Part 9

Anthony heard a sigh of contentment at his back: relaxed from the tension of driving he removed his cap, and, with crossed legs, contemplated the sylvan quiet. He watched a flock of blackbirds wheeling above the apple tree, and decided that they had been within easy shot.

“Look over your head!” she cried suddenly; “what gorgeous apples.”

He rose, and, measuring the distance in a swift glance, jumped, and caught hold of a limb, by means of which he drew himself up into the tree. He mounted rapidly, filling his cap with crimson apples; when his pockets were full he paused. Down through the screen of leaves he could see her upturned countenance, framed in the broad, white hat; her expression was severely impersonal; yet, viewed from that informal angle, she did not appear displeased. And, when he had descended, she picked critically among the store he offered. She rolled back the gloves upon her wrists, and bit largely, with youthful gusto. On the road, after a moment's hesitation, Anthony embarked upon the consumption of the remainder. He strolled a short distance from the car, and found a seat upon a low stone-wall.

XXXV

SOON, he saw, she too left the car, and passed him, apparently ignorant of his presence. But, upon her return, she stopped, and indicated with her foot some feathery plants growing in a ditch by the road. “Horsetails,” she declared; “they are Paleozoic... millions of years old.”

“They look fresh and green still,” he observed. She glanced at him coldly, but his expression was entirely serious. “I mean the species of course. Father has fossils of the Devonian period... they were trees then.” She chose a place upon the wall, ten feet or more from him, and sat with insolent self-possession, whistling an inconsequential tune. There was absolutely no pose about her, he decided; she possessed a masculine carelessness in regard to him. She leaned back, propped upon her arms, and the frank, flowing line of her full young body was like the June day in its uncorseted freedom and beauty.

“If you will get that package from the confectioner's--” she suggested finally. She unfolded the paper, and exposed a row of small cakes, which she divided rigorously in two; rewrapping one division she held it out toward him.

“No, no,” he protested seriously. “I'm not hungry.”

“It's past two,” she informed him, “and we can't possibly be back in time for luncheon. I'd rather not hold this out any longer.” He relieved her without further words. “Two brioche and two babas,” she enumerated. He resumed his place, and then consumed the cakes without further speech.

“The study of biology,” she informed him later, with a gravity appropriate to the subject, “makes a great many small distinctions seem absurd. When you get accustomed to thinking in races, and in millions of years, the things your friends fuss about seem absurd. And so, if you like, why, smoke.”

It was his constant plight that, between the formal restrictions of his position, and the vigorous novelty of her speech, Anthony was constantly at a loss. “Perhaps,” he replied inanely; “I know nothing about those things.”

She flashed over him a candid, amber gaze that singularly resembled her father's. “You are not at all acquisitive,” she informed him; “and it's perfectly evident that you are the poorest sort of chauffeur. You drive very nicely,” she continued with severe justice. “One could trust you in a crisis; but it is little things that make a chauffeur, and in the little things,” she paused to indicate a globe of cigarette smoke that instantly dissolved, “you are like--that.”

He moodily acknowledged to himself the truth of her observation, but such acumen he considered entirely unnecessary in one so young; he did not think it becoming. He contrasted her, greatly to her detriment, with the elusive charm of Eliza Dreen; the girl before him was too vivid, too secure; he felt instinctively that she was entirely free from the bonds, the conventions, that held the majority of girls within recognized, convenient limits. Her liberty of mind upset a balance to which both heredity and experience had accustomed him. The entire absence of a tacitly recognized masculine superiority subconsciously made him uneasy, and he took refuge in imponderable silence.

“Besides,” she continued airily, “you are too physically normal to think, all normal people are stupid.... You are like one of those wood creatures in the classic pastorals.”

A faint grin overspread Anthony's countenance; among so many unintelligible words he had regained his poise--this was the usual, the familiar feminine chatter, endless, inconsequential, by means of which all girls presented the hopeless tangle of their thoughts and emotions; its tone had deceived him only at the beginning.

