Phil, I saw, was looking annoyed. He disliked Maltby Phar, openly
disliked him; so I felt certain--I was perhaps rather hoping--that he
would take this opportunity to escape. With Phil I was never then
entirely at ease; but in those days I was wholly so with Maltby. Miss
Goucher answered my summons in person, and I suggested a sauterne cup
for my friends. Phil frowned on the suggestion, but Maltby beamed. The
ayes had it, and Miss Goucher, who had remained neutral, withdrew. It
was Phil's chance; yet he surprised me by settling back and refilling
his pipe.
"When you came, Mr. Phar," he said, his tone withdrawing toward
formality, "we were discussing the education of Susan."
"Then I came just in time!" cried Maltby.
"For what?" I queried.
"I may prevent a catastrophe. If you're really going to see this thing
through, Boz"--his name for me--"for God's sake do a little clear
thinking first! Don't drift. Don't flounder. Don't wallow. Scrap all
your musty, inbred prejudices once for all, and see that at least one
kid on this filthy old planet gets a plain, honest, unsentimentalized
account of what she is and what the world is. If you can bring yourself
to do that, Susan will be unique. She will be the first educated woman
in America."
"'What she is and what the world is,'" repeated Phil, slowly. "What is
the world, may I ask? And what is Susan?"
There was a felt tenseness in the moment; the hush before battle. We
leaned forward a little from our easy-chairs, and no one of us noticed
that Susan had slipped noiselessly to the window seat by the opened
library window which gave upon the terrace. But there, as we later
discovered, she was; and there, for the present silently, she remained.
"The world," began Maltby Phar sententiously, "is a pigsty."
"Very well," interrupted Phil; "I'll grant you that to start with. What
follows?"
"What we see about us," said Maltby.
"And what do we see?" asked Phil.
At this inopportune moment Miss Goucher reappeared, bearing a Sheffield
tray, on which stood three antique Venetian goblets, and a tall pitcher
of rare Bohemian glass, filled to the brim with an iced sauterne cup
garnished with fresh strawberries and thin disks of pineapple. Nothing
less suggestive of the conventional back-lot piggery could have been
imagined. By the time a table had been placed, our goblets filled, and
Miss Goucher had retired, Maltby had decided to try for a new opening.
"Excellent!" he resumed, having drained and refilled his goblet. "Now,
Mr. Farmer, if you really wish to know what the world is, and what Susan
is, I am ready. Have with you! And by the way, Boz," he interjected,
sipping his wine, "your new housekeeper is one in a thousand. Mrs.
Parrot was admirable; I've been absurdly regretting her loss. But Mrs.
Parrot never quite rose to _this_!"
Phil's tongue clicked an impatient protest against the roof of his
mouth. "I am still unenlightened, Mr. Phar."
"True," said Maltby. "That's the worst of you romantic idealists. It's
your permanent condition." He settled back in his chair, and fell to his
old trick of slowly caressing the back of his left hand with the palm of
his right. "The world, my dear Mr. Farmer," he continued, "the universe,
indeed, as we have come gradually to know it, is an infinity of blindly
clashing forces. They have always existed, they will always exist; they
have always been blind, and they always will be. Anything may happen in
such an infinity, and we--this world of men and microbes--are one of the
things which has temporarily happened. It's regrettable, but it is so.
And though there is nothing final we can do about it, and very little in
any sense, still--this curious accident of the human intellect enables
us to do something. We can at least admit the plain facts of our
horrible case. Here, a self-realizing accident, we briefly are. Death
will dissipate us one by one, and the world in due time. That much we
know. But while we last, why must we add imaginary evils to our real
ones, and torment ourselves with false hopes and ridiculous fears?
"Why can't each one of us learn to say: 'I am an accident of no
consequence in a world that means nothing. I might be a stone, but I
happen to be a man. Hence, certain things give me pleasure, others pain.
And, obviously, in an accidental, meaningless world I can owe no duty to
anyone but myself. I owe it to myself to get as much pleasure and to
avoid as much pain as possible. Unswerving egotism should be my law.'"
He paused to sip again, with a side glance toward Phil.
"Elementary, all this, I admit. I apologize for restating it to a
scholar. But such are the facts as science reveals them--are they not?
You have to try somehow to go beyond science to get round them. And
where do you go--you romantic idealists? Where _can_ you go? Nowhere
outside of yourselves, I take it. So you plunge, perforce, down below
the threshold of reason into a mad chaos of instinct and desire and
dream. And what _there_ do you find? Bugaboos, my dear sir, simply
bugaboos: divine orders, hells, heavens, purgatories, moral
sanctions--all the wild insanity, in two words, that had made our
wretched lives even less worth living than they could and should be!"
