Читать книгу Phases of an Inferior Planet - Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson - Страница 5

Mariana's neighbor sat in his room. He sat motionless, his head resting upon his hands, his arms resting upon an office desk, which was plainly finished and of cheap walnut. At his left elbow a lamp cast an illumination upon his relaxed and exhausted figure, upon the straight, dark hair, upon the bulging brow, and upon the sinewy and squarely shaped hands, with their thin and nervous fingers.

The desk upon which he leaned was covered with a litter of closely written letter-sheets, and at the back a row of pigeon-holes contained an unassorted profusion of manuscripts.

The walls of the room were lined with roughly constructed shelves of painted wood, which were filled to overflowing with well-worn volumes in English, French, and German, Oken's Die Zeugung upon the north side confronting Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication upon the south. A cabinet in one corner contained a number of alcoholic specimens of embryonic development, and a small table near by supported a microscope and several instruments for physiological experiments. Above the mantel, perhaps arranged in freakish disregard of superstition, hung a skull and a pair of cross-bones, and beneath them a series of photographs illustrating the evolution of rudimentary nervous systems.

Upon the hearth, within convenient reach of the desk, stood a small spirit-stove, and on it a coffee-pot, which emitted a strong and stimulating aroma. Beside it a table was spread, with the remains of a cold supper and an unused cup and saucer.

The man lifted his head from his hands, turned up the wick of the lamp, and took up his pen.

From without came the rumble of the elevated road and the shrill cries of a newsboy proclaiming the redundant virtues of the Evening Post. A warm August breeze, entering at the open window, which was raised from the floor, caused the flame of the lamp to flicker slightly. Outside upon the fire-escape the young plants were arranged in rows of systematic precision, their tender leaves revealed in the narrow path of lamplight leading from the heated room to the iron railing overlooking the street. With absent-minded elaboration the man drew an irregular line upon the paper before him. The line bore no relation whatever to the heading of the paper, which was written in a remarkably firm and heavy hand, and read:

"Transmission of Acquired Characteristics."

Suddenly he laid the pen aside, and rose, wiping the moisture from his brow with his handkerchief. Then he threw off his coat and drew up his shirt-sleeves. It was oppressively warm, and the lamp seemed to possess the heating qualities of a Latrobe stove. For a couple of minutes he walked slowly up and down the uncarpeted floor. From the adjoining room came the sound of a piano and a woman singing. He shook his head impatiently, but the sound continued, and he yawned and stretched his arms with resentful resignation. After which he lifted the coffee-pot from the little stove and filled the cup upon the table.

Returning to his seat, he drank his coffee slowly, allowing his abstracted gaze to wander through the window and into the city night without. Upon the drawn shades of the opposite tenement-house he could trace the shadows of men and women passing to and fro like the unsubstantial outlines of figures remembered in a dream. His thoughts fluttered restlessly. He was tired. Yes, but the coffee would get him into shape again, and he must work. It was barely ten o'clock. The day had been trying. The experiments made in the college laboratory had been unsuccessful. He had gone about them wrongly. Professor Myers had been mistaken in his calculations. It was unfortunate. The opportunity for work had been excellent, and in September, when the session began, his lectures at that infernal Woman's College would take a good two hours daily, to say nothing of the preparations. What a bore it would be! If he had only money enough to follow out his work independently he might make a splendid success of it. True, he had spent enough on those travels and excavations in Egypt and Assyria to have supported an ordinary Philistine in comfort for an ordinary lifetime. But he did not regret them. They had given balance to his judgment, and he had acquired an immense amount of information. And those studies in Ancient India. Why, they had even more direct bearing upon his theories. Involuntarily his glance strayed round the book-lined walls and to the manuscripts in his desk. He devoured the closely written, almost illegible pages with insatiable eyes – eyes stricken with the mania for knowledge. The bronzed and sallow face he turned towards the light was suffused with the glow of a consuming purpose. In its deep-eyed, thin-lipped severity of drawing, every sensuous curve had been erased by lines of toil.