In the stillness which followed other blackbirds, equally within shot, winged over the apple tree; the shadow of the boughs crept farther and farther down the road. She rose vigorously. “I must get back,” she announced. She remained silent during the return, but Anthony, with the sense of direction cultivated during countless days in the fields and swales, found the way without hesitation.

When she left the car he slowly backed and circled to the carriage house. As he splashed body and wheels with water, polished the metal, dried and dusted the cushions, the crisp, cool voice of Annot Hardinge rang in his ears. He divined something of her isolated existence, her devotion to the absorbed, kindly man who was her father, and speculated upon her matured youth. She recalled his sister Ellie, for whose inflexible integrity he cherished a deep-seated admiration; but both left him cold before the poignant tenderness of Eliza... Eliza, the unforgettable, who loved him.

XXXVI

AFTER an unsubstantial dinner of grilled sweetbreads and mushrooms, and a frozen pudding, he continued his interrupted letter: “But there isn't any use in my trying to write my love in words; it won't go into words, even inside of me I can't explain it--it seems as if instead of its being a part of me that I am a part of it, of something too big for me to see the end of.” Then he became practicable, and wrote optimistically of the things that were soon to be.

There was a letter box at the upper corner of the street, and, passing the porch, he saw the biologist sunk in an attitude of profound dejection. His daughter sat with bare arms and neck at his side; her hair was bound in a gleaming mass about her ears, and one hand was laid upon the man's shoulder, while she patted Thomas Huxley with the other. The dog rose, growling belligerently at the unfamiliar figure, but sank again beneath a sharp command. When he returned Rufus Hardinge greeted him, and turned to his daughter with a murmured suggestion, but she shook her head in decisive negation. A light shone palely in the long windows at their back. The sun, at its skyey, evening toilette, seemed, in the rosy glow of westering candles, to scatter a cloud of powdered gold over the worn and huddled shoulders of the world.

Suddenly, seemingly in reconsideration of her decision, she called, “Oh, Anthony!” and he retraced his steps to the porch. “My father suggests that you sit here,” she told him distantly. “He says that you are very young, and that solitude is not good for you.”

“Annot,” the older man protested humorously, “you have mangled my intent beyond any recognition.” With an unstudied, friendly gesture he tended Anthony his cigar case. A deep preoccupation enveloped him; he sat with loose hands and unseeing eyes. In the deepening twilight his countenance was grey. Anthony had taken a position upon the edge of the porch, his feet in the fragrant grass, out of which fireflies rose glimmering, mounting higher and higher, until, finally, they disappeared into the night above, in the pale birth of the stars.

A deep silence enfolded them until in an unexpected, low voice, Rufus Hardinge repeated mechanically aloud lines called, evidently, out of a memory of long ago:

''Within thy beams, Oh, Sun! or who could find,

While fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed,

That too,” he paused, groping in his memory for

the words:

“That too such countless orbs thou madst us

blind.”

The girl rose, and drew his head into her warm, young arms. “Don't, father,” she cried, in a sudden, throbbing apprehension; “please... please. You have the clearest, most beautiful eyes in the world. Think of all they have seen and understood--” He patted her absently. Anthony moved silently away.

XXXVII

NOT long after, at breakfast, the young and disdainful maid conveyed to Anthony a request to proceed, when he had finished, to the conservatory. There he discovered Annot Har-dinge, with her sleeves rolled up above her vigorous elbows, dusting with a fine, brown powder the rows of monotonous, potted plants. She directed him to follow her with a slender-nosed watering pot. He wondered silently at the featureless display of what he found to be ordinary bean plants, some of the dwarf variety, others drawn up against the wall. They bore in exact, minute inscriptions, strange names and titles, cryptic numbers; some, he saw, were labelled “Dominants,” others, “Recessives.”

“The 'cupids' are doing wretchedly, poor dears!” she exclaimed before a row of dwarf sweet peas. “This is my father's laboratory,” she told him briefly.

“I thought he had something to do with Darwin and the missing link.”

