Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man Part 33

The blue that had been so timid and so tentative overspread the sky; more robins came, and after them bluebirds and redbirds and Peterbirds, and the impudent screaming robber jay that is so beautiful and so bold, and flute-voiced vireos, and nuthatches, and the darling busybody wren fussing about her house-building in the corners of our piazzas. The first red flowers of the j.a.panese quince opened flame-like on the bare brown bushes. When the bridal-wreath by the gate saw that, she set industriously to work upon her own wedding-gown. The yellow jessamine was full of waxy gold buds; and long since those bold frontiersmen of the year, the Judas-trees, had flaunted it in bravest scarlet, and the slim-legged scouts of the pines showed shoulder-straps and c.o.c.kades of new gay green above gallant brown leggings.

One brand new morning the b.u.t.terfly Man called me aside and placed in my hands a letter. The American Society of Natural History invited Mr.

John Flint, already a member of the Entomological Society of France, a Fellow of the Entomological Society of London, and a member of the greatest of Dutch and German a.s.sociations, to speak before it and its guests, at a most notable meeting to be held in the Society's splendid Museum in New York City. Not to mention two mere ex-Presidents, some of the greatest scientific names of the Americas were included in that list. And it was before such as these that my b.u.t.terfly Man was to speak. Behold me rocking on my toes!

The first effect of this invitation was to please me immensely, I being a puffed-up old man and carnal-minded at times; nor do I seem to improve with age. The plaudits of the world, for anybody I admire and love, ring most sweetly in my foolish ears. Now the honors he had gotten from abroad were fine and good in their way, but this meant that the value of his work was recognized and his position established in his own country, in his own time. It meant a widening of his horizon, a.s.sociation with clever men and women, enn.o.bling friendships to broaden his life. A just measure of appreciation from the worthwhile sweetens toil and encourages genius. And yet--our eyes met, and mine had to ask an old question.

"Would you better accept it?" I wondered.

"I can't afford not to," said he resolutely. "The time's come for me to get out in the open, and I might just as well face the music, and Do it Now. Risks? I hardly think so. I never hunted in couples, remember--I always went by my lonesome and got away with it. Besides, who's remembering Slippy? n.o.body. He's drowned and dead and done with.

But, however, and nevertheless, and because, I shall go."

Again we looked at each other; and his look was untroubled.

"The pipe-dreams I've had about slipping back into little old New York! But if anybody had told me I'd go back like I'm going, with the sort of folks waiting for me that will be waiting now, I'd have pa.s.sed it up. Well, you never can tell, can you? And in a way it's funny--now isn't it?"

"No, you never can tell," said I, soberly. "But I do not think it at all funny. Quite the contrary." Suppose, oh, suppose, that after all these years, when a well-earned success was in his grasp, it should happen--I turned pale. He read my fear in my face and his smile might have been borrowed from my mother's mouth.

"Don't you get cold feet, parson," he counseled kindly. "Be a sport!

Besides, it's all in the Game, you know."

"Is it?"

"Sure!"

"And worth while, John?"

He laughed. "Believe me! It's the worthwhilest thing under the sun to sit in the Game, with a sport's interest in the hands dealt out, taking yours as it comes to you, bluffing all you can when you've got to, playing your cards for all they're worth when it's your turn. No reneging. No squealing when you lose. No boasting how you did it when you win. There's nothing in the whole universe so intensely and immensely worth while as being _you_ and alive, with yourself the whole kitty and the sky your limit! It's one great old Game, and I'm for thanking the Big Dealer that I'da whack at playing it." And his eyes snapped and his lean brown face flushed.

"And you are really willing to--to stake yourself now, my son?"

"Lord, parson, you ought to know! And you a dead ringer for the real thing in a cla.s.sy sport yourself!"

"My _dear_ son--!"

My dear son waved his fine hand, and chuckled in his red beard.

"Would _you_ back down if this was your call? Why, you're the sort that would tackle the biggest noise in the ring, even if you knew you'd be dragged out on your pantry in the first half of the first round, if you thought you'd got holy orders to do it! If you saw me getting jellyfish of the spine now, you'd curl up and die--wouldn't you, honest Injun?" His eyes crinkled and he grinned so infectiously that my fears subsided. I had an almost superst.i.tious certainty that nothing really evil could happen to a man who could grin like that.

Fate and fortune are perfectly powerless before the human being who can meet them with the sword of a smile.

"Well," I admitted cautiously, "jellyfish of the spine must be an unlovely ailment; not that I ever heard of it before."

"You're willing for me to go, then?"

"You'd go anyhow, would you not?"

"Forget it!" said he roughly. "If you think I'd do anything I knew would cause you uneasiness, you've got another thing coming to you."

"Oh, go, for heaven's sake!" said I, sharply.

"All right. I'll go for heaven's sake," he agreed cheerfully. "And now it's formally decided I'm to go, and talk, the question arises--what they really want me to talk about? _I_ don't know how to deal in glittering generalities. A chap on the trail of truth has got to let generalities go by the board. The minute he tackles the living Little People he chucks theories and bucks conditions.

"Suppose I tell the truth as I see it: that most so-called authorities are like cats chasing their tails--because they accept theories that have never been really proven, run after them, and so never get anywhere? And that facts dug up in the open under the sunlight don't always fit in with notions hatched out in libraries under the electric light?

"Suppose I say that after they've run everything down to that plasma they're so fond of beginning and ending with, there is still something behind it all their theories can't explain away? Protoplasm doesn't explain Life any more than the battery explains electricity. Instinct?

