I SAID 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.”