ON Monday afternoon St. Peter mounted to his study and lay down on the
box-couch, tired out with his day at the university. The first few weeks
of the year were very fatiguing for him; there were so many exhausting
things besides his lectures and all the new students; long faculty
meetings in which almost no one was ever frank, and always the old fight
to keep up the standard of scholarship, to prevent the younger
professors, who had a sharp eye to their own interests, from farming the
whole institution out to athletics, and to the agricultural and
commercial schools favoured and fostered by the State Legislature.
The September heat, too, was hard on him. He wanted to be out at the
lake every day--it was never so fine as in late September. He was lying
with closed eyes, resting his mind on the picture of intense autumn-blue
water, when he heard a tap at the door and his daughter Rosamond
entered, very handsome in a silk suit of a vivid shade of lilac,
admirably suited to her complexion and showing that in the colour of her
cheeks there was actually a tone of warm lavender. In that low room she
seemed very tall indeed, a little out of drawing, as, to her father’s
eye, she so often did. Usually, however, people were aware only of her
rich complexion, her curving, unresisting mouth and mysterious eyes. Tom
Outland had seen nothing else, and he was a young man who saw a great
deal.
“Am I interrupting something important, Papa?”
“No, not at all, my dear. Sit down.”
On his writing-table she caught a glimpse of pages in a handwriting not
his--a script she knew very well.
“Not much choice of chairs, is there?” she smiled. “Papa, I don’t like
to have you working in a place like this. It’s not fitting.”
“Much easier than to break in a new room, Rosie. A work-room should be
like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it’s better than a new one.”
“That’s really what I came to see you about.” Rosamond traced the edge
of a hole in the matting with the tip of her lilac sunshade. “Won’t you
let me build you a little study in the back yard of the new house? I
have such good ideas for it, and you would have no bother about it at
all.”
“Oh, thank you, Rosamond. It’s most awfully nice of you to think of it.
But keep it just an idea--it’s better so. Lots of things are. For the
present I’ll plod on here. It’s absurd, but it suits me. Habit is such a
big part of work.”
“With Augusta’s old things lying about, and those dusty old forms? Why
didn’t she at least get those out of your way?”
“Oh, they have a right here, by long tenure. It’s their room, too. I
don’t want to come upon them lying in some dump-heap on the road to the
lake. They remind me of the times when you were little girls, and your
first party frocks used to hang on them at night, when I worked.”
Rosamond smiled, unconvinced. “Papa, don’t joke with me. I’ve come to
talk about something serious, and it’s very difficult. You know I’m a
little afraid of you.” She dropped her shadowy, bewitching eyes.
“Afraid of me? Never!”
“Oh, yes, I am when you’re sarcastic. You musn’t be to-day, please.
Louie and I have often talked this over. We feel strongly about it. He’s
often been on the point of blurting out with it, but I’ve curbed him.
You don’t always approve of Louie and me. Of course it was only Louie’s
energy and technical knowledge that ever made Tom’s discovery succeed
commercially, but we don’t feel that we ought to have all the returns
from it. We think you ought to let us settle an income on you, so that
you could give up your university work and devote all your time to
writing and research. That is what Tom would have wanted.”
St. Peter rose quickly, with the light, supple spring he had when he was
very nervous, crossed to the window, wide on its hook, and half closed
it. “My dear daughter,” he said decisively, when he had turned round to
her, “I couldn’t possibly take any of Outland’s money.”
“But why not? You were the best friend he had in the world, he owed more
to you than to anyone else, and he hated having you hampered by
teaching. He admired your mind, and nothing would have pleased him more
than helping you to do the work you do better than anyone else. If he
were alive, that would be one of the first things he would use this
money for.”
“But he is not alive, and there was no word about me in his will, and so
there is nothing to build your pretty theory upon. It’s wonderfully nice
of you and Louie, and I’m very pleased, you know.”
“But Tom was so impractical, Father. He never thought it would mean more
than a liberal dress allowance for me, if he thought at all. I don’t
know--he never spoke to me about it.”
