The Unspeakable Perk Part 28

"Oh, yes. He will do that. How are you going to deliver the message?"

Again her words might as well not have been spoken.

"You'd better have your luggage ready for a quick start."

"Will it be soon?"

"It may be."

"How shall we know?"

"I will get word to you."

"Bring it?"

He shook his head.

"No; I fear not. This is good-bye."

"You're very casual about it," she said, aggrieved. "At least, it would be polite to pretend."

"What am I to pretend?"

"To be sorry. Aren't you sorry? Just a little bit?"

"Yes; I'm sorry. Just a little bit--at least."

"I'm most awfully sorry myself," she said frankly. "I shall miss you."

"As a curiosity?" he asked, smiling.

"As a friend. You have been a friend to us--to me," she amended sweetly.

"Each time I see you, I have more the feeling that you've been more of a friend than I know."

"'That which thy servant is,'" he quoted lightly. But beneath the lightness she divined a pain that she could not wholly fathom. Quite aware of her power, Miss Polly Brewster was now, for one of the few times in her life, stricken with contrition for her use of it.

"And I--I haven't been very nice," she faltered. "I'm afraid sometimes I've been quite horrid."

"You? You've been 'the glory and the dream.' I shall be needing memories for a while. And when the glory has gone, at least the dream will remain--tethered."

"But I'm not going to be a dream alone," she said, with wistful lightness. "It's far too much like being a ghost. I'm going to be a friend, if you'll let me. And I'm going to write to you, if you will tell me where. You won't find it so very easy to make a mere memory of me. And when you come home--When ARE you coming home?"

He shook his head.

"Then you must find out, and let me know. And you must come and visit us at our summer place, where there's a mountain-side that we can sit on, and you can pretend that our lake is the Caribbean and hate it to your heart's content--"

"I don't believe I can ever quite hate the Caribbean again."

"From this view you mustn't, anyway. I shouldn't like that. As for our lake, n.o.body could really help loving it. So you must be sure and come, won't you?"

"Dreams!" he murmured.

"Isn't there room in the scientific life for dreams?"

"Yes. But not for their fulfillment."

"But there will be beetles and dragon-flies on our mountain," she went on, conscious of talking against time, of striving to put off the moment of departure. "You'll find plenty of work there. Do you know, Mr. Beetle Man, you haven't told me a thing, really, about your work, or a thing, really, about yourself. Is that the way to treat a friend?"

"When I undertook to spread before you the true and veracious history of my life," he began, striving to make his tone light, "you would none of it."

"Are you determined to put me off? Do you think that I wouldn't find the things that are real to you interesting?"

"They're quite technical," he said shyly.

"But they are the big things to you, aren't they? They make life for you?"

"Oh, yes; that, of course." It was as if he were surprised at the need of such a question. "I suppose I find the same excitement and adventure in research that other men find in politics, or war, or making money."

"Adventure?" she said, puzzled. "I shouldn't have supposed research an adventurous career, exactly."

"No; not from the outside." His hidden gaze shifted to sweep the far distances. His voice dropped and softened, and, when he spoke again, she felt vaguely and strangely that he was hardly thinking of her or her question, except as a part of the great wonder-world surrounding and enfolding their companioned remoteness.

"This is my credo," he said, and quoted, half under his breath:--

"'We have come in search of truth, Trying with uncertain key Door by door of mystery.

We are reaching, through His laws, To the garment hem of Cause.

As, with fingers of the blind, We are groping here to find What the hieroglyphics mean Of the Unseen in the seen; What the Thought which underlies Nature's masking and disguise; What it is that hides beneath Blight and bloom and birth and death.'"

Other men had poured poetry into Polly Brewster's ears, and she had thought them vapid or priggish or affected, according as they had chosen this or that medium. This man was different. For all his outer grotesquery, the n.o.ble simplicity of the verse matched some veiled and hitherto but half-expressed quality within him, and dignified him. Miss Brewster suffered the strange but not wholly unpleasant sensation of feeling herself dwindle.

"It's very beautiful," she said, with an effort. "Is it Matthew Arnold?"

"Nearer home. You an American, and don't know your Whittier? That pa.s.sage from his 'Aga.s.siz' comes pretty near to being what life means to me. Have I answered your requirements?"

"Fully and finely."

She rose from the rock upon which she had been seated, and stretched out both hands to him. He took and held them without awkwardness or embarra.s.sment. By that alone she could have known that he was suffering with a pain that submerged consciousness of self.

"Whether I see you again or not, I'll never forget you," she said softly. "You HAVE been good to me, Mr. Perkins."

"I like the other name better," he said.

"Of course. Mr. Beetle Man." She laughed a little tremulously. Abruptly she stamped a determined foot. "I'm NOT going away without having seen my friend for once. Take off your gla.s.ses, Mr. Beetle Man."

"Too much radiance is bad for the microscopical eye."

"The sun is under a cloud."

"But you're here, and you'd glow in the dark."