Part 10

He saw the neurologist as the latter circled the plaster cupids to the entrance of the house--a heavy man with a broad, smooth face, thinlipped like a priest, with staring yellow gloves. Anthony remained in the lower hall, but no demand for his assistance sounded from above. When the specialist descended, he flashed a glance, as bitingly swift and cold as glacial water, over Anthony, then nodded in the direction of the garden.

“Miss Annot tells me that you are sleeping in the house,” he said when they were outside; “on the chance that she might need you for her father... she will. He is at the point of mental dissolution.” An involuntary repulsion possessed Anthony at the detached manner in which the other pronounced these hopeless words. “Nothing may be done; that is--it is not desirable that anything should. I am telling you this so that you can act intelligently. Rufus Hardinge knows it; there was a consultation at Geneva, which he approved.

“He is,” he continued with a warmer, more personal note, “a very distinguished biologist; his investigations, his conclusions, have been invaluable.” He glanced at an incongruous, minute, jewelled watch on his wrist, and continued more quickly. “Ten years ago he should have stopped all work, vegetated--he was burning up rapidly; merely a reduced amount of labor would have accomplished little for his health or subject. And we couldn't spare his labor, no mere prolongation of life would have justified that loss of knowledge, progress. It was his position; he insisted upon it and we concurred... he chose... insanity.

“Miss Annot is not aware of this; he must have every moment possible; every note is priceless. The end will come--now, at any time.” He had reached the small, canary yellow Dreux landaulet waiting for him, and stepped into it with a sharp nod. “You may expect violence,” he added, as the car gathered momentum.

But that evening in the dim quietude of the piazza the biologist seemed to have recovered completely his mental poise. He spoke in a buoyant vein of the great men he had known, celebrated names in the world of the arts, in politics and science. He recalled Braisted, the astronomer, searching relaxation in the Boulevard school of French fictionists. “I told him,” he chuckled at the mild, scholastic humor, “that he had been peeping too long at Venus.”

Annot was steeped in an inscrutable silence.

For the first time, Anthony was actually aware of her features: she had a broad, low brow swept by the coppery hair loosely tied at the back; her eyes resembled her father's, they were amber-colored, and singularly candid in their interest in all that passed before them; while her nose tilted up slightly above a mouth frankly large. It was the face of a boy, he decided, but felt instantly that he had fallen far short of the fact--the allurement, the perfection, of her youthful maturity hung overwhelmingly about her the challenge of sex.

Rather, she was all girl, he recognized, but of a new variety. A vision of _the nice_ girls he had known dominated his vision, flooded his mind, all smiling with veiled eyes, clothed in a thousand reserves, fluttering graces, innocent wiles, with their gaze firmly set toward the shining, desirable goal of matrimony. Eliza was not like that, it was true; but she, from the withdrawn, impersonal height of her cool perfection, was a law to herself. There was a new freedom in Annot's acceptance of life, he realized vaguely, as different as possible from mere license; no one, he was certain, would presume with Annot Hardinge: her very frankness offered infinitely less incentive to unlawful thoughts than the conscious modesty of the others.

When the biologist left the piazza Annot turned with a glad gesture to her companion. “He hasn't seemed so well--not for years; his little, gay fun again... it's too good to be true. I should like to celebrate--something entirely irresponsible. I have worried, oh, dreadfully.” The night was still, moonless; the stars burned like opals in the intense purple deeps of the sky. The air, freighted with the rich fruitage of full summer, hung close and heavy. “It's hot as a blotter,” Annot declared. “I think, yes--I'm sure, I should like to go out in the car.” She rose. “Will you bring it around, please?”

He drove slowly over the deserted lane by the lawn, and found her, enveloped in the lustrous folds of a black satin wrap, at the front gate. Over her hair she had tied a veil drawn about her brow in a webby filament of flowers “I think I'll sit in front,” she decided; “perhaps I'll drive.” He waited, at the steering wheel, for directions.

