The Grain of Dust Part 15

This answer made him wonder whether after all he might not be too positive in his derisive disbelief in women's instincts. He laughed.

"Well--now for your father."

The workshop proved to be an annex to the rear, reached by a pa.s.sage leading past a cosy little dining room and a kitchen where the order and the s.h.i.+ne of cleanness were notable even to masculine eyes. "You are well taken care of," he said to her--she was preceding him to show the way.

"We take care of ourselves," replied she. "I get breakfast before I leave and supper after I come home. Father has a cold lunch in the middle of the day, when he eats at all--which isn't often. And on Sat.u.r.day afternoons and Sundays I do the heavy work."

"You _are_ a busy lady!"

"Oh, not so very busy. Father is a crank about system and order. He has taught me to plan everything and work by the plans."

For the first time Norman had a glimmer of real interest in meeting her father. For in those remarks of hers he recognized at once the rare superior man--the man who works by plan, where the ma.s.ses of mankind either drift helplessly or are propelled by some superior force behind them without which they would be, not the civilized beings they seem, but even as the savage in the dugout or as the beast of the field. The girl opened a door; a bright light streamed into the dim hallway.

"Father!" she called. "Here's Mr. Norman."

Norman saw, beyond the exquisite profile of the girl's head and figure, a lean tallish old man, dark and gray, whose expression proclaimed him at first glance no more in touch with the affairs of active life in the world than had he been an inhabitant of Mars.

Mr. Hallowell gave his caller a polite glance and handshake--evidence of merest surface interest in him, of amiable patience with an intruder.

Norman saw in the neatness of his clothing and linen further proof of the girl's loving care. For no such abstracted personality as this would ever bother about such things for himself. These details, however, detained Norman only for a moment. In the presence of Hallowell it was impossible not to concentrate upon him.

As we grow older what we are inside, the kind of thoughts we admit as our intimates, appears ever more strongly in the countenance. This had often struck Norman, observing the men of importance about him, noting how as they aged the look of respectability, of intellectual distinction, became a thinner and ever thinner veneer over the selfishness and greediness, the vanity and sensuality and falsehood. But never before had he been so deeply impressed by its truth. Evidently Hallowell during most of his fifty-five or sixty years had lived the purely intellectual life. The result was a look of spiritual beauty, the look of the soul living in the high mountain, with serenity and vast views constantly before it. Such a face fills with awe the ordinary follower of the petty life of the world if he have the brains to know or to suspect the ultimate truth about existence. It filled Norman with awe. He hastily turned his eyes upon the girl--and once more into his face came the resolute, intense, white-hot expression of a man doggedly set upon an earthy purpose.

There was an embarra.s.sed silence. Then the girl said, "Show him the worms, father."

Mr. Hallowell smiled. "My little girl thinks no one has seen that sort of thing," said he. "I can't make her believe it is one of the commonplaces."

"You've never had anyone here more ignorant than I, sir," said Norman.

"The only claim on your courtesy I can make is that I'm interested and that I perhaps know enough in a general way to appreciate."

Hallowell waved his hand toward a row of large gla.s.s bottles on one of the many shelves built against the rough walls of the room. "Here they are," said he. "It's the familiar ill.u.s.tration of how life may be controlled."

"I don't understand," said Norman, eying the bottled worms curiously.

"Oh, it's simply the demonstration that life is a mere chemical process----"

Norman had ceased to listen. The girl was moving toward the door by which they had entered--was in the doorway--was gone! He stood in an att.i.tude of attention; Hallowell talked on and on, pa.s.sing from one thing to another, forgetting his caller and himself, thinking only of the subject, the beloved science, that has brought into the modern world a type of men like those who haunted the deserts and mountain caves in the days when Rome was falling to pieces. With those saintly hermits of the Dark Ages religion was the all-absorbing subject. And seeking their own salvation was the goal upon which their ardent eyes were necessarily bent. With these modern devotees, science--the search for the truth about the world in which they live--is their religion; and their goal is the redemption of the world. They are resolved--step by step, each worker contributing his mite of discovery--to transform the world from a h.e.l.l of discomfort and pain and death to a heaven where men and women, free and enlightened and perhaps immortal, shall live in happiness. They even dream that perhaps this race of G.o.ds shall learn to construct the means to take them to another and younger planet, when this Earth has become too old and too cold and too nakedly clad in atmosphere properly to sustain life.

From time to time Norman caught a few words of what Hallowell said--words that made him respect the intelligence that had uttered them. But he neither cared nor dared to listen. He refused to be deflected from his one purpose. When he was as old as Hallowell, it would be time to think of these matters. When he had s.n.a.t.c.hed the things he needed, it would be time to take the generous, wide, philosopher view of life. But not yet. He was still young; he could--and he would!--drink of the sparkling heady life of the senses, typefied now for him in this girl. How her loveliness flamed in his blood--flamed as fiercely when he could not see the actual, tangible charms as when they were radiating their fire into his eyes and through his skin! First he must live that glorious life of youth, of nerves aquiver with ecstasy. Also, he must shut out the things of the intellect--must live in brain as well as in body the animal life--in brain the life of cunning and strategy. For the intellectual life would make it impossible to pursue such ign.o.ble things. First, material success and material happiness. Then, in its own time, this intellectual life to which such men as Hallowell ever beckon, from their heights, such men as Norman, deep in the wallow that seems to them unworthy of them, even as they roll in it.

