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.