“Yes—a little. But why write in my mother’s name? Why make it a sentimental correspondence?”
Mr. Grew reddened to his bald temples. “Why, I tell you it began that way, as a kinder joke. And when I saw that the first letter pleased and interested him, I was afraid to tell him—I couldn’ttell him. Do you suppose he’d gone on writing if he’d ever seen me, Ronny?”
Ronald suddenly looked at him with new eyes. “But he must have thought your letters very beautiful—to go on as he did,” he broke out.
“Well—I did my best,” said Mr. Grew modestly.
Ronald pursued his idea. “Whereareall your letters, I wonder? Weren’t they returned to you at his death?”
Mr. Grew laughed. “Lord, no. I guess he had trunks and trunks full of better ones. I guess Queens and Empresses wrote to him.”
“I should have liked to see your letters,” the young man insisted.
“Well, they weren’t bad,” said Mr. Grew drily. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Ronny,” he added suddenly. Ronald raised his head with a quick glance, and Mr. Grew continued: “I’ll tell you where the best of those letters is—it’s inyou. If it hadn’t been for that one look at life I couldn’t have made you what you are. Oh, I know you’ve done a good deal of your own making—but I’ve been there behind you all the time. And you’ll never know the work I’ve spared you and the time I’ve saved you. Fortune Dolbrowski helped me do that. I never saw things in little again after I’d looked at ‘em with him. And I tried to give you the big view from the stars... So that’s what became of my letters.”
Mr. Grew paused, and for a long time Ronald sat motionless, his elbows on the table, his face dropped on his hands.
Suddenly Mr. Grew’s touch fell on his shoulder.
“Look at here, Ronald Grew—do you want me to tell you how you’re feeling at this minute? Just a mite let down, after all, at the idea that you ain’t the romantic figure you’d got to think yourself... Well, that’s natural enough, too; but I’ll tell you what it proves. It proves you’re my son right enough, if any more proof was needed. For it’s just the kind of fool nonsense I used to feel at your age—and if there’s anybody here to laugh at it’s myself, and not you. And you can laugh at me just as much as you like...”
“WHAT’S become of the Daunt Diana? You mean to say you never heard the sequel?”
Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of the collector who has a good thing to show. He knew he had a good listener, at any rate. I don’t think much of Ringham’s snuff-boxes, but his anecdotes are usually worth while. He’s a psychologist astray amongbibelots, and the best bits he brings back from his raids on Christie’s and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments of human nature he picks up on those historic battle-fields. If hisflairin enamel had been half as good we should have heard of the Finney collection by this time.
He really has—queer fatuous investigator!—an unusually sensitive touch for the human texture, and the specimens he gathers into his museum of heterogeneous memories have almost always some mark of the rare and chosen. I felt, therefore, that I was really to be congratulated on the fact that I didn’t know what had become of the Daunt Diana, and on having before me a long evening in which to learn. I had just led my friend back, after an excellent dinner at Foyot’s, to the shabby pleasant sitting-room of myrive-gauchehotel; and I knew that, once I had settled him in a good arm-chair, and put a box of cigars at his elbow, I could trust him not to budge till I had the story.
YOU remember old Neave, of course? Little Humphrey Neave, I mean. We used to see him pottering about Rome years ago. He lived in two tiny rooms over a wine shop, on polenta and lentils, and prowled among the refuse of the Ripetta whenever he had a fewsoldito spend. But you’ve been out of the collector’s world for so long that you may not know what happened to him afterward...
He was always a queer chap, Neave; years older than you and me, of course—and even when I first knew him, in my raw Roman days, he gave me an extraordinary sense of age and experience. I don’t think I’ve ever known any one who was at once so intelligent and so simple. It’s the precise combination that results in romance; and poor little Neave was romantic.
He told me once how he’d come to Rome. He wasoriginaireof Mystic, Connecticut—and he wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Rome seemed as far as anything on the same planet could be; and after he’d worried his way through Harvard—with shifts and shavings that you and I can’t imagine—he contrived to get sent to Switzerland as tutor to a chap who’d failed in his examinations. With only the Alps between, he wasn’t likely to turn back; and he got another fellow to take his pupil home, and struck out on foot for the seven hills.
I’m telling you these early details merely to give you a notion of the man’s idealism. There was a cool persistency and a headlong courage in his dash for Rome that one wouldn’t have guessed in the little pottering chap we used to know. Once on the spot, he got more tutoring, managed to make himself a name for coaxing balky youths to take their fences, and was finally able to take up the more congenial task of expounding “the antiquities” to cultured travellers. I call it more congenial—but how it must have seared his soul! Fancy unveiling the sacred scars of Time to ladies who murmur: “Was thisactuallythe spot—?” while they absently feel for their hatpins! He used to say that nothing kept him at it but the exquisite thought of accumulating thelirefor his collection. For the Neave collection, my dear fellow, began early, began almost with his Roman life, began in a series of little nameless odds and ends, broken trinkets, torn embroideries, the amputated extremities of maimed marbles: things that even the rag-picker had pitched away when he sifted his haul. But they weren’t nameless or meaningless to Neave; his strength lay in his instinct for identifying, putting together, seeing significant relations. He was a regular Cuvier of bric-a-brac. And during those early years, when he had time to brood over trifles and note imperceptible differences, he gradually sharpened his instinct, and made it into the delicate and redoubtable instrument it is. Before he had a thousand francs’ worth ofanticaglieto his name he began to be known as an expert, and the big dealers were glad to consult him. But we’re getting no nearer the Daunt Diana...
Well, some fifteen years ago, in London, I ran across Neave at Christie’s. He was the same little man we’d known, effaced, bleached, indistinct, like a poor “impression”—as unnoticeable as one of his own early finds, yet, like them, with aquality, if one had an eye for it. He told me he still lived in Rome, and had contrived, by fierce self-denial, to get a few decent bits together—“piecemeal, little by little, with fasting and prayer; and I mean the fasting literally!” he said.
He had run over to London for his annual “look-round”—I fancy one or another of the big collectors usually paid his journey—and when we met he was on his way to see the Daunt collection. You know old Daunt was a surly brute, and the things weren’t easily seen; but he had heard Neave was in London, and had sent—yes, actually sent!—for him to come and give his opinion on a few bits, including the Diana. The little man bore himself discreetly, but you can imagine his pride. In his exultation he asked me to come with him—“Oh, I’ve thegrandes et petites entrees, my dear fellow: I’ve made my conditions—” and so it happened that I saw the first meeting between Humphrey Neave and his fate.