She gazed at him pityingly from the heights of a vast superiority. “Darwin did some valuable preliminary work,” she instructed him; “although Wallace really guessed it all first. Now Mendel, Bateson, are the important names. They were busy with the beginnings; and, among the beginnings, plants are the most suggestive.” She indicated a small row of budding sweet peas. “Perhaps, in those flowers, the whole secret of the universe will be found; perhaps the mystery of our souls will be explained; isn't it thrilling! The secret of inheritance may sleep in those buds--if they are white it will prove... oh, a thousand things, and among them that father is the most wonderful scientist alive; it will explain heredity and control it, make a new kind of world possible, a world without the most terrible diseases. What church, what saint, what god, has really done that?” she demanded. “Stupid priggish figures bending out of their gold-plated heavens!”

Her enthusiasm communicated a thrill to him as he regarded the still, withdrawn mystery of the plants. For the first time he thought of them as alive, as he was alive; he imagined them returning his gaze, his interest, exchanging--critically, in their imperceptible, chaste tongue--their unimpassioned opinions of him. It was a disturbing possibility that the secret of his future, of life and death, might lurk in the flowers to unfold on those slender stems. He was oppressed by a feeling of a world crowded with invisible, living forms, of fields filled with billions of grassy inhabitants, of seas, mountains, made up of interlocking and contending lives; every breath, he felt, absorbed races of varied individuals. He thought, too, of people as plants, as roses--Oh, Eliza!--as nettles, rank weeds, crimson lilies. And, vaguely, this hurt him; something valuable, something sustaining, vanished from his unformulated, instinctive conception of life; the world of men, their aims, their courage, ideals, lost their peculiar beauty, their importance; the past, rising from the mold through those green tubes and vanishing into a future of dissolving gases, shrunk, stripped of its glamor, to an affair of little moment.

Outside, as he descended the lawn, the sun had the artificial glitter of an incandescent light; the trees waved their arms at him threateningly. Then, with a shrug of his normal young shoulders, he relinquished the entire conception; he forgot it. He recklessly permeated a universe of airy atoms with the smoke of a Dulcina. “That's a woolly delusion,” he pronounced.

That evening he burnished the car, and mounted the ladder to his room late. But the evening following, detained to perform a trivial task, found him seated upon the porch, enveloped in the fragrant clouds of Habana leaf.

XXXVIII

ANNOT, as now he mentally termed her, dressed in the inevitable yellow, was swinging a satin slipper on the point of her foot; her father was, if possible, more greyly withdrawn than before.

“To-night,” the biologist finally addressed his daughter, “your mother has been dead eighteen years.... She hated science; she said it had destroyed my heart. Impossible--a purely functionary pump. The illusions of emotions are cerebro-spinal reflexes, only that. She said that I cared more for science than--than herself.” He raised his head sharply, “I was forced to tell her the truth, in common honor: science first.... Tears are an automatic escapement to protect the vision. But women have no logic, little understanding; hopelessly romantic, a false quantity--romance, dangerous. I was away when she died ... Borneo, Aurignacian strata had been discovered, a distinct parallel with the Maurer jaw. Death is only a change of chemical activity,” he shot at Anthony in a voice not entirely steady, “the human entity a passing agglomeration, kinetic.... Love is a mechanical principle, categorically imperative,” his voice sank, became diffuse. “Absolute science, selfless.

“People found her beautiful, I didn't know,” he added wistfully; “beauty is a vague term. The Chapelle skull is beautiful, as I understand it, as I understand it. In a letter to me,” after a long pause, “she employed the term 'frozen to death'; she said that I had frozen her to death. Only a figure, romantic, inexact.”

“Stuff!” Annot exclaimed lightly, but her anxious countenance contradicted the spirit of her tones. “You mustn't stir about in old troubles. Everything great demands sacrifice; mother didn't quite understand; and I expect she got lonely, poor dear.”