"_Should?_ Why _should_?" asked Phil. "Granting your universe, who gives
a negligible damn for a little discomfort more or less?"
"I do!" Maltby asserted. "I want all the comfort I can get; and I could
get far more in a world of clear-seeing, secular egotists than I can in
this mixed mess of superstitious, sentimental idealists which we choose
to call civilized society! Take just one minor practical illustration:
Say that some virgin has wakened my desire, and I hers. In a reasonable
society we could give each other a certain amount of passing
satisfaction. But do we do it? No. The virgin has been taught to believe
in a mystical, mischievous something, called Purity! To follow her
natural instinct would be a sin. If you sin and get caught on earth,
society will punish you; and if you don't get caught here, you'll
infallibly get caught hereafter--and then God will punish you. So the
virgin tortures herself and tortures me--unless I'm willing to marry
her, which would be certain to prove the worst of tortures for us both.
And there you are."
It was at this point that Susan spoke from her window.
"Pearl and papa weren't married, Mr. Phar; but they didn't get much fun
out of not being."
I confess that I felt a nervous chill start at the base of my spine and
shiver up toward my scalp. Even Phil, the man of Indian gravity, looked
for an instant perturbed.
"Susan!" I demanded sharply. "Have you been listening?"
"Mustn't I listen?" asked Susan. "Why not? Are you cross, Ambo?"
"The mischief's done," said Phil to me quietly; "better not make a point
of it."
"Please don't be cross, Ambo," Susan pleaded, slipping through the
window to the terrace and coming straight over to me. "Mr. Phar feels
just the way papa did about things; only papa couldn't talk so
splendidly. He had a very poor vocabulary"--"Vocabulary!" I
gasped--"except nasty words and swearing. But he meant just what Mr.
Phar means, _inside_."
Phil, as she ended, began to make strange choking noises and retired
suddenly into his handkerchief. Maltby put down his glass and stared at
Susan.
"Young person," he finally said, "you ought to be spanked! Don't you
know it's an unforgivable sin to spy on your elders!"
"But you don't believe in sin," responded Susan calmly, without the
tiniest suspicion of pertness in her tone or bearing. "You believe in
doing what you want to. _I_ wanted to hear what you were saying, Mr.
Phar."
"Of course you did!" Phil struck in. "But next time, Susan, as a
concession to good manners, you might let us know you're in the
neighborhood--?"
Susan bit her lower lip very hard before she managed to reply.
"Yes. I will next time. I'm sorry, Phil." (_Phil!_) Then she turned to
Maltby. "But I wasn't spying! I just didn't know you would any of you
mind."
"We don't, really," I said. "Sit down, dear. You're always welcome." I
had been doing some stiff, concentrated thinking in the last three
minutes, and now I had taken the plunge. "The truth is, Susan," I went
on, "that most children who live in good homes, who are what is called
'well brought up,' are carefully sheltered from any facts or words or
thoughts which their parents do not consider wholesome or pleasant.
Parents try to give their children only what they have found to be best
in life; they try to keep them in ignorance of everything else."
"But they can't," said Susan. "At least, they couldn't in Birch Street."
"No. Nor elsewhere. But they try. And they always make believe to
themselves that they have succeeded. So it's supposed to be very
shocking and dangerous for a girl of your age to listen to the free
conversation of men of our age. That's the reason we all felt a little
guilty, at first, when we found you'd been overhearing us."
"How funny," said Susan. "Papa never cared."
"Good for him!" exclaimed Maltby. "I didn't feel guilty, for one! I
refuse to be convicted of so hypocritically squeamish a reaction!"
"Oh!" Susan sighed, almost with rapture. "You know such a lot of words,
Mr. Phar! You can say anything."
"Thanks," said Maltby; "I rather flatter myself that I can."
"And you _do_!" grunted Phil. "But words," he took up the dropped
threads rather awkwardly, "are nothing in themselves, Susan. You are too
fond of mere words. It isn't words that matter; it's ideas."
"Yes, Phil," said Susan meekly, "but I love words--best of all when
they're pictures."
Phil frowned, without visible effect upon Susan. I saw that her mind had
gone elsewhere.
"Ambo?"
"Yes, dear?"
"You mustn't ever worry about me, Ambo. My hearing or knowing things--or
saying them. I--I guess I'm different."
Maltby's face was a study in suppressed amazement; Phil was still
frowning. It was all too much for me, and I laughed--laughed from the
lower ribs!
Susan laughed with me, springing from her chair to throw her arms
tightly round my neck in one big joyous suffocating hug!
"Oh, Ambo!" she cried, breathless. "Isn't it going to be fun--all of
us--together--now we can _talk_!"