For that collectionwashis fate: or, one may say, it was embodied in the Diana who was queen and goddess of the realm. Yes—I shall always be glad I was with Neave when he had his first look at the Diana. I see him now, blinking at her through his white lashes, and stroking his seedy wisp of a moustache to hide a twitch of the muscles. It was all very quiet, but it was thecoup de foudre. I could see that by the way his hands trembled when he turned away and began to examine the other things. You remember Neave’s hands—thin, sallow, dry, with long inquisitive fingers thrown out like antennae? Whatever they hold—bronze or lace, hard enamel or brittle glass—they have an air of conforming themselves to the texture of the thing, and sucking out of it, by every finger-tip, the mysterious essence it has secreted. Well, that day, as he moved about among Daunt’s treasures, the Diana followed him everywhere. He didn’t look back at her—he gave himself to the business he was there for—but whatever he touched, he felt her. And on the threshold he turned and gave her his first free look—the kind of look that says:“You’re mine.”
It amused me at the time—the idea of little Neave making eyes at any of Daunt’s belongings. He might as well have coquetted with the Kohinoor. And the same idea seemed to strike him; for as we turned away from the big house in Belgravia he glanced up at it and said, with a bitterness I’d never heard in him: “Good Lord! To think of that lumpy fool having those things to handle! Did you notice his stupid stumps of fingers? I suppose he blunted them gouging nuggets out of the gold fields. And in exchange for the nuggets he gets all that in a year—only has to hold out his callous palm to have that great ripe sphere of beauty drop into it! That’s my idea of heaven—to have a great collection drop into one’s hand, as success, or love, or any of the big shining things, drop suddenly on some men. And I’ve had to worry along for nearly fifty years, saving and paring, and haggling and intriguing, to get here a bit and there a bit—and not one perfection in the lot! It’s enough to poison a man’s life.”
The outbreak was so unlike Neave that I remember every word of it: remember, too, saying in answer: “But, look here, Neave, you wouldn’t take Daunt’s hands for yours, I imagine?”
He stared a moment and smiled. “Have all that, and grope my way through it like a blind cave fish? What a question! But the sense that it’s always the blind fish that live in that kind of aquarium is what makes anarchists, sir!” He looked back from the corner of the square, where we had paused while he delivered himself of this remarkable metaphor. “God, I’d like to throw a bomb at that place, and be in at the looting!”
And with that, on the way home, he unpacked his grievance—pulled the bandage off the wound, and showed me the ugly mark it had made on his little white soul.
It wasn’t the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him—it was the inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy of the discrepancy between a man’s wants and his power to gratify them. Neave’s taste was too exquisite for his means—was like some strange, delicate, capricious animal, that he cherished and pampered and couldn’t satisfy.
“Don’t you know those little glittering lizards that die if they’re not fed on some wonderful tropical fly? Well, my taste’s like that, with one important difference—if it doesn’t get its fly, it simply turns and feeds on me. Oh, it doesn’t die, my taste—worse luck! It gets larger and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a bigger bite of me—that’s all.”
That was all. Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations—as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses—only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable—that he was never to know the last deep identification which only possession can give. He had trained himself in short, to feel, in the rare great thing—such an utterance of beauty as the Daunt Diana, say—a hundred elements of perfection, a hundredreasons why, imperceptible, inexplicable even, to the average “artistic” sense; he had reached this point by a long austere process of discrimination and rejection, the renewed great refusals of the intelligence which perpetually asks more, which will make no pact with its self of yesterday, and is never to be beguiled from its purpose by the wiles of the next-best-thing. Oh, it’s a poignant case, but not a common one; for the next-best-thing usually wins...
You see, the worst of Neave’s state was the fact of his not being a mere collector, even the collector raised to his highest pitch of efficiency. The whole thing was blent in him with poetry—his imagination had romanticized the acquisitive instinct, as the religious feeling of the Middle Ages turned passion into love. And yet his could never be the abstract enjoyment of the philosopher who says: “This or that object is really mine because I’m capable of appreciating it.” Neavewantedwhat he appreciated—wanted it with his touch and his sight as well as with his imagination.
It was hardly a year afterward that, coming back from a long tour in India, I picked up a London paper and read the amazing headline: “Mr. Humphrey Neave buys the Daunt collection”... I rubbed my eyes and read again. Yes, it could only be our old friend Humphrey. “An American living in Rome ... one of our most discerning collectors”; there was no mistaking the description. I clapped on my hat and bolted out to see the first dealer I could find; and there I had the incredible details. Neave had come into a fortune—two or three million dollars, amassed by an uncle who had a corset-factory, and who had attained wealth as the creator of the Mystic Super-straight. (Corset-factory sounds odd, by the way, doesn’t it? One had fancied that the corset was a personal, a highly specialized garment, more or less shaped on the form it was to modify; but, after all, the Tanagras were all made from two or three moulds—and so, I suppose, are the ladies who wear the Mystic Super-straight.)
The uncle had a son, and Neave had never dreamed of seeing a penny of the money; but the son died suddenly, and the father followed, leaving a codicil that gave everything to our friend. Humphrey had to go out to “realize” on the corset-factory; and his description ofthat... Well, he came back with his money in his pocket, and the day he landed old Daunt went to smash. It all fitted in like a Chinese puzzle. I believe Neave drove straight from Euston to Daunt House: at any rate, within two months the collection was his, and at a price that made the trade sit up. Trust old Daunt for that!
I was in Rome the following spring, and you’d better believe I looked him up. A big porter glared at me from the door of the Palazzo Neave: I had almost to produce my passport to get in. But that wasn’t Neave’s fault—the poor fellow was so beset by people clamouring to see his collection that he had to barricade himself, literally. When I had mounted the stateScalone, and come on him, at the end of half a dozen echoing saloons, in the farthest, smallestreduitof the vast suite, I received the same welcome that he used to give us in his little den over the wine shop.
“Well—so you’ve got her?” I said. For I’d caught sight of the Diana in passing, against the bluish blur of an oldverdure—just the background for her poised loveliness. Only I rather wondered why she wasn’t in the room where he sat.
He smiled. “Yes, I’ve got her,” he returned, more calmly than I had expected.
