The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
Macraven, with his butterfly nets and his microscopes beside him, peered uneasily up and down the lonely little station platform. From a near-by clover field, in full bloom, echoed the call of bobolinks. From somewhere in the remoter distance came the sound of pounding; then a dog barked, and the morning grew silent again. The only figure in sight was that of a much bewhiskered and ferret-eyed workman, placidly squatting beside a row of track lamps, at the far end of the bald little platform.
“Can you tell me if I am right in assuming that this is Cedar Hills?” asked Macraven, weighed down by the loneliness of the place and some wordless sense of impending calamity.
“It be!” responded the lamp cleaner, with a gently forgiving nod toward the station sign, where the name stood in letters a foot high.
“If I am not mistaken, the fruit farm of Doctor Ezra Shotwell is somewhere in this neighborhood?”
“It be!”
“Then could you please tell me about how far away?”
The lamp cleaner sat and studied for a moment or two.
“'Bout four mile!”
The distant sound of hammering broke forth again, and a dog barked dismally once more through the morning quietness. All the world, it seemed to the Dean of Amboro, had fallen asleep. He turned again to his uncommunicative companion.
“Could you tell me the best way of getting there?”
“Be yuh goin' there?”
“I be!” retorted the professor, exasperated.
The old lamp cleaner slowly wheeled about and pointed to a clump of willows beyond the clover field.
“The Harkins boy is waitin' for yuh there with the Shotwell team, I guess. Scart to death o' the train, he says. Ain't takin' no chances on another runaway!”
Even as he spoke, a team of prancing bays, with heads high and ears forward, emerged from the shadow of the willows. Macraven looked at them with gathering distrust. The youth who was holding the reins could have been little more than twelve or thirteen years of age. The professor promptly decided that if only four miles separated him from the Shotwell farm, he preferred to walk.
“Air yuh the man from Amboro they was lookin' for yisterday?” languidly inquired the lamp cleaner.
“Yesterday?” echoed Macraven, in alarm. “Surely I wired the right date!”
He peered through his pocket note-book with a sigh of distress. His friend viewed him with forbearance modified by compassion, slowly wagging his head up and down.
“She said as yuh might be a little queerlike.”
“Who said I'd be 'queerlike'?” demanded the other.
“That gurl o' Shotwell's. She druv through with that team o' bays o' theirs yisterday. Waited a hull hour and a half for the up train. When the train did pull in, that team o' hers run away, lickety-split. Smashed a hind spring afore the gurl could git 'em sawed off 'n the wind!”
“Was she hurt?”
“No, but she was mad!” He wagged his head again, in silent memory of the scene. She's a high-stepper, that gurl! Then she cooled down and said I was to hev yuh sent over to the farm, if yuh got in when nobody was round—said I was to try and git some little wits in my head—he-he—and look out for a middle-aged gen'leman with thin legs!”
An inconsequential feeling of irritability crept over the young professor of anthropology. He was, obviously, in the land of the Barbaroi, where worth went unrecognized.
He left instructions for the Harkins boy to carry his traps on to the farm, whither he would follow on foot. A walk of four miles through the fresh country air would brush the cobwebs from his brain and give him a chance to think things out and perhaps swing back to a more cheerful point of view.
He sighed as he resumed his journey down the little winding roadway, between slopes of resinous pine, through orchard lands stippled with light and shade, and along rolling pasture fields threaded with a flashing and tumbling little rivulet; for he had suddenly thought of his telegram and his arrival one day too late. After all, it was just as well that he was getting away from his work. Twice, old Ramsdell, the professor of Greek, had accused him of absently carrying off his gold-headed umbrella. Once, too, he had worn his house coat into the lecture hall—a very comfortable garment that Anne Appleby had quilted and trimmed with scarlet military braid for him. He had been grinding too hard. The quiet life of the country had much to be said in its favor.
For a moment he almost envied Shotwell, his old friend who had been dean of the same “residence,” had lectured in the same halls, and had worried along on the same frugal salary. But seven years before, the older man had startled both Amboro and the outer world by the unexpected publication of his romantic novel, “Princess Impossible.” He had plaintively enough cried his apologies for it, before his gently smiling academic friends; but in clubs and car seats, in boudoirs and libraries, half a million readers had sighed and wept over its well-stiffened mush of adventure and its well-candied meringue of sentiment. Little had they imagined, all the while, that the “Shirley Legrange” of the eleven-editioned romance was Ezra Ingraham Shotwell, M.A., Ph.D., F.A.S.L., author of “Racial Evolution.” Yet, ironically enough, the returns from that eleven-editioned frolic in easy-handed eroticism had given the overworked Amboro lecturer a belated chance to cut loose from academic confinement and to take unto himself the many-acred estate where he now toyed with the hybridization of orchard fruits and labored in secluded ease and content on the sixth and last volume of his colossal “Evolutionary Series.”
Again the young professor of anthropology sighed, as he came to a stop in the narrow, winding road and gazed absently about him at the murmuring woods, the softly rolling. fields, the shadowy thickets from which the birds were singing. That was all he asked for—freedom, such as his old friend had found, to do his own work in his own way. And here, at least, he would be free from all danger of entangling alliances.
It was not that he was so match afraid of women—he prided himself that he knew them too well for that—it was more that he was afraid of his own racial instincts, calling to him so arbitrarily out of the tomb of the past. Nor was he uncertain of what course to choose. When one was wedded to one's profession, one was better off, frankly, without women about. Anne herself had always agreed with him on that—and then she would casually ask, ten minutes later, why he had gone out in the sleet without his rubbers, and if he was eating his meals on time. Or she would intimately demand, as she picked a piece of lint from his carpet, if Dodson was airing the deanery blankets properly. She had even come and bullied him about that new window and sent a chimney cleaner to the deanery when his grate refused to draw. He had often heard that it was the practical and housewifely sort of woman, from the day of the cave dweller down to that of the auto user, who ensnared men.
As he trudged more blithely along through the quiet and fragrant pine woods, he felt more and more grateful for the uncounted miles that lay between him and Amboro. A relieving sense of emancipation crept over him. It seemed, as he threaded his way deeper and deeper into the solitudes of that tranquil country road, that he was forging farther and farther across the frontier of some newer and freer existence.
Yet his day was not all delight. For as the morning grew older, and the sun mounted higher, he began to regret his caution in the matter of the Harkins boy and the team. As he had feared, his left knee had already begun to trouble him.
He unbuttoned his heat-absorbing black coat, and every now and then fanned himself with his broad-brimmed clerical-looking “wide-awake” hat. Yet he kept stoically on until he came to an alluringly secluded thicket of pine and thorn tree. The country had grown more broken, and faintly, at times, he could hear the sound of running water.
He decided, at the music of that call, to swing aside into the coolness of the woods and rest, if only for a few moments, on one of the fallen logs. He stood there, chewing a dandelion stem, idly debating whether to turn to the right or to the left, when all thought was arrested by a sudden and unexpected sound.
With a strangely quickened interest, he turned in the direction of that unlooked-for interruption—for the sound he had heard across the leafy silences was unmistakably that of a young girl singing.