Desire was smiling as she left Dr. Rogers' office. It was a smile
compounded of derision and relief--a shamefaced smile which admitted an
opinion of herself very far from flattering.
So occupied was she with her mental reactions that she had no attention
to spare for the opposite side of the street and therefore missed the
slightly peculiar action of her husband-by-courtesy. Professor Spence,
when he had first caught sight of his wife had automatically paused, as
if to call or cross over. It had become their friendly habit to inform
each other of their daily plans and a cheery "whither away?" had risen
naturally to the professor's lips. It rose to them, but did not leave
them, for, in the intervening instant, he had grasped the fact of
Desire's smiling abstraction and had sought its explanation in the
place from which she had come. Desire calling at old Bones' office at
this hour of the morning? Before he had recovered from the surprise of
it, she had passed.
Time, which seems so mighty, is sometimes quite negligible. The most
amazing mental illuminations may occupy only the fraction of a second.
A light flashes and is gone--but meanwhile one has seen.
The professor's pause was hardly noticeable. He walked on at once. But
years could not have instructed him more thoroughly than that one
second. He had received a revelation. Like all revelations, he received
it in its entirety and realized it piecemeal. His thoughts stumbled
over each other in confusion.... Desire at John's office at this
unusual hour? ... Desire in her prettiest frock and smiling ...
smiling, and so lost in her own thoughts that she saw no one ...
Desire ... John? ... What the devil!
Spence had a finicky dislike of strong language. He thought it savored
of weakness, yet he found himself swearing heartily as he hurried
on--meaningless swears which by their very childishness brought him
back to common sense. His step slowed, he forced himself to be
reasonable. He took a brief against his own unwarranted disturbance of
mind and reduced it to argument. There was nothing at all strange, he
pointed out, in Desire having called at old Bones' office at this, or
any other, time of day (but what under heaven did she do it for?). She
might easily have forgotten to tell the doctor some-thing. (What in
thunder would she have to tell him?) She might have dropped in, in
passing (at that hour of the morning?) merely to ask him over for some
tennis (was the dashed telephone out of order?). Or she might have felt
a trifle seedy (pshaw! her health was perfect--idiot!). Anyway she had
a perfect right to see Dr. Rogers at any time and for any reason she
might choose. (Yes, she had--that was the devil of it!)
At this point of his argument the professor was nearly-run down by a
delivery boy on a bicycle and saved himself only by a sharp collision
with a telegraph pole. This served to clear his brain somewhat. His
confusion of thought dropped away. He began to look his revelation in
the face--
"Desire--John?"
It was certainly possible! Why had he never seen it before? ... He
had been warned. John himself had warned him--Old John who had been so
palpably "hit" when he had first seen Desire at Friendly Bay. But he,
Benis Spence, had laughed. Honestly laughed. No possibility of this
possibility had troubled him. He simply had not seen it. And now--he
saw. The thing italicised itself on his brain.
Granted that Desire might love, there was no reason on earth why she
should not love John.
The conclusion seemed childishly simple and yet he had never seriously
considered it. Why? Relentlessly he forced himself to answer why. It
was because he had believed that when Desire woke to love, if she
should so wake, she would wake to love for him! He tore this admission
out of a shrinking heart and laughed at it. It was funny, quite funny
in its ridiculous conceit.... But it hadn't been conceit, it had
been assurance. Impossible to account for, and absurd as it seemed now,
it was some-thing higher than vanity which had hidden in his heart that
happy sense of kinship with Desire which had made John's warning seem
an emptiness of words.
It was gone now, that wonderful sense of "belonging," swept away in the
swift rush of startled doubt. Searching as it might, his mind could not
find anywhere the faintest foothold for a belief that Desire, free to
choose, should turn to him and not to another.
"I had better go and sleep this off somewhere," murmured the professor
with a wry smile. "Mustn't let it get ahead of me. Mustn't make any
more mistakes. This needs thinking out--steady now!"
He tried to forget his own problem in thinking of hers. It couldn't be
very pleasant for her--this. And yet she had been smiling as she came
out of John's office. Perhaps she did not know yet? On second thoughts,
he felt sure that she did not know. He recognized the essentials of
Desire. She was loyalty itself. And had he not reason to know from his
own present experience that the beginnings of love can be very blind.
John, too--but with John it was different. John had given his warning.
If the warning were to be justified he could not blame John. He could
not blame anyone save his own too confident self. Why, oh why, had he
been so sure? Had he not known that love is the most unaccountable of
all the passions? How had he dared to build security on that subtle
thing within himself which, without cause or reason, had claimed as his
the unstirred heart of the girl he had married.
