XXVITHE BIOLOGIST AND THE PURITAN
THE solemnity of the parting song had driven Bardek off alone. Allen and Kate walked along ahead, but at the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, a dark, forbidding place, Allen insisted upon stopping to wait for Gorgas and Leopold, who were straggling far in the rear. Fumbling accidentally in his pockets, Blynn produced his morning mail, two letters, still unopened. They moved up to the lights of the station to see what it would disclose. One was from Gorgas—she had a habit of jotting notes to persons she met every day. He glanced at it hurriedly, but in the bad light did not catch the full meaning. The other letter set him dancing.
“Can you spare me for the remainder of the month, Madam Manager, and part of September?” he asked. His eyes showed good news.
“Is it money?” the practical manager asked first.
“Bushels!” he cried. “Diccon has booked a series of lectures in a string of cities,” he read, “Rochester, Ithaca, Albany, Providence and Boston. I cover the route three times, fifteen lectures in five weeks, at—what do you think? One hundred dollars each and expenses!”
“How much is that altogether?” Kate was figuring.
“I don’t know. I’m so excited, I can’t count. One hundred apiece—child’s play! I’ve got ’em all done. Isn’t it great! and isn’t it robbery! ‘Each local center pays three hundred dollars,’ he read, ‘and expenses, which makes it one hundred dollars per lecture. I hope this is not too slight an honorarium.’ Golly! Too slight? Let me confess something, Kate. I don’t take any pennies out of the cash-drawer of Top-o’-the-Hill. By George! you don’t know how splendid I feel to be able to face those children like a man. That ‘salary’—oh, you were managing it beautifully, I know—but that ‘salary’ was choking me, even before I got any. I’m glad that’s all over and settled.”
They were strolling toward home through the wooded Seminary grounds, on which site once stood the old “Classical and Military Lyceum,” where Beauregarde, Meade and many another Northern and Southern officer received preliminary training. Over these same grounds, in 1777, came Sullivan’s men, driving the British advance post before them; and a little later, on that October morning, General Washington rode down the “Great Road” with his eager staff.
“I dug a cannon-ball out of my garden the other day,” Allen remarked abruptly. The thrill of the evening was upon them and they had had no need for speech; but if the man would talk, Kate would tuckher hand in his arm and be content. “A little round, rusty thing, about as big as your fist—it made me a little more reverent toward this old battleground.... The Continentals came up out of the fog over there,” he pointed earnestly, although it was almost too dark to see him, “surprised the pickets in the Allen House and bayoneted every one—poor devils!... They swept on over this ground, firing from behind trees, for the Fifty-second British Light Infantry, who were tenting over there in the fields beyond the New Street, were stirring out like hornets—and such a bugling and banging there must have been!... The Fifty-second put up a running fight and weren’t able to make a stand for nearly a mile.... Think of it! Washington himself followed right after Sullivan’s men—perhaps he rode over this very spot!... Doesn’t it excite you?”
“Not a bit, Sentimental Sir,” she laughed coolly.
“You are standing, mebbe, on historic spots, madam!” he mocked her laughter with assumed sternness. “That battle came near to deciding everything—think of the historic persons who struggled here—Washington and Wayne, and Lafayette, and—and—”
“And me,” she helped.
“Since when have you become an historic person, madam?”
“‘On this spot,’” she quoted an imaginary stone, “‘one wonderful evening late in August in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-two, stood Keyser Levering,familiarly known as Kate, with her arm linked comfortably in that of a poetic but pleasant person otherwise unknown.’... Washington and Lafayette were nice boys,” said she, “and that battle was their fun, but standing here very much alive and living my little life is all the history I’ll ever have; so I’ve got to make the most of it.... Sentimental Sir, aren’t you going to get all worked up over historic me, standing here?—or do I have to be dead before it is proper to become really stirred?”
She waited expectantly. Kate had told her story to this man in as many veiled ways as is permitted to a lady; but each time he had looked at her earnestly, as if she had propounded a serious riddle. And always it amused her—at least she smiled gamely—to see how really obtuse this clever man could be. This time, in the darkening night, she could not see his eyes as he bent forward; but she felt his arm tighten and the brotherly pat of his hand upon her own.
“You’re all right, Kate,” he said; and then, “Good old Kate!” which he repeated with great satisfaction. A second later, he asked irrelevantly, “Where are those children?” meaning Gorgas and Leopold.
