The Wrong Twin Part 19

"Now," said Herman, "you give him a nice fat banana. Mamma, give the young one a banana to give to Emil."

The banana was brought and the Wilbur twin cautiously extended it. Emil, at sight of the fruit, chattered madly and tried to leap for it. He appeared to believe that this strange being meant to deprive him of it.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed it when it was thrust nearer, still regarding the boy with dark suspicion. Then he deftly peeled the fruit and hurriedly ate it, as if one could not be--with strangers about--too sure of one's supper.

The monkey moved Dave Cowan to lecture again upon the mysteries of organic evolution.

"About three hundred million years difference between those two," he said, indicating Herman and his pet with a wave of the calabash. "And it's no good asking whether it's worth while, because we have to go on and on. That little beast is your second cousin, Herman."

"I got a Cousin Emil in the old country," said Minna, "but he ain't lookin' like this last time I seen him. I guess you're foolish in the head again."

"He came out of the forest and learned to stand up, to walk without using his hands, and he got a thumb, and pretty soon he was able to be a small-town mayor or run a nice decent saloon and argue about politics."

"Hah, that's a good one!" said Herman. "You hear what he says, Emil?"

The beast looked up from his banana, regarding them from eyes unutterably sad.

"See?" said Dave. "That's the life force, and for a minute it's conscious that it's only a monkey."

They became silent under Emil's gaze of acute pathos--human life aware of its present frustration. Then suddenly Emil became once more an animated and hungry monkey with no care but for his food.

"There," said Dave. "I ask you, isn't that the way we do? Don't we stop to think sometimes and get way down, and then don't we feel hungry and forget it all and go to eating?"

"Sure, Emil is sensible just like us," said Minna.

"But there's some catch about the whole thing," said Dave. "Say, Doc, what do you think life is, anyway?"

Purdy scanned the monkey with shrewd eyes, and grinned.

"I only know what it is physiologically," he said. "Physiologically, life is a constant force rhythmically overcoming a constant resistance."

"Pretty good," said Dave, treasuring the phrase. "The catch must be right there--it always does overcome the constant resistance."

"When it can't in one plant," said Purdy, "it dismantles it and builds another, making improvements from time to time."

"Think what it's had to do," said Dave, "to build Herman from a simple, unimproved plant like Emil! Herman's a great improvement on Emil."

"My Herman has got a soul," said Minna, stoutly--"monkeys ain't."

Dave Cowan and Purdy exchanged a tolerant smile. They were above arguing that outworn thesis. Dave turned to his son.

"Anyway, Buzzer, if you ever get discouraged, remember we were all like that once, and cheer up. Remember your ancestry goes straight back to one of those, and still back of that--"

"To the single cell of protoplasm," said Purdy.

"Beyond that," said Dave, "to star dust."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.

"Foolish in the head," said Minna. "You think you know things better than the reverent what preaches at the Lutheran church! He could easy enough tell you what you come from. My family was in Bavaria more than two hundred years, and was not any monkeys."

"Maybe Emil he got a soul, too, like a human," remarked Herman.

"You bet he has," said Dave Cowan, firmly--"just like a human."

"You put him to bed," directed Minna. "He listen to such talk and go foolish also in the head."

The Wilbur twin watched Emil put to bed, then followed his father out into the quiet, starlit streets. He was living over again an eventful afternoon. They reached the Penniman porch without further talk. Dave Cowan sat with his guitar in the judge's chair and lazily sounded chords and little fragments of melody. After a time the Pennimans and the Merle twin came from church. The Wilbur twin excitedly sought Winona, having much to tell her. He drew her beside him into the hammock, and was too eager for more than a moment's dismay when she discovered his bare feet, though he had meant to put on shoes and stockings again before she saw him.

"Barefooted on Sunday!" said Winona in tones of prim horror.

"It was so hot," he pleaded; "but listen," and he rushed headlong into his narrative.

His father knew gypsies, and had been to Chicago and Omaha and--and Cadiz and Cameroon--and he was sorry for Miss Juliana Whipple because she was a small-towner and no one had ever kissed her since her mother died; and if ever gypsies did carry him off he didn't want any one to worry about him or try to get him back; and the Vielhabers were very nice people that kept a nice saloon; and Mrs. Vielhaber had given him lots of apple cake that was almost like an apple pie, but without any top on it; and they had a lovely picture that would look well beside the lion picture, but it would probably cost too much money; and they had a monkey, a German monkey, that was just like a little old man; and once, thousands of years ago, when the Bible was going on, we were all monkeys and lived in trees, but a constant force made us stand and walk like people.

