Dr. Voss Was Quite at Ease

A fortnight later, by excellent good fortune, Adrian Voss gave one of his pleasant dinners to five or six old cronies, all of them clever, reputable people and all judges of good wine, and Kessler so contrived it that he remained behind after the rest had gone. This was no new arrangement but a thing that had befallen them scores of times. Where Kessler was liked, he was liked well. Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer after the lighthearted and loose-tongued had their feet on the threshold; they liked to sit a while in his unobtrusive company, sobering their minds in the man's rich silence after the strain of gaiety. To this rule Voss was no exception.

The dinner had been arranged for the second Tuesday of the month, and Kessler arrived early, as was his habit, to find the hall fire blazing and Doyle taking coats with the gravity of a man who has done the same thing for twenty years and expects to do it for twenty more. The company was the old circle: a federal judge grown mellow, a pair of physicians, the head of a charitable trust, and Reyes, who had come late and sat at the far end of the table with her back very straight. Voss presided with his usual warmth, refilling glasses himself, laughing at his own stories before the punchlines arrived, and the first hour was as pleasant an hour as Kessler could remember spending in that house.

The dinner itself, however, had not gone quietly. Dr. Reyes had been at the table, the first time the three of them had sat down together in over a year, and the evening had come apart over the fish course. It began as banter. Voss teased her about her conservatism, and Reyes, who could hold her wine and her temper equally well, answered with a smile that held a blade.

"I don't call it conservatism, Adrian. I call it wanting to see the data. You used to want to see the data."

"And you used to be able to imagine a datum before it arrived," said Voss. "There was a time when you could entertain an idea that no instrument had yet confirmed. Now you file everything under metaphysics that cannot be pipetted."

"Replication," said Reyes, setting down her glass with a click. "You use that word like a foreign coin you have no intention of spending. I ask you for one experiment, Adrian. One. Run it blind, let me pick the samples, publish what falls out. You know what you tell me every time. The effect is too delicate to measure. No: the instruments are too crude. No, wait: my expectations would spoil it. Whichever way I offer to run it, you have a reason ready, and the reason is always the same, which is that you do not want it run. Do you hear yourself? You are keeping a chapel, Adrian, with a centrifuge standing where the altar ought to be."

"And you hear nothing," said Voss, still smiling, but his knuckles were white on the stem of his glass. "You have put a balance pan under everything you have ever believed, Alma, and one day you will set the soul upon it and read off a number and call the number the whole of the matter. I have stood at a bench and watched a preparation alter under my own attention, and I could never get you to look at it. There are territories in the organism that no pipette will ever reach. The soul, if you like the old word. The compound of conscience and appetite, if you like the new one. I have seen it. I have held it in my hands."

"Held what in your hands?" said Reyes. "Show me the hands."

Nobody at the table spoke. The judge laughed too loud and asked Voss about the new endowment, and the table recovered. In that half second Kessler saw his friend's face: the mouth opened a little and stayed open, the color gone from under the eyes, and the glass set down on the cloth too carefully for a man at his own table. Then Voss put the look away again at once, the way a hand palms a card and is shown empty.

"Because most of what you file under breakthroughs cannot be replicated," said Reyes. "I stood in your lab four years ago and asked to see your controls, and you showed me a whiteboard full of philosophy. That was the last time, Adrian. I watched a serious mind walk out of science and take the door with it."

"Careful," said Voss, and his voice had gone light in a way Kessler had learned to dread. "You sound like the review boards. You sound like the people who knew the heart was a pump and laughed at anyone who thought otherwise."

"I would rather laugh with the pump," said Reyes, rising, "than pray with the ghost." She put her napkin on the table, thanked their hostess with real courtesy, wished Kessler a warm good night, and was gone before the dessert appeared. Voss had laughed it off for the rest of the evening, but the laugh had cost him something; Kessler could see the seams of it.

Now the two men sat on opposite sides of the fire in the hall of the house on Aldercote Square. Voss was a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with perhaps a slyish cast about the eyes, but every mark of capacity and kindness; and you could see by his looks that he cherished for Kessler a sincere and warm affection.

"I have been wanting to speak to you, Adrian," Kessler began. "You know that will of yours."

A close observer might have gathered that the topic was unwelcome. But Voss carried it off gaily. "My poor Walter," he said. "You are unfortunate in such a client. I never saw a man so distressed by a document as you were by my will, unless it was Alma at what she calls my scientific heresies. O, I know she's a good fellow. You needn't frown. An excellent fellow, and I always mean to see more of her. But a hidebound pedant for all that, an ignorant, blatant pedant. I was never more disappointed in any person than in Alma Reyes."

"You know I never approved of it," pursued Kessler, ruthlessly disregarding the new topic.

"My will? Yes, certainly, I know that," said Voss, a trifle sharply. "You have told me so."

"Well, I tell you so again," said the lawyer. "I have been learning something of young Marsh."

The large handsome face of Adrian Voss grew pale to the very lips, and a blackness came about his eyes. "I do not care to hear more," he said. "This is a matter I thought we had agreed to drop."

"What I heard was abominable," said Kessler.

"It can make no change. You do not understand my position," returned Voss, with a certain incoherence of manner. "I am painfully situated, Walter. My position is a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking."

"Adrian," said Kessler, "you know me. I am a man to be trusted. Make a clean breast of it in confidence, and I make no doubt I can get you out of it."

"My good Walter," said Voss, "this is very good of you, downright good of you, and I cannot find words to thank you with. I believe you fully. I would trust you before any person alive, ay, before myself, if I could make the choice. But it is not what you fancy. It is not as bad as that. And just to put your good heart at rest, I will tell you one thing. The moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Marsh. I give you my hand upon that. And I will add one little word, Walter, which I am sure you will take in good part. This is a private matter, and I beg of you to let it sleep."

Kessler reflected a little, looking into the fire.

"I have no doubt you are perfectly right," he said at last, getting to his feet.

"Well, but since we have touched on this business, and for the last time I hope," Voss continued, "there is one point I should like you to understand. I have really a very great interest in poor Marsh. I know you have seen him. He told me so, and I fear he was rude. But I do sincerely take a great, a very great interest in that young man. And if I am taken away, Walter, I wish you to promise me that you will bear with him and get his rights for him. I think you would, if you knew all. It would be a weight off my mind if you would promise."

"I can't pretend that I shall ever like him," said the lawyer.

"I don't ask that," pleaded Voss, laying his hand on the other's arm. "I only ask for justice. I only ask you to help him, for my sake, when I am no longer here."

Kessler heaved an irrepressible sigh. "Well," he said, "I promise."

He walked home through the empty square. The clock over the old market hall said half past one. He regretted the promise already, and he would think about Voss's pale lips for days. What he could not get rid of was the sound of Reyes's chair pushed back and the silence in the room after the door had closed on her. Voss had watched the fire while it happened, his head turned a little to one side, as though he were listening for something at a distance that no one else at the table could hear.