“And all the rest of the loot?”
“Yes. I had to buy the lump.”
“Had to? But you wanted to, didn’t you? You used to say it was your idea of heaven—to stretch out your hand and have a great ripe sphere of beauty drop into it. I’m quoting your own words, by the way.”
Neave blinked and stroked his seedy moustache. “Oh, yes. I remember the phrase. It’s true—itisthe last luxury.” He paused, as if seeking a pretext for his lack of warmth. “The thing that bothered me was having to move. I couldn’t cram all the stuff into my old quarters.”
“Well, I should say not! This is rather a better setting.”
He got up. “Come and take a look round. I want to show you two or three things—new attributions I’ve made. I’m doing the catalogue over.”
The interest of showing me the things seemed to dispel the vague apathy I had felt in him. He grew keen again in detailing his redistribution of values, and above all in convicting old Daunt and his advisers of their repeated aberrations of judgment. “The miracle is that he should have got such things, knowing as little as he did what he was getting. And the egregious asses who bought for him were no better, were worse in fact, since they had all sorts of humbugging wrong reasons for admiring what old Daunt simply coveted because it belonged to some other rich man.”
Never had Neave had so wondrous a field for the exercise of his perfected faculty; and I saw then how in the real, the great collector’s appreciations the keenest scientific perception is suffused with imaginative sensibility, and how it’s to the latter undefinable quality that in the last resort he trusts himself.
Nevertheless, I still felt the shadow of that hovering apathy, and he knew I felt it, and was always breaking off to give me reasons for it. For one thing, he wasn’t used to his new quarters—hated their bigness and formality; then the requests to show his things drove him mad. “The women—oh, the women!” he wailed, and interrupted himself to describe a heavy-footed German Princess who had marched past his treasures as if she were inspecting a cavalry regiment, applying an unmodulatedMugneeficentto everything from the engraved gems to the Hercules torso.
“Not that she was half as bad as the other kind,” he added, as if with a last effort at optimism. “The kind who discriminate and say: ‘I’m not sure if it’s Botticelli or Cellini I mean, butone of that school, at any rate.’ And the worst of all are the ones who know—up to a certain point: have the schools, and the dates and the jargon pat, and yet wouldn’t know a Phidias if it stood where they hadn’t expected it.”
He had all my sympathy, poor Neave; yet these were trials inseparable from the collector’s lot, and not always without their secret compensations. Certainly they did not wholly explain my friend’s attitude; and for a moment I wondered if it were due to some strange disillusionment as to the quality of his treasures. But no! the Daunt collection was almost above criticism; and as we passed from one object to another I saw there was no mistaking the genuineness of Neave’s pride in his possessions. The ripe sphere of beauty was his, and he had found no flaw in it as yet...
A year later came the amazing announcement—the Daunt collection was for sale. At first we all supposed it was a case of weeding out (though how old Daunt would have raged at the thought of anybody’s weedinghiscollection!) But no—the catalogue corrected that idea. Every stick and stone was to go under the hammer. The news ran like wildfire from Rome to Berlin, from Paris to London and New York. Was Neave ruined, then? Wrong again—the dealers nosed that out in no time. He was simply selling because he chose to sell; and in due time the things came up at Christie’s.
But you may be sure the trade had found an answer to the riddle; and the answer was that, on close inspection, Neave had found the collection less impeccable than he had supposed. It was a preposterous answer—but then there was no other. Neave, by this time, was pretty generally recognized as having the subtlestflairof any collector in Europe, and if he didn’t choose to keep the Daunt collection it could be only because he had reason to think he could do better.
In a flash this report had gone the rounds and the buyers were on their guard. I had run over to London to see the thing through, and it was the queerest sale I ever was at. Some of the things held their own, but a lot—and a few of the best among them—went for half their value. You see, they’d been locked up in old Daunt’s house for nearly twenty years, and hardly shown to any one, so that the whole younger generation of dealers and collectors knew of them only by hearsay. Then you know the effect of suggestion in such cases. The undefinable sense we were speaking of is a ticklish instrument, easily thrown out of gear by a sudden fall of temperature; and the sharpest experts grow shy and self-distrustful when the cold current of depreciation touches them. The sale was a slaughter—and when I saw the Daunt Diana fall at the wink of a little third-ratebrocanteurfrom Vienna I turned sick at the folly of my kind.
For my part, I had never believed that Neave had sold the collection because he’d “found it out”; and within a year my incredulity was justified. As soon as the things were put in circulation they were known for the marvels they are. There was hardly a poor bit in the lot; and my wonder grew at Neave’s madness. All over Europe, dealers began to be fighting for the spoils; and all kinds of stuff were palmed off on the unsuspecting as fragments of the Daunt collection!
Meanwhile, what was Neave doing? For a long time I didn’t hear, and chance kept me from returning to Rome. But one day, in Paris, I ran across a dealer who had captured for a song one of the best Florentine bronzes in the Daunt collection—a marvellousplaquetteof Donatello’s. I asked him what had become of it, and he said with a grin: “I sold it the other day,” naming a price that staggered me.
“Ye gods! Who paid you that for it?”
His grin broadened, and he answered: “Neave.”
“Neave?Humphrey Neave?”
“Didn’t you know he was buying back his things?”
“Nonsense!”
“He is, though. Not in his own name—but he’s doing it.”
And hewas, do you know—and at prices that would have made a sane man shudder! A few weeks later I ran across his tracks in London, where he was trying to get hold of a Penicaud enamel—another of his scattered treasures. Then I hunted him down at his hotel, and had it out with him.
“Look here, Neave, what are you up to?”
He wouldn’t tell me at first: stared and laughed and denied. But I took him off to dine, and after dinner, while we smoked, I happened to mention casually that I had a pull over the man who had the Penicaud—and at that he broke down and confessed.
“Yes, I’m buying them back, Finney—it’s true.” He laughed nervously, twitching his moustache. And then he let me have the story.