They peered fruitlessly into the darkness, and even retraced their steps a part of the way down the Valley, but there was no sign of them.
“They have felt the spell of the evening and have tracked off,” Kate suggested. “Didn’t Leopold do that song well? ‘Forty year on when afar and asunder,’” she sang. “It gave me a thrill, I tell you.”
“Me, too,” Blynn pressed his lips together. “And how he felt it! Did you see him straining to keep the tears back? Think what it meant to him, that old parting song of Harrow!”
The floating melody and the words of the song lingered. By association, the thought of Gorgas came into their minds.
“They’ll be home before us,” Kate spoke out. “While we’ve been dawdling along they have probably taken some short cut. It may be Gorgas has dragged Leopold on one of her ‘bee-lines.’”
“Well, well!” Blynn laughed. “At night, too. Gorgas claims that’s to be one of the studies in Top-o’-the-Hill. ‘Cut a straight path,’ she says, ‘like a bee, only bee-ier:
‘Through bush, through briar,Ice, rain, water, fire;Over river, up tree,Bee-ier than a flying bee,Through hedge and over gate,Straight! straight! straight! straight!’
‘Through bush, through briar,Ice, rain, water, fire;Over river, up tree,Bee-ier than a flying bee,Through hedge and over gate,Straight! straight! straight! straight!’
‘Through bush, through briar,
Ice, rain, water, fire;
Over river, up tree,
Bee-ier than a flying bee,
Through hedge and over gate,
Straight! straight! straight! straight!’
“She goes up one side of a tree and down the other like a squirrel! I was on one last Wednesday. Phew! She chose a southeast ‘bee-line’ and insisted upon fording the Schuylkill river, clothes and all! She said her conscience wouldn’t let her back out. I just had to follow to keep her from mischief.”
They were not at home, however, when Kate and Allen arrived, nor did they come in for hours after. Then Gorgas walked in alone. She was rather disheveled.With only a slight word of greeting, she went up the stairs as if she were tired out.
“Another ‘bee-line,’ Gorgas?” Blynn asked cheerfully.
She stopped on the landing and looked back at him.
“You bet!” she nodded almost angrily and moved swiftly up the stairs.
“What is a ‘bee-line’?” Leopold, at the doorway, asked quietly. He was spick and orderly as ever, save that his tie was completely off its moorings and hanging over his left shoulder.
Blynn explained, quoting the verses of the game, and joked about the tell-tale tie.
“Ah!” Leopold adjusted the cravat thoughtfully. “She did not give a name to it.”
That night Blynn and Leopold walked home together. They talked of Gorgas as if the theme had been set in advance. She came abruptly into their conversation, but so intent was each upon his own thought that neither considered the need of apology or explanation. Without introduction, Leopold began:
“She is beautifully unschooled. It is a rare thing nowadays to meet a natural woman—and with the beginnings of a mind.”
“Sometimes,” Blynn pondered as he talked, “I have taken pride in having shaped that mind of hers. But—she is herself, and would have been herself without any help or hindrance from me.”
“You have done much for her,” Leopold protested.
“Nonsense!”
“Much! I recognize it. Some of your Puritan conscience is in her.”
“How do you make that out?”
Leopold pondered in turn. “Tonight she—and on other nights, too—she—but I can’t give illustrations.”
Blynn looked at him. “I think I understand,” he brightened up. “She is just naturally moral.”
Leopold laughed quietly. “Moral! What a wretched word!”
“Oh, I don’t mean—”
“Don’t explain, friend Allen. I know you don’t mean the little prudential codes of playing safe and getting on in life. You mean that she has principles of conduct which she has thought out—”
“No,” explained Blynn. “I don’t mean that at all. She has principles of conduct, all right, but they are not thought out; they are instinctive. She plays fair by instinct; she couldn’t want to take advantage: not because she has reasoned the thing out, but because—because she just knows it isn’t the square thing to do. And then she has a powerful lot of self-respect without a trace of vanity. She—”
The two men interrupted each other continually. That was their method—tossing the idea back and forth.
“Yes,” Leopold took it up, “she fights reason without any reason at all, and won’t let herself go. She admits things with delicious candor; she has wants andowns up to them, but she won’t let herself satisfy them. She knows her instincts, but she holds them down.”
“Good!” Blynn commented. “She has character. Control—that’s the whole of character. But we’re talking very vaguely. Wants! Instincts! What sort? They may be friends or enemies.”