He set the cup aside and returned to his work. From a drawer of his desk he drew a thick volume, consisting of a number of legal-cap sheets, bound with a systematic regard for subject. Upon the cover was written in printed letters: "Notes," and beneath: "A History of Man, with Special Application of the Science of Ontogeny."

After consulting this briefly he laid it away and fell to writing. From the adjoining room still came the sound of a woman singing. The voice was light and flippant.

"Damn it!" said the man, suddenly, with angry impatience. He said it vehemently, looking up from his work with nervous irritability. At the same moment there came a slight tap at his door.

He laid aside his pen, rose, and opened it. Mr. Paul stood upon the outside.

"Well, Mr. Algarcife," he began, grimly, "you see I have broken a life-long principle and taken a man at his word. I came for the book you spoke of."

Algarcife welcomed him impatiently. "So I suppose I must prove your principle relative, if not erroneous," he answered. His voice was singularly full and clear. "It was Milligan on the Vocabulary of Aboriginal Tasmanians, was it not? Yes, I think it will aid you."

Mr. Paul came in and they sat down. Algarcife offered him coffee and cigars, but he declined. He sat stiffly in his chair and looked at the other with cynical interest.

"You write all night on this lye, I suppose?" he said, abruptly. "A combined production of brains and coffee."

Algarcife lighted his pipe and leaned back in his chair, blowing gray circles of smoke upon the atmosphere.

"You are right," he responded; "I find I do my best work after midnight, when I am drunk on caffeine or coffee. I suppose it will do for me in the end."

Mr. Paul returned his indifferent gaze with one of severity. "You are all nerves as it is," he said. "You haven't an ounce of good barbarian blood in your body – merely a colorless machine for ratiocination. I tell you, there is no bigger fool than the man who, because he possesses a few brains, forgets that he is an animal."

The other laughed abstractedly.

"What wholesome truths you deliver," he said. "I think Luther must have had your manner. Well, if I were in your place, I should probably say the same, though less forcibly. But they are theories. You see, I argue this way: with one man's mind and one man's power of work, I could never accomplish what I have before me – any more than poor Buckle, with the brain of a giant, could accomplish what he undertook. It is too big for a single man in this stage of development. So, with one man's mind, I intend to do six men's amount of labor. If I hold out, I will have my reward; if I go to pieces, I shall at least have the satisfaction of a good fight."

His voice was distinct and forcible, with a widely varied range of expression.

There was a second tap at the door, and Mr. Nevins entered, looking depressed and ill-humored.

"Hello, Anthony!" he called. "What! is Mr. Paul squandering your midnight oil? You should have sent him to bed long ago."

"It is not my hour for retiring," responded Mr. Paul.

Anthony interrupted pacifically.

"Mr. Paul is exhorting me," he said, "and I have no doubt that, with slight modifications, his sermon may be adapted to your case. He predicts brain-softening and general senility."

"An inspired prophecy," returned Mr. Nevins, crossly, "and savoring of Jeremiah. As for myself, it is but common justice that a man who has conscientiously refused the cultivation of the mind should not be called upon to lose what he doesn't possess." Then he grew suddenly cheerful. "Confound it! What's the use of being a philosopher on paper when you can be one in practice. What's the use of dying when you can eat, drink, and be merry?"

"Eating," remarked Mr. Paul, with depressing effect, "produces dyspepsia, drinking produces gout."

"And thought, paresis," added Anthony, lightly. "They are all merely different forms of dissipation. I have chosen mine; Nevins has chosen his. Only, as a matter of taste, I'd rather die by work than wine. Personally, I prefer consumption to apoplexy."