“You know how I’d hungered and thirsted for thereal thing—you quoted my own phrase to me once, about the ‘ripe sphere of beauty.’ So when I got my money, and Daunt lost his, almost at the same moment, I saw the hand of Providence in it. I knew that, even if I’d been younger, and had more time, I could never hope, nowadays, to form such a collection asthat. There was the ripe sphere, within reach; and I took it. But when I got it, and began to live with it, I found out my mistake. It was amariage de convenance—there’d been no wooing, no winning. Each of my little old bits—the rubbish I chucked out to make room for Daunt’s glories—had its own personal history, the drama of my relation to it, of the discovery, the struggle, the capture, the first divine moment of possession. There was a romantic secret between us. And then I had absorbed its beauties one by one, they had become a part of my imagination, they held me by a hundred threads of far-reaching association. And suddenly I had expected to create this kind of intense personal tie between myself and a roomful of new cold alien presences—things staring at me vacantly from the depths of unknown pasts! Can you fancy a more preposterous hope? Why, my other things, myownthings, had wooed me as passionately as I wooed them: there was a certain little bronze, a little Venus Callipyge, who had drawn me, drawn me, drawn me, imploring me to rescue her from her unspeakable surroundings in a vulgar bric-a-brac shop at Biarritz, where she shrank out of sight among sham Sevres and Dutch silver, as one has seen certain women—rare, shy, exquisite—made almost invisible by the vulgar splendours surrounding them. Well! that little Venus, who was just a specious seventeenth century attempt at the ‘antique,’ but who had penetrated me with her pleading grace, touched me by the easily guessed story of her obscure, anonymous origin, was more to me imaginatively—yes! more than the cold bought beauty of the Daunt Diana...”
“The Daunt Diana!” I broke in. “Hold up, Neave—the Daunt Diana?”
He smiled contemptuously. “A professional beauty, my dear fellow—expected every head to be turned when she came into a room.”
“Oh, Neave,” I groaned.
“Yes, I know. You’re thinking of what we felt that day we first saw her in London. Many a poor devil has sold his soul as the result of such a first sight! Well, I soldherinstead. Do you want the truth about her?Elle etait bete a pleurer.”
He laughed, and stood up with a little shrug of disenchantment.
“And so you’re impenitent?” I paused. “And yet you’re buying some of the things back?”
Neave laughed again, ironically. “I knew you’d find me out and call me to account. Well, yes: I’m buying back.” He stood before me half sheepish, half defiant. “I’m buying back because there’s nothing else as good in the market. And because I’ve a queer feeling that, this time, they’ll bemine. But I’m ruining myself at the game!” he confessed.
It was true: Neave was ruining himself. And he’s gone on ruining himself ever since, till now the job’s nearly done. Bit by bit, year by year, he has gathered in his scattered treasures, at higher prices than the dealers ever dreamed of getting. There are fabulous details in the story of his quest. Now and then I ran across him, and was able to help him recover a fragment; and it was wonderful to see his delight in the moment of reunion. Finally, about two years ago, we met in Paris, and he told me he had got back all the important pieces except the Diana.
“The Diana? But you told me you didn’t care for her.”
“Didn’t care?” He leaned across the restaurant table that divided us. “Well, no, in a sense I didn’t. I wanted her to want me, you see; and she didn’t then! Whereas now she’s crying to me to come to her. You know where she is?” he broke off.
Yes, I knew: in the centre of Mrs. Willy P. Goldmark’s yellow and gold drawing-room, under a thousand-candle-power chandelier, with reflectors aimed at her from every point of the compass. I had seen her wincing and shivering there in her outraged nudity at one of the Goldmark “crushes.”
“But you can’t get her, Neave,” I objected.
“No, I can’t get her,” he said.
Well, last month I was in Rome, for the first time in six or seven years, and of course I looked about for Neave. The Palazzo Neave was let to some rich Russians, and the splendid new porter didn’t know where the proprietor lived. But I got on his trail easily enough, and it led me to a strange old place in the Trastevere, an ancient crevassed black palace turned tenement house, and fluttering with pauper clothes-lines. I found Neave under the leads, in two or three cold rooms that smelt of thecuisineof all his neighbours: a poor shrunken little figure, seedier and shabbier than ever, yet more alive than when we had made the tour of his collection in the Palazzo Neave.
The collection was around him again, not displayed in tall cabinets and on marble tables, but huddled on shelves, perched on chairs, crammed in corners, putting the gleam of bronze, the opalescence of old glass, the pale lustre of marble, into all the angles of his low dim rooms. There they were, the proud presences that had stared at him down the vistas of Daunt House, and shone in cold transplanted beauty under his own painted cornices: there they were, gathered in humble promiscuity about his bent shabby figure, like superb wild creatures tamed to become the familiars of some harmless old wizard.
As we went from bit to bit, as he lifted one piece after another, and held it to the light of his low windows, I saw in his hands the same tremor of sensation that I had noticed when he first examined the same objects at Daunt House. All his life was in his finger-tips, and it seemed to communicate life to the exquisite things he touched. But you’ll think me infected by his mysticism if I tell you they gained new beauty while he held them...
We went the rounds slowly and reverently; and then, when I supposed our inspection was over, and was turning to take my leave, he opened a door I had not noticed, and showed me into a slit of a room beyond. It was a mere monastic cell, scarcely large enough for his narrow iron bed and the chest which probably held his few clothes; but there, in a niche of the bare wall, facing the foot of the bed—there stood the Daunt Diana.
I gasped at the sight and turned to him; and he looked back at me without speaking.
“In the name of magic, Neave, how did you do it?”
He smiled as if from the depths of some secret rapture. “Call it magic, if you like; but I ruined myself doing it,” he said.
I stared at him in silence, breathless with the madness and the wonder of it; and suddenly, red to the ears, he flung out his boyish confession. “I lied to you that day in London—the day I said I didn’t care for her. I always cared—always worshipped—always wanted her. But she wasn’t mine then, and I knew it, and she knew it ... and now at last we understand each other.” He looked at me shyly, and then glanced about the bare cold cell. “The setting isn’t worthy of her, I know; she was meant for glories I can’t give her; but beautiful things, my dear Finney, like beautiful spirits, live in houses not made with hands...”
His face shone with extraordinary sweetness as he spoke; and I saw he’d got hold of the secret we’re all after. No, the setting isn’t worthy of her, if you like. The rooms are as shabby and mean as those we used to see him in years ago over the wine shop. I’m not sure they’re not shabbier and meaner. But she rules there at last, she shines and hovers there above him, and there at night, I doubt not, steals down from her cloud to give him the Latmian kiss.
YOU remember—it’s not so long ago—the talk there was about Dredge’s “Arrival of the Fittest”? The talk has subsided, but the book of course remains: stands up, in fact, as the tallest thing of its kind since—well, I’d almost said since “The Origin of Species.”
