“Overwork, Backmaker,” Dorn mumbled. “Barbara's been overworking terribly. You mustn't think—”
“I don't,” I said. “I'm just sorry she couldn't be made to realize what actually happened.” “Hypersensitive; things that wouldn't ordinarily… It's overwork. You've no idea. She wears herself out. Practically no nerves left.”
His face, pleading for understanding, looked even more melancholy than before. I felt sorry for him and slightly superior; at the moment, at least, I didn't have to apologize for any female unpredictability. “Okay, okay, there doesn't seem to be any great harm done. And the girl appears to be in good hands now.”
“Oh she is,” he answered with evident relief at dropping the subject of Barbara's behavior. “I don't think there's anything more we can do for her now; in fact I'd say we're only in the way. How about meeting Mr. Haggerwells now?”
“Why not?” The last episode had doubtless finished me for good so far as Barbara was concerned; whatever neutral report she might have given her father originally could now be counted on for a damning revision. I might as well put a nonchalant face on matters before returning to the world outside Haggershaven.
Thomas Haggerwells, large-boned like his daughter, with the ginger hair faded and a florid, handsome complexion, made me welcome. “Historian, ay, Backmaker? Delighted. Combination of art and science; Clio, most enigmatic of the muses. The ever-changing past, ay?”
“I'm afraid I'm no historian yet, Mr. Haggerwells. I'd like to be one. If Haggershaven will let me be part of it.”
He patted me on the shoulder. “The fellows will do what they can, Backmaker; you can trust them.”
“That's right,” said Dorn cheerfully; “you look strong as an ox, and historians can be kept happy with books and a few old papers.”
“Ace is our cynic,” explained Mr. Haggerwells; “very useful antidote to some of our soaring spirits.” He looked absently around and then said abruptly, “Ace, Barbara is quite upset.”
I thought this extreme understatement, but Dorn merely nodded. “Misunderstanding, Mr. H.”
“So I gathered.” He gave a short, self-conscious laugh. “In fact that's all I did gather. She said something about a woman… .”
“Girl, Mr. H., just a girl.” He gave a quick outline of what had happened, glossing over Barbara's hysterical welcome.
“I see. Quite an adventure in the best tradition, ay Backmaker? And the victims killed in cold blood; makes you wonder about civilization. Savagery all around us.” He began pacing the flowered carpet. “Naturally we must help the poor creature. Shocking, quite shocking. But how can I explain to Barbara? She… she came to me,” he said, half proudly, half apprehensively. “I wouldn't want to fail her; I hardly know…” He pulled himself together. “Excuse me, Backmaker. My daughter is highstrung. I fear I'm allowing concern to interfere with our conversation.”
“Not at all, sir,” I said. “I'm very tired; if you'll excuse me…”
“Of course, of course,” he answered gratefully. “Ace will show you your room. Sleep well—we'll talk more tomorrow. And Ace—come back here afterward, will you?”
Barbara Haggerwells had both Dorn and her father well cowed, I thought as I lay awake. Clearly she could brook not even the suspicion of rivalry, even when it was entirely imaginary. It would be rather frightening to be her father, or—as I suspected Ace might be—her lover, and subject to her tyrannical dominance.
But it was neither Barbara nor overstimulation from the full day which caused my insomnia. A torment, successfully suppressed for hours, invaded me. Connecting the trip of the Escobars—” attached to the Spanish legation"— with the counterfeit pesetas was pure fantasy. But what is logic? I could not argue myself into reasonableness. I could not quench my feeling of responsibility with ridicule nor convincingly charge myself with perverse conceit in magnifying my trivial errands into accountability for all that flowed from the Grand Army—for much which might have flowed from the Grand Army. Guilty men cannot sleep because they feel guilty. It is the feeling, not the abstract guilt which keeps them awake.
Nor could I pride myself on my chivalry in rescuing distressed maidens. I had only done what was unavoidable, grudgingly, without warmth or charity. There was no point in being aggrieved by Barbara's misinterpretation with its disastrous consequences to my ambitions. I had not freely chosen to help; I had no right to resent a catastrophe which should properly have followed a righteous choice.
