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withdrawn mystery of the plants.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.