"There is such a thing as the means justifying the end," responded Mr. Nevins, in reckless ill-humor. "And it is a great principle. If I wasn't a fool, I'd make a bonfire of my brush and palette, and start afresh on a level with my appetite. I would become the apostle of good-living, which means fast living. I tell you, an hour of downright devilment is worth all the art since Adam. Aristippus is greater than Raphael."

"What has gone wrong?" demanded Algarcife, soothingly. "Too much purple in the 'Andromeda'? I always said that purple was the imperial color of his satanic majesty. If you had followed the orthodox art of your college days, and hadn't gone wandering after strange gods, you might have escaped a dash of that purple melancholia."

"You're a proper fellow," returned Mr. Nevins, with disgust. "Who was it that won that last debate in '82 by a glowing defence of Christianity against agnosticism, and, when the Reverend Miles lit out about the new orator in his flock, floored him with: 'Was that good? Then what a magnificent thing I could have made of the other side!'"

Mr. Paul had opened his book, and glanced up with candid lack of interest. Anthony laughed languidly.

"I saw Miles some weeks ago," he said, "and he is still talking about my 'defection,' as he calls it. I couldn't convince him that I was merely the counsel for a weak case, and that I was always an agnostic at heart."

Mr. Nevins lighted a cigar in silence. Then he nodded abruptly towards the wall. "What's that noise?" he demanded, irritably.

"That," replied Algarcife, "is a fiend in woman's form, who makes night hideous. I can't begin to work until she sings herself hoarse, and she doesn't do that until midnight. Verily, she is possessed of seven devils, and singing devils at that."

Mr. Nevins was listening attentively. His irritability had vanished.

"Why, it's Mariana!" he exclaimed. "Bless her pretty throat! An hour of Mariana is worth all the spoken or unspoken thoughts of – of Marcus Aurelius, to say nothing of Solomon."

Mr. Paul closed his book and looked up gravely. "A worthy young woman," he observed, "though a trifle fast. As for Solomon, his wisdom has been greatly exaggerated."

"Fast!" protested Mr. Nevins. "She's as fast as – as Mr. Paul – "

"Your insinuation is absurd," returned Mr. Paul, stiffly. But Mr. Nevins was not to be suppressed.

"Then don't display your ignorance of such matters. As for this St. Anthony, he thinks every woman who walks the New York streets a bleached pattern of virtue. I don't believe he'd know a painted Jezebel unless she wore a scarlet letter."

Anthony turned upon him resentfully. "Confound it, Nevins," he said, "I am not a born fool!"

"Only an innocent," retorted Mr. Nevins, complacently.

A resounding rap upon the panels of the door interrupted them. Mr. Nevins rose.

"That's Ardly," he said. "He and I are doing New York to-night."

Ardly came inside, and stood with his hand upon the door-knob.

"Come on, Nevins," he said. "I've got to do a column on that new danseuse. She dances like a midge, but, by Jove! she has a figure to swear by – "

"And escape perjury," added Mr. Nevins. "Mariana says it is false."

"Mariana," replied Ardly, "is a sworn enemy to polite illusions. She surveys the stage through a microscope situated upon the end of a lorgnette. It is a mistake. One should never look at a woman through glasses unless they be rose-colored ones. A man preserves this principle, and his faith in plumpness and curves along with it; a woman penetrates to the padding and powder. Come on, Nevins."

Mr. Nevins followed him into the hall, and then turned to look in again. "Algarcife, won't you join us on a jolly little drunk? Won't you, Mr. Paul?"

When they had gone, and Mr. Paul had gone likewise, though upon a different way, Anthony heated the coffee, drank two cups, and resumed his work.

"Taken collectively," he remarked, "the human race is a consummate nuisance. What a deuced opportunity for work the last man will have – only, most likely, he'll be an ass."

The next day he passed Mariana on the stairs without seeing her. He was returning from the college laboratory, and his mind was full of his experiments. Later in the afternoon, when he watered his plants, he turned his can, in absent-minded custom, upon the geranium, and saw that there was a scarlet bloom among the leaves. The sight pleased him. It was as if he had given sustenance to a famished life.