Anthony rose, and made his way somberly toward the stable, but running feet, his name called in low, urgent tones, arrested his progress. An-not approached with the trouble deepening in her gaze. “Does he seem entirely himself to you?” she asked, but, before he could answer,--“of course, you don't know him well enough. You see, he is working too much again, an average of sixteen hours for the ten days past. I haven't said anything because the most difficult part of his work is at an end. If his last conclusions are right he will have only to scribble the reports, put a book together.... I can always tell when he is overworked by the cobwebs--he tries to brush them off his face,” she explained. “They don't exist, of course.

“But I really wanted to say this,” she lifted her candid gaze to his face. “Could you be a little more about the house? we might need you; we'll use the car very little for a while.” The apprehension was clearly visible now. “Would you mind helping him with his clothes; he gets them mixed? It isn't regular, I know,” she told him; “but we have a great deal of money; anything you required--”

“Perhaps I'd be better at that,” he suggested. “You know, you said I was a rotten chauffeur.”

For a moment, appealing, she had seemed nearer to him, but now she retreated spiritually, slipped behind her cold indifference. “There will be nothing more to-night; if he grows worse you will have to move into the house.” She left him abruptly, gathering her filmy skirt from the grass, an elusive shape with gleams on her hair, her arms and neck white for an instant and then veiled in the scarf of night.

In his room he could still hear, mingled with the faint, muffled squeaking of the mice in the empty hayloft, Hardinge's voice, jerky, laborious, “a categorical imperative... categorical imperative.” He wondered what that meant applied to love? An errant air brought him the unmistakable odor of white lilacs, an ineffable impression of Eliza.

XXXIX

THE day following found him installed in the house, in a small chamber formed where the tower fronted upon the third story. At luncheon a place was laid for him at the table with Annot and her father, where the attentions of the disdainful and shapely maid positively quivered with suppressed scorn. Anthony had found in his room fifty dollars in an envelope, upon which Annot had scribbled that he might need a few things; and, at liberty in the afternoon, he boarded an electric car for the city, where he invested in fresh and shining pumps, and other necessities.

The house was dark when he inserted his newly acquired latchkey in the front door and made his way softly aloft. But a thread of light was shining under the door of Rufus Har-dinge's study. Later--he had just turned out the light--a short knock fell upon his door.

“Me,” Annot answered his instant query. “I am going to ask you to dress and come to my father. It may be unnecessary; he may go quietly to bed; but go he must.”

He found her in a dressing gown that fell in heavy, straight folds of saffron satin, her feet thrust in quaint Turkish slippers with curled points; while over her shoulders slipped and slid the coppery rope of her hair. She led the way to the study, which she entered without knocking. Anthony saw the biologist bent over pages spread in the concentrated light of a green shaded globe. In a glass case against the wall some moldy bones were mounted and labelled; fragmentary and sinister-appearing casts gleamed whitely from a stand; and, everywhere, was the orderly confusion of books and papers that had distinguished the library.

“Come, Rufus,” Annot laid her hand upon his shoulder; “it's bedtime for all scientists. You promised me you would be in by eleven.”

He gazed at her with the hasty regard directed at an ill-timed, casual stranger. “Yes, yes,” he ejaculated impatiently, “get to bed. I'll follow... some crania tracings, prognathic angles--”

“To-morrow will do for those,” she insisted gently, “you are making yourself ill again--”

“Nonsense,” he interrupted, “never felt better in my life, never--” his voice dwindled abruptly to silence, as though a door had been closed on him; his lips twisted impotently; beads of sweat stood out upon his white, strained forehead. His whole body was rigid in an endeavor to regain his utterance. He rose, and would have fallen, if Annot's arm had not slipped about his shoulders. Anthony hurried forward, and, supporting him on either side, they assisted him into the sleeping chamber beyond. There, at full length on a couch, a sudden, marble-like immobility fell upon his features, his mouth slightly open, his hands clenched. Annot busied herself swiftly, while Anthony descended into the dark, still house in search of ice. When he returned, Hardinge was pronouncing disconnected words, terms. “Eoliths,” he said, “snow line... one hundred and thirty millimeters.” He was silent for a moment, then, struggling into a sitting posture, “Annot!” he cried sharply, “I've frightened you again. Only a touch of... aphasia; unfortunately not new, my dear, but not serious.”

