two down the corridor and landed at the feet of Dawson, PhD, as Kerry had already begun to call him. He always seemed to be just arriving whenever she went out!

Dawson stooped and caught it, and quite rudely, Kerry afterward remembered, put his gaze upon it, as one who would eagerly devour its contents. Then, after an instant Kerry stood with outstretched hand, he lifted an absentminded gaze and apologized.

“Oh, can this be yours?” he asked, and handed the paper to her almost reluctantly. “Or is it just waste paper?” he added as an afterthought.

“Thank you!” said Kerry, stepping back to her own door and throwing the paper on her bed. She closed and locked her stateroom door, and went on down the corridor.

Dawson had lingered waiting for her.

“Are you going to the dining room now?” he asked. “May I walk with you?”

There was nothing for Kerry to do but assent, and together they went to the table.

They were the first of their table to come to lunch. Dawson seated her politely and then went to his own place. But as soon as some of the others came in he made excuse to go to his stateroom for a magazine in which he said he found a joke he wanted to read to them all.

When he returned a few minutes later with the magazine they all listened politely to his joke, and made out to laugh quite creditably, but Kerry found herself wondering why he cared to take so much trouble to hunt up that vapid little joke. Was the man utterly devoid of any sense of humor?

McNair came late to the table, and Kerry was just rising to leave as he entered the dining room.

“Oh, are you going so soon?” he said as she passed him. “I’ve been hard at work all the morning, and did not realize I was being so late. Well, perhaps I’ll see you on deck this afternoon.”

Then he caught Dawson’s eyes upon him balefully, as he rose from his seat.

“I’m coming, Miss Kavanaugh,” said Dawson, much to Kerry’s annoyance, for she had risen with one of the other women, hoping to avoid his undesired company.

“Now,” he said, bustling ahead in his brusque way, “we’re going to find a quiet place where we won’t be disturbed. I know the very spot. I’ve been guarding it all the morning hoping you would come, but you didn’t appear.”

He looked at her for an answer, but Kerry had been taught long ago by her father to keep a quiet tongue in her head whenever a stranger who might be troublesome was around.

Kerry did not answer. Instead she smiled off at the sea and pointed to a gull that was dipping and circling above the deck.

Her companion looked annoyed at the gull, as if it were intruding.

“Now, if you’ll just come over here,” said Dawson eagerly, “I think we shall not be disturbed.”

Dawson led the way to a corner where he had prepared two seats for a tête-à-tête.

Kerry looked at her watch and hesitated.

“I can spare you ten minutes perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “You see I’m very busy just now. I have certain work that I must do before this voyage is over, and I must keep to my schedule or I won’t get done.”

“Work?” said Dawson eagerly. “Well, perhaps what I have to say will help a little in that way.”

Kerry looked at him surprised.

“How could what you have to say have any possible bearing on my work?” she asked with a ripple of laughter.

He looked annoyed.

“Well, suppose you tell me what your work is and then perhaps I shall be better able to explain to you,” he answered cunningly.

Kerry felt a hot antagonism against the man. He was presuming greatly on a friendship to which he had no right.

“My work? Oh, a little reading, a little writing, some letters and odds and ends, and quite a lot of mending. I came away in a great hurry, you see. Are you good at mending, or darning stockings, Professor Dawson?” Kerry ended with a laugh that was so like her father’s she almost recognized it herself. Her father had been good at throwing people off the track. She had always admired the skill with which he evaded the inquisition of curious newspaper men and visiting scientists who wanted to pry knowledge out of him for their own ends. Kerry had a feeling that here was one of the same brand and instinctively she took her father’s way of self-defense.

Dawson’s reaction to her answer was embarrassment and annoyance, but he held himself in check and summoned a smile.

“I see you are witty like your father,” he remarked dryly, “and you know how to keep your own counsel,” he added with a bit of a snarl at the end of his tone.

Kerry sobered and looked at him gravely.

“I don’t understand you, Professor Dawson; what is it you are trying to say to me?”

She was now yet quite eighteen, but she suddenly felt ages old. She sensed vaguely that a battle was ahead, and she must fight single-handed. There was no one living to help her.

“I want to talk to you about the thing that interests you most in all the world!” he said eagerly. “You know what it is, but you are afraid to trust me. But you needn’t be. I am your friend, and I was your father’s friend. I stand ready to help you in every way possible. And Miss Kavanaugh, I want you to know that of all your father’s friends I know no one better fitted to help you than I am because of my deep interest for years in the things that your father was studying.”

He paused and pierced Kerry with that cunning beady black gaze of his.

“Yes?” said Kerry coolly, almost choking over the word in her dry little frightened throat, but voicing the syllable with a self-possession worthy of a woman of the world. She looked him back with a cool, inscrutable gaze in her purply-blue eyes that had somehow turned a deep amber, the friendliness all shut out of them.

“Do you believe that I may help you in your great work?”

