The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
As John Herrin Macraven pushed his way through the aisles of dark pines bordering the roadside, he was overtaken by a subtle feeling of migration, an impression that he was passing from a world of realities into one of purely Hesperidean setting. A thick carpeting of pine needles muffled his hurrying steps; the wind sighed count in the treetops overhead; a bird or two chirped drowsily.
Then came the fuller sound of the human note, the high and clear soprano once more. The young professor, like a man in a dream, made his way from the darker belt of pines to a thicket of wild plum, through which a little stream glimmered and flashed and danced. It was from the heart of this thicket, apparently, that the light-noted Arcadian voice was singing, with all the abandon of an April bird.
As the young man guardedly pushed the tangled plum branches to one side, his startled eyes made out the crystal glimmer of a secluded pool. On the greensward beside this pool knelt a young girl, vigorously toweling a great mass of golden-yellow hair. As it fell and swung over her face, from time to time, she threw back her head with a quick upward motion, to free herself of the engulfing cascade. Her round young arms were bare, and gleamed in the strong sunlight. Her throat, too, was bare, and, cut out against its emerald background, seemed of more than ivory whiteness.
The professor gazed down at her without restraint, without shame, without even a thought of intrusion. He could have flung a dozen classical allusions at her—Aphrodite emerging from the sea, Ariadne among her nymphs, Diana beside the secret pool. For his impression of the tableau, at the moment, was a purely impersonal and æsthetic one. Then of a sudden the charm was broken.
Whether it was mere accident or some vague and telepathic impression, he was never able to say, but before even the impulse of withdrawal had come to him, as the eyes of the singing girl idly turned about the little woodland coign, they came to a halt at the precise point where the intruding stranger stood.
He thought he heard the sound of a frightened and muffled and strictly human “Oh, goodness!” The next moment he saw nothing more than a startled and indignant young woman covering her shoulders with a red-striped Turkish towel. He would have fled, madly, ignominiously, but flight was already too late. Instead, as was his custom in moments of great embarrassment, he coughed gravely, all the while conscious that his face was turning a deeper and deeper color. His mental misery, however, seemed somewhat to reassure and calm the young woman confronting him.
“Hello!”
Her challenge was an audaciously timid one.
“Hello!” responded the professor inadequately.
“Well?” she demanded, more imperiously.
The intruder fumbled with his hat.
“Were you looking for any one?” asked the girl.
“II hope you don't mind!” stammered the abashed scholar. “I didn't dream of intruding, you know!” And his scarlet brow plainly bore out the truth of his declaration. He waited for her to speak.
The girl gave vent to a ripple of light and easy laughter. Then she stopped and looked the intruder up and down.
“You're John Herrin Macraven!” she announced, with sudden conviction, plaiting her hair with deft and twinkling fingers.
The professor bowed gravely.
“And you don't know me?” laughed the girl.
The professor confessed that he did not.
“I'm Sybil!” she announced simply.
“Is it possible?” gasped the scholar. Little Sybil, grown almost into a woman, the child he had trotted on his knee and put out of his study for knocking over his insect cases! He gazed at her, from head to foot, and she in turn colored under his prolonged and studious stare.
“Would you mind turning round for a minute?” she asked.
He noticed, for the first time, that she was holding her jacket in her hand. He faced about, tingling again with embarrassment.
“I really forgot!” he stammered.
There was a moment of silence.
“It's all right now,” announced the girl placidly. “You can turn back.”
“You're—er—quite sure?”
“Yes—it's on!”
The young professor wheeled about, slowly and cautiously.
“And you are little Sybil!” he repeated, wagging a contemplative head. “Why, my dear young lady, seven years ago, when you left Amboro, you were nothing more than”
“I'm nineteen,” announced Sybil, with dignity. She was gathering up her comb and brushes from the grass by this time. “Why didn't you come on Monday, as you telegraphed?”
The professor tried to remember; he could only recall that it should have been Tuesday.
“Your telegram said Monday. I waited two hours, in the heat. And the horses ran away and smashed the Gladstone springs!” pursued the practical- minded Sybil.
“Did it?” asked the professor vacuously, thinking of the telegram. Then he sighed plaintively. “Quite frequently, of late, I find myself making mistakes of that nature, especially about dates.”
“That's what Anne says,” the girl announced.
“What Anne says?” echoed the other.
