Strong Hearts Part 7

The Entomologist

I

An odd feature of New Orleans is the way homes of all ranks, in so many sections of it, are mingled. The easy, bright democracy of the thing is what one might fancy of ancient Greeks; only, here there is a general wooden frailty.

A notable phase of this characteristic is the mult.i.tude of small, frame, ground-story double cottages fronting endwise to the street, on lots that give either side barely s.p.a.ce enough for one row of twelve-foot rooms with windows on a three-foot alley leading to the narrow backyard.

Thus they lie, deployed in pairs or half-dozens, by hundreds, in the variable intervals that occur between houses and gardens of dignity and elegance; hot as ovens, taking their perpetual bath of the great cleanser, sunshine. Sometimes they open directly upon the banquette (sidewalk), but often behind as much as a fathom of front-yard, as gay with flowers as a girl's hat, and as fragrant of sweet-olive, citronelle, and heliotrope as her garments. In the right-hand half of such a one, far down on the Creole side of Ca.n.a.l street, and well out toward the swamp, lived our friend the entomologist.

Just a glance at it was enough to intoxicate one's fancy. It seemed to confess newness of life, joy, pa.s.sion, temperance, refinement, aspiration, modest wisdom, and serene courage. You would say there must live two well-mated young lovers--but one can't always tell.

II

We first came to know the entomologist through our opposite neighbors, the Fontenettes, when we lived in the street that still bears the romantic name, Sixth. What a pity nothing rhymes to it. _Their_ ground-story cottage was of a much better sort. It lay broadside to the street, two-thirds across a lot of forty feet width, in the good old Creole fashion, its front garden twelve feet deep, and its street fence, of white palings, higher than the pa.s.ser's head. The parlor and dining-room were on the left, and the two main bedrooms on the right, next the garden; Mrs.

Fontenette's in front, opening into the parlor, Monsieur's behind, letting into the dining-room. For there had been a broader garden on the parlor and dining-room side, but that had been sold and built on. I fancy that if Mrs. Fontenette--who was not a Creole, as her husband was, but had once been a Miss Bangs, or something, and still called blackberries "blackbries," and made root rhyme with foot--I fancy if she had been doomed to our entomologist's sort of a house she would have been too broken in spirit to have made anybody's acquaintance.

For our pretty blonde neighbor had ambitions, or _had_ had, as she once hinted to me with a dainty sadness. When I somehow let slip to her that I had repeated her delicately balanced words to my wife she gave me one melting glance of reproach, and thenceforth confided in me no more beyond the limits of literary criticism and theology--and botany. I remember we were among the few roses of her small flower-beds at the time, and I was trying to show her what was blighting them all in the bud. She called them "rose-es."

They rarely bloomed for her; she was always for being the rose herself--as Monsieur Fontenette once said; but he said it with a glance of fond admiration. Her name was Flora, and yet not flowers, but their book-lore, best suited her subtle capriciousness. She made such a point of names that she could not let us be happy with the homely monosyllable by which we were known, until we allowed her to hyphenate us as the Thornd.y.k.e-Smiths.

There hung in our hall an entire unmarred beard of the beautiful gray Spanish moss, eight feet long. I had got this unusual specimen by tiptoeing from the thwarts of a skiff with twelve feet of yellow creva.s.se- waters beneath, the shade of the vast cypress forest above, and the bough whence it hung brought within hand's reach for the first time in a century. Thus I explained it one day to Mrs. Fontenette, as she touched its ends with a delicate finger.

"Tillandsia"--was her one word of response. She loved no other part of botany quite so much as its Latin.

"The Baron ought to see that," said Monsieur. He was a man of quiet manners, not over-social, who had once enjoyed a handsome business income, but had early--about the time of his marriage--been made poor through the partial collapse of the house in Havre whose cotton-buyer he had been, and, in a scant way, still was. "When a cotton-buyer geds down, he stays,"

was all the explanation he ever gave us. He had unfretfully let adversity cage him for life in the only occupation he knew, while the wife he adored kept him pecuniarily bled to death, without sharing his silent resigna-- There I go again! Somehow I can't talk about her without seeming unjust and rude. I felt it just now, even, when I quoted her husband's fond word, that she always chose to be the rose herself. Well, she nearly always succeeded; she was a rose--with some of the rose's drawbacks.

When we asked who the Baron might be it was she who told us, but in a certain disappointed way, as if she would rather have kept him unknown a while longer. He was, she said, a profoundly learned man, graduate of one of those great universities over in his native Germany, and a naturalist.

