The Bacillus of Beauty Part 4

The Judge glanced up at me, slipping his paper knife end over end through his fingers.

"I have spoken of myself as nonplussed," he said more seriously, "and I am. I was never more so; but I see no occasion for anxiety. Since when has it been thought necessary to call priest or physician because of a young lady's growing charm? Confronted by an ugly duckling, we must congratulate the swan."

"Judge, how much money does one need to marry on in New York?"

"All that a man has; all that he can get; often more. But--ah--is the question imminent? Nelly is in school; you have come out of the West, as I understand it, to attack New York. Conquer it, Sir; conquer New York before you speak of marriage to a New York woman."

"Helen is not a New York woman."

"We naturalize them at the docks and stations."

"But you--" I repressed a movement of impatience. "Didn't you marry young?"

"Mrs. Baker and I began our married life in one room; cooked over the gas jet, in tin pails. And if little Nelly is the equal of other women of her family--but that is practice versus principle, my young friend; practice versus principle."

He turned again to his letters, and I understood that the interview was closed.

Right after lunch I started for Barnard. Helen has written so much about the college that as soon as I struck the Boulevard I knew the solid brick building with its tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of stone fasces. I turned into the cloistered court on One Hundred and Nineteenth Street and paused a minute, looking up at its Ionic porticoes and high window lettered "Millbank Hall."

Then I entered, and a page, small, meek and blue-uniformed, trotted ahead of me through a beautiful hall, white with marble columns and mosaics, sumptuous with golden ceiling, dazzling with light and green with palms, to the curtained entrance of a dainty reception room.

"Stop a minute, Mercury," I said as he turned to leave; "where is Miss Winship?"

He reappeared from an office beyond, replying:--

"Biol'gy lab'r'tory. What name?"

Instead of waiting until Nelly could be summoned, I followed the mildly disapproving boy up a great, white stairway, past groups of girls, some in bright silk waists and some in college gowns. Even in the farthest corner remote from the hubbub, a musical echo blent of gay talk and laughter filled the air; a light body of sound that the walls held and gave out as a continuous murmur.

A second time piping, "What name, Sir?" Mercury opened the door of a large room with many windows. At the far corner my eyes sought out Helen in conversation with a keen-eyed, weazened little man, at sight of whom the boy took to his heels.

Three women besides Helen were in the room, bunched at a table that ran along two sides under the windows. They wore big checked ap.r.o.ns, and one of them squinted into her microscope under a fur cap. Wide-mouthed jars, empty or holding dirty water, stood on other tables ranged up and down the middle of the room, and there was a litter of porcelain-lined trays, test tubes, pipettes, gla.s.s stirring-rods and racks for microscope slides.

Against the wall to the left were cabinets with sliding doors, showing retorts, apparatus, bottles of drugs, jars of specimens and large, coloured models of flowers and of the lower marine forms. Against the right hand wall were sinks, an incubator and, beyond, a door leading into a drug closet. There was the usual laboratory smell, in which the penetrating fume of alcohol, the smokiness of creosote and carbolic acid, the pungency of oil of clove and the aroma of Canada balsam struggled for the mastery.

In her college gown Helen looked more like herself than the day before and less so, the familiar dress accentuating every difference. Against the flowing black her loveliness shone fair and delicate as a cameo, I thought of the Princess Ida,

Liker to the inhabitant Of some far planet close upon the sun Than our man's earth; such eyes were in her head, And so much grace and power-- Lived through her to the tips of her long hands And to her feet.

She had not noticed my entrance, but as I stepped forward, she turned, and I was again lost in wonder at her marvellous grace. Her beauty seemed a harmony so vitally perfect that the sight of it was a joy approaching pain.

I had not been mistaken! She was the rarest thing in human form on this earth. I was awed and frightened anew at her perfection.

"Why, how did you find your way out here?" she asked with girlish directness. "I'm not quite ready to go; I must finish my sections for Prof. Darmstetter."

The Professor--I had guessed his ident.i.ty--joined us, glancing at me inquisitively. His spare figure seemed restless as a squirrel's, but around the pupils of his eyes appeared the faint, white rim of age.