I’m not wrong, at any rate, in calling it the most important contribution yet made to the development of the Darwinian theory, or rather to the solution of the awkward problem about which that theory has had to make such a circuit. Dredge’s hypothesis will be contested, may one day be disproved; but at least it has swept out of the way all previous conjectures, including of course Lanfear’s magnificent attempt; and for our generation of scientific investigators it will serve as the first safe bridge across a murderous black whirlpool.
It’s all very interesting—there are few things more stirring to the imagination than that sudden projection of the new hypothesis, light as a cobweb and strong as steel, across the intellectual abyss; but, for an idle observer of human motives, the other, the personal, side of Dredge’s case is even more interesting and arresting.
Personal side? You didn’t know there was one? Pictured him simply as a thinking machine, a highly specialized instrument of precision, the result of a long series of “adaptations,” as his own jargon would put it? Well, I don’t wonder—if you’ve met him. He does give the impression of being something out of his own laboratory: a delicate scientific instrument that reveals wonders to the initiated, and is absolutely useless in an ordinary hand.
In his youth it was just the other way. I knew him twenty years ago, as an awkward lout whom young Archie Lanfear had picked up at college, and brought home for a visit. I happened to be staying at the Lanfears’ when the boys arrived, and I shall never forget Dredge’s first appearance on the scene. You know the Lanfears always lived very simply. That summer they had gone to Buzzard’s Bay, in order that Professor Lanfear might be near the Biological Station at Wood’s Holl, and they were picnicking in a kind of sketchy bungalow without any attempt at elegance. But Galen Dredge couldn’t have been more awe-struck if he’d been suddenly plunged into a Fifth Avenue ball-room. He nearly knocked his shock head against the low doorway, and in dodging this peril trod heavily on Mabel Lanfear’s foot, and became hopelessly entangled in her mother’s draperies—though how he managed it I never knew, for Mrs. Lanfear’s dowdy muslins ran to no excess of train.
When the Professor himself came in it was ten times worse, and I saw then that Dredge’s emotion was a tribute to the great man’s proximity. That made the boy interesting, and I began to watch. Archie, always enthusiastic but vague, had said: “Oh, he’s a tremendous chap—you’ll see—” but I hadn’t expected to see quite so clearly. Lanfear’s vision, of course, was sharper than mine; and the next morning he had carried Dredge off to the Biological Station. And that was the way it began.
Dredge is the son of a Baptist minister. He comes from East Lethe, New York State, and was working his way through college—waiting at White Mountain hotels in summer—when Archie Lanfear ran across him. There were eight children in the family, and the mother was an invalid. Dredge never had a penny from his father after he was fourteen; but his mother wanted him to be a scholar, and “kept at him,” as he put it, in the hope of his going back to “teach school” at East Lethe. He developed slowly, as the scientific mind generally does, and was still adrift about himself and his tendencies when Archie took him down to Buzzard’s Bay. But he had read Lanfear’s “Utility and Variation,” and had always been a patient and curious observer of nature. And his first meeting with Lanfear explained him to himself. It didn’t, however, enable him to explain himself to others, and for a long time he remained, to all but Lanfear, an object of incredulity and conjecture.
“Whymy husband wants him about—” poor Mrs. Lanfear, the kindest of women, privately lamented to her friends; for Dredge, at that time—they kept him all summer at the bungalow—had one of the most encumbering personalities you can imagine. He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.
The poor Lanfears almost died of him that summer, and the pity of it was that he never suspected it, but continued to lavish on them a floundering devotion as uncomfortable as the endearments of a dripping dog—all out of gratitude for the Professor’s kindness! He was full, in those days, of raw enthusiasms, which he forced on any one who would listen when his first shyness had worn off. You can’t picture him spouting sentimental poetry, can you? Yet I’ve seen him petrify a whole group of Mrs. Lanfear’s callers by suddenly discharging on them, in the strident drawl of Western New York, “Barbara Frietchie” or “The Queen of the May.” His taste in literature was uniformly bad, but very definite, and far more assertive than his views on biological questions. In his scientific judgments he showed, even then, a remarkable temperance, a precocious openness to the opposite view; but in literature he was a furious propagandist, aggressive, disputatious, and extremely sensitive to adverse opinion.
Lanfear, of course, had been struck from the first by his gift of accurate observation, and by the fact that his eagerness to learn was offset by his reluctance to conclude. I remember Lanfear’s telling me that he had never known a lad of Dredge’s age who gave such promise of uniting an aptitude for general ideas with the plodding patience of the accumulator of facts. Of course when Lanfear talked like that of a young biologist his fate was sealed. There could be no question of Dredge’s going back to “teach school” at East Lethe. He must take a course in biology at Columbia, spend his vacations at the Wood’s Holl laboratory, and then, if possible, go to Germany for a year or two.
All this meant his virtual adoption by the Lanfears. Most of Lanfear’s fortune went in helping young students to a start, and he devoted his heaviest subsidies to Dredge.
“Dredge will be my biggest dividend—you’ll see!” he used to say, in the chrysalis days when poor Galen was known to the world of science only as a perpetual slouching presence in Mrs. Lanfear’s drawing-room. And Dredge, it must be said, took his obligations simply, with that kind of personal dignity, and quiet sense of his own worth, which in such cases saves the beneficiary from abjectness. He seemed to trust himself as fully as Lanfear trusted him.
The comic part of it was that his only idea of making what is known as “a return” was to devote himself to the Professor’s family. When I hear pretty women lamenting that they can’t coax Professor Dredge out of his laboratory I remember Mabel Lanfear’s cry to me: “If Galen would only keep away!” When Mabel fell on the ice and broke her leg, Galen walked seven miles in a blizzard to get a surgeon; but if he did her this service one day in the year, he bored her by being in the way for the other three hundred and sixty-four. One would have imagined at that time that he thought his perpetual presence the greatest gift he could bestow; for, except on the occasion of his fetching the surgeon, I don’t remember his taking any other way of expressing his gratitude.
