by Rufus King
And I do not see how Drusilla or any girl could have remained in love with Ramier during those ten months.
Throughout the rare instances when I have come into contact with the species, I have found that a scientist with even an ordinary sort of a problem to gnaw at is as touchy as a caged tiger. When one of them is, as Ramier was, busied with gnawing at a problem the solution of which would overwhelm the world, then his immediate or even intermediate vicinity is more dynamic than any mere mortal should be called upon to endure.
But Drusilla is far from being either a mere or an ordinary mortal. She combines an infernally attractive sort of beauty with a really intelligent mind. It is her hair that gives her beauty its infernal quality. It is a vivid red, and riots like flame about her pale, clear skin. She furthermore possesses a temper that is only excelled by the one owned, and cultivated, by her father, Judson Duveen, whose career in the world of finance was as meteoric as his own blood pressure, and who retired several years ago with a substantial fortune of a good many million dollars in the bank, or wherever it is he keeps it.
Both Drusilla and Ramier had specialized throughout their four years at Bramwell in chemistry and physics, and it was during some particularly violent experiment or other in the classroom that they realized they were kindred souls. I believe the experiment was not alone spectacular but also smelly, and involved a dash of this-and-that entrapped in a retort. I am unfortunately unfamiliar with the appropriate chemical terms, but any scientist who may happen to be reading this at the moment can doubtlessly fill them in to his own satisfaction and know clearly what I am talking about.
Having mixed and entrapped his this and his that, Professor Kretjz, who was responsible if not accountable for the course, raised his hand impressively for attention and added six drops of something else.
When Drusilla and Ramier recovered their wits sufficiently to inquire, rhetorically, as to their respective whereabouts, they found that they were in each other’s arms with the wreckage of the laboratory draped in occasional dabs about them.
“You needn’t be frightened,” said Ramier, with the cool calmness that never deserted him, the while he released the lower sections of a fortunately lightly built chair from his neck.
“I’m not,” said Drusilla, with an imitative but less perfectly cooled calmness. “If you will push that desk away, or whatever it is that is sticking into the middle of my back, I am quite confident that I can stand without further assistance.”
“If Snoodgy had only told us what sort of a result we were to be on the lookout for,” said Ramier, pushing the desk away from Drusilla’s back, but doing nothing else, “we might be able to determine whether or not the experiment was a success.”
“The fact that he was quoting from Kossel’s ‘Uber Molekiilbindung als Frage des Atombaus,’” said Drusilla, attempting to pry one of Ramier’s arms from its encircling position about her waist, and making a mental note of the high efficiency of his muscular development, and incidentally understanding the better how he could be such an expert full back on the football team and still, at one and the same time, be such a keen and intelligent scientist, “leads me to think that Snoodgy expected this precise result.”
“I agree with you,” said Ramier eagerly, and proved his subconscious dexterity by imprisoning in addition to her waist the hand which Drusilla was using as a lever. “We must also take into consideration his remarks at the opening of the hour selected from Kossel’s ‘Uber die physikalische Natur der Valenzkrafte’ from Die Naturwissenschaften of July, 1919.”
“Indeed we must,” said Drusilla, as she inspected Ramier more keenly through the light sifting of plaster that still floated about them. “On the whole, yes,” she added enigmatically, “I should call the experiment a success.”
There is no telling how much longer the experiment, or clinch—call it what you will—might have continued, for a groan coming from beneath a heap of light wreckage awoke both of them to the possibly fatal aspects of the moment.
The groan originated with Professor Kretjz, alias “Snoodgy,” whose main reaction to his own experiment was an immediate and strong distaste for piled bric-a-brac, particularly when piled upon himself, and a keen interest in what anybody was going to do about it.
The class was a small one—not more than ten students at the most—and the laboratory was large. Coming from various parts of it arose eight other groans to swell the volume of Snoodgy’s.