“Ha!” Leopold interjected gleefully. “That’s her very phrase! I can see your coaching there, old boy! And you’ve done a good job—so far.”
“I’m glad,” said Blynn simply. The thoughts of the two men were on totally different levels. For over an hour that night off in Cresheim Valley, Leopold had been matching his instincts against that very control which meant in Gorgas, character. All the rushing events of that tremulous night were in his mind as he talked; but Blynn, characteristically, considered only the general application of his theory. “I’m glad,” he went on. “I wasn’t sure. Her mother is practically useless to her—so is her sister, for that matter. I have planted a few seed-ideas, that is all. If they’ve rooted, I’m glad. But, gracious me! She’s had no chance to test herself. That may come; but it will be later, when she’s older and better able to be her own master. She’s quite sheltered here. No one will bother her here. What—”
Blynn stopped speaking. A self-satisfied exclamation from Leopold arrested his thinking. Some of his own dormant instincts began to tug at his mind—suspicion, among others and a swift, unreasoned touch of jealousy; but he checked himself and went on. “Ofcourse, I have been able to do very little. A man must generalize, he must—”
“She understood all your generalizations,” Leopold interrupted.
“Did she say—but—how could you know?”
“She told me.”
“Told you what?”
“Well, among other things, she told me your story of the pale wanderer who turned a whole city full of people into lepers. Ugh! That was an ugly dose! It got into her, somehow, and sickened her. It has made her afraid to let go. Leper! Ugh! How could you?”
“Because it is life,” Blynn spoke warmly. “Ignorance is the only sin. You remember your Socrates. If we really knew all, he said, we would never embrace evil. Ignorance makes our criminals, it makes our slums, it brings into the world cripple-minded children, it separates mothers and fathers, breeds disease, and corrupts the best of us. We don’t take evil into our lives because we believe it to be evil, but because we ignorantly think it good.”
“Phew!” Leopold affected concern. “Youarea Puritan! Scratch a Puritan and find a preacher!... Well; you’ve made her half a Puritan—you and your ghastly leper—and it is a good thing.” Leopold nodded sagely. “At first, I did not like it. It seemed inconsistent with her strong sense of individual freedom. I am not much of a Puritan myself. I obey my will. I do not let it be balked by creed or dictummade by others. And I have always believed in giving the same freedom to everyone. That is my idea of tolerance. But she is not that way—and, strange, I am glad!”
They talked for a desultory moment on freedom and restrictions, but Leopold came back to Gorgas.
“She is not wholly Puritan,” he explained. “At times—no; at other times—tonight, for instance—she takes fright, calls on her little gods, and fights. You it is, I gather, who have planted that in her—”
“Oh, no!” Blynn protested grimly. The generalities of Leopold began to assume horrid, specific meanings. His slow mind was racing to catch up with the events. The “bee-line,” the angry, disheveled Gorgas mounting the stairs, the cravat so accusingly awry—what did they mean? Suddenly his memory began to piece data together, material that had been observed by his eyes, that had been recorded on the phonographic-disk of a brain, but which never before had been summoned into consciousness. The pictures that he conjured made him ill, and as he walked he drew in deep breaths to steady himself. “Oh, no!” he repeated, while his mind throbbed, “I taught her nothing. She has her own character, predestined to grow into its own as an oak from an acorn. You can’t spread morals on children like stucco on a wall. Character is the self revealed. You can only bring it out. But with Gorgas I didn’t even bring it out. It was always there.”
“I believe you,” Leopold answered. “You are quite right. And I am glad. Strange that I should want in a woman the qualities that I do not respect myself.”
“You want—Gorgas?”
“Yes.”
Leopold went on calmly, but Allen only half heeded him; through the dark they strode, the biologist pursuing serenely his theory, the other hearing only the turmoil of his own wild thoughts. Finally the pleasant voice at his side caught Allen’s attention. Leopold was saying:
“There is something, after all, in that old worship of chastity in women—the ‘double-standard,’ as we call it today—something more than merely the echo of the age of chivalry or the offshoot of the worship of the Virgin. It is an ingrained necessity, I am finding. A man must be sure of his woman. Faithfulness, constancy, unconquerability—those are the qualities that hold us. If the woman surrenders easily, we men suspect that the next comer will have the same victory. Then the Othello-Desdemona business! The ideal method, I fancy, is savage seizure, like the Sabines. The longer they struggle, the longer they’ll stay contented in captivity. I’m a biologist. In biology all mating is war of sex. Gorgas—well—let me give you an added confidence—tonight I took her in my arms forcibly—”
“Leopold!” Blynn clutched him by the arm.