“What work is that?” asked Kerry sweetly, feeling herself growing more and more angry now. Why, this man was almost impertinent! He was almost in a class with Sam Morgan! Was there any abominable animal or insect to which she might compare him that would rank even lower than a louse?

“I mean the great work on which you are now engaged!” he announced with a meaningful look, and lowering his voice he asked huskily, “Your father’s great book!”

He studied her face a moment and then went on.

“I can understand how you must be hampered, not being a scientist yourself. There will be things of course that should be altered to bring them up to the times. Your father was an older man and quite conservative. And I, knowing your father’s general trend, would be able to make suggestions to you without in the least changing his style—”

But Kerry had suddenly risen, and as she stood for an instant looking down upon the small, sharp little man she seemed to have grown taller by several inches, and to have acquired a new poise. She smiled quite frigidly as a queen might have done to a presuming courtier, and answered him with steady voice in which the rising anger was quite held in abeyance.

“Mr.—Professor—Dawson, you are making a great mistake! You seem to be under the impression that I am trying to finish or rewrite or reconstruct some work of my father’s for publication. That is not the case. Whatever my father wrote was entirely finished and complete and contracted for with his publisher before he died. But if it had not been, I certainly should never allow
any
man, whether he thought he was a scientist or not, whether he professed to be a friend or a foe, to add to or reconstruct or delete a single word from anything my father had ever written. Certainly not you, Professor Dawson. Now, if you will excuse me, I have something else to do.”

And with her red-gold head held high she marched away from the place and stumbled down the companionway straight into the arms of a man who was coming up.

Graham McNair caught her as she would have fallen, and she looked up and gave a little sob of a laugh as she recovered herself, but he saw that there were tears on her cheeks.

“Can—I do anything for you?” he asked, a little at a loss to know whether to laugh it off or go deeper into facts.

“No thank you—or, yes—there is. There’s a man out there on the deck—I wish you’d throw him overboard for me please. Not quite drown him, perhaps—but—just give him a
good scare!”

Her face was dimpling with smiles, but he could see that the tears were not far away from the blue eyes lifted so bravely. The red-gold hair caught the sunlight in a full blaze as she looked up and he looked down upon her.

His eyes twinkled back to her smile, but his face grew suddenly grave as he answered.

“I’ll do that!” he said earnestly. “I’ll take pleasure in doing it. I think I know just whom you mean.”

Then he flashed her a smile to cover his own gravity, and they went their ways.

When Kerry reached her stateroom she looked at once at the bed for the paper she had thrown there before going to lunch, but it was nowhere to be seen. She looked on the floor under the bed, and down behind the mattress, but she could not find it. She even sent for the stewardess, but the stewardess said she had not been there since early that morning. Then Kerry got out her papers and went through them carefully, but the page numbered seventy-five, one of the pages she had recopied that morning, was nowhere to be found!

A
fter Kerry had gone over everything in the room three times, the last time slowly and unhurriedly, with a calm conviction growing in her mind that it was positively gone, she sat herself down to discover what had been on that missing sheet.

Indelibly she found stamped on her brain the vision of Dawson as he held it in his hand and scanned it avidly. She was sure from his brief absorption, his absentminded gaze as he handed it back to her, that he had seen something there that more than interested him.

She took out her papers and went over the previous page, and the following one with the notes in little bunches fastened that mentioned the Einstein theory in connection with the new ideas that Shannon Kavanaugh had worked out! It was the page of all the others perhaps that she would least have wished to have seen by a stranger before the book was safely under copyright. It contained the crux of all the argument in brief form. What ill wind had worked against her that it should have been just that page that had strayed out into the corridor when the enemy was passing?

For now she had unconsciously come to call this Dawson person an enemy. Kerry felt as if an evil force were specializing on her incompetent self just then.

With a heavy heart she sat thinking. How often her father had warned her that she must not open her mouth about his book, must never even speak of it, nor answer any question about it no matter how insignificant. He had told her of enemies in the profession, thieves also, who would steal not only thunder, but glory that did not belong to them. She felt that Dawson, PhD, was both a scientific enemy and thief.

It was plain to be seen that he had planned in some way to use her or the book for his own purposes. His proposition on deck just now angered her beyond words. What did he think she was? A child to be led around by bland words? Did he think her father so much of a fool as not to have left his affairs complete, and in hands that were competent to look after them?

And yet, had he? How careless she had been that she had allowed a single sheet of the precious paper to slip out that door!

She tried to think of the possibilities for the thief.

He might use the subject matter in an article, or as a basis in a book of his own, if indeed there was enough to base his argument upon in that single page. Of course if he was a bright man—and he must be, in the sense of having cleverness, cunning—he would quickly understand and supply all that the stolen paragraphs implied. Even if he wrote only an article in a magazine using the material he had—and of course he must have got it somehow! There were such things as skeleton keys—would that be enough to hurt the contract with the publisher of the book?