Ramier and Drusilla proceeded to organize a relief party. It was shortly augmented by the entire student body of the university and by most of the townspeople as well, all of whom had been drawn to the scene by the pleasant hope that is ever present in humanity, when an accident occurs, that it will prove mildly fatal.
It proved nothing of the sort. Professor Kretjz and his ten disciples emerged from their individual heaps and debris shaken and plastered but sound in wind and limb, as well as feeling smugly comfortable in the knowledge that for a good while to come they would be both heroic and in the nature of seven-day wonders.
This latter view was not shared by Professor Kretjz, who was of but one mind as to just how the president and fellows of the university would regard his slight excursion among the valency forces that control atoms.
Parents have, as he knew, a fierce desire that their offspring drink deeply from the cup of knowledge; but, as he also knew, parents have an equally strong aversion toward having that selfsame cup knock their drinking offspring for a goal. And the more goals thus tallied by the cup of knowledge, the fewer would be the number of parents who would send their offspring to Bramwell. And the president and fellows of Bramwell were as heartily attracted toward anyone who drove trade from their doors as are the like poles of two magnets which, as I understand it, is little less than nothing at all.
These thoughts passed nimbly through Snoodgy’s mind while the last of the table legs was being removed from his head.
Nor was he wrong.
Nine letters from nine irate and badly worried parents addressed to the President of Bramwell University proved Snoodgy’s undoing. He gathered his retorts and his bottles and his what-nots about him and left for that vague section of our vast territory known as “other parts.” He has since become, as I am told, one of the leading scientific lights of our day—to put it roughly on a professional basis, somewhere around five hundred watts.
There was no tenth letter, as Ramier Bellmy is an orphan, which is quite right and natural in a hero. Unlike the general run of orphans, however, Ramier is neither downtrodden, the pitiful victim of relentless and fiendish machinations on the part of “certain” utterly unscrupulous capitalists, nor poor. I wish he were. It would make the drama of this account so much simpler and more thrilling. The annoying facts are that he possesses a comfortable fortune in gilt-edged securities that yield him a very un-orphanish income per year.
The departure of Professor Kretjz left a bad blank in the lives of Drusilla and Ramier, for with the laboratory temporarily in ruins and its high priest quite permanently absent-on-insistence, they had no opportunity for pursuing their—yes, their pursuit of science. It particularly meant that there was less reason for their seeing so much of each other, and youth, when it is in love—Cupid alone knows why—requires some perfectly definite excuse for contact, no matter how fictitious the excuse may be. It seems they employ it in some occult manner for preserving their self-respect.
But a frigidly polite and formal discussion that took place between Drusilla and Ramier on the campus, one spring afternoon toward the close of the last term, quickly put a stop to their impasse.
“Good afternoon, Miss Duveen,” said Ramier to Drusilla, or words to that effect. “Have you made any further strides in Stock’s ‘Ultrastrukturchemie’ since Snoodgy left us on our own?”
“None,” said Drusilla formally, and noted that Ramier’s pleasantly stern and not-too-classical-tobe-impossible features were already covered with their first coat of tan. “No, Mr. Bellmy, I have made
no strides at all.”
Then she sighed.
The sigh, in addition to the ever-perennial complications that attend the ushering in of spring, drove all thoughts of the baseball practice to which he had been hastening from Ramier’s head. The space left vacant within it by their departure was at once rented and occupied by a large family of singing birds composed exclusively of nightingales who tried their utmost to force their lyric notes to his lips. What he did manage to say, after concentrating an eye as intelligently as possible upon the tip of Drusilla’s enchanting nose, was, “Well, well! That’s too bad.” And he neither whistled nor sang it, but growled it.
“I was wondering, Mr. Bellmy—I thought that, perhaps,” murmured Drusilla, removing an indignant pebble six inches to the left of its lay with the end of an excitingly cut sandal, “if you had a free moment at any time you could help me. I simply cannot catch Stock’s allusions to the Periodic System in reference to Dobereiner’s having pointed out the existence of ‘triads’ in 1817.”