Later, when Anthony had assisted him in the removal of his clothes, and lowered the light, he found Annot in the study assembling the papers scattered on the table. “I am glad that you are here,” she said simply. “Soon he can have a complete rest.” She sank into a chair; he had had no idea that she could appear so lovely: her widely-opened eyes held flecks of gold; beneath the statuesque fall of the dressing gown her bare ankles were milky-white.

XL

HE felt strangely at ease in a setting so easily strange. There was a palpable flavor of unreality in the moment, of detachment from the commonplace round of existence; it was without connection, without responsibility to yesterday or to to-morrow; he was isolated with the informal vision of Annot in an hour which seemed neither day nor night. He felt--inarticulately--divorced from his customary daily personality; and, with no particular need for speech, lit a cigarette, and blew clouds of smoke at the ceiling. It was his companion who interrupted this mood.

“The life that people think so tremendously important,” she observed, “the things one does, are hardly more real than a suit of clothes, with religion for a nice, prim white collar, gloves for morals, and a hidden red silk handkerchief for a rare revolt. And all the time, politely ignored, decently covered, our bodies are underneath. Now and then some one slips out of his covering, and stands bare before his shocked and protesting friends, but they soon hurry something about him, a conventional shawl, a moral sheet. Do you happen to remember a wonderful caricature of Louis XIV--simply a wig, a silk suit, buckled shoes and a staff?”

The mordant humor of that drawing penetrated Anthony's understanding: he saw rooms, streets, a world full of gesticulating suits, dresses, nodding hats, bonnets; he saw the unsubstantial concourse haughtily erect, condescending, cunningly deceptive, veiling in a thousand subterfuges their essential emptiness. The thought evaporated in laughter at the obvious humor of such a spectacle; its social significance missed him totally, happily.

“What an unthinking person you are,” she told him; “you just--live. It's rather remarkable--one of Bacchus' company caught in the modern streets. It is all so different now,” she added plaintively; “men get drunk in saloons or at dinner, and the purple stain of the grape centers in their noses. I tried myself,” she confessed, “in Geneva. I was with a specialist who had father. The café balcony overhung the lake; it was at night, and the villages looked like clusters of fireflies about a black mirror; and you simply never saw so many stars. We were looking for a lyric sensation, but it was the most awful fizzle; he insisted on describing an operation with all the grey and gory details complete, and I fell fast asleep.”

The outcome of her experiment tallied exactly with that of his own more involuntary efforts in that field. It established in his mind a singularly direct sympathy with her; the uneasy element which her attitude had called up in him disappeared entirely, its place taken by a comfortable sense of freedom, a total lack of _rot_.

She rose, vanishing into her father's room, then, coming to the door, nodded shortly, and left for the night.

He found on the bureau in his tower room what remained of the fifty dollars--it had been reduced to less than eight. Suddenly he remembered his purpose there, his supreme need of money, the imperative westward call.... He bitterly cursed his lax character as he recalled the cigars he had purchased, the silk shirt too, and an unnecessary tie. A deep gloom settled upon his spirit. He heard in retrospect his father's clear, high voice--“shiftless, no sense of responsibility.” He sat miserably on the edge of the bed in the dark, while the petty, unbroken procession of past failures wheeled through his brain. Then the shining vision of Eliza, compassionate, tender, folded him in peace; one by one he would subdue those rebellious elements in himself, of fate, that held them apart.

XLI

AT a solitary breakfast the incident of the preceding night seemed fantastic, unreal; he retained the broken, vivid memory of the scene, the thrill of vague words, that lingers disturbingly into the waking world from a dream. And, when he saw Annot later, there was no trace of a consequent informality in her manner; she was distant, hedged about by an evident concern for her father. “I have sent for Professor Jamison.” She addressed Anthony with blank eyes. “Please be within call in case--”