St. Peter smiled quizzically. “I’m not so sure about his
impracticalness. When he was working on that gas, he once remarked to me
that there might be a fortune in it. To be sure, he didn’t wait to find
out whether there was a fortune, but that had to do with quite another
side of him. Yes, I think he knew his idea would make money and he
wanted you to have it, with him or without him.”
The young woman’s face grew troubled. “Even if I married?”
“He wanted you to have whatever would make you happy.”
She sighed luxuriously. “Louie has done that. The only thing that
troubles me is, I feel you ought to have some of this money, that he
would wish it. He was so full of gratitude, felt that he owed you so
much.”
Her father again rose, with that guarded, nervous movement. “Once and
for all, Rosamond, understand that he owed me no more than I owed him.
Nothing hurts me so much as to have any member of my family talk as if
we had done something fine for that young man, brought him out, produced
him. In a lifetime of teaching, I’ve encountered just one remarkable
mind; but for that, I’d consider my good years largely wasted. And there
can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. I can’t explain
just how I feel about it, but it would somehow damage my recollections
of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace like everything
else. And that would be a great loss to me. I’m purely selfish in
refusing your offer; my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will
not have translated into the vulgar tongue.”
His daughter looked perplexed and a little resentful.
“Sometimes,” she murmured, “I think you feel I oughtn’t to have taken
it, either.”
“You had no choice. For you it was settled by his own hand. Your bond
with him was social, and it follows the laws of society, and they are
based on property. Mine wasn’t, and there was no material clause in it.
He empowered you to carry out all his wishes, and I realize that you
have responsibilities--but none toward me. There is Rodney Blake, of
course, if he should ever turn up. You keep up some search for him?”
“Louie attends to it. He has investigated and rejected several
impostors.”
“Then, of course, there are other friends of Tom’s. The Cranes, for
instance?”
Rosamond’s face grew hard. “I won’t bother you about the Cranes, Papa.
We will attend to them. Mrs. Crane is a common creature, and she is
advised by that dreadful shyster brother of hers, Homer Bright. You know
what he is.”
“Oh, yes! He was about the greatest bluffer I ever had in my classes.”
Rosamond had risen to go. “I want you to be awfully happy, daughter,”
St. Peter went on, “and Tom did. It’s only young people like you and
Louie who can get any fun out of money. And there is enough to cover the
fine, the almost imaginary obligations. You won’t be sorry if you are
generous with people like the Cranes.”
“Thank you, Papa. I shan’t forget.” Rosamond went down the narrow
stairway, leaving behind her a faint, fresh odour of lavender and
orrisroot, and her father lay down again on the box-couch. “A hint about
the Cranes will be enough,” he was thinking.
He didn’t in the least understand his older daughter. Not that he
pretended to understand Kathleen, either; but he usually knew how she
would feel about things, and she had always seemed to need his
protection more than Rosamond. When she was a student at the university,
he used sometimes to see her crossing the campus alone, her head and
shoulders lowered against the wind, her muff beside her face, her narrow
skirt clinging close. There was something too plucky, too “I
can-go-it-alone,” about her quick step and jaunty little head; he didn’t
like it, it gave him a sudden pang. He would always call to her and
catch up with her, and make her take his arm and be docile.
She had been much quicker at her lessons than Rosie, and very clever at
water-colour portrait sketches. She had done several really good
likenesses of her father--one, at least, was the man himself. With her
mother she had no luck. She tried again and again, but the face was
always hard, the upper lip longer than it seemed in life, the nose long
and severe, and she made something cold and plaster-like of Lillian’s
beautiful complexion. “No, I don’t see Mamma like that,” she used to
say, throwing out her chin. “Of course I don’t! It just _comes_ like
that.” She had done many heads of her sister, all very sentimental and
curiously false, though Louie Marsellus protested to like them. Her
drawing-teacher at the university had urged Kathleen to go to Chicago
and study in the life classes at the Art Institute, but she said
resolutely: “No, I can’t really do anybody but Papa, and I can’t make a
living painting him.”
“The only unusual thing about Kitty,” her father used to tell his
friends, “is that she doesn’t think herself a bit unusual. Nowadays the
girls in my classes who have a spark of aptitude for anything seem to
think themselves remarkable.”