This, of course, was a lie. Drusilla is much too clever a girl to be stumped by anything so simple as a group of three chemically similar elements whose atomic weights—as she told me in strictest confidence—are such that one of them is the mean of the other two. On the other hand, she is far too clever a girl ever to admit it.
“That is perfectly simple,” said Ramier, putting his head eagerly between the steel jaws of the trap and blissfully releasing the catch, “and if you have nothing more pressing to do, we might drop into the Kitchen this evening and talk it over.”
CHAPTER III
MOSTLY CONCERNING A VILE CONCOCTION LABELED BY A PIRATE IN SKIRTS, “CERISE SUPREME”
The Kitchen is a small shop near the university where the students can sit at round tables and talk, while they ruin their stomachs with basic frozen milk devices thinly disguised beneath sweet syrups and nuts and fruit.
The establishment is owned and run by a busy elderly body called Mother Bain. If I have grasped her character correctly from hearsay, she possesses an unflagging and never-failing inventiveness, and her concoctions—whatever else they may lack—are never guilty of the stigma of sameness.
It further seems that Mother Bain is endowed with an unerring intuition as to the probable trend in flavors that the palate of the student body will take for each forthcoming week. Rarely does she find any surplus of stock left souring upon her capable hands. While her life is not precisely a bed of roses, she is, nevertheless, succeeding quite well in feathering the nest into which she ultimately plans to retire and sink. Inasmuch as she has the advantage of being not only an institution but a monopoly, her goal is assured.
The meeting between Ramier and Drusilla—it was much too formal to call it a tryst, to say nothing of its publicity—took place at the Kitchen on the same evening as their brief but effective conversation during the afternoon on the campus. It was followed by others at increasingly frequent intervals, until the departure of Professor Kretjz was counterbalanced, and Drusilla’s and Ramier’s respective pursuits of science went on as strenuously as if no such detail as a wrecked laboratory had given them pause.
Nor were they satisfied with mere discussions alone. Ramier, with his income, which was a hundred times too large for any student, was not the lad to be put out by the blowing up of a laboratory. He arranged to outfit one of his own; one where Drusilla and he could continue their experiments with bases and reagents and whatever cabalistic properties their desperate thirsts for knowledge might desire.
It happened, as Ramier found out upon inquiry, that Mother Bain possessed a back parlor—in the fullest sense of the word—that connected with her shop. It was quite suitable to Ramier’s purpose, but Mother Bain was frankly skeptical, and said so, as to whether or not Ramier’s purpose was quite suitable to her back parlor. However, the persuasive rent of thirty dollars a week convinced her that it was.
All of which brings us down to the statement I made at the start of this detour, that it has never failed to strike me as absurd that Ramier’s stupendous discovery should have originated in five corks with needles stuck through them, and a bar magnet.
The five corks were suspiciously easy to procure, as were the five needles, thanks to Drusilla, who kept a package of them lying about for props rather than for sewing—an art with which in those days, she had small patience—but the immediate demand for a basin that would hold about a quart of water was more difficult to meet.
The laboratory contained any number of other things, but it did not contain a basin.
Under the spell of the fine fervor of the experiment, both Ramier and Drusilla were irritated at being balked, and Ramier, hastening into the shop portion of the Kitchen, demanded a basin of the very first person whom he saw.
It happened to be Billy Preston, who was engaged in reflectively eating a Harlem Special. This, I believe, is a confection remotely connected with chocolate ice cream—say a cousinship, many times removed. Billy Preston was furthermore one of the ten students who had been sitting at Professor Kretjz’s feet, figuratively speaking—at least at first—when the enthusiastic savant had done his best to blow them to pieces.
