It had never occurred to Dick to doubt David's story. It did not, even
now. He had accepted it unquestioningly from the first, supplemented the
shadowy childish memories that remained to him with it, and gradually
co-ordinating the two had built out of them his house of the past.
Thus, the elderly man whom he dimly remembered was not only his father;
he was David's brother. And he had died. It was the shock of that death,
according to David, that had sent him into the mountains, where David
had followed and nursed him back to health.
It was quite simple, and even explicable by the new psychology. Not that
he had worried about the new psychology in those early days. He had
been profoundly lethargic, passive and incurious. It had been too much
trouble even to think.
True, he had brought over from those lost years certain instincts and a
few mental pictures. He had had a certain impatience at first over the
restrictions of comparative poverty; he had had to learn the value of
money. And the pictures he retained had had a certain opulence which the
facts appeared to contradict. Thus he remembered a large ranch house,
and innumerable horses, grazing in meadows or milling in a corral. But
David had warned him early that there was no estate; that his future
depended entirely on his own efforts.
Then the new life had caught and held him. For the first time he had
mothering and love. Lucy was his mother, and David the pattern to which
he meant to conform. He was happy and contented.
Now and then, in the early days, he had been conscious of a desire to go
back and try to reconstruct his past again. Later on he knew that if
he were ever to fill up the gap in his life, it would be easier in that
environment of once familiar things. But in the first days he had been
totally dependent on David, and money was none too plentiful. Later on,
as the new life took hold, as he went to medical college and worked at
odd clerical jobs in vacations to help pay his way, there had been
no chance. Then the war came, and on his return there had been the
practice, and his knowledge that David's health was not what it should
have been.
But as time went on he was more and more aware that there was in him a
peculiar shrinking from going back, an almost apprehension. He knew more
of the mind than he had before, and he knew that not physical hardship,
but mental stress, caused such lapses as his. But what mental stress had
been great enough for such a smash? His father's death?