Though wilfulness was implied in the line of her figure, in the way she
sometimes threw out her chin, Kathleen had never been deaf to reasoning,
deaf to her father, but once; and that was when, shortly after
Rosamond’s engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry
Scott McGregor. Scott was young, was just getting a start as a
journalist, and his salary was not large enough for two people to live
upon. That fact, the St. Peters thought, would act as a brake upon the
impetuous young couple. But soon after they were engaged Scott began to
do his daily prose poem for a newspaper syndicate. It was a success from
the start, and increased his earnings enough to enable him to marry. The
Professor had expected a better match for Kitty. He was no snob, and he
liked Scott and trusted him; but he knew that Scott had a usual sort of
mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father
thought a more interesting man would make her happier. There was no
holding her back, however, and the curious part of it was that, after
the very first, her mother supported her. St. Peter had a vague
suspicion that this was somehow on Rosamond’s account more than on
Kathleen’s; Lillian always worked things out for Rosamond. Yet at the
time he couldn’t see how Kathleen’s marriage would benefit Rosie. “Rosie
is like your second self,” he once declared to his wife, “but you never
pampered yourself at her age as you do her.”
V
IT was an intense September noon--warm, windy, golden, with the smell of
ripe grapes and drying vines in the air, and the lake rolling blue on
the horizon. Scott McGregor, going into the west corner of the
university campus, caught sight of Mrs. St. Peter, just ahead of him,
walking in the same direction. He ran and caught up with her.
“Hello, Lillian! Going in to see the Professor? So am I. I want him to
go swimming with me--I’m cutting work. Shall we drop in and hear the end
of his lecture, or sit down here on a bench in the sun?”
“We can go quietly to the door and listen. If it’s not interesting, we
can come back and sit down for a chat.”
“Good! I came early to overhear a bit. This is the hour he’s with his
seniors, isn’t it?”
They entered and went along the hall until they came to number 17; the
door was ajar, and at the moment one of the students was speaking. When
he finished, they heard the Professor reply to him.
“No, Miller, I don’t myself think much of science as a phase of human
development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our
attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems
are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But
the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made
more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes
nothing of them. Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of
the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and
sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the
Renaissance did, nor any new sins--not one! Indeed, it takes our old
ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away
the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a
physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of
taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don’t think
you help people by making their conduct of no importance--you impoverish
them. As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on
Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering
angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the
other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same
chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that’s
what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their
own little individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature
needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as
possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of
course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
“Moses learned the importance of that in the Egyptian court, and when he
wanted to make a population of slaves into an independent people in the
shortest possible time, he invented elaborate ceremonials to give them a
feeling of dignity and purpose. Every act had some imaginative end. The
cutting of the finger nails was a religious observance. The Christian
theologians went over the books of the Law, like great artists,
getting splendid effects by excision. They reset the stage with
more space and mystery, throwing all the light upon a few sins of
great dramatic value--only seven, you remember, and of those only
three that are perpetually enthralling. With the theologians came the
cathedral-builders; the sculptors and glassworkers and painters. They
might, without sacrilege, have changed the prayer a little and said,
_Thy will be done in art, as it is in heaven_. How can it be done
anywhere else as it is in heaven? But I think the hour is up. You might
tell me next week, Miller, what you think science has done for us,
besides making us very comfortable.”
As the young men filed out of the room, Mrs. St. Peter and McGregor went
in.
“I came over to get you to go to the electrician’s with me, Godfrey, but
I won’t make you. Scott wants you to run out to the lake, and it’s such
a fine day, you really should go.”
“Car’s outside. We’ll just drop Lillian at the house, Doctor, and you
can pick up your bathing-suit. We heard part of your lecture, by the
way. How you get by the Methodists is still a mystery to me.
“I wish he would get into trouble, Scott,” said Lillian as they left the
building. “I wish he wouldn’t talk to those fat-faced boys as if they
were intelligent beings. You cheapen yourself, Godfrey. It makes me a
little ashamed.”
“I was rather rambling on to-day. I’m sorry you happened along. There’s
a fellow in that lot, Tod Miller, who isn’t slow, and he excites me to
controversy.”