In love with Mabel? Not a bit! But the queer thing was that hedidhave a passion in those days—a blind, hopeless passion for Mrs. Lanfear! Yes: I know what I’m saying. I mean Mrs. Lanfear, the Professor’s wife, poor Mrs. Lanfear, with her tight hair and her loose figure, her blameless brow and earnest eye-glasses, and her perpetual attitude of mild misapprehension. I can see Dredge cowering, long and many-jointed, in a diminutive drawing-room chair, one square-toed shoe coiled round an exposed ankle, his knees clasped in a knot of red knuckles, and his spectacles perpetually seeking Mrs. Lanfear’s eye-glasses. I never knew if the poor lady was aware of the sentiment she inspired, but her children observed it, and it provoked them to irreverent mirth. Galen was the predestined butt of Mabel and Archie; and secure in their mother’s virtuous obtuseness, and in her worshipper’s timidity, they allowed themselves a latitude of banter that sometimes turned their audience cold. Dredge meanwhile was going on obstinately with his work. Now and then he had queer fits of idleness, when he lapsed into a state of sulky inertia from which even Lanfear’s admonitions could not rouse him. Once, just before an examination, he suddenly went off to the Maine woods for two weeks, came back, and failed to pass. I don’t know if his benefactor ever lost hope; but at times his confidence must have been sorely strained. The queer part of it was that when Dredge emerged from these eclipses he seemed keener and more active than ever. His slowly growing intelligence probably needed its periodical pauses of assimilation; and Lanfear was marvellously patient.
At last Dredge finished his course and went to Germany; and when he came back he was a new man—was, in fact, the Dredge we all know. He seemed to have shed his blundering, encumbering personality, and come to life as a disembodied intelligence. His fidelity to the Lanfears was unchanged; but he showed it negatively, by his discretions and abstentions. I have an idea that Mabel was less disposed to deride him, might even have been induced to softer sentiments; but I doubt if Dredge even noticed the change. As for his ex-goddess, he seemed to regard her as a motherly household divinity, the guardian genius of the darning needle; but on Professor Lanfear he looked with a deepening reverence. If the rest of the family had diminished in his eyes, its head had grown even greater.
FROM that day Dredge’s progress continued steadily. If not always perceptible to the untrained eye, in Lanfear’s sight it never deviated, and the great man began to associate Dredge with his work, and to lean on him more and more. Lanfear’s health was already failing, and in my confidential talks with him I saw how he counted on Galen Dredge to continue and amplify his doctrine. If he did not describe the young man as his predestined Huxley, it was because any such comparison between himself and his great predecessors would have been repugnant to his taste; but he evidently felt that it would be Dredge’s role to reveal him to posterity. And the young man seemed at that time to take the same view of his calling. When he was not busy about Lanfear’s work he was recording their conversations with the diligence of a biographer and the accuracy of a naturalist. Any attempt to question or minimize Lanfear’s theories roused in his disciple the only flashes of wrath I have ever seen a scientific discussion provoke in him. In defending his master he became almost as intemperate as in the early period of his literary passions.
Such filial dedication must have been all the more precious to Lanfear because, about that time, it became evident that Archie would never carry on his father’s work. He had begun brilliantly, you may remember, by a little paper onLimulus Polyphemusthat attracted a good deal of notice when it appeared in theCentral Blatt; but gradually his zoological ardour yielded to an absorbing passion for the violin, which was followed by a sudden plunge into physics. At present, after a side-glance at the drama, I understand he’s devoting what is left of his father’s money to archaeological explorations in Asia Minor.
“Archie’s got a delightful little mind,” Lanfear used to say to me, rather wistfully, “but it’s just a highly polished surface held up to the show as it passes. Dredge’s mind takes in only a bit at a time, but the bit stays, and other bits are joined to it, in a hard mosaic of fact, of which imagination weaves the pattern. I saw just how it would be years ago, when my boy used to take my meaning in a flash, and answer me with clever objections, while Galen disappeared into one of his fathomless silences, and then came to the surface like a dripping retriever, a long way beyond Archie’s objections, and with an answer to them in his mouth.”
It was about this time that the crowning satisfaction of Lanfear’s career came to him: I mean, of course, John Weyman’s gift to Columbia of the Lanfear Laboratory, and the founding, in connection with it, of a chair of Experimental Evolution. Weyman had always taken an interest in Lanfear’s work, but no one had supposed that his interest would express itself so magnificently. The honour came to Lanfear at a time when he was fighting an accumulation of troubles: failing health, the money difficulties resulting from his irrepressible generosity, his disappointment about Archie’s career, and perhaps also the persistent attacks of the new school of German zoologists.
“If I hadn’t Galen I should feel the game was up,” he said to me once, in a fit of half-real, half-mocking despondency. “But he’ll do what I haven’t time to do myself, and what my boy can’t do for me.”
That meant that he would answer the critics, and triumphantly affirm Lanfear’s theory, which had been rudely shaken, but not displaced.
“A scientific hypothesis lasts till there’s something else to put in its place. People who want to get across a river will use the old bridge till the new one’s built. And I don’t see any one who’s particularly anxious, in this case, to take a contract for the new one,” Lanfear ended; and I remember answering with a laugh: “Not while Horatius Dredge holds the other.”
It was generally known that Lanfear had not long to live, and the Laboratory was hardly opened before the question of his successor in the chair of Experimental Evolution began to be a matter of public discussion. It was conceded that whoever followed him ought to be a man of achieved reputation, some one carrying, as the French say, a considerable “baggage.” At the same time, even Lanfear’s critics felt that he should be succeeded by a man who held his views and would continue his teaching. This was not in itself a difficulty, for German criticism had so far been mainly negative, and there were plenty of good men who, while they questioned the permanent validity of Lanfear’s conclusions, were yet ready to accept them for their provisional usefulness. And then there was the added inducement of the Laboratory! The Columbia Professor of Experimental Evolution has at his disposal the most complete instrument of biological research that modern ingenuity has yet produced; and it’s not only in theology or politicsque Paris vaut bien une messe!There was no trouble about finding a candidate; but the whole thing turned on Lanfear’s decision, since it was tacitly understood that, by Weyman’s wish, he was to select his successor. And what a cry there was when he selected Galen Dredge!
Not in the scientific world, though. The specialists were beginning to know about Dredge. His remarkable paper on Sexual Dimorphism had been translated into several languages, and a furious polemic had broken out over it. When a young fellow can get the big men fighting over him his future is pretty well assured. But Dredge was only thirty-four, and some people seemed to feel that there was a kind of deflected nepotism in Lanfear’s choice.