“Go west, young man,” she told him, and would say nothing more. A distant bell thinly struck eleven jarring notes as they moved into the flickering gloom of empty streets with the orange blur of lamps floating unsteadily on dim boughs above, and the more brilliant, crackling radiance of the arc lights at the crossings.

The headlights of the automobile cut like white knives through the obscurity of hedged ways; at sudden turnings they plunged into gardens, flinging sharply on the shadowy night vivid glimpses of incredible greenery, unearthly flowers, wafers of white wall. They drove for a long, silent period, with increasing momentum as the way became more open and direct; now they seemed scarcely to touch the uncertain surface below, but to be wheeling through sheer space, flashing their stabbing incandescence into the empty envelopment beyond the worlds.

They passed with a muffled din through the single street of a sleeping village, leaving behind a confusion of echoes and the startled barking of a dog. Anthony could see Annot's profile, pale and clear, against the flying and formless countryside; the lace about her hair fluttered ceaselessly; and her wrap bellowed and clung about her shoulders, about her gloveless hands folded upon her slim knees. She was splendidly, regally scornful upon the wings of their reckless flight; the throttle was wide open; they swung from side to side, hung on a single wheel, lunged bodily into the air. In the mad ecstasy of speed she rose; but Anthony, clutching her arms, pulled her sharply into the seat. Then, decisively, he shut off the power, the world ceased to race behind them, the smooth clamor of the engine sank to a low vibratone.

“You did that wonderfully,” she told him with glowing cheeks, shining eyes; “it was marvellous. A moment like that is worth a life-time on foot... laughing at death, at everything that is safe, admirable, moral... a moment of the freedom of soulless things, savage and unaccountable to God or society.”

The illuminated face of the clock before him indicated a few minutes past one, and, tentatively, he repeated the time. “How stupid of you,” she protested; “silly, little footrule of the hours, the conventional measure of the commonplace. For punishment--on and on. Like Columbus' men you are afraid of falling over the edge of--propriety.” She turned to him with solemn eyes. “I assure you there is no edge, no bump or brimstone, no place where good stops and tumbles into bad; it's all continuous--”

He lost the thread of her mocking discourse, and glanced swiftly at her, his brow wrinkled, the shadow of a smile upon his lips. “Heavens! but you are good-looking,” she acknowledged, her countenance studiously critical, impersonal. After that silence once more fell upon them; the machine sang through the dark, lifting over ridges, dropping down declines.

Anthony had long since lost all sense of their position. The cyanite depths of the sky turned grey, cold; there was a feeling in the air of settling dew; a dank mist filled the hollows; the color seemed suddenly to have faded from the world. He felt unaccountably weary, inexpressibly depressed; he could almost taste the vapidity of further existence. Annoys hard, bright words echoed in his brain; the flame of his unthinking idealism sank in the thin atmosphere of their logic.

XLII

SHE had settled low in the seat, her mouth and chin hidden in the folds of the satin wrap; her face seemed as chill as marble, her youth cruel, disdainful. But her undeniable courage commanded his admiration, the unwavering gaze of her eyes into the dark. He wondered if, back of her crisp defenses, she were happy. He knew from observation that she led an almost isolated existence... she had gathered about her no circle of her own age, she indulged in none of the rapturous confidences, friendships, so sustaining to other girls. The peculiar necessities of her father had accomplished this. Yet he was aware that she cherished a general contempt for youth at large, for a majority of the grown, for that matter. Contempt colored her attitude to a large extent: that and happiness did not seem an orderly pair.

He felt, rather than saw, the influence of the dawn behind him; it was as though the grey air grew more transparent. Annot twisted about. “Oh! turn, turn!” she cried; “the day! we are driving away from it.” A sudden intoxicating freshness streamed like a sparkling birdsong over the world, and Anthony's dejection vanished with the gloom now at their backs. Delicate lavender shadows grew visible upon the grass, the color shifted tremulously, like the shot hues of changeable silks, until the sun poured its ore into the verdant crucible of the countryside.

