When Nanny had taken the plate into the house, Judith made room for
Mrs. Trench on the settle at her side. David leaned against the solid
beam that he had set, seven years ago, to support the arch of the
doorway. His blue eyes were full of unwonted content. Theodora was
perched on the afternoon tea table, folded now to look like a packing
case, steadying herself by a brown hand on her father’s arm. Eileen was
on the other bench with Lary. She resumed the narrative that had been
interrupted by her mother’s arrival:
“Yes, he’s the most unspeakable beast I ever saw. Oh, by-the-way,
mamma, I was telling them about meeting Mr. and Mrs. Nims, this
afternoon. Kitten and Hal and I had to go over to the house to get
some rugs and things for the play, in the college chapel, and Adelaide
opened the door for us.”
“You don’t mean-- How did she treat you?”
“Oh, all right. She didn’t know me from anybody else.... But she’s
coming to help coach us, the night of dress rehearsal. Mrs. Henderson
said, in her talk, that most of the charm in that Sargent portrait
was the technique--brush work and colour arrangement. But Adelaide
Nims doesn’t need Johnny Sargent or any other artist to tell her how
to colour up. She had on an embroidered Chinese robe--the kind the
Mandarin women wear in the house--pinkish tan, with a wide band of blue
around the sleeves and neck--the kind of blue that fairly made her hair
flame. I wanted to eat her, she was so beautiful. And just then I got
a glimpse of her husband, through the window. He was sprawled all over
a lawn bench that was built to hold three decent-sized people, and his
stomach came out like the side of the rain barrel. I was trying to get
a good look at his face, when he began to yawn--you know, the kind of
a yawn that ate up all the rest of his features. I wanted to giggle
... or scream! And when he finally came into the house, and Kitten and
I met him, I couldn’t think of a thing but that awful cavern inside
his mouth. Gee! I’d hate to have to live with a man who looks like a
hogshead, split down the middle, and an Edam cheese for a head--and no
neck at all.”
“I didn’t suppose the nobility looked like that,” Mrs. Trench snapped.
“Humph! He’s only a younger son--and nine brothers and nephews between
him and a handle to his name. Adelaide must have been in an awful tight
pinch to have married him, money or no money.”
“He may not have been so stout when he courted her,” David ventured.
“When your mother married me, no one would have thought of calling me
her ‘better three-quarters’--and look at us now.”
“_Other_ three-quarters,” Lavinia corrected. “I never could see the
justice in calling a man his wife’s ‘better’ half.”
“There’s historical warrant for your objection, mamma,” Lary said,
hoping to avert the revelation his mother was all too prone to
make--her callous contempt for David in particular and men as a class.
“You don’t mean the tiresome old story of Adam and the rib,” Eileen
demurred.
“Nothing like that. I found the story in some elective Greek we were
reading, my third year in college. And as you describe this Mr. Nims,
he seems to fit the original model. Seven of us were selected to
translate the Symposium of Plato, and I had the story Aristophanes was
said to have told at that memorable banquet. It was in response to
the toast, ‘The Origin of Love.’ As the gods planned the world, there
was no such thing as love. But they had created a race of terribly
efficient mortals--hermaphroditic beings, man and woman in one body,
their faces looking in opposite directions. They had four legs and a
double pair of arms, and when they wanted to go somewhere in a hurry,
they rolled over and over, like an exaggerated cart wheel, touching all
their hands and feet to the ground in succession. They could see what
was going on behind them, and could throw missiles in two directions at
the same time.
“As long as they didn’t realize their advantage, it was all right. But
one day a leader was born among them. I suspect it was the female half
of him who discovered that they were superior to the gods. If they went
about it right, they could capture Olympus, and send the gods to earth
to toil and offer sacrifices. The one thing the gods cared about was
having their vanity fed, by the smoke from countless altars. It was
for this service that man was created, in the beginning. So, when it
was reported on Mount Olympus that mortals aspired to be gods, Zeus
conceived a way to avert the disaster, and at the same time have twice
as many creatures on earth to offer sacrifices.
“He made a great feast, and invited all the insolent race of man. And
when he had them at his mercy, so that they couldn’t escape, he had
them brought to him, one at a time, and cleft them in two, vertically,
so that they could look only in one direction, and run on only two
feet--”
“O-wee-woo!” Theodora squirmed. “Didn’t they bleed ... terribly?”
“Hush, Theo, it’s only a story,” Mrs. Trench exclaimed, irritably.
“And that’s how a man and his other half came to be separated,” David
said, drawing Theodora to him and stroking her pain-puckered brow.
“Yes, the gods thought they had destroyed man, when they cleft him
in two,” Lary went on, his brown eyes shining. “But in that act of
ruthlessness they sowed the seeds of their own destruction. When they
hurled the mutilated creatures out of Paradise, most of the halves
became separated. Then began the endless search for their other halves.
The men realized that they couldn’t live up to their full capacity,
with the feminine side of themselves gone. And when they did find
each other, they experienced a rapture that surpassed the highest
emotional possibility of the immortals. That thrill was love. The gods
heard about it, and condescended to mate with mortals, in the hope
of experiencing the thrill. But it was useless. They had not been
separated from their other halves.”
“But how did they sow the seeds of their own destruction?” Judith asked.
“It’s the old story of the apple in the Garden of Eden. The thing
they couldn’t get became the ultimate desideratum. They devoted all
their energy to the quest of love. They deserted all their old godlike
pursuits--and in the end, the Greek deities crumbled and were destroyed
by the more vigorous gods of the barbarians.”
Theodora pondered the tale. She could not be satisfied by the
application to Mr. and Mrs. Nims. The tub-like man, who was far more
tublike in her imagination than Eileen’s exaggerated description
should have warranted, was undoubtedly the man who was married to
Hal’s sister. But Mrs. Nims was thin. And he was her second husband.
Manifestly something was wrong.
“But Lary, suppose when those men tried to find their other halves,
they couldn’t.... Their right halves had died, or had got tired of
waiting and had gone off with some one else....”
“There wouldn’t be any thrill of love, and the man couldn’t do his
best, because he lacked the right person to urge him on,” David told
her.
“Humph!” this from Eileen, “I guess the woman would be in as bad a fix
as the man. Poor Adelaide Nims has had two tries at her other half, and
missed it both times. She’s terribly unhappy, for all that she puts up
such a good front. Lady Judith, don’t you think she ought to keep on
trying till she does find the right one? Or is there a right one for
all of us?”
“Yes ... unless we rush off into an alliance that prevents us from
recognizing our true mate,” Mrs. Ascott said pointedly.
The girl flushed. The shaft had gone home. She shifted her gaze from
the clear gray eyes ... and surprised an inexplicable expression on her
mother’s face.