“If he could choose Dredge he might as well have chosen his own son,” I’ve heard it said; and the irony was that Archie—will you believe it?—actually thought so himself! But Lanfear had Weyman behind him, and when the end came the Faculty at once appointed Galen Dredge to the chair of Experimental Evolution.
For the first two years things went quietly, along accustomed lines. Dredge simply continued the course which Lanfear’s death had interrupted. He lectured well even then, with a persuasive simplicity surprising in the slow, inarticulate creature one knew him for. But haven’t you noticed that certain personalities reveal themselves only in the more impersonal relations of life? It’s as if they woke only to collective contacts, and the single consciousness were an unmeaning fragment to them.
If there was anything to criticize in that first part of the course, it was the avoidance of general ideas, of those brilliant rockets of conjecture that Lanfear’s students were used to seeing him fling across the darkness. I remember once saying this to Archie, who, having recovered from his absurd disappointment, had returned to his old allegiance to Dredge.
“Oh, that’s Galen all over. He doesn’t want to jump into the ring till he has a big swishing knock-down argument in his fist. He’ll wait twenty years if he has to. That’s his strength: he’s never afraid to wait.”
I thought this shrewd of Archie, as well as generous; and I saw the wisdom of Dredge’s course. As Lanfear himself had said, his theory was safe enough till somebody found a more attractive one; and before that day Dredge would probably have accumulated sufficient proof to crystallize the fluid hypothesis.
THE third winter I was off collecting in Central America, and didn’t get back till Dredge’s course had been going for a couple of months. The very day I turned up in town Archie Lanfear descended on me with a summons from his mother. I was wanted at once at a family council.
I found the Lanfear ladies in a state of incoherent distress, which Archie’s own indignation hardly made more intelligible. But gradually I put together their fragmentary charges, and learned that Dredge’s lectures were turning into an organized assault on his master’s doctrine.
“It amounts to just this,” Archie said, controlling his women with the masterful gesture of the weak man. “Galen has simply turned round and betrayed my father.”
“Just for a handful of silver he left us,” Mabel sobbed in parenthesis, while Mrs. Lanfear tearfully cited Hamlet.
Archie silenced them again. “The ugly part of it is that he must have had this up his sleeve for years. He must have known when he was asked to succeed my father what use he meant to make of his opportunity. What he’s doing isn’t the result of a hasty conclusion: it means years of work and preparation.”
Archie broke off to explain himself. He had returned from Europe the week before, and had learned on arriving that Dredge’s lectures were stirring the world of science as nothing had stirred it since Lanfear’s “Utility and Variation.” And the incredible outrage was that they owed their sensational effect to the fact of being an attempted refutation of Lanfear’s great work.
I own that I was staggered: the case looked ugly, as Archie said. And there was a veil of reticence, of secrecy, about Dredge, that always kept his conduct in a half-light of uncertainty. Of some men one would have said off-hand: “It’s impossible!” But one couldn’t affirm it of him.
Archie hadn’t seen him as yet; and Mrs. Lanfear had sent for me because she wished me to be present at the interview between the two men. The Lanfear ladies had a touching belief in Archie’s violence: they thought him as terrible as a natural force. My own idea was that if there were any broken bones they wouldn’t be Dredge’s; but I was too curious as to the outcome not to be glad to offer my services as moderator.
First, however, I wanted to hear one of the lectures; and I went the next afternoon. The hall was jammed, and I saw, as soon as Dredge appeared, what increased security and ease the interest of his public had given him. He had been clear the year before, now he was also eloquent. The lecture was a remarkable effort: you’ll find the gist of it in Chapter VII of “The Arrival of the Fittest.” Archie sat at my side in a white rage; he was too clever not to measure the extent of the disaster. And I was almost as indignant as he when we went to see Dredge the next day.
I saw at a glance that the latter suspected nothing; and it was characteristic of him that he began by questioning me about my finds, and only afterward turned to reproach Archie for having been back a week without notifying him.
“You know I’m up to my neck in this job. Why in the world didn’t you hunt me up before this?”
The question was exasperating, and I could understand Archie’s stammer of wrath.
“Hunt you up? Hunt you up? What the deuce are you made of, to ask me such a question instead of wondering why I’m here now?”
Dredge bent his slow calm scrutiny on his friend’s quivering face; then he turned to me.
“What’s the matter?” he said simply.
“The matter?” shrieked Archie, his clenched fist hovering excitedly above the desk by which he stood; but Dredge, with unwonted quickness, caught the fist as it descended.
“Careful—I’ve got aKallimain that jar there.” He pushed a chair forward, and added quietly: “Sit down.”
Archie, ignoring the gesture, towered pale and avenging in his place; and Dredge, after a moment, took the chair himself.
“The matter?” Archie reiterated with rising passion. “Are you so lost to all sense of decency and honour that you can put that question in good faith? Don’t you reallyknowwhat’s the matter?”
Dredge smiled slowly. “There are so few things onereally knows.”
“Oh, damn your scientific hair-splitting! Don’t you know you’re insulting my father’s memory?”
Dredge stared again, turning his spectacles thoughtfully from one of us to the other.
“Oh, that’s it, is it? Then you’d better sit down. If you don’t see at once it’ll take some time to make you.”
Archie burst into an ironic laugh.
“I rather think it will!” he conceded.
“Sit down, Archie,” I said, setting the example; and he obeyed, with a gesture that made his consent a protest.
Dredge seemed to notice nothing beyond the fact that his visitors were seated. He reached for his pipe, and filled it with the care which the habit of delicate manipulations gave to all the motions of his long, knotty hands.
“It’s about the lectures?” he said.
Archie’s answer was a deep scornful breath.
“You’ve only been back a week, so you’ve only heard one, I suppose?”
“It was not necessary to hear even that one. You must know the talk they’re making. If notoriety is what you’re after—”
“Well, I’m not sorry to make a noise,” said Dredge, putting a match to his pipe.
Archie bounded in his chair. “There’s no easier way of doing it than to attack a man who can’t answer you!”
Dredge raised a sobering hand. “Hold on. Perhaps you and I don’t mean the same thing. Tell me first what’s in your mind.”
The request steadied Archie, who turned on Dredge a countenance really eloquent with filial indignation.
“It’s an odd question for you to ask; it makes me wonder what’s in yours. Not much thought of my father, at any rate, or you couldn’t stand in his place and use the chance he’s given you to push yourself at his expense.”