“I am most frightfully hungry,” Annot admitted with that entire frankness which he found so refreshing. “I wonder--” On either hand fields, far farmhouses, reached unbroken to the horizon; before them the road rose between banks of soft, brown loam, apparently into the sky. But, beyond the rise, they came upon a roadside store, its silvery boards plastered with the garish advertisements of tobaccos, and a rickety porch, now undergoing a vigorous sweeping at the hands of an old man with insecure legs, upon whose faded personage was stamped unmistakably the initials “G. A. R.”

Anthony brought the car to a halt, and returned his brisk and curious salutation. “Shall I bring out some crackers?” he asked from the road. But she elected to follow him into the store. The interior presented the usual confusion of gleaming tin and blue overalls, monumental cheeses and cards of buttons, a miscellany of ludicrously varied merchandise. Annot found a seat upon a splintered church pew, now utilized as a secular resting place, while Anthony foraged through the shelves. He returned with the crackers, and a gold lump of dates, upon which they breakfasted hugely. “D'y like some milk?” the aged attendant inquired, and forthwith dipped it out of a deep, cool and ringing can.

Afterward they sat upon the step and smoked matutinal cigarettes. The day gathered in a shimmering haze above the vivid com, the emerald of the shorn fields; the birds had already subsided from the heat among the leaves. Anthony saw that the lamps of the car were still alight, a feeble yellow flicker, and turned them out. He tested the engine; and, finding it still running, turned with an unspoken query to Annot. She rose slowly.

The wrap slipped from her bare shoulders and her dinner gown with its high sulphur girdle, the scrap of black lace about her hair, presented a strange, brilliantly artificial picture against the blistered, gaunt boards of the store, with, at its back, the open sunny space of pasture, wood and sky.

“It's barely twenty miles back,” she told him, once more settled at his side. The old man regarded them from under one gnarled palm, the other tightly clasped about the broom handle; his jaw was dropped; incredulity, senile surprise, claimed him for their own.

With Annot, Anthony reflected, he was everlastingly getting into new situations; she seemed to lift him out of the ordinary course of events into a perverse world of her own, a front-backward land where the unexpected, without rule or obligation, continually happened; and, what was strangest of all, without any of the dark consequences which he had been taught must inevitably follow such departures. He recalled the incredulous smiles, the knowing insinuations, that would have greeted the exact recounting of the past night at Doctor Allhop's drugstore. He would himself, in the past, have regarded such a tale as a flimsy fabrication. And suddenly he perceived dimly, in a mind unused to such abstractions, the veil of ugliness, of degradation, that hung so blackly about the thoughts of men. He gazed with a new sympathy and comprehension at the scornful line of Annot's vivid young lips; something of her superiority, her contempt, was communicated to him.

She became aware of his searching gaze, and smiled in an intimate, friendly fashion at him. “You are the most comfortable person alive,” she told him. There was nothing critical in her tones now. “I said that you were not a good chauffeur, and--” the surroundings grew familiar, they had nearly reached their destination, and an impalpable reserve fell upon her, but she continued to smile at him, “and... you are not.” That was the last word she addressed to him that day.

As, later, he sluiced the automobile with water, he recalled the strange intimacy of the night, her warm and sympathetic voice; once she had steadied herself with a clinging hand upon his shoulder. These new attributes of the person who, shortly, passed him silently and with cold eyes, stirred his imagination; they were potent, rare, unsettling.

XLIII

Notwithstanding, in the days which followed there was a perceptible change in Annot's attitude toward him: she became, as it were, conscious of his actuality. One afternoon she read aloud to him a richly-toned, gloomy tale of Africa. They were sitting by a long window, open, but screened from the summer heat by stiff, darkly-drooping green folds, where they could hear the drip of the fountain in its basin, a cool punctuation on the sultry page of the afternoon. Annot proceeded rapidly in an even, low voice; she was dressed in filmy lavender, with little buttons of golden velvet, an intricately carved gold buckle at her waist.

