The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
“What's the good of science, anyway?”
It was Sybil who gave indignant yet indolent expression to this amazing question, comfortably propped up against an old elm, with an armful of field flowers scattered about her.
They had idled the forenoon away together, and the young professor, as he lay sprawled out on the grass beside her, was far from unhappy. He had been gazing at her lazily, but studiously, with what she had contemptuously called his “scientific look.”
“I know what you're doing,” she had said. “You're trying to analyze me and give me a Latin name as long as your arm—the same as you do with those bugs of yours!”
She was often disconcertingly correct in her blind and thoughtless intuitions.
“What a lovely bug you'd make, just to study month after month!”
The professor, obviously, was getting on a bit. Nature and the force of habit, however, promptly reasserted themselves, for at a retrospective view of his audacity, he blushed.
“Yes,” Sybil had gone on, astutely unobserving, “to be pinned down and torn to pieces, wing by wing, and to struggle to writhe away, while you sat and speculated as to the theory of nervous derivation!”
And it was then that she had flung out her interrogation as to the final good of all science.
“Oh, I know,” she went on, a little combatively and yet a little plaintively, “you imagine I live in a world of illusions. But, after all, my world's as real as yours. You think I'm only posing when I tell you that the flowers talk to me in the language of perfumes, and that I can learn things from the sound of water and the robins and the wind. But there's really some terribly old wisdom in the whisper of pine trees, and Are you listening?” she cried suddenly.
The young professor was listening, but more to the lilting and soothing melody of her voice than to the words she was so heatedly uttering. He had just discovered that the curve of her lips was the loveliest curve in all nature.
“But you come and drag me to earth with that ferrety microscope-slide look of yours! You reach out and prick every bubble of my make-believe with that University of Amboro voice of yours, demanding the why and the wherefore of everything. You're forever trying to turn all the beautiful mysteries of nature into bald and sordid facts. Facts—I hate them! You probe and analyze and dissect, but you've never once surrendered yourself to one great current of feeling, and let it carry you away, softly, happily”
“Oh, I say!” The young professor of anthropology was looking about him, visibly alarmed, when his eyes chanced to rest upon a small red ant crawling across the hem of her skirt. He followed the movements of the insect intently.
“Pardon me,” he said, “but see, this is the well-known Pharaoh's ant, the tiny Monomorium pharaonis!”
“Is it?” said Sybil, with uplifted eyebrows.
“Yes, one of those little insects whose community life is as complex and highly organized as that of man himself!”
“Indeed!” said Sybil, with the ghost of a sigh.
“There are the winged males, and the females, winged until they mate, and the wingless and unhappy neuters rt
“Neuters, did you say?”
“Yes, neuters, who slave their dull lives out, toiling and laboring and dying for the hive.”
“Very much like the human plan, after all, isn't it?” commented Sybil absently.
The professor looked at her blankly, oppressed by the feeling that she was in some way making fun of him. But her light and careless laugh, as she looked back into his questioning eyes, persuaded him that he was quite wrong in this suspicion.
“Well?” she asked.
He still looked at her.
“Oh, please don't try to study me with such contemplative wisdom! I'm not worth the trouble—I'm only a moment's splash of sunlight on the gray walls of your life. I'm only a foolish child leaning out of the windows of idleness!”
“You're a poet, my dear!” said the professor, with feeling.
“You'd like it better if Anne were here!” suddenly complained the girl, with a quick side glance at her companion,
“Would I?” retorted the professor tartly.
“You know you would!” mourned the unhappy spirit at his side.
“But Anne isn't here!” he was human enough to observe. He wondered why it was that all the perfect moments of life were marred by some incongruously trifling word or touch.
“But she's coming,” said Sybil.
If Anne had been an angry hornet, ready for attack, the professor could not have looked more dismayed.
“Anne coming here?” he echoed.
“Father has asked her to—to look after us!”
She leaned nearer to him, pregnantly, as she spoke, and they looked into each other's eyes for a moment or two of unbroken silence, Then the mounting color slowly crept up to the very hat brim of the man of science. Sybil denied herself the luxury of laughter; she only continued to shake her head mournfully.
“You and Anne have so much in common,” she went on, with her soft bitterness. “You are really both so much alike, so used to the same way of looking at things, and”
“I can't say that I ever regarded Anne as being the possessor of what by any stretch of the imagination might be called the scientific mind!” retorted the man.
“I won't have you criticize Anne!” demurred Sybil.
“But why shouldn't I criticize Anne?”
“Because—oh,because you and Anne must really be so much to each other!”
“Must be?” asked the indignant and heartless one. “I can't recall being either conscious of any particular affinity or devastated by any particular subjugation!”
“Then you're not in love?” cried Sybil, and her involuntary look of relief was so flattering that the professor found it no easy thing to keep from falling headlong into her petal-sprinkled feminine pit of open confession. But he had walked with science for twelve long years, and it had taught him discretion. He had the good luck to keep silence.
“But when two people are practically engaged?” said Sybil, returning to the attack.
“I am not and never was engaged to Anne!” declared the professor, with unexpected acerbity. He had been going to add, “And never will be!” but again he had the good luck to be silent.
“But you have an understanding, of course?” murmured the girl gently. “Or it's understood there's an understanding?”
The professor was on the point of declaring that he believed Anne to have some understanding on the matter, and some very distinct understanding. Still again, however, that admonishing inner voice prompted him to keep his own counsel.
He flung a pebble moodily into the brook at their feet and then looked at Sybil. Sybil only shook out her skirts and announced that it would be luncheon time before they could get back to the house. He noticed a new and more mature look, he thought, in her contemplative eyes.
He rose to his feet, rubbing his left knee for a moment or two—he was still painfully absent-minded about sitting on damp grass—and caught up with Ins silent companion. He felt that from that moment forth they stood in a new relation to each other. The note of artlessness had given way to a feeling of impending conflict, of some silent, yet solemn combat between elemental and embattled sex. And he noticed that the newer Sybil who walked at his side did not go home by way of the fields, where there would have been three fences to climb, but decorously by way of the lane.