第31章 VI(3)

"I can't explain. I don't understand, myself. I do a lot of things by instinct." She, standing with her hands behind her back and with clear, childlike eyes gravely upon him, looked puzzled but resolved. "And my instinct tells me not to do anything secret about you."

This answer made him wonder whether after all he might not be too positive in his derisive disbelief in women's instincts. He laughed. "Well--now for your father."

The workshop proved to be an annex to the rear, reached by a passage leading past a cosy little dining room and a kitchen where the order and the shine of cleanness were notable even to masculine eyes. "You are well taken care of," he said to her--she was preceding him to show the way.

"We take care of ourselves," replied she. "I get breakfast before I leave and supper after I come home.

Father has a cold lunch in the middle of the day, when he eats at all--which isn't often. And on Saturday afternoons and Sundays I do the heavy work."

"You ARE a busy lady!"

"Oh, not so very busy. Father is a crank about system and order. He has taught me to plan everything and work by the plans."

For the first time Norman had a glimmer of real interest in meeting her father. For in those remarks of hers he recognized at once the rare superior man--the man who works by plan, where the masses of mankind either drift helplessly or are propelled by some superior force behind them without which they would be, not the civilized beings they seem, but even as the savage in the dugout or as the beast of the field. The girl opened a door; a bright light streamed into the dim hallway.

"Father!" she called. "Here's Mr. Norman."

Norman saw, beyond the exquisite profile of the girl's head and figure, a lean tallish old man, dark and gray, whose expression proclaimed him at first glance no more in touch with the affairs of active life in the world than had he been an inhabitant of Mars.

Mr. Hallowell gave his caller a polite glance and handshake--evidence of merest surface interest in him, of amiable patience with an intruder. Norman saw in the neatness of his clothing and linen further proof of the girl's loving care. For no such abstracted personality as this would ever bother about such things for himself. These details, however, detained Norman only for a moment. In the presence of Hallowell it was impossible not to concentrate upon him.

As we grow older what we are inside, the kind of thoughts we admit as our intimates, appears ever more strongly in the countenance. This had often struck Norman, observing the men of importance about him, noting how as they aged the look of respectability, of intellectual distinction, became a thinner and ever thinner veneer over the selfishness and greediness, the vanity and sensuality and falsehood. But never before had he been so deeply impressed by its truth. Evidently Hallowell during most of his fifty-five or sixty years had lived the purely intellectual life. The result was a look of spiritual beauty, the look of the soul living in the high mountain, with serenity and vast views constantly before it. Such a face fills with awe the ordinary follower of the petty life of the world if he have the brains to know or to suspect the ultimate truth about existence.

It filled Norman with awe. He hastily turned his eyes upon the girl--and once more into his face came the resolute, intense, white-hot expression of a man doggedly set upon an earthy purpose.

There was an embarrassed silence. Then the girl said, "Show him the worms, father."

Mr. Hallowell smiled. "My little girl thinks no one has seen that sort of thing," said he. "I can't make her believe it is one of the commonplaces."

"You've never had anyone here more ignorant than I, sir," said Norman. "The only claim on your courtesy I can make is that I'm interested and that I perhaps know enough in a general way to appreciate."

Hallowell waved his hand toward a row of large glass bottles on one of the many shelves built against the rough walls of the room. "Here they are," said he. "It's the familiar illustration of how life may be controlled."

"I don't understand," said Norman, eying the bottled worms curiously.

"Oh, it's simply the demonstration that life is a mere chemical process----"

Norman had ceased to listen. The girl was moving toward the door by which they had entered--was in the doorway--was gone! He stood in an attitude of attention; Hallowell talked on and on, passing from one thing to another, forgetting his caller and himself, thinking only of the subject, the beloved science, that has brought into the modern world a type of men like those who haunted the deserts and mountain caves in the days when Rome was falling to pieces. With those saintly hermits of the Dark Ages religion was the all-absorbing subject. And seeking their own salvation was the goal upon which their ardent eyes were necessarily bent. With these modern devotees, science--the search for the truth about the world in which they live --is their religion; and their goal is the redemption of the world. They are resolved--step by step, each worker contributing his mite of discovery--to transform the world from a hell of discomfort and pain and death to a heaven where men and women, free and enlightened and perhaps immortal, shall live in happiness.

They even dream that perhaps this race of gods shall learn to construct the means to take them to another and younger planet, when this Earth has become too old and too cold and too nakedly clad in atmosphere properly to sustain life.

From time to time Norman caught a few words of what Hallowell said--words that made him respect the intelligence that had uttered them. But he neither cared nor dared to listen. He refused to be deflected from his one purpose. When he was as old as Hallowell, it would be time to think of these matters. When he had snatched the things he needed, it would be time to take the generous, wide, philosopher view of life.