Spence returned home with lagging step. The old distaste for familiar
things, which he thought had gone with the coming of Desire, was heavy
upon him. The gate of his pleasant home shut behind him like a prison
gate. In short, Benis Spence paid for a moment's enlightenment with a
bad day and a night that was no better.
By the morning he had won through. One must carry on. And the advantage
of a quiet manner is that no one notices when it grows more quiet.
Desire was already in the library when he entered it. She looked very
crisp and cool. It struck Spence for the first time that she was
dressing her part--the neat, dark skirt and laundered blouse,
blackbowed at the neck in a perfect orgy of simplicity, were eminently
secretarial. How beautifully young she was!
Desire looked up from her note-book with business-like promptitude.
"I think," she said, "that we are quite ready to go on with the
thirteenth chapter."
"But I think," said Benis, "that it would be much nicer to go fishing."
"Why?"
"Well, it's Friday, for one thing. Do you really think it safe to begin
the thirteenth chapter on a Friday?"
His secretary's smile was dutiful, but her lips were firm. "We didn't
do a thing-yesterday," she reminded him. "I couldn't find you anywhere
and no one knew where you were."
"I was--just around," vaguely.
"Not around here," Desire was uncompromising. "Benis, I think we should
really be more businesslike. We should have talked this thirteenth
chapter over yesterday. I see you have a note here for some opening
paragraphs on The Apprehension of Color in Primitive Minds--"
A cascade of goblin laughter from Yorick interrupted her.
"Yorick is amused," said Benis. "He knows all about the apprehension of
color in primitive minds. He advises us to go fishing."
Desire watched him stroke the bird's bent head with a puzzled frown.
"I wish you wouldn't joke about--this," she said slowly. "You don't
want that habit of mind to affect your serious work."
Spence looked up surprised.
"The whole character of the book is changing," went on Desire
resolutely. "It will all have to be revised and brought into harmony.
I'm sure you've felt it yourself. In a book like this the treatment
must be the same throughout. I've heard you say that a hundred times.
It doesn't matter what the treatment is, the necessary thing is that it
be consistent. Isn't that right?"
"Certainly."
"Well--yours isn't!"
Spence forgot the parrot (who immediately pecked his finger). He almost
forgot that he had suffered an awakening and had passed a bad night.
Desire interested him in the present moment as she always did. She
was--what was she? "Satisfying" was perhaps the best word for it. Just
to be with her seemed to round out life.
"Prove it!" said he with some heat.
For half an hour he listened while she proved it with great energy and
a thorough knowledge of her facts. He listened because he liked to
listen and not because she was telling him anything new. He knew just
where his "treatment" of his material had changed, and he knew, as
Desire did not, what had changed it. For the change was not really in
the treatment at all, but in himself.
This book had been his earliest ambition. It had been the sole
companion of his thoughts for years. It had been the little idol which
must be served. Without a word of it being written, it had grown with
his growth. His notes for it comprised all that he had filched from
life. He had not hurried. He was leisurely by nature. Then had come the
war, lifting him out of all the things he knew. And, after the war, its
great weariness. Not until he had met Desire and found, in her fresh
interest, something of his own lost enthusiasm, had he been able to
work again. Then, in a glow of recovered energy, the book had been
begun. And all had gone well until the book's inspirer had begun to
usurp the place of the book itself. (Spence smiled as he realized that
Desire was painstakingly tracing the course of her self-caused
destruction.) How could he think of the book when he wanted only to
think of her? Insensibly, his gathered facts had begun to lose their
prime importance, his deductions had lost their sense of weight, all
that he had done seemed strangely insignificant--it was like looking at
something through the wrong end of a telescope. The great book was a
star which grew steadily smaller.
The proportion was wrong. He knew that. But at present he could do
nothing to readjust it. Two interests cannot occupy the same space at
the same time. The book interest had simply succumbed to an interest
older and more potent.
"In this chapter, the Sixth," Desire was saying, "you seem to lose some
of the serious purpose which is a prominent note in the opening
chapters. You begin to treat things casually. You almost allow yourself
to be humorous. Now is this supposed to be a humorous book, or is it
not?"
"Oh--not. Distinctly not."
"Well then, don't you see? If you had treated the thing in that
semi-humorous manner all through and continued in that vein you would
produce a certain definite type of book. The critics would probably
say--"
"I know, spare me!"
"They would say," sternly, "that 'Professor Spence has a light touch.'
That 'he has treated his subject in a popular manner.'" (The professor
groaned.) "But that isn't a patch upon what they will say if you mix up
your styles as you are doing at present."
"But--well, what do you advise?"
Desire sucked her pencil. (He had given up trying to cure her of this
poisonous habit.)