At last I slept, only to dream Barbara Haggerwells was a great fish pursuing me over endless roads on which my feet bogged in clinging, tenacious mud. Opening my mouth to shout for help was useless; nothing came forth but a croak which sounded faintly like my mother's favorite “Gumption!”
In the clear autumn morning my notions of the night dwindled, even if they failed to disappear entirely. By the time I was dressed Ace Dorn showed up; we went to the kitchen where Ace introduced me to a middle-aged man, Hiro Agati, whose close-cut stiff black hair stood perfectly and symmetrically erect all over his head.
“Dr. Agati's a chemist,” remarked Ace, “condemned to be head chef for a while on account of being too good a cook.”
“Believe that,” said Agati, “and you'll believe anything. Truth is they always pick on chemists for hard work. Physicists like Ace never soil their hands. Well, so long as you can't eat with the common folk, what'll you have, eggs or eggs?”
Agati was the first Oriental I'd ever seen. The great anti-Chinese massacres of the 1890s, which generously included Japanese and indeed all with any sign of the epicanthic eye fold, had left few Asians to have descendants in the United States. I'm afraid I stared at him more than was polite, but he was evidently used to such rudeness for he paid no attention.
“They finally got the girl to sleep,” Ace informed me. “Had to give her opium. No report yet this morning.”
“Oh,” I said lamely, conscious I should have asked after her without waiting for him to volunteer the news. “Oh. Do you suppose we'll find out who she is?”
“Mr. H. telegraphed the sheriff first thing. It'll all depend how interested he is, and that's not likely to be very. What's to drink, Hiro?”
“Imitation tea, made from dried weeds; imitation coffee made from burnt barley. Which'll you have?”
I didn't see why he stressed the imitation; genuine tea and coffee were drunk only by the very rich. Most people preferred “tea” because it was less obnoxious than the counterfeit coffee. Perversely, I said, “Coffee, please.”
He set a large cup of brown liquid before me which had a tantalizing fragrance quite different from that given off by the beverage I was used to. I added milk and tasted, aware he was watching my reaction.
“Why,” I exclaimed, “this is different. I never had anything like it in my life. It's wonderful.”
“C8 H10 O2,” said Agati with an elaborate air of indifference. “Synthetic. Specialty of the house.”
“So chemists are good for something after all,” remarked Ace.
“Give us a chance,” said Agati; “we could make beef out of wood and silk out of sand.”
“You're a physicist like B—like Miss Haggerwells?” I asked Ace.
“I'm a physicist, but not like Barbara. No one is. She's a genius. A great creative genius.”
“Chemists create,” said Agati sourly; “physicists sit and think about the universe.”
“Like Archimedes,” said Ace.
How shall I write of Haggershaven as my eyes first saw it twenty-two years ago? Of the rolling acres of rich plowed land, interrupted here and there by stone outcroppings worn smooth and round by time, and trees in woodlots or standing alone strong and unperturbed? Of the main building, grown by fits and starts from the original farmhouse into a great, rambling eccentricity, stopping short of monstrosity only by its complete innocence of pretense? Shall I describe the two dormitories, severely functional, escaping harshness because they had not been built by carpenters and, though sturdy enough, betray
ed the amateur touch in every line? Or the cottages and apartments, two, four, at most six rooms, for the married fellows and their families? These were scattered all over, some so avid for privacy that one could pass unknowing within feet of the concealing trees or shrubbery, others bold in the sunshine on knolls or in hollows.
I could tell of the small shops, the miniature laboratories, the inadequate observatory, the heterogeneous assortment of books which was both less and more than a library, the dozens of outbuildings. But these things were not the Haven. They were merely the least of its possessions. For Haggershaven was not a material place at all, but a spiritual freedom. Its limits were only the limits of what its fellows could do or think or inquire. It was circumscribed only by the outside world, not by internal rules and taboos, competition or curriculum.
