The Grain of Dust Part 24

"You are forgetting these improvements add to the value of the property.

I've bought it."

That quieted her. "You are sure you didn't pay those decorators and furnishers too much?" said she.

"You don't like their work?" inquired he, chagrined.

"Oh, yes--yes, indeed," she a.s.sured him. "I like plain, solid-looking things. But--two thousand dollars is a lot of money."

Norman regretted that, as his whole object had been to please her, he had not ordered the more showy cheaper stuff but had insisted upon the simplest, plainest-looking appointments throughout. Even her bedroom furniture, even her dressing table set, was of the kind that suggests cost only to the experienced, carefully and well educated in values and in taste.

"But I'm sure it isn't fair to charge _all_ these things to the company,"

she protested. "I can't allow it. Not the things for my personal use."

"You _are_ a fierce watchdog of a treasurer," said Norman, laughing at her but noting and respecting the fine instinct of good breeding shown in her absence of greediness, of desire to get all she could. "But I'm letting the firm of decorators take over what you leave behind in the old house. I'll see what they'll allow for it. Maybe that will cover the expense you object to."

This contented her. Nor was she in the least suspicious when he announced that the decorators had made such a liberal allowance that the deficit was but three hundred dollars. "Those chaps," he explained, "have a wide margin of profit. Besides, they're eager to get more and bigger work from me."

A few weeks, and he was enjoying the sight of her ensconced with her father in luxurious comfort--with two servants, with a well-run house, with pleasant gardens, with all that is at the command of an income of six thousand a year in a comparatively inexpensive city. Only occasionally--and then not deeply--was he troubled by the reflection that he was still far from his goal--and had made apparently absurdly little progress toward it through all this maneuvering. The truth was, he preferred to linger when lingering gave him so many new kinds of pleasure. Of those in the large and motley company that sit down to the banquet of the senses, the most are crude, if not coa.r.s.e, gluttons. They eat fast and furiously, having a raw appet.i.te. Now and then there is one who has some idea of the art of enjoyment--the art of prolonging and varying both the joys of antic.i.p.ation and the joys of realization.

He turned his attention to tempting her to extravagance in dress. But his success there was not all he could have wished. She wore better clothes--much better. She no longer looked the poor working girl, struggling desperately to be neat and clean. She had almost immediately taken on the air of the comfortable cla.s.ses. But everything she got for herself was inexpensive and she made dresses for herself, and trimmed all her hats. With the hats Norman found no fault. There her good taste produced about as satisfactory results as could have been got at the fashionable milliners--more satisfactory than are got by the women who go there, with no taste of their own beyond a hazy idea that they want "something like what Mrs. So-and-So is wearing." But homemade dresses were a different matter.

Norman longed to have her in toilettes that would bring out the full beauty of her marvelous figure. He, after the manner of the more intelligent and worldly-wise New York men, had some knowledge of women's clothes. His sister knew how to dress; Josephine knew how, though her taste was somewhat too sober to suit Norman--at least to suit him in Dorothy. He thought out and suggested dresses to Dorothy, and told her where to get them. Dorothy tried to carry out at home such of his suggestions as pleased her--for, like all women, she believed she knew how to dress herself. Her handiwork was creditable. It would have contented a less exacting and less trained taste than Norman's. It would have contented him had he not been infatuated with her beauty of face and form. As it was, the improvement in her appearance only served to intensify his agitation. He now saw in her not only all that had first conquered him, but also those unsuspected beauties and graces--and possibilities of beauty and grace yet more entrancing, were she but dressed properly.

"You don't begin to appreciate how beautiful you are," said he. It had ever been one of his rules in dealing with women to feed their physical vanity sparingly and cautiously, lest it should blaze up into one of those consuming flames that produce a very frenzy of conceit. But this rule, like all the others, had gone by the board. He could not conceal his infatuation from her, not even when he saw that it was turning her head and making his task harder and harder. "If you would only go over to New York to several dressmakers whose names I'll give you, I know you'd get clothes from them that you could touch up into something uncommon."

"I can't afford it," said she. "What I have is good enough--and costs more than I've the right to pay." And her tone silenced him; it was the tone of finality, and he had discovered that she had a will.

Never before had Frederick Norman let any important thing drift. And when he started in with Dorothy he had no idea of changing that fixed policy. He would have scoffed if anyone had foretold to him that he would permit the days and the weeks to go by with nothing definite accomplished toward any definite purpose. Yet that was what occurred.

Every time he came he had in mind a fixed resolve to make distinct progress with the girl. Every time he left he had a furious quarrel with himself for his weakness. "She is making a fool of me," he said to himself. "She _must_ be laughing at me." But he returned only to repeat his folly, to add one more to the lengthening, mocking series of lost opportunities.

