The Stone Image | Page 4

wife beating."
It was a few days after this conversation that I was puzzled and annoyed by a faint odor of Chinese punk hanging in the air of the dining room when I came down to breakfast.
Incense of all kinds is distasteful to me; so much so that I never attend high-church services when I can avoid it, and of all the scents with which the nose of man is insulted I particularly detest that of Chinese punk. Even as a pretext for keeping away mosquitoes we have never burned joss sticks in the house, yet there the scent was, as plain as cabbage on a New England Thursday.
I sniffed the air like a restive hound for a few moments, then concluded that my olfactory nerves had been playing a practical joke on me, and dismissed the matter from my mind.
But the odor persisted. Some days it was more pronounced than others--occasionally it was so faint as to be no more than a reminiscent annoyance--but always it was present.
There seemed to be a subtle connection, too, between the varying strength of the perfume and Betty's health. On mornings when the bitter-sweet effluvium hung like an invisible fog among the rafters of the hall and dining-room ceilings there were great, violet circles against the white flesh beneath her eyelids, and her eyes themselves were dull and lackluster, as though she had been troubled in her sleep. As the pungent tang of the incense waned and faded from the house, her face regained its wanted color, and the old-time sparkle returned to her eyes.
The mystery of the odor baffled me, and the changes in Betty worried me. So, like all modern philosophers, I thought much, drank much, and smoked much over the problem--and arrived nowhere.
Betty, too, fretted about the perfume because it annoyed me, and about herself because, except for toothache, measles, and similar childish ills, she had never been sick a day in her life. Betty is neither the broken lily nor drooping-violet type of woman. She can shop all morning, go to a matinee, and foxtrot half the night, which is a considerably larger contract than I should care to take on. Also she can handle a canoe like a red Indian, swim like a Sandwich Islander, and play stiff enough tennis to command the respect of any man. And here she was developing nerves and headaches and listlessness, just as though she were an ordinary woman instead of being my wife.
"I think I'll go to see Doctor Towbridge," she announced. "It's not like me to be all done in at breakfast time."
I agreed with her enthusiastically. Next to having no Betty at all, a sick Betty was the worst thing I could imagine.
When she returned from the doctor's she was more puzzled than ever. "He couldn't find anything wrong," she said, "and that worries me all the more, 'cause people don't get this way when there's nothing the matter with them."
Doctor Towbridge and I rode downtown together next morning, and I begged him for some clew to Betty's indisposition. "Wel-l," he answered, after the manner of all physicians who find themselves in a tight place, "I don't know that I'd care to say positively at this time just what Mrs. Haig's trouble is. Organically she's as fit as a fiddle, but she seems to be suffering from a lowering of vitality, possibly induced by insomnia. And I discovered traces of hysteria, too."
"Insomnia!" I scouted. "Why, man, Betty sleeps like a top; she sleeps as well as I do, and I'm almost as hard to rouse as Lazarus."
Doctor Towbridge lit a fresh cigar and stared for a minute at the rows of near-colonial villas racing past the car windows. "Did Mrs. Haig ever walk in her sleep as a child?" he asked. "Somnambulism may have the same effect as insomnia, you know."
Now, Betty and I had known each other just three months when we were married; so I had no more idea whether she had walked in her sleep as a child than I had what colored pinafores she wore when she was attending kindergarten. But Doctor Towbridge's question gave me to think. Suppose Betty were sleepwalking! And our sleeping rooms were on the second floor. Good Lord, if she were to walk through an open window! I determined then and there to do some watchful waiting that night.
But if the old saying concerning the ultimate destination of good resolutions be true, I must have paved several blocks of infernal highways with mine; for midnight found me in bed, wooing Morpheus in no uncertain nasal tones.
Two o'clock, though, found me awake; very wide awake.
I sat up in bed. The big, white November moon, swimming easily in a surf of frothy clouds, splashed an intermittent spray of silver light over the bedroom's