“All the same,” murmured his wife, “it’s hardly dignified to think aloud
in such company. It’s in rather bad taste.”
“Thank you for the tip, Lillian. I won’t do it again.”
It took Scott only twenty minutes to get out to the lake. He drew up at
the bit of beach St. Peter had bought for himself years before; a little
triangle of sand running out into the water, with a bath-house and seven
shaggy pine-trees on it. Scott had to fuss with the car, and the
Professor was undressed and in the water before him.
When McGregor was ready to go in, his father-in-law was some distance
out, swimming with an over-arm stroke, his head and shoulders well out
of the water. He wore on his head a rubber visor of a kind he always
brought home from France in great numbers. This one was vermilion, and
was like a continuation of his flesh--his arms and back were burned a
deep terra-cotta from a summer in the lake. His head and powerful
reaching arms made a strong red pattern against the purple blue of the
water. The visor was picturesque--his head looked sheathed and small and
intensely alive, like the heads of the warriors on the Parthenon frieze
in their tight, archaic helmets.
By five o’clock St. Peter and McGregor were dressed and lying on the
sand, their overcoats wrapped about them, smoking. Suddenly Scott began
to chuckle.
“Oh, Professor, you know your English friend, Sir Edgar Spilling? The
day after I met him at your house, he came up to my office at the
_Herald_ to get some facts you’d been too modest to give him. When he
was leaving he stood and looked at one of these motto cards I have over
my desk, DON’T KNOCK, and said: ‘May I ask why you don’t have that
notice on the outside of your door? I didn’t observe any other way of
getting in.’ They never get wise, do they? He really went out to see
Marsellus’ place--seemed interested. Doctor, are you going to let them
call that place after Tom?”
“My dear boy, how can I prevent it?”
“Well, you surely don’t like the idea, do you?”
The Professor lit another cigarette and was a long while about it. When
he had got it going, he turned on his elbow and looked at McGregor.
“Scott, you must see that I can’t make suggestions to Louie. He’s
perfectly consistent. He’s a great deal more generous and
public-spirited than I am, and my preferences would be enigmatical to
him. I can’t, either, very gracefully express myself to you about his
affairs.”
“I get you. Sorry he riles me so. I always say it shan’t occur the next
time, but it does.” Scott took out his pipe and lay silent for a time,
looking at the gold glow burning on the water and on the wings of the
gulls as they flew by. His expression was wistful, rather mournful. He
was a good-looking fellow, with sunburned blond hair, splendid teeth,
attractive eyes that usually frowned a little unless he was laughing
outright, a small, prettily cut mouth, restless at the corners. There
was something moody and discontented about his face. The Professor had a
great deal of sympathy for him; Scott was too good for his work. He had
been delighted when his daily poem and his “uplift” editorials first
proved successful, because that enabled him to marry. Now he could sell
as many good-cheer articles as he had time to write, on any subject, and
he loathed doing them. Scott had early picked himself out to do
something very fine, and he felt that he was wasting his life and his
talents. The new group of poets made him angry. When a new novel was
discussed seriously by his friends, he was perfectly miserable. St.
Peter knew that the poor boy had seasons of desperate unhappiness. His
disappointed vanity ate away at his vitals like the Spartan boy’s wolf,
and only the deep lines in his young forehead and the twitching at the
corners of his mouth showed that he suffered.
Not long ago, when the students were giving an historical pageant to
commemorate the deeds of an early French explorer among the Great Lakes,
they asked St. Peter to do a picture for them, and he had arranged one
which amused him very much, though it had nothing to do with the
subject. He posed his two sons-in-law in a tapestry-hung tent, for a
conference between Richard Plantagenet and the Saladin, before the walls
of Jerusalem. Marsellus, in a green dressing-gown and turban, was seated
at a table with a chart, his hands extended in reasonable, patient
argument. The Plantagenet was standing, his plumed helmet in his hand,
his square yellow head haughtily erect, his unthoughtful brows fiercely
frowning, his lips curled and his fresh face full of arrogance. The
tableau had received no special notice, and Mrs. St. Peter had said
dryly that she was afraid nobody saw his little joke. But the Professor
liked his picture, and he thought it quite fair to both the young men.