Young? Well, eh--comparatively--yes. At which the silent husband smiled his dissent.

The Baron was an entomologist. Both the Fontenettes thought we should be fascinated with the beauty of some of his cases of moths and b.u.t.terflies.

"And coleoptera," said the soft rose-wife. She could ask him to bring them to us. Take us to him?--Oh!--eh--her embarra.s.sment made her prettier, as she broke it to us gently that the Baroness was a seamstress. She hushed at her husband's mention of shirts; but recovered when he harked back to the Baron, and beamed her unspoken apologies for the great, brave scholar who daily, silently bore up under this awful humiliation.

III

Toward the close of the next afternoon she brought the entomologist. I can see yet the glad flutter she could not hide as they came up our front garden walk in an air spiced by the "four-o'clocks," with whose small trumpets--red, white, and yellow--our children were filling their laps and stringing them on the seed-stalks of the cocoa-gra.s.s. He was bent and spectacled, of course; _l'entomologie oblige_; but, oh, besides!--

"Comparatively young," Mrs. Fontenette had said, and I naturally used her husband, who was thirty-one, for the comparison. Why, this man? It would have been a laughable flattery to have guessed his age to be forty-five.

Yet that was really the fact. Many a man looks younger at sixty--oh, at sixty-five! He was dark, bloodless, bowed, thin, weatherbeaten, ill-clad-- a picture of decent, incurable penury. The best thing about his was his head. It was not imposing at all, but it was interesting, albeit very meagrely graced with fine brown hair, dry and neglected. I read him through without an effort before we had been ten minutes together; a leaf still hanging to humanity's tree, but faded and shrivelled around some small worm that was feeding on its juices.

And there was no mistaking that worm; it was the avarice of knowledge. He had lost life by making knowledge its ultimate end, and was still delving on, with never a laugh and never a cheer, feeding his emaciated heart on the locusts and wild honey of entomology and botany, satisfied with them for their own sake, without reference to G.o.d or man; an infant in emotions, who time and again would no doubt have starved outright but for his wife, whom there and then I resolved we should know also. I was amused to see, by stolen glances, Mrs. Smith study him. She did not know she frowned, nor did he; but Mrs. Fontenette knew it every time.

We all had the advantage of him as to common sight. His gla.s.ses were obviously of a very high power, yet he could scarcely see anything till he clapped his face close down and hunted for it. When he pencilled for me the new Latin name he had given to a small, slender, almost dazzling green, beetle inhabiting the Spanish moss--his own scientific discovery-- he wrote it so minutely that I had to use a lens to read it.

As we sat close around the library lamp, I noticed how often his poor clothing had been mended by a woman's needle. His linen was discouraging, his cravat awry and dingy, and his hands--we had better pa.s.s his hands; yet they were slender and refined.

Also they shook, though not from any habit commonly called vicious. You could see that no vice of the body nor any l.u.s.t of material things had ever led him captive. He gave one the tender despair with which we look on a blind babe.

When we expressed regret that his wife had not come with him, he only bent with a deeper greed into a book I had handed him, and after a moment laid it down disappointedly, saying that it was "fool of plundters." Mrs.

Fontenette asking to be shown one of them, they reopened the book together, she all consciousness as she bent against him over the page, he oblivious of everything but the phrase they were hunting. He gave his forehead a tap of despair as he showed where the book called this same Tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a parasite.

"It iss no baraseet," he explained, in a mellow falsetto, "it iss an epipheet!"

"An air-plant!" said his fair worshipper, softly drinking in a bosomful of gladness as she made the distance between them more discreet.

Distances were all one to him. He seemed like a burnt log, still in shape but gone to ashes, except in one warm spot where glowed this self- consuming, world-sacrificing adoration of knowledge; knowledge sought, as I say, purely for its own sake and narrowed down to names and technical descriptions. Men of _perverted_ principles and pa.s.sions you may find anywhere; but I never had seen anyone so totally undeveloped in all the emotions, affections, tastes that make life _life_.

IV

A few afternoons later I went to his house. For pretext I carried a huge green worm, but I went mainly to see just how unluckily he was married. He was not at home. I found his partner a small, bright, toil-worn, pretty woman of hardly twenty-eight or nine, whose two or three children had died in infancy, and who had blended wifehood and motherhood together, and was taking care of the Baron as a widow would care for a crippled son, and at the same time reverencing him as if he were a demiG.o.d. Of his utter failure to provide their daily living she confessed herself by every implication, simply--proud! What else should a demiG.o.d's wife expect? At the same time, without any direct statement, she made it clear that she had no disdain, but only the broadest charity, for men who make a living.