Most of this I could see for myself, much of it was explained by Ace. “But how can you afford the time to take me all around this way?” I asked. “I must be interfering with your own work.”
He grinned. “This is my period to be guide, counselor, and friend to those who've strayed in here, wittingly or un. Don't worry, after you're a fellow you'll get told off for all the jobs, from shoveling manure to gilding weathercocks.”
I sighed. “The chances of my getting to be a fellow are minus nothing. Especially after last night.”
He didn't pretend to misunderstand. “Barbara'll come out of it. She's not always that way. As her father says, she's high-strung, and she's been working madly. And to tell the truth,” he went on in a burst of frankness, “she really doesn't get on too well with other women. She has a masculine mind.”
I have often noticed that men not strikingly brilliant themselves attribute masculine minds to intelligent women on the consoling assumption that feminine minds are normally inferior. Ace, however, was manifestly innocent of any attempt to patronize.
“Anyway,” he concluded, “she has only one vote.”
I didn't know whether to take this as a pledge of support or mere politeness. “Isn't it wasteful, assigning a chemist like Dr. Agati to kitchen work? Or isn't he a good chemist?”
“Just about the best there is. His artificial tea and coffee would bring a fortune to the Haven if there were a profitable market; even as it is it'll bring a good piece of change. Wasteful? What would you have us do, hire cooks and servants?”
“They're cheap enough.”
“Or frightfully expensive. Specialization, the division of labor, is certainly not cheap in anything but dollars and cents, and not always then. And it's unquestionably wasteful in terms of equality. And I don't think there's anyone at the Haven who isn't an egalitarian.”
“But you do specialize and divide labor. Don't tell me you swap your physics for Agati's chemistry.”
“In a way we do. Of course, I don't set up as an experimenter, any more than he does as a speculator. But there have been plenty of times I've worked under his direction when he needed an assistant who didn't know anything but had a strong back.”
“All right,” I said, “but I still don't see why you can't hire a cook and some dishwashers.”
“Where would our equality be then? What would happen to our fellowship?”
Haggershaven's history, which I got little by little, was more than a link with the past; it was a possible hint of what might have been if the War of Southron Independence had not interrupted the American pattern. Barbara's great-great-grandfather, Herbert Haggerwells, had been a Confederate major from North Carolina who, as conquerors sometimes do, had fallen in love with the then fat Pennsylvania countryside. After the war he had put everything—not much by Southron standards, but a fortune in depreciated, soon to be repudiated, United States greenbacks—into the farm which later formed the nucleus of Haggershaven. Then he married a local girl and transformed himself into a Northerner.
Until I became too accustomed to notice it anymore I used to stare at his portrait in the library, picturing in idle fancy a possible meeting on the battlefield between this aristocratic gentleman with his curling mustache and daggerlike imperial and my own plebian Granpa Hodgins. But the chance of their ever having come face-to-face was much more than doubtful; I, who had studied both their likenesses, was the only link between them.
“Hard-looking character, ay?” commented Ace. “This was painted when he was mellow; imagine him twenty years earlier. Pistols cocked and Juvenal or Horace or Seneca in the saddlebags.”
“He was a cavalry officer, then?”
“I don't know. Don't think so as a matter of fact. Saddlebags was just my artistic touch. They say he was a holy terror; discipline and all that—it sort of goes with a man on horseback. And the old Roman boys are pure deduction; he was that type. Patronized several writers and artists; you know: 'Drop down to my estate and stay a while,' and they stayed five or ten years.”
But it was Major Haggerwells's son who, seeing the deterioration of Northern colleges, had invited a few restive scholars to make their home with him. They were free to pursue their studies under an elastic arrangement which permitted them to be self-supporting through work on the farm.
Thomas Haggerwells's father had organized the scheme further, attracting a larger number of schoolmen who contributed greatly to the material progress of the Haven. They patented inventions, marketless at home, which brought regular royalties from more industrialized countries. Agronomists improved the Haven's crops and took in a steady income from seed. Chemists found ways of utilizing otherwise wasted by-products; proceeds from scholarly works—and one more popular than scholarly—added to the funds. In his will, Volney Haggerwells left the properties to the fellowship.