Anthony listened as closely as possible, the faint smile which seldom left him hovering over his lips. The bald action of the narrative--a running fight with ambushed savages from a little tin pot of a steamer, a mysterious affair in the darkness with a grim skeleton of a fellow, stakes which bore a gory fruitage of human heads, held him; but the rest... words, words. His attention wavered, fell upon minute, material objects; Annot's voice grew remote, returned, was lost among his juggling thoughts.

“Isn't it splendid!” she exclaimed, at last closing the volume; “the most beautiful story of our time--” She stopped abruptly, and cast a penetrating glance at him. “I don't believe you even listened,” she declared. “In your heart you prefer, 'Tortured by the Tartars.'”

His smile broadened, including his eyes.

“You are impossible! No,” she veered suddenly, “you're not; if you cared for this you wouldn't be... you. That's the most important thing in the world. Besides, I wouldn't like you; everybody reads now, it's frightfully common; while you are truly indifferent. Have you noticed, my child, that books always increase where life runs thin? and you are alive, not a papier-mâché man painted in the latest shades.”

Anthony dwelt on this unexpected angle upon his mental delinquencies. The approval of Annot Hardinge, so critical, so outspoken, was not without an answering glow in his being; no one but she might discover his ignorance to be laudable.

She rose, and the book slipped neglected to the floor. “The mirror of my dressing table is collapsing,” she informed him; “I wonder if you would look at it.” He followed her above to her room; it was a large, four-square chamber, its windows brushed by the glossy leaves of an aged black-heart cherry tree. Her bed was small, with a counterpane of grotesque lace animals, a table held a scattered collection of costly trifles, and a closet door stood open upon a shimmering array from deepest orange to white and pale primrose. An enigmatic lacy garment, and a surprisingly long pair of black silk stockings, occupied a chair; while the table was covered with columns of print on long sheets of paper. “Galleys,” she told him. “I read all father's proof.”

He moved the dressing table from the wall, and discovered the bolt which had held the mirror in place upon the floor. As he screwed it into position, Annot said:

“Don't look around for a minute.” There was a swift whisper of skirts, a pause, then, “all right.” He straightened up, and found that she had changed to a white skirt and waist. Fumbling in the closet she produced a pair of low, brown shoes, and kicking off her slippers, donned the others, balancing each in turn on the bed.

“Let's go--anywhere,” she proposed; “but principally where books are not and birds are.” At a drugstore they purchased largely of licorice root, which they consumed sitting upon a fence without the town.

XLIV

I SAID that instinctively, back in my room,” Annot remarked with a puzzled frown. “It was beastly, really, to feel the necessity... as though we had something corrupt to hide. And I feel that you are especially nice--that way. You see, I am not trying to dispose of myself like the clever maidens at the balls and bazaars, my legs and shoulders are quite uncalculated. There is no price on... on my person; I'm not fishing for any nice little Christian ceremony. No man will have to pay the price of hats at Easter and furs in the fall, of eternal boredom, for me. All this stuff in the novels about the sacredness of love and constancy is just--stuff! Love isn't like that really; it's a natural force, and Nature is always practical: potato bugs and jimson-weed and men, it is the same law for all of them--more potato bugs, more men, that's all.”

Anthony grasped only the larger implications of this speech, its opposition to that love which he had felt as a misty sort of glory, as intangible as the farthest star, as fragrant as a rose in the fingers. There was an undeniable weight of solid sense in what Annot had said. She knew a great deal more than himself, more--yes--than Eliza, more than anybody he had before known; and, in the face of her overwhelmingly calm and superior knowledge, his vision of love as eternal, changeless, his ecstatic dreams of Eliza with the dim, magic white lilacs in her arms, grew uncertain, pale. Love, viewed with Annot's clear eyes, was a commonplace occurrence, and marriage the merest, material convenience: there was nothing sacred about it, or in anything--death, birth, or herself.

And was not the biologist, with his rows of labelled plants and bones, his courageous questioning of the universe, of God Himself, bigger than the majority of men with their thin covering of cant, the hypocrisy in which they cloaked their doubts, their crooked politics and business? Rufus Hardinge's conception of things, Annot's reasoning and patent honesty, seemed more probable, more convincing, than the accepted romantic, often insincere, view of living, than the organ-roll and stained glass attitude.