The truth lay deeper than he saw. He recognized only his own weakness of the infatuated lover's fatuous timidity. He did not realize how potent her charm for him was, how completely content she made him when he was with her, just from the fact that they were together. After a time an unsatisfied pa.s.sion often thus diffuses itself, ceases to be a narrow torrent, becomes a broad river whose resistless force is hidden beneath an appearance of sparkling calm. Her ingenuousness amused him; her developing taste and imagination interested him; her freshness, her freedom from any sense of his importance in the world fascinated him, and there was a keener pleasure than he dreamed in the novel sensation of breathing the perfume of what he, the one time cynic, would have staked his life on being unsullied purity. Their relations were to him a delightful variation upon the intimacy of master and pupil. Either he was listening to her or was answering her questions--and the time flew.

And there never was a moment when he could have introduced the subject that most concerned him when he was not with her. To have introduced it would have been rudely to break the charm of a happy afternoon or evening.

Was she leading him on and on nowhere deliberately? Or was it the sweet and innocent simplicity it seemed? He could not tell. He would have broken the charm and put the matter to the test had he not been afraid of the consequences. What had he to fear? Was she not in his power? Was she not his, whenever he should stretch forth his hand and claim her?

Yes--no doubt--not the slightest doubt. But--He was afraid to break the charm; it was such a satisfying charm.

Then--there was her father.

Men who arrive anywhere in any direction always have the habit of ignoring the nonessential more or less strongly developed. One reason--perhaps the chief reason--why Norman had got up to the high places of material success at so early an age was that he had an unerring instinct for the essential and wasted no time or energy upon the nonessential. In his present situation Dorothy's father, the abstracted man of science, was one of the factors that obviously fell into the nonessential cla.s.s. Norman knew little about him, and cared less. Also, he took care to avoid knowing him. Knowing the father would open up possibilities of discomfort--But, being a wise young man, Norman gave this matter the least possible thought.

Still, it was necessary that the two men see something of each other.

Hallowell discovered nothing about Norman, not enough about his personal appearance to have recognized him in the street far enough away from the laboratory to dissociate the two ideas. Human beings--except his daughter--did not interest Hallowell; and his feeling for her was somewhat in the nature of an abstraction. Norman, on the other hand, was intensely interested in human beings; indeed, he was interested in little else. He was always thrusting through surfaces, probing into minds and souls. He sought thoroughly to understand the living machines he used in furthering his ambitions and desires. So it was not long before he learned much about old Newton Hallowell--and began to admire him--and with a man of Norman's temperament to admire is to like.

He had a.s.sumed at the outset that the scientist was more or less the crank. He had not talked with him many times before he discovered that, far from being in any respect a crank, he was a most able and well-balanced mentality--a genius. The day came when, Dorothy not having returned from a shopping tour, he lingered in the laboratory talking with the father, or, rather, listening while the man of great ideas unfolded to him conceptions of the world that set his imagination to soaring.

Most of us see but dimly beyond the ends of our noses, and visualize what lies within our range of sight most imperfectly. We know little about ourselves, less about others. We fancy that the world and the human race always have been about as they now are, and always will be.

History reads to us like a fairy tale, to which we give conventional acceptance as truth. As to the future, we can conceive nothing but the continuation of just what we see about us in the present. Norman, practical man though he was, living in and for the present, had yet an imagination. He thought Hallowell a kind of fool for thinking only of the future and working only for it--but he soon came to think him a divine fool. And through Hallowell's spectacles he was charmed for many an hour with visions of the world that is to be when, in the slow but steady processes of evolution, the human race will become intelligent, will conquer the universe with the weapons of science and will make it over.

When he first stated his projects to Norman, the young man had difficulty in restraining his amus.e.m.e.nt. A new idea, in any line of thought with which we are not familiar, always strikes us as ridiculous.

Norman had been educated in the ignorant conventional way still in high repute among the vulgar and among those whose chief delight is to make the vulgar gape in awe. He therefore had no science, that is, no knowledge--outside his profession--but only what is called learning, though tommyrot would be a fitter name for it. He had only the most meager acquaintance with that great fundamental of a sound and sane education, embryology. He knew nothing of what science had already done to destroy all the still current notions about the mystery of life and birth. He still laughed, as at a clever bit of legerdemain, when Hallowell showed him how far science had progressed toward mastery of the life of the lower forms of existence--how those "worms" could be artificially created, could be aged, made young again, made diseased and decrepit, restored to perfect health, could be swung back and forth or sideways or sinuously along the span of existence--could even be killed and brought back to vigor.