Evolution? The survival of the fittest? Well, nothing is tagged for fair, and I'm more than willing to be shown. For the more I find out from the living things themselves,--you can't get truth from death, you've got to get it from life--the more self-evident it seems to me that to exist at all insects must have arrived on the scene complete, handfinished, with the union label of the Great Workshop on them by way of a trade-mark."

"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, one G.o.d, world without end, Amen!" said I, smiling. I have never thought it necessary to explain or excuse the Creator. G.o.d is; things are.

But he shook his head, wrinkling his forehead painfully. "I wish I _knew_," said he, wistfully. "You're satisfied to believe, but I have got to know. Oh, great Power behind Things, I want to know! I want to _know_!"

Ah, but I also do most pa.s.sionately wish to know! If, however, the Insect has taught me anything in my lifelong study of it, it is to recognize the Unknowable, to know there is that which I cannot hope to know. But if under the law of its world, so different from ours and yet so alike because so inevitable, the Insect must move in a fixed circle within which it is safe, a circle whose very limitation preserves it from error and thus from destruction, may not a like fixed circle beyond which _we_ may not penetrate preserve us, too? Are these mountain peaks of the Unknowable, the Impa.s.sable, which encompa.s.s the skyline of our humanity, these heights so mysterious and so unscalable, not rather bulwarks between man's pride and the abyss?

Something of this I said to the b.u.t.terfly Man, and he nodded, but did not answer. He fell into a brown study; then plunged from the room without further look or word and made for his own desk. I was not afraid of what the b.u.t.terfly Man, fresh from little Appleboro's woods and fields, would have to say to the scholars and scientists gathered to hear him!

Apparently he was not either, for after he had gotten a few notes together he wisely turned the whole affair over to that mysterious Self that does our work and solves our problems for us. On the surface he busied himself with a paper setting forth the many reasons why the County of Appleboro should appropriate adequate funds for a common dipping vat, and hurried this to Dabney, who was holding open a s.p.a.ce in the _Clarion_ for it. Then there were new breeding cages to be made, for the supply of eggs and coc.o.o.ns on hand would require additional quarters, once they began to emerge.

By the Sat.u.r.day he had finished all this; and as I had that afternoon free we spent some beautiful hours with the microscope and slide mounts. I completed, too, the long delayed drawings of some diurnal wasp-moths and their larvae. We worked until my mother interrupted us with a summons to an early dinner, for Sat.u.r.day evening belongs to the confessional and I was shortly due at the church.

I left Flint with Madame and Miss Sally Ruth, who had run over after the neighborly Appleboro wont with a plate of fresh sponge-cake and a bowl of fragrant custard. Miss Sally Ruth is nothing if not generous, but there are times when one could wish upon her the affliction of dumbness. As I slipped into my ca.s.sock in the study, I could hear her uplifted voice, a voice so insistent and so penetrating that it can pierce closed doors and come through a ceiling:

"I declare to goodness, I don't know what to believe any more! She's got money enough in her own right, hasn't she? For heaven's sake, then, why should she marry for more money? But you never really know people, do you? Why, folks say--"

I hurried out of the house and ran the short distance to the church. I wished I hadn't heard; I wished Miss Sally Ruth, good as she is, would sometimes hold her tongue. She will set folks by the ears in heaven some of these days if she doesn't mend her ways before she gets there.

It must have been all of ten o'clock when I got back to the Parish House. Madame had retired; John Flint's rooms were dark. The night itself was dark, though in between the clouds that a brisk wind pulleyhauled about the skies, one saw many stars.

Too tired to sleep, I sat beside my window and breathed the repose that lay like a benediction upon the little city. I found myself praying; for Mary Virginia, whom I loved and over whom I was sorely troubled; for Laurence, even now walking such a road as I also once had to travel with feet as young but no more steadfast; and then with a thankfulness too deep for words, I thought a prayer for the b.u.t.terfly Man. So thinking and so praying, with a glow in my heart because of him, I closed my window, and crept into bed and into sleep.

I awoke with a start. Somebody was in the room. There was an urgent voice whispering my name, an urgent hand upon me. A pocket light flashed, and in its pale circle appeared the face of John Flint.

"Get up!" said he in an intense whisper. "And come. Come!"

"Why, what in the name of heaven--"

"Don't make a row!" he snarled, and brought his face close. "Here--let me help you. Heaven, man, how slow you are!" With furious haste he forced my clothes upon me and even as I mechanically struggled to adjust them he was hustling me toward the door, through the dark hall, and down the stairs.

"Easy there--careful of that step!" he breathed in my ear, guiding me.

"But what is the matter?" I whispered back impatiently. I do not relish mystery and I detest being led w.i.l.l.ynilly.

"In my rooms," said he briefly, and hustled me across the garden on the double run, I with my teeth chattering, for I had been dragged out of my sleep, and the night air was cold.

He fairly lifted me up his porch-steps, unlocked his door, and pushed me inside. With the drawn shades and the flickering firelight, the room was peaceful and pleasant enough. Then Kerry caught my astonished gaze, for the dog stood statue-like beside the Morris chair, and when I saw what Kerry guarded I crossed myself. Sunk into the chair, the b.u.t.terfly Man's old gray overcoat partly around her, was Mary Virginia.

At my involuntary exclamation she raised her head and regarded me. A great sigh welled from her bosom and I could see her eyes dilate and her lips quiver.

"Padre, Padre!" Down went her head, and she began to cry childishly, with sobs.

I watched her helplessly, too bewildered to speak. But the other man's face was the face of one crucified. I saw his eyes, and something I had been all too blind to rushed upon me overwhelmingly. This, then, was what had driven him forth for a time, this was what had left its indelible imprint upon him! He had hung upon his cross and I had not known. Oh, b.u.t.terfly Man, I had not known!