It was odd how few her smiles were, and droll how much sweetness--what a sane winsomeness--she managed to radiate without them. I left her in her clean, bright cottage, like a nesting bird in a flowery bush, and entered my own home, declaring, with what I was gently told was unnecessary enthusiasm, that the Baron's wife was the "unluckily married" one, and the best piece of luck her husband had ever had. I had seen women make a virtue of necessity, but I had never before seen one make a conviction, comfort, and joy of it, and I should try to like the Baron, I said, if only for her sake.

Of course I became, in some degree, a source of revenue to him.

Understand, there was always a genuine exchange of so much for so much; he was not a "baraseet"--oh, no!--yet he hung on. We still have, stowed somewhere, a large case of b.u.t.terflies, another of splendid moths, and a smaller one of glistening beetles. Nor can I begrudge their cost, of whatever sort, even now when my delight in them is no longer a constant enthusiasm. The cases of specimens have pa.s.sed from daily sight, but thenceforth, as never before, our garden was furnished with guests--pages, ladies, poets, fairies, emperors, G.o.ddesses--coming and going on gorgeous wings, and none ever a stranger more than once. My non-parasitic friend "opened a new world" to me; a world that so flattered one with its grace and beauty, its marvellous delicacy and minuteness, its glory of color and curiousness of marking, and its exquisite adaptation of form to need and function, that in my meaner depths, or say my childish shallows--I resented Mrs. Fontenette's making the same avowal for herself--I didn't believe her!

I do not say she was consciously shamming; but I could see she drank in the Baron's revelations with no more true spiritual exaltation than the quivering twilight moths drew from our veranda honeysuckles. Yet it was mainly her vanity that feasted, not any lower impulse--of which, you know, there are several--and, possibly, all her vanity craved at first was the tinsel distinction of unusual knowledge.

One night she got into my dreams. I seemed to be explaining to Monsieur Fontenette apologetically that this newly opened world was not at all separate from my old one, but shone everywhere in it, like our winged guests in our garden, and followed and surrounded me far beyond the Baron's company, terminology, and magnifying-gla.s.s, lightening the burdens and stress of the very counting-room and exchange. Whereat he seemed to flare up!

"Ah!--you--I believe yes! But she?" he waved his hand in fierce unbelief.

I awoke concerned, and got myself to sleep again only by remembering the utter absence of vanity in the Baron himself. I lay smiling in the dark to think how much less all our verbal caressings were worth to him than the drone of the most familiar beetle, and how his life-long delving in books and nature had opened up this fairy world to him only at the cost of shutting up all others. If education means calling forth and perfecting our powers and affections, he was ten times more uneducated than his wife, even as we knew her then. He appeared to care no more for human interests, far or near, in large or small, than a crab cares for the stars. I fell asleep chuckling in remembrance of an occasion when Mrs. Fontenette, taking her cue from me, spoke to him of his plant-and-insect lore as one of the many worlds there are within _the_ world, no more displacing it than light displaces air, or than fragrance displaces form or sound. He made her say it all over again, and then asked: "Vhere vas dat?"

His whole world was not really as wide as Gregory's island was to its gentle hermit. No b.u.t.terfly raptures for him; he devoured the one kind of facts he cared for, as a caterpillar devours leaves.

V

How Mrs. Fontenette got Mrs. "Thornd.y.k.e-Smith" and me entangled with some six or eight others in her project for a botanizing and b.u.t.terfly-chasing picnic I do not know; but she did. On the evening before the appointed day I perfidiously crawfished out of it, and our house furnished only one delegate, whom I urged to go rather than break up the party--I never break up a party if I can avoid it. "But as for me going," I said, "my business simply won't let me!" At which our pretty neighbor expressed her regrets with a ready resignation that broke into open sunshine as she lamented the same inability in her husband. To my suggestion that the Baroness be invited, Mrs. Fontenette smiled a sweet amus.e.m.e.nt that was perfect in its way, and said she hoped the weather would be propitious; people were so timid about rain.

It was. When I came home, tardily, that afternoon, the picnickers had not returned, though the oleanders and c.r.a.pe-myrtles on the grounds next ours cast shadows three times their length across our lawn. In an aimless way I roamed from the house down into our small rear garden, thinking oftenest, of course, of the absentees, and admiring the refined good sense with which Monsieur Fontenette seemed to have decided to let this unperilous attack of silliness run itself out in the woman he loved with so much tenderness and with so much pa.s.sion.