Dredge received this in silence, puffing slowly at his pipe.
“Is that the way it strikes you?” he asked at length.
“God! It’s the way it would strike most men.”
He turned to me. “You too?”
“I can see how Archie feels,” I said.
“That I’m attacking his father’s memory to glorify myself?”
“Well, not precisely: I think what he really feels is that, if your convictions didn’t permit you to continue his father’s teaching, you might perhaps have done better to sever your connection with the Lanfear lectureship.”
“Then you and he regard the Lanfear lectureship as having been founded to perpetuate a dogma, not to try and get at the truth?”
“Certainly not,” Archie broke in. “But there’s a question of taste, of delicacy, involved in the case that can’t be decided on abstract principles. We know as well as you that my father meant the laboratory and the lectureship to serve the ends of science, at whatever cost to his own special convictions; what we feel—and you don’t seem to—is that you’re the last man to put them to that use; and I don’t want to remind you why.”
A slight redness rose through Dredge’s sallow skin. “You needn’t,” he said. “It’s because he pulled me out of my hole, woke me up, made me, shoved me off from the shore. Because he saved me ten or twenty years of muddled effort, and put me where I am at an age when my best working years are still ahead of me. Every one knows that’s what your father did for me, but I’m the only person who knows the time and trouble that it took.”
It was well said, and I glanced quickly at Archie, who was never closed to generous emotions.
“Well, then—?” he said, flushing also.
“Well, then,” Dredge continued, his voice deepening and losing its nasal edge, “I had to pay him back, didn’t I?”
The sudden drop flung Archie back on his prepared attitude of irony. “It would be the natural inference—with most men.”
“Just so. And I’m not so very different. I knew your father wanted a successor—some one who’d try and tie up the loose ends. And I took the lectureship with that object.”
“And you’re using it to tear the whole fabric to pieces!”
Dredge paused to re-light his pipe. “Looks that way,” he conceded. “This year anyhow.”
“This year—?” Archie gasped at him.
“Yes. When I took up the job I saw it just as your father left it. Or rather, I didn’t see any other way of going on with it. The change came gradually, as I worked.”
“Gradually? So that you had time to look round you, to know where you were, to see you were fatally committed to undoing the work he had done?”
“Oh, yes—I had time,” Dredge conceded.
“And yet you kept the chair and went on with the course?”
Dredge refilled his pipe, and then turned in his seat so that he looked squarely at Archie.
“What would your father have done in my place?” he asked.
“In your place—?”
“Yes: supposing he’d found out the things I’ve found out in the last year or two. You’ll see what they are, and how much they count, if you’ll run over the report of the lectures. If your father’d been alive he might have come across the same facts just as easily.”
There was a silence which Archie at last broke by saying: “But he didn’t, and you did. There’s the difference.”
“The difference? What difference? Would your father have suppressed the facts if he’d found them? It’syouwho insult his memory by implying it! And if I’d brought them to him, would he have used his hold over me to get me to suppress them?”
“Certainly not. But can’t you see it’s his death that makes the difference? He’s not here to defend his case.”
Dredge laughed, but not unkindly. “My dear Archie, your father wasn’t one of the kind who bother to defend their case. Men like him are the masters, not the servants, of their theories. They respect an idea only as long as it’s of use to them; when it’s usefulness ends they chuck it out. And that’s what your father would have done.”
Archie reddened. “Don’t you assume a good deal in taking it for granted that he would have had to in this particular case?”
Dredge reflected. “Yes: I was going too far. Each of us can only answer for himself. But to my mind your father’s theory is refuted.”
“And you don’t hesitate to be the man to do it?”
“Should I have been of any use if I had? And did your father ever ask anything of me but to be of as much use as I could?”
It was Archie’s turn to reflect. “No. That was what he always wanted, of course.”
“That’s the way I’ve always felt. The first day he took me away from East Lethe I knew the debt I was piling up against him, and I never had any doubt as to how I’d pay it, or how he’d want it paid. He didn’t pick me out and train me for any object but to carry on the light. Do you suppose he’d have wanted me to snuff it out because it happened to light up a fact he didn’t fancy? I’m usinghisoil to feed my torch with: yes, but it isn’t really his torch or mine, or his oil or mine: they belong to each of us till we drop and hand them on.”
Archie turned a sobered glance on him. “I see your point. But if the job had to be done I don’t see that you need have done it from his chair.”
“There’s where we differ. If I did it at all I had to do it in the best way, and with all the authority his backing gave me. If I owe your father anything, I owe him that. It would have made him sick to see the job badly done. And don’t you see that the way to honour him, and show what he’s done for science, was to spare no advantage in my attack on him—that I’m proving the strength of his position by the desperateness of my assault?” Dredge paused and squared his lounging shoulders. “After all,” he added, “he’s not down yet, and if I leave him standing I guess it’ll be some time before anybody else cares to tackle him.”
There was a silence between the two men; then Dredge continued in a lighter tone: “There’s one thing, though, that we’re both in danger of forgetting: and that is how little, in the long run, it all counts either way.” He smiled a little at Archie’s outraged gesture. “The most we can any of us do—even by such a magnificent effort as your father’s—is to turn the great marching army a hair’s breadth nearer what seems to us the right direction; if one of us drops out, here and there, the loss of headway’s hardly perceptible. And that’s what I’m coming to now.”
He rose from his seat, and walked across to the hearth; then, cautiously resting his shoulder-blades against the mantel-shelf jammed with miscellaneous specimens, he bent his musing spectacles on Archie.
“Your father would have understood why I’ve done, what I’m doing; but that’s no reason why the rest of you should. And I rather think it’s the rest of you who’ve suffered most from me. He always knew what I wasthere for, and that must have been some comfort even when I was most in the way; but I was just an ordinary nuisance to you and your mother and Mabel. You were all too kind to let me see it at the time, but I’ve seen it since, and it makes me feel that, after all, the settling of this matter lies with you. If it hurts you to have me go on with my examination of your father’s theory, I’m ready to drop the lectures to-morrow, and trust to the Lanfear Laboratory to breed up a young chap who’ll knock us both out in time. You’ve only got to say the word.”
There was a pause while Dredge turned and laid his extinguished pipe carefully between a jar of embryo sea-urchins and a colony of regenerating planarians.
Then Archie rose and held out his hand.
“No,” he said simply; “go on.”