But Mariana, engrossed in lesser things, had seen him upon the stairs and upon the balcony. She still cherished an unreasonable resentment at what she considered his trespass upon her individual rights; and yet, despite herself, the trenchant quality in the dark, massive-browed face had not been without effect upon her. The ascetic self-repression that chastened his lips, and the utter absence of emotion in the mental heat of his glance tantalized her in its very unlikeness to her own nature. She, who thrilled into responsive joy or gloom at reflected light or shade, found her quick senses awake to each passing impression, and had learned to recognize her neighbor's step upon the stair; while he, wrapped in an intellectual trance, created his environment at will, and was as oblivious of the girl at the other end of the fire-escape as he was to the articles of furniture in his room.

It was as if semi-barbarism, in all its exuberance of undisciplined emotion, had converged with the highest type of modern civilization – the civilization in which the flesh is degraded from its pedestal and forced to serve as a jangled vehicle for the progress of the mind.

The next night, as Algarcife stood at his window looking idly down upon the street below, he heard the sound of a woman sobbing in the adjoining room. His first impulse was to hasten in the direction from whence the sound came. He curbed the impulse with a shake.

"Hang it," he said, "it is no business of mine!"

But the suppressed sobbing from the darkness beyond invited him with its enlistment of his quick sympathies.

The electric light, falling upon the fire-escape, cast inky shadows from end to end. They formed themselves into dense outlines, which shivered as if stirred by a phantom breeze.

He turned and went back to his desk. Upon the table he had spread the supper of which he intended partaking at eleven o'clock. For an unknown reason he had conceived an aversion to the restaurant in the basement, and seldom entered it. He slept late in the day and worked at night, and his meals were apt to be at irregular hours.

He wrote a line, and rose and went back to the window. For an instant he stood and listened, then stepped out upon the fire-escape and walked across the shivering shadows towards the open window beyond.

Upon the little door beneath the window a girl was leaning, her head bowed upon her outstretched arm. The light in the room beyond was low, but he could see distinctly the slight outlines of her figure and the confusion of her heavy hair. She was sobbing softly.

"I beg your pardon," he said, the sympathetic quality in his voice dominating, "but I am sure that I can help you."

His forcible self-confidence exercised a compelling effect. The girl lifted her head and looked at him. Tears stood in her eyes, and as the electric light caught the clear drops they cast out scintillant flashes. Against the dim interior her head, with its nimbus of hair, had the droop and poise of the head of a mediæval saint.

"Oh, but you don't know how unhappy I am!" she said.

He spoke as he would have spoken to Mr. Paul in the same circumstances. "You have no one to whom you can go?"

"No."

"Then tell me about it."

His tone was that in which a physician might inquire the condition of a patient's digestion. It was absolutely devoid of the recognition of sex.

"Oh, I have worked so hard!" said Mariana.

"Yes?"

"And I hoped to sing in opera, and – Morani tells me that – it will be impossible."

"Ah!" In the peculiar power of his voice the exclamation had the warmth of a handshake.

Mariana rested her chin upon her clasped hands and looked at him. "He says it must be a music-hall – or – or nothing," she added.

He was silent for a moment. He felt that it was a case in which his sympathy could be exceeded only by his ignorance. "And this is why you are unhappy?" he asked. "Is there nothing else?"

She gave a little sob. "I am tired," she said. "My allowance hasn't come – and I missed my dinner, and I am – hungry."

Algarcife responded with relieved cheerfulness.

"Why, we are prepared for that," he said. "I was just sitting down to my supper, and you will join me."

In his complete estrangement from the artificial restraints of society, it seemed to him the simplest of possible adjustments of the difficulty. He felt that his intervention had not been wholly without beneficial results.

Mariana glanced swiftly up into his face.

"Come!" he said; and she rose and followed him.