As soon as there came a convenient pause in Hallowell's talk, Norman said, "And you devote your whole life to these things?"

Hallowell's countenance lost its fine glow of enthusiasm. "I have to make a living. I do chemical a.n.a.lyses for doctors and druggists. That takes most of my time."

"But you can dispatch those things quickly."

Hallowell shook his head. "There's only one way to do things. My clients trust me. I can't s.h.i.+rk."

Norman smiled. He admired this simplicity. But it amused him, too; in a world of s.h.i.+rking and shuffling, not to speak of downright dishonesty, it struck the humorous note of the incongruous. He said:

"But if you could give all your time you would get on faster."

"Yes--if I had the time--_and_ the money. To make the search exhaustive would take money--five or six thousand a year, at the least. A great deal more than I shall ever have."

"Have you tried to interest capitalists?"

Hallowell smiled ironically. "There is much talk about capitalists and capital opening up things. But I have yet to learn of an instance of their touching anything until they were absolutely sure of large profits. Their failed enterprises are not miscarriage of n.o.ble purpose but mistaken judgment, judgment blinded by hope and greed."

"I see that a philosopher can know life without living it," said Norman.

"But couldn't you put your scheme in such a way that some capitalist would be led to hope?"

"I'd have to tell them the truth. Possibly I might discover something with commercial value, but I couldn't promise. I don't think it is likely."

Norman's eyes were on the door. His thoughts were reaching out to the distant and faint sound of a piano. "Just what do you propose to search for?" inquired he.

He tried to listen, because it was necessary that he have some knowledge of Hallowell's plans. But he could not fix his attention. After a few moments he glanced at his watch, interrupted with, "I think I understand enough for the present. I've stayed longer than I intended. I must go now. When I come again I may perhaps have some plan to propose."

"Plan?" exclaimed Hallowell, his eyes lighting up.

"I'm not sure--not at all sure," hastily added Norman. "I don't wish to give you false hopes. The matter is extremely difficult. But I'll try.

I've small hope of success, but I'll try."

"My daughter didn't explain to me," said the scientist. "She simply said one of the gentlemen for whom she worked was coming to look at my place.

I thought it was mere curiosity."

"So it was, Mr. Hallowell," said Norman. "But I have been interested. I don't as yet see what can be done. I'm only saying that I'll think it over."

"I understand," said Hallowell. He was trying to seem calm and indifferent. But his voice had the tremulous note of excitement in it and his hands fumbled nervously, touching evidence of the agitated gropings of his mind in the faint, perhaps illusory, light of a new-sprung hope. "Yes, I understand perfectly. Still--it is pleasant to think about such a thing, even if there's no chance of it. I am very fond of dreaming. That has been my life, you know."

Norman colored, moved uneasily. The fineness of this man's character made him uncomfortable. He could pity Hallowell as a misguided failure.

He could dilate himself as prosperous, successful, much the more imposing and important figure in the contrast. Yet there was somehow a point of view at which, if one looked carefully, his own sort of man shriveled and the Hallowell sort towered.

"I _must_ be going," Norman said. "No--don't come with me. I know the way.

I've interrupted you long enough." And he put out his hand and, by those little clevernesses of manner which he understood so well, made it impossible for Hallowell to go with him to Dorothy.

He was glad when he shut the door between him and her father. He paused in the hall to dispel the vague, self-debasing discomfort--and listening to _her_ voice as she sang helped wonderfully. There is no more trying test of a personality than to be estimated by the voice alone. That test produces many strange and startling results. Again and again it completely reverses our judgment of the personality, either destroys or enhances its charm. The voice of this girl, floating out upon the quiet of the cottage--the voice, soft and sweet, full of the virginal pa.s.sion of dreams unmarred by experience--It was while listening to her voice, as he stood there in the dimly lighted hall, that Frederick Norman pa.s.sed under the spell in all its potency. In taking an anaesthetic there is the stage when we reach out for its soothing effects; then comes the stage when we half desire, half fear; then a stage in which fear is dominant, and we struggle to retain our control of the senses.

Last comes the stage when we feel the full power of the drug and relax and yield or are beaten down into quiet. Her voice drew him into the final stage, was the blow of the overwhelming wave's crest that crushed him into submission.

She glanced toward the door. He was leaning there, an ominous calm in his pale, resolute face. She gazed at him with widening eyes. And her look was the look of helplessness before a force that may, indeed must, be struggled against, but with the foregone certainty of defeat.

A gleam of triumph shone in his eyes. Then his expression changed to one more conventional. "I stopped a moment to listen, on my way out," said he.

Her expression changed also. The instinctive, probably unconscious response to his look faded into the sweet smile, serious rather than merry, that was her habitual greeting. "Mr. Tetlow didn't get away from father so soon."

"I stayed longer than I intended. I found it even more interesting than I had expected. . . . Would you be glad if your father could be free to do as he likes and not be worried about anything?"

"That is one of my dreams."

"Well, it's certainly one that might come true. . . . And you--It's a shame that you should have to do so much drudgery--both here and in New York."