"We've been at this sort of thing only a few years," said Hallowell. "I rather think it will not be many years now before we shall not even need the initial germ of life to enable us to create but can do it by pure chemical means, just as a taper is lighted by holding a match to it."

Norman ceased to think of sleight-of-hand.

"Life," continued the juggler, transformed now into practical man, leader of men, "life has been demonstrated to be simply one of the forms of energy, or one of the consequences of energy. The final discovery is scientifically not far away. Then--" His eyes lighted up.

"Then what?" asked Norman.

"Then immortality--in the body. Eternal youth and health. A body that is renewable much as any of our inanimate machines of the factory is renewable. Why not? So far as we know, no living thing ever dies except by violence. Disease--old age--they are quite as much violence as the knife and the bullet. What science can now do with these 'worms,' as my daughter calls them--that it will be able to do with the higher organisms."

"And the world would soon be jammed to the last acre," objected Norman.

Hallowell shrugged his shoulders. "Not at all. There will be no necessity to create new people, except to take the place of those who may be accidentally obliterated."

"But the world is dying--the earth, itself, I mean."

"True. But science may learn how to arrest that cooling process--or to adapt man to it. Or, it may be that when the world ceases to be inhabitable we shall have learned how to cross the star s.p.a.ces, as I think I've suggested before. Then--we should simply find a planet in its youth somewhere, and migrate to it, as a man now moves to a new house when the old ceases to please him."

"That is a long flight of the fancy," said Norman.

"Long--but no stronger than the telegraph or the telephone. The trouble with us is that we have been long stupefied by the ignorant theological ideas of the universe--ideas that have come down to us from the childhood of the race. We haven't got used to the new era--the scientific era. And that is natural. Why, until less than three generations ago there was really no such thing as science."

"I hadn't thought of that," admitted Norman. "We certainly have got on very fast in those three generations."

"Rather fast. Not so fast, however, as we shall in the next three.

Science--chemistry--is going speedily to change all the conditions of life because it will turn topsy-turvy all the ways of producing things--food, clothing, shelter. Less than two generations ago men lived much as they had for thousands of years. But it's very different to-day.

It will be inconceivably different to-morrow."

Norman could not get these ideas out of his brain. He began to understand why Hallowell cared nothing about the active life of the day--about its religion, politics, modes of labor, its habits of one creature preying upon another. To-morrow, not religion, not politics, but chemistry, not priests nor politicians, but chemists, would change all that--and change it by the only methods that compel. An abstract idea of liberty or justice can be rejected, evaded, nullified. But a telephone, a steam engine, a mode of prolonging life--those realizations of ideas _compel_.

When Dorothy came, Norman went into the garden with her in a frame of mind so different from any he had ever before experienced that he scarcely recognized himself. As the influence of the father's glowing imagination of genius waned before the daughter's physical loveliness and enchantment for him, he said to himself, "I'll keep away from him."

Why? He did not permit himself to go on to examine into his reasons. But he could not conceal them from himself quickly enough to hide the knowledge that they were moral.

"What is the matter with you to-day?" said Dorothy. "You are not a bit interesting."

"Interested, you mean," he said with a smile of raillery, for he had long since discovered that she was not without the feminine vanity that commands the centering of all interest in the woman herself and resents any wandering of thought as a slur upon her own powers of fascination.

"Well, interested then," said she. "You are thinking about something else."

"Not now," he a.s.sured her.

But he left early. No sooner had he got away from the house than the scientific dreaming vanished and he wished himself back with her again--back where every glance at her gave him the most exquisite sensations. And when he came the following day he apparently had once more restored her father to his proper place of a nonessential. All that definitely remained of the day before's impression was a certain satisfaction that he was aiding with his money an enterprise of greater value and of less questionable character than merely his own project.

But the powerful influences upon our life and conduct are rarely direct and definite. He, quite unconsciously, had a wholly different feeling about Dorothy because of her father, because of what his new knowledge of and respect for her father had revealed and would continue to reveal to him as to the girl herself--her training, her inheritance, her character that could not but be touched with the splendor of the father's n.o.ble genius. And long afterward, when the father as a distinct personality had been almost forgotten, Norman was still, altogether unconsciously, influenced by him--powerfully, perhaps decisively influenced. Norman had no notion of it, but ever after that talk in the laboratory, Dorothy Hallowell was to him Newton Hallowell's daughter.

When he came the following day, with his original purposes and plans once more intact, as he thought, he found that she had made more of a toilet than usual, had devised a new way of doing her hair that enabled him to hang a highly prized addition in his memory gallery of widely varied portraits of her.