In his new rationalism he eyed the world with gloomy prescience; he had within him the somber sense of slain illusions; all this, he felt, was proper to increasing years and experience; yet, between them, they emptied the notable bag of licorice.

Annot rested a firm palm upon his shoulder and sprang to the ground, and they walked directly and silently back. “It's a mistake to discuss things,” Annot discovered to him from the door of her room, “they should be lived; thus Zarathustrina.”

XLV

LATER they were driven from the porch by a heavy and sudden shower, a dark flood torn in white streamers and pennants by wind gusts, and entered through a long window a formal chamber seldom occupied. A thick, white carpet bore a scattered design in pink and china blue; oil paintings of the Dutch school, as smooth as ice, hung in massive gold frames; a Louis XVI clock, intricately carved and gilded, rested upon a stand enamelled in black and vermilion, inlaid with pagodas and fantastic mandarins in ebony and mother-of-pearl and camphor wood. At intervals petulant and sweet chimes rang from the clock: trailing, silvery bubbles of sound that burst in plaintive ripples.

Rufus Hardinge sat with bowed head, his lips moving noiselessly. Annot occupied a chair with sweeping, yellow lines, that somehow suggested to Anthony a swan. “Father has had a tiresome letter from Doctor Grundlowe at Bonn,” she informed the younger man.

“He disagrees with me absolutely,” Hardinge declared. “But Caprera at Padova disagrees with him; and Markley, at Glasgow, contravenes us all.”

“It's about a tooth,” Annot explained.

“The line to the anterior-posterior diameter is simian,” the biologist asserted. “The cusps prove nothing, but that forward slope--” he half rose from his chair, his eyes glittering wrathfully at Anthony, but fell back trembling... “simian,” he muttered.

“A possible difference of millions of years in human history,” Annot added further.

“But can't they agree at all!” Anthony exclaimed; “don't they know anything? That's an awful long time.”

“A hundred million years,” the elder interrupted with a contemptuous gesture, “nothing, a moment. I place the final glacial two hundred and seventy million after Jenner, and we have--, agreed to dismiss it; trifling, adventitious. There are more fundamental discrepancies,” he admitted. “Unless something definite is discovered, a firm base established, a single ray of light let into a damnable dark,” he stopped torn with febrile excitement, then, scarcely audible, continued, “our lives, our work... will be of less account than the blood of Oadacer, spilt on barbaric battle-fields.”

The rain ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Anthony followed Annot to the porch. In the black spaces between the swiftly shifting clouds stars shone brilliantly; there was a faint drip from the trees. “He gets dreadfully depressed,” she interpreted her parent to him. “They wrangle all the time, exactly like a lot of schoolgirls. You have no idea of the bitterness, the jealousy, the contemptuous personalities in the Quarterlies. Really, they are as fanatical, as narrow, as the churches they ignore; they are quite like Presbyterian biologists and Catholic.” She sighed lightly. “They leave little for a youngish person to dream on. You are so superior--to ignore these centessimo affairs. Will you lean from the edge of your cloud and smile on a daughter of the earth in last year's dinner gown?”

It was, he told himself, nonsense; yet he was moved to make no easy reply, something in her voice, illusive and wistful, made that impossible. “It's very good-looking,” he said impotently.

“I'm glad you like it,” she told him simply. “M'sieur Paret fitted it himself while an anteroom full of women hated me. Oh, Anthony!” she exclaimed, “I'd love to wander with you down that brilliant street and through the Place Vendôme to the Seine. Better still--there's a little shop on the Via Cavour in Florence where they sell nothing but chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, the most heavenly cakes with black hearts and the most heavenly smell. And you'd like Spain, so fierce and hot against its dusty hills; and Cortina, green beneath its red mountains. We could get a porter and rucksacks, and walk--” she broke off, her hands pressed to her cheeks, a dawning dismay in her eyes. Then she was gone with a flutter of the skirt so carefully draped by M'sieur Paret.

XLVI