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Her enthusiasm communicated a thrill to him as he regarded the still, withdrawn mystery of the plants.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.
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.
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.
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 ofrot.
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.
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—”
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 ofthe nicegirls 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.
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.
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.
ISAID 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.”
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.
THE pictures of far places had stirred him but slightly: but to travel with Annot, to see anything with Annot, would offer continual amusement and surprise; her vigorous candor, her freedom from sham and petty considerations, enveloped the most commonplace perspectives in an atmosphere of high novelty. The trace of the vagabond, the detachment of the born dweller in tents, woven so picturesquely through his being, responded to her careless indifference to the tyranny of an established and timid scheme of existence.
The following day her old, bright hardness had returned: she railed at him in French, in German, in Italian; she called him the solemn shover, Sir Anthony Absolute. And, holding Thomas Huxley's head directed toward him, recommended that resigned quadruped to emulate Anthony's austere and inflexible virtues.