"I've thought about that. If you were not so--so temperamental, I would
say go back and begin again. But that is risky. It will be better to go
on, I think, trying to recapture the more serious style, until the
whole book it at least in some form. Then you will know exactly where
you are and what is necessary to harmonize the whole. You can then
rewrite the 'off' chapters, bringing them into line. This is a
recognized literary method, I believe."
"Is it? Good heavens!"
"I read it in a book."
"Then it must be literary. All right. I'm agreeable. But at present--"
"At present," firmly, "the main thing is to go on."
"This morning?"
"Certainly."
"But I don't want to go on this morning. That is the flaw in your
literary method. It makes me go on whether I want to or not. Now the
really top-notchers never do that. They are as full of stoppages as a
freight train. Fact. They only create when the spirit moves them."
"Aren't you thinking of Quakers?" suggested Desire sweetly. "Besides
you are not creating. You are compiling--a very different thing."
"But what is the use of compiling an off chapter when I know it is
going to be an off one?"
Desire threw down her pencil.
"Oh, Benis," she said. "I don't like this. Don't let us play with
words. Surely you are not getting tired--you can't be."
Her eyes, urgent and truth-compelling, forced an answer.
"I don't quite know," he said. "But I am certainly off work at present.
There may be all kinds of reasons. You will have to be patient, Desire."
"Then," in a low voice, "it isn't only indolence?"
He was moved to candor. "It isn't indolence at all. I have always been
a fairly good worker, and will be again. But the driving force has
shifted. I have not been doing good work and I know it. The more I know
it the worse the work will become.... It doesn't matter, really,
child," he added gently, seeing that she had turned away. "The world
can wait for the bit of knowledge I can give it."
Desire, whose face was invisible, took a moment to answer this. When
she did her voice was carefully with-out expression.
"Then this ends my usefulness. You will not need me any more."
The professor, who had been nursing his knee on the corner of the desk,
straightened up so suddenly that he heard his spine click.
"What's this?" he said. (Good heavens--the girl was as full of
surprises as a grab-bag!)
"It was for the book you needed me, was it not? That was my share of
our partnership."
("Now you've done it!" shouted an exultant voice in the professor's
brain. "Oh, you are an ass!")
"Shut up!" said Spence irritably. "I wasn't talking to you," he
explained apologetically. "It's just a horrid little devil I converse
with sometimes. What I meant was--" He did not seem to know what he
meant and looked rather helplessly out of the window. "Oh, I say," he
said presently, "you are not going to--to act like that, are you?
Agitation's so frightfully bad for me. Ask old Bones."
"You are not agitated," said Desire coldly. "Please be serious."
"I am. Deuced serious. And agitated too. You ought to think twice
before you startle me like that--just when everything was going along
so nicely."
"I am only reminding you of your own agreement," stubbornly. "I want to
be of use."
"Very selfish of you. Can't you think of someone else once in a while?"
"Selfish? Because I want to help?"
"Certainly. I wonder you don't see it! Think of the mornings I've put
in on this dashed book just because you wanted to help. I have to be
polite, haven't I?--up to a point. But when you begin to blame me for
doing poorly what I do not want to do at all I begin to see that my
self-sacrifice is not appreciated."
"You are talking nonsense."
"Perhaps I am. But it was you who started it. When you said I did not
need you, you said a very nonsensical thing. And a very unkind thing,
too. A man does not like to talk of--his need. But, now that we have
come to just this point, let us have it out. Surely our partnership was
not quite as narrow as you suggest? The book is a detail. It is L. part
of life which will fit in somewhere--an important part in its right
place--but it isn't the whole pattern." He smiled whimsically. "Do not
think of me as just an animated book, my dear--if you can help it. And
remember, no matter how we choose to interpret our marriage, you are my
wife. And my very good comrade. The one thing which could ever change
my need of you is your greater need of--of someone else."
The last words were casual enough but the look which accompanied them
was keen, and a sense of relief rose gratefully in the professor as no
sign of disturbance appeared upon the thoughtful face of his hearer.
"Is Benis here, my dear?" asked Aunt Caroline opening the door. "Oh
yes, I see that he is. Benis, you are wanted on the 'phone. If you
would take my advice, which you never do, you would have an extension
placed in this room. Then you could always just answer and save Olive a
great deal of bother. Not that I think maids ought to mind being
bothered. They never did in my time. But it would be quite simple for
you, when you are writing here, to attend to the 'phone. Perhaps if the
butcher heard a man's voice occasionally he might be more respectful. I
do not expect much of tradespeople, as you know, but if the butcher--"
"Is it the butcher who wishes to speak to me, Aunt?"
"Good gracious, no. It's long distance. Why don't you hurry? ... Men
have no idea of the value of time," she added as the professor
vanished. "My dear you must not let Benis overwork you. He doesn't
intend to be unkind, but men never think."