“Don’t be alarmed, my Puritan friend,” Leopold laughed pleasantly. “I am simply courting that young lady—”
“She is only a child!” Blynn gasped.
“She is seventeen—will be eighteen shortly. Biology calls that quite old enough.”
Blynn dropped his grasp. “She is only a child,” he repeated firmly.
“My mother was married and had children at seventeen,” Leopold considered for a moment. The agitation of his companion was hid by the darkness. “Child? Oh, no, my dear Allen—she is a full-grown woman—charged with womanhood. Well, she broke away tonight.... At first, I was angry—then I was glad. Her resistance is the measure of her constancy.... You don’t mind my talking out this way, old fellow.”
“No! no! Go on!”
But he did not go on. Leopold’s sensitiveness was slowly taking account of the long stride of the man by his side. As they passed a street-lamp he saw the white face staring ahead into the night, and caught the firm lips and the long, deep breathing.
“You are fond of her?” Leopold asked mildly.
No answer; but in that vibrating moment words were not essential.
Unconscious of direction, the two men had been marching on across the city-line, and were now pacing through a deeply wooded lane in Montgomery county.
“I always fancied it was a purely pedagogic interest,”Leopold remarked, as if to the trees lined thick along the road.
Again there was no answer.
“So!” Leopold spoke with sympathy. “I did not know. Forgive me.”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
They tramped along sturdily.
“Have you told her that you—”
“Merciful heavens!” Blynn broke forth; but restrained further speech.
“Why not?” Leopold asked kindly.
“She is a child. Oh, yes! yes! yes!” he struck down the attempted interruption. “I have taken her by the hand and led her as an older brother might take his little sister. I have watched over her ... talked to her of books, of life, of God.... I have been the confidant of her little troubles and have—have—tried to give her courage and—understanding. She has opened the door of her life to me. I have stepped within and have broken bread with her. Now ... how could I desecrate ... how could I sully ... I don’t mean that. It is hard for me to say, Leopold. I can’t explain it to you. To me she is still a serious-eyed, fearless child, who has come to me in the perfect faith of innocence.... My reason doesn’t tell me that. My reason tells me to go and seize her, fight you for her, and carry her off. But there’s something else.... You call it Puritan.... Maybe it is racial, or an inheritance. Maybe it is only superstition. Whatever it is, it holds me fast. I am chained, boundabsolutely. I cannot speak. I cannot go to that child and—and—unmask.... Let’s go back.”
They turned and trudged along the uneven road without speaking until a stray light or two along the Chestnut Hill Pike told them they were coming back into the village.
“I have been wondering,” Leopold spoke thoughtfully, “what it is that draws us to our mates. Nobody knows. It is the greatest mystery in creation. Let us face the facts: Gorgas is a remarkable girl; she thinks; she has unusual abilities. Good! But that is not what draws us. I know dozens of women who are her superior—women whose conversation is—well!—shall I say more congenial? The truth is, Gorgas is not ready to enter on an intellectual level with either of us. In fact—well!—her education must be kept up—uh—afterwards. You are right; in many respects she is yet a child. I see things as a biologist: I fancy that her charm, after all, is her youth and her astonishing health. That is the mating cry—health.”
“If you don’t mind, Leopold,” Blynn stopped, “I’ll leave you here and cut off across this field alone.”
Leopold laughed pleasantly.
“I shock your good old Puritan soul, I see. Nothing shocks me. God made all, and there is no high nor low—that’s my simple creed. And don’t forget that in biology man is not different from the rest of creation; we are onlyvertebrata, my good friend, subject all to the same law of life; biology knows no Chosen Species. Good night, old Allen.... I am sorry we did nothave this talk earlier. I am not strong for self-sacrifice, but, really, I believe, if I had known, I—well, I would not have let things go so far.”
Blynn looked hard at him, in his eyes the fire of a zealot.
“Things have—have—gone far; have they?”
“Quite,” said Leopold. “Quite far.”
After that night Blynn withdrew abruptly from the daily councils at “Top-o’-the-Hill.” The preparation of the lectures seemed to be taking all his time. He dropped in on the group once or twice for a moment’s chat, and to see the progress, but his mind seemed ever hard at work, selecting and rejecting material. That series must be a great go, he explained; he would put his best into it, and give them the worth of their money. In two weeks he was off to Rochester.