I suppose I expected there would be some uniformity, some basic type characterizing the fellows. Not that Barbara, or Ace, or Hiro Agati resembled a stereotype at any point, any more than I did myself, but then I was not one of the elect nor likely to be. Even after I had met more than half of them the notion persisted that there must be some stamp on them proclaiming what they were.
Yet as I wandered about the Haven, alone or with Ace, the people I met were quite diverse, more so by far than in the everyday world. There were the ebullient and the glum, the talkative and the laconic, the bustling and the slow moving. Some were part of a family, others lived ascetically, withdrawn from the pleasures of the flesh.
In the end I realized there was, if not a similarity, a strong bond. The fellows, conventional or eccentric, passionate or reserved, were all earnest, purposeful, and, despite individual variations, tenacious. They were, though I hesitate to use so emotional a word, dedicated. The cruel struggle and suspicion, the frantic endeavor to improve one's own financial, social, or political standing by maiming or destroying someone else intent on the same endeavor was either unknown or so subdued as to be imperceptible at the Haven. Disagreements and jealousies existed, but they were different in kind rather than in degree from those to which I had been accustomed all my life. The pervasive fears which fostered the latter, the same fears which made lotteries and indenture frantic gambles to escape the wretchedness of life, could not circulate in the security of the Haven.
After the scene at my arrival, I didn't see Barbara again for some ten days. Even then it was but a glimpse, caught as she hurried in one direction and I sauntered in another. She threw me a single frigid glance and went on. Later, I was talking with Mr. Haggerwells, who had proved to be not quite an amateur of history but more than a dabbler, when, without knocking, she burst into the room.
“Father, I—” Then she caught sight of me. “Sorry. I didn't know you were entertaining.”
His tone was that of one found in a guilty act. “Come in, come in, Barbara. Backmaker is after all something of a protg of yours. Urania, you know—if one may stretch the ascription a bit—encouraging Clio.”
“Really, Father!” She was regal. Wounded, scornful, but majestic. “I'm sure I don't know enough about selftaught pundits to sponsor them. It seems too bad they have to waste your time—”
&nbs
p; He flushed. “Please, Barbara. You must, you really must control…”
Her disapproval became open anger. “Must I? Must I? And stand by while every pretentious swindler usurps your attention? Oh, I don't ask for any special favors as your daughter; I know too well I have none coming. But I should think at least the consideration due a fellow of the Haven would prompt ordinary courtesy even where no natural affection exists!”
“Barbara, please… Oh, my dear girl, how can you… ?”
But she was gone, leaving him distressed and me puzzled. Not at her lack of restraint but at her accusation that he lacked a father's love for her. Nothing was clearer than his pride in her or his protective, baffled tenderness. It did not seem possible so willful a misunderstanding could be maintained.
“You can't judge Barbara by ordinary standards,” insisted Ace uncomfortably, when I told him what had happened.
“I'm not judging her by any standards or at all,” I said; “I just don't see how anyone could get things so wrong.”
“She… Her nature needs sympathy. Lots of it. She's never had the understanding and encouragement she ought to have.”
“It looks the other way around to me.”
“That's because you don't know the background. She's always been lonely. From childhood. Her mother was impatient of children and never found time for her.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Why… she told me, of course.”
“And you believed her. Without corroborative evidence. Is that what's called the scientific attitude?”
He stopped stock-still. “Look here, Backmaker"—a moment before I had been Hodge to him—"Look here, Backmaker, I'm damned tired of all the things people say about Barbara; the jeers and sneers and gossip by people who just aren't good enough to breathe the same air with her, much less have the faintest notion of her mind and spirit—”
“Come off it, Ace,” I interrupted. “I haven't got anything against Barbara. The shoe is on the other foot. Tell her I'm all right, will you? Don't waste time trying to convince me; I'm just trying to get along.”
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