To Winona this was a shocking narrative, and she wished to tell Dave Cowan that he was having a wretched influence upon the boy, but Dave was now singing "In the Gloaming," and she knew he would merely call her Madame la Marquise, the toast of all the court, or something else unsuitable to a Sabbath evening. She tried to convey to the Wilbur twin that sitting in a low drinking saloon at any time was an evil thing.

"Anyway," said he, protestingly, "you say I should always learn something, and I learned about us coming up from the monkeys."

"Why, Wilbur Cowan! How awful! Have you forgotten everything you ever learned at Sunday-school?"

"But I saw the monkey," he persisted, "and my father said so, and Doctor Purdy said so."

Winona considered.

"Even so," she warned him, "even if we did come up from the lower orders, the less said about it the better."

He had regarded his putative descent without prejudice; he was sorry that Winona should find scandal in it.

"Well," he remarked to relieve her, "anyway, there's some catch in it.

My father said so."

CHAPTER VI

Wilber Cowan went off to bed, only a little concerned by this new-found flaw in his ancestry. He would have thought it more important could he have known that this same Cowan ancestry was under a.n.a.lysis at the Whipple New Place.

There the three existing male Whipples sat about a long, magazine-littered table in the library and smoked and thought and at long intervals favoured one another with fragmentary speech. Gideon sat erect in his chair or stood before the fireplace, now banked with ferns; black-clad, tall and thin and straight in the comely pleasance of his sixty years, his face smoothly shaven, his cheekbones jutting above depressed cheeks that fell to his narrow, pointed chin, his blue eyes crackling far under the brow, high and narrow and shaded with ruffling gray hair, still plenteous. His ordinary aspect was severe, almost saturnine; but he was wont to destroy this effect with his thin-lipped smile that broke winningly over small white teeth and surprisingly hinted an alert young man behind these flickering shadows of age. When he sat he sat gracefully erect; when he stood to face the other two, or paced the length of the table, he stood straight or moved with supple joints. He was smoking a cigar with fastidious relish, and seemed to commune more with it than with his son or his brother. Beside Sharon Whipple his dress seemed foppish.

Sharon, the round, stout man, two years younger than Gideon, had the same blue eyes, but they looked from a face plump, florid, vivacious.

There was a hint of the choleric in his glance. His hair had been lighter than Gideon's, and though now not so plentiful, had grayed less noticeably. His fairer skin was bedizened with freckles; and when with a blunt thumb he pushed up the outer ends of his heavy eye-brows or c.o.c.ked the thumb at a speaker whose views he did not share, it could be seen that he was the most aggressive of the three men. Sharon notoriously lost his temper. Gideon had never been known to lose his.

Sharon smoked and lolled carelessly in a Morris chair, one short, stout arm laid along its side, the other carelessly wielding the cigar, heedless of falling ashes. Beside the careful Gideon he looked rustic.

Harvey D., son of Gideon, worriedly paced the length of the room. His eyes were large behind thick gla.s.ses. He smoked a cigarette gingerly, not inhaling its smoke, but ridding himself of it in little puffs of distaste. His brown beard was neatly trimmed, and above it shone his forehead, pale and beautifully modelled under the carefully parted, already thinning, hair that was arranged in something almost like ringlets on either side. He was neat-faced. Of the three men he carried the Whipple nose most gracefully. His figure was slight, not so tall as his father's, and he was garbed in a more dapper fashion. He wore an expertly fitted frock coat of black, gray trousers faintly striped, a pearl-gray cravat skewered by a pear-headed pin, and his small feet were incased in shoes of patent leather. He was arrayed as befitted a Whipple who had become a banker.

Gideon, his father, achieved something of a dapper effect in an old-fashioned manner, but no observer would have read him for a banker; while Sharon, even on a Sunday evening, in loose tweeds and stout boots, was but a country gentleman who thought little about dress, so that one would not have guessed him a banker--rather the sort that makes banking a career of profit.