"You are friendt of Mees Veensheep?" he asked. "Looks she not vell? New York has agreed vit' her; not so?"

At my awkward, guarded a.s.sent, I thought that something of the same surprise Judge Baker had voiced at my moderation flitted over the old man's face.

"I find you kvite right; kvite right," he said, "New York has done Mees Veensheep goot; she looks fery vell."

He whisked into the drug closet, and Helen seated herself before a microscope next that of the fur-capped woman.

"Do you care for slides?" she said. "I'll get another microscope and while I draw you may look at any on my rack. But be careful; most of the things are only temporarily mounted--just in glycerine. Here is the sweetest longitudinal section of the tentacle of an _Actinia_, and here--look at these lovely transverse sections of the plumule of a pea; you can see the primary groups of spiral vessels. They've taken the carmine stain wonderfully! But my work is not advanced; I wish you could see that of the other girls."

"I mustn't interfere with your task; I'll look about until you are ready."

Her shining head was already bent over the microscope; her pencil was moving, glad to respond to the touch of that lovely hand.

I picked up a book, the same little volume I had noticed the day before, on "Imbedding, Sectioning and Staining." Near it lay a treatise on histology. I opened to the first chapter, on "Protoplasm and the Cell,"

but I couldn't fix my thoughts on _Bathybius_ or the _Protomoeba_.

I walked toward an aquarium, flanking which stood a jar half-filled with water in which floated what seemed a big cup-shaped flower of bright brown jelly with waving petals of white and rose colour.

While I looked, thinking only of the curve of Helen's lips and the dancing light in her eyes, and the glowing colour of her soft flesh, Prof.

Darmstetter's thin, high-pitched voice grated almost at my ear.

"T'at is _Actinia_--sea anemone."

"I come from the West; I have never seen the sea forms living," I answered with an effort, fearing that he meant to show me about the laboratory.

"It is fery goot sea anemone; fery strong, fery perfect; a goot organism."

He bent over the jar, rubbing his hands. His parchment face crackled with an almost tender complacency. For a full minute he seemed to gloat over the flower-like animal.

"Very pretty," I said, carelessly.

"Fery pretty, you call it? T'e prettiness is t'e sign of t'e gootness, t'e strengt', t'e perfection. You know t'at?"

To his challenging question, in which I saw the manner of a teacher with his pupils, I replied:

"In your estimation goodness and beauty go together?"

"T'ey are t'e same; how not? See t'is way."

He shook his lean, reproving forefinger at a shapeless, melting ma.s.s that lay at the bottom of a second jar, exuding an ooze of viscid strings.

"T'at,"--he spat the word out--"is also sea anemone. It is diseased; it is an ugly animal."

"The poor thing's dying," said Helen, coming to his side. "There ought to have been some of the green seaweed, Ulva, in the water. Wouldn't that have saved it?"

"Ugliness,"--Darmstetter disregarded the question--"is disease; it is bat organism; t'e von makes t'e ot'er. T'e ugly plant or animal is diseased, or else it is botched, inferior plant or animal. It is t'e same vit' man and voman; t'ey are animals. T'e ugly man or voman is veak, diseased or inferior. On t'e ot'er hand,"--I felt what was coming by the sudden oiling of his squeak--"t'e goot man or voman, t'e goot human organism, mus' haf beauty. Not so?" Again he rubbed his hands.

Helen glanced mischievously at me, as a half-repressed snort interrupted his dissertation.

The woman in the fur cap, who might have been a teacher improving odd hours, had knocked up the barrel of her microscope; she gazed through the window at the dazzling Hudson. Next her a thin, sallow girl, whose dark complexion contrasted almost weirdly with her yellow hair, slashed at a cake of paraffine, her deep-set eyes emitting a spark at every fall of the razor. The other student, a young woman with the heavy figure of middle age, went steadily on, dropping paraffine shavings into some fluid in a watch crystal. With a long-handled pin she fished out minute somethings left by the dissolving substance, dropping these upon other crystals--some holding coloured fluids--and finally upon gla.s.s slides. She worked as if for dear life, but every quiver of her back told that she was listening.