“Yes, Anne. She told me you went to Lydia Ramsdell's wedding, the second day after the bride had left for Palm Beach, with black gloves and a bunch of tuberoses for the remains!”
The professor, with every sign and token of distress, protested that Anne was always exaggerating things.
“Anne's a dear!” cried the girl, with a touch of reproof in her voice. “Father says she's the finest woman that ever walked in shoe leather. She's found something to do in life. She's made herself mean something in this world. She's not just an idler, an atom, like me!”
“Atoms, it must be remembered, are matters of vast importance,” corrected the man of science.
“But why didn't you ride over with young Harkins?” persisted the girl.
He explained that he had preferred walking, scarcely realizing the distance.
Then Sybil asked him if he wasn't nearly starved to death, and if he liked swimming, and if he had noticed that berry bird on the thorn tree; and while she was saying that she would show him a short cut back to the house, he was pondering what could ever have given rise to the popular misconception that women were less practical than men.
“I'm not a bit clever, like Anne, you know,” Sybil was prattling on, as she stooped to gather an armful of sweet brier.
The professor looked down at the laughing face, the wind-loosened hair, the lithe young figure stooping before him.
“My dear young lady, I grant that intellectual acumen is not a thing to be despised in women, but in the fulfillment of her profoundest biological duties, I fail to comprehend the ad- vantages of mere cleverness alone. If what has been called the modern woman could only remember that this purely factitious mental culture of hers is absolutely subservient to her more glorious and more essential mission of continuing and But, dear me, dear me, you're far too young to have the slightest inkling of what I was about to say!”
“Oh, no, I'm not!” said Sybil, tying her belt. “I've always felt that—just what you were going to say. It's perfectly true.”
The young' professor coughed gravely.
“You see, being so much alone up here, I've had to think things out for myself. Then reading father's proofs for him” She broke off with a laugh. “Father says I know too much for my own good. But of course that's all rubbish. Still, I seem to feel things somehow—things that every other woman who ever lived learned and felt, ages and ages ago. I imagine myself Sappho, sometimes—don't laugh!—and sometimes I've the feeling that I'm Joan hearing voices, and sometimes Francesca looking out of lonely towers on a strange world!”
“You—you have a wonderful imagination,” averred her companion.
“That's what father says,” she chattered on. “That's why he lets me be so lazy, and write things nobody will understand, and try to dream things out. But it isn't the verses I care for. It's life—it's beautiful ways of living that bring the thought of them to me. That's what I love. It's flowers and singing birds and the afternoon sun- light on soft hills, and the being young and happy and satisfied, and going to bed tired and glad, with so many new things to do and see to-morrow!”
They were crossing an undulating meadow by this time, knee-deep in heavy-scented clover blossoms. The bobolinks overhead were pouring down their liquid notes, and in the flat noonday sunlight all the world seemed lazy and good-natured and carefree. The professor drank in a deep breath of the blossom-scented air.
“I wish you'd teach me the secret,” he said humbly, and with slightly heightened color. “I mean, show me how you can be so light-hearted, so happy, so in love with living!”
She turned and looked at him, with the ingenuous and confidential gaze of a child. Then she stopped him, with one small sunburned hand on his black coat sleeve, and together they looked about the light-bathed landscape, from east to west. Her face had the solemnity of a youthful seer's.
“Why should it be so hard, in such a beautiful world as this?” inquired the young rhapsodist.
“It shouldn't!” agreed the man of science, yet as he said it, his gaze was not on the world, but on the girl's upturned face and dark-lidded eyes. He wondered, though, if 'in some way she was not secretly making fun of him.
“One only has to drift, like the butterflies,” she crooned softly, as if speaking to herself. “And in the end, you find everything—at the end of the rainbow!” She sighed happily. “I love to dream, don't you? I love to lie and watch the buds unfold. I love to listen to the sound of water, and hear voices seem to break through the drone. Don't you?”
“Yes, of course,” assented the other, “if it's in a dry place.”
The girl shook her head sorrowfully.
“No, I know you'd think of bugs!”
“Not with you,” essayed the professor courageously.
She checked her laughter and pointed into the rolling lowlands before them.
“There's the house—see? In that clump of maples above the apple trees! And there's father, coming down the west lane in the surrey! Won't it be awful with dad away for a whole month?”
The young professor found himself in no way elated at the sight of that particular house, which had once seemed so dismally distant.