“Have you a china or porcelain basin that will hold about a quart of water?” demanded Ramier intensely, as he came to a full stop beside the table and glared down at Billy in the manner of one distressed scientist glaring at another.
Now, Billy, at heart, was not much of a scientist, although he steadfastly refused to admit it, and I really believe that he was secretly glad that the laboratory had been wrecked. He certainly had no intention whatever of being interrupted in the consumption of his Harlem Special for something so trivial as a basin. It was far too expensive a dish to receive anything but the most flattering attention. He scowled heavily at Ramier with the upper portion of his face.
“Go a-glu-way,” he said sternly, and waved a just-emptied spoon in a significant gesture of dismissal.
“Have you or have you not got a china or porcelain basin that will hold about a quart of water?” repeated Ramier more loudly, as he stolidly shoved the spoon to a more comfortable distance from his nose.
“Nu-teaky-waank!” growled Billy, preparing to get up and paste the pest one on his button.
“Hah!” cried Ramier releasing the spoon, whereupon Billy at once impressed it back into service. “This will do.”
The “this” referred to by Ramier was a large glass bowl that reposed on a counter and contained a brave showing of lonely cherries at large in a red-colored syrup. It represented Mother Bain’s single error in judgment throughout her hitherto unbroken chain of successes. For the past three weeks it had in vain made coquettish advances to the student palate. Not a student, not a palate would touch it. It was a signal failure and a total loss.
The mere sight of it had come to be a thorn in Mother Bain’s side, and the things she muttered about it under her breath, whenever her looks plumbed its distressingly unchanging depths, were less maternal than such matters are cracked up to be.
With that perfect un-self-consciousness and single-mindedness which none but a scientist can effect, Ramier at once lifted the offending bowl from its anchorage and started to vanish with it through the doorway of the laboratory.
Mother Bain happened to come into the shop just at that moment. She arrived in plenty of time to see her stock of Cerise Supreme go bolting out in Ramier’s arms. Dud and unnatural child though it was, Mother Bain was not the soul to permit such a brazen kidnapping to pass unsung. Her first intention was to loose a healthy shriek and cry either “Stop thief!” or “Murder!” or both. Similar neat and ungaudy remarks had served her well in the past and had caused many a trembling defaulter to stop rooted in his tracks.
Mother Bain’s second and cooler thought was to do nothing of the kind. As she instantly reflected, there was her glass bowl to consider. With a determined glint in her beady eye and a surprising firmness and agility in her withering limbs, she headed for the doorway through which Rami
er and her bowl and her suddenly-most-precious Cerise Supreme—precious inasmuch as somebody evidently wanted it even to the point of committing theft in order to get it—had vanished.
This move on the part of Mother Bain was more than Billy’s curiosity could stand. Not even the enchaining powers of a Harlem Special could keep him from witnessing the denouement of such an intriguing mystery as the startling disappearance of Mother Bain’s stock of Cerise Supreme in the arms of one of the most prominent members of his class; of one who was now presumably a lunatic at large.
As Billy described it to me, the scene when he arrived at the doorway of the laboratory—nee back parlor—was one of utter confusion. It was a confusion in which Drusilla, Ramier, and Mother Bain all seemed to be, and were, talking at once. He assures me that Mother Bain held the lead by a pitch of at least twelve notes. The bowl of Cerise Supreme was an added complication, inasmuch as it had been converted into a loving-cup, equal sections of which were being grasped by three pairs of hands.
“If you break this bowl,” Ramier was hissing into Mother Bain’s left ear, “you will hold up our experiment for another hour, and I won’t be responsible for my actions if you do.”
“If you break dis bowl,” Mother Bain was hissing—much louder and much hissier, as Billy insists—into Ramier’s right ear, “I’ll charge you the ten dollars it cost me, and the five dollars’ worth of stewed cherries that’s in it.”
“If you would both stop talking and listen to each other for a minute,” Drusilla was saying stonily, “we could end this ridiculous situation and get down to work.”