I, Libertine

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “That I will, sir, and thank you.”

  Beside Lance’s brook at Featherfront ran a bridle path. A mile or so downstream it met the little road between Titsey and Tatsfield; the other way, three miles or so, would bring a rider to Sir Gregory Eustace’s holding.

  It might be called a manse, considering the land he owned, which, though fit only for goats and bark-browsing deer, was considerable in extent; indeed, it began at the margin of the Featherfront property, which had been a part of Sir Gregory’s land. Sir Gregory called his estate Minden, after the battle, which perpetuated itself in his memory because it was there he had by mistake achieved his baronetcy, having become hopelessly lost with a contingent of light horse, and emerging suddenly from a defile, had inadvertently pierced and broken the French lines and started that famous rout. He was a widower, a very owl of a little man, with sharp ears, huge eyes and a little hooked beak, and he lived with a sizable staff of servants, three daughters, their governess (a genteel spinster named Callow), a small hunting stable and some dogs. His library was admirable and his chief occupation was a prodigious combing of it and the making of endless notes, it being his ambition to write the biography of the City of the Seven Hills from the whelping of the Wolf of Romulus to the death of the thirteenth Clement. Since the purchase of Featherfront, Lance had made it a point to ride or walk up to Minden from time to time; it was a pleasant walk with a glass of good sack at the end of it; it was a source of London news and talk, for Sir Gregory went up for a day or so each fortnight; and it was … now—

  Dutifully precepted by Barrowbridge, Lance left no possibility unexamined. What might have been an embarrassment of riches in his search for a partner in scandal became a most methodical matter after his talk with the old man. There was an upstairs maid, for example, a veritable queen among females, a creature of light, who could be summarily dismissed, because of the elimination of the lower orders. He was saved cogitation upon Barbara and Bella Eustace, their likes, dislikes, and potential weaknesses, because of the dictum about ages: they were eight and ten years old respectively. He did not know how old Elaine, the elder daughter, was, and he would not ask; she was past thirteen, which was what was important. The only other female of high enough station, who also fell within the ‘natural activity’ statute, was Hepzibah Callow, the governess. Miss Callow had a classical education, extraordinarily perfect diction, and skin trouble; her father, he heard, had been an Irish army officer, which seemed on the face of it to present little altitude until one recalled that the Gunning sisters and Miss Chudleigh herself came from similar sources. It would seem that the daughters of Irish officers floated free in the social structure, rather like literary men and educators; one might never solidly place them as not gentry, just as merchant baronets and musicians could never quite be called gentlefolk.

  Miss Callow, then, and Elaine Eustace.

  Elaine Eustace was totally subject to her father’s control in speech and movement, but the silent net of his discipline could not contain her vibrancy, which escaped in little vivid flashes of teeth, of eyes, of wit and wistfulness. Her hair was gold (and red) in the sun, red (and gold) by the fire. She seldom looked up at anything which interested her, really interested her; it was as if she were afraid she could not contain herself if she opened her eyes; so she would peep between lowered lashes like some bright bird turning and turning its head behind bars. On the other hand … there was the warning about involvements during, and involvements after.

  So then … Miss Callow?

  Oh dear, he thought. Miss Callow.

  He bade his farewells at the conclusion of this most casual of calls, and walked home in deep thought. He wanted to go straight to Barrowbridge, and found his patience not broken but badly bent at having to negotiate a particularly ardent attack of Meadows. This time it was not as he entered, but before, while crossing the footbridge to his land. Meadows burst out of the house, half-mad with exhaustion and enthusiasm; he had for three days and nights been gobbling the dim contents of old books and slaving over his bubbling messes. “Paracelsus!” he piped from a hundred feet, capering and galloping across the bowling green. “My dear chap, I can’t tell you. I can. I shall.” Almost as an afterthought, he resumed breathing for a time, clutching both fists together tight under his heart, the while fixing Lance with eyes so deep-set and far away that they seemed part of some other-place, like animals peering from a distant wood. “Paracelsus, I’ve discovered Paracelsus. I’ve read him and read him; read of him, I mean to say and all that.” He breathed again painfully and shrilly, and then took Lance’s left biceps in both hands, kneading as he towed the young man along. “And I never knew what he meant.”

  “What did he mean?” asked Lance laboriously.

  “Nonsense!” cried Meadows, so abruptly that Lance shied like a colt, and Meadows almost left the ground. “I mean, it’s nonsense about the philosopher’s stone, transmutation and all that. No, not that, I mean I believe it can be done, but what’s nonsense is that transmutation is what alchemy is for. It jolly well isn’t I mean to say,” he blethered, and paused to wipe spittle from the corner of his lip with his shoulder, “Alchemy is what Paracelsus said, for making medicines. Alchemy,” he orated, loosing one of his hands to help him, “is chemistry and chemistry is medicine. Alchemy is medicine, d’you see, what? What? My dear, dear chap,” he said, replacing the elocutionary hand a split-second before Lance could free himself, and beginning to knead again, “it’s a revelation. Bring me the sick, bring me the maimed!”

  “My dear, dear chap,” said Lance, unable to keep himself from vicious mimicry, “don’t you think you ought to get some sleep?”

  “Sleep? Sleep? at a time like this? I’ll never sleep again. Yes, thank you, thank you, that’s what I shall do first. An elixir to banish sleep. You know what you’ve done?” he squeaked, incredibly adding another wave of excitement to his hysteria. “You’ve given me a score of years, just by a wave of your hand. For if we sleep a third of each day, we sleep a third of a life, and if a life’s threescore years, we’re dead and useless a third of it, sleeping. I owe you twenty years for your inspiration, Lance, and I shall pay it, I shall pay it …” and at last he loosed his host and went toward the laboratory wing at a dead run.

  Lance stood watching the thin, ungainly, flapping figure, crossing the green, crossing the paille maille court, catching his foot in a wicket, which pulled out but which also tilted the flying alchemist forward at forty-five degrees. He increased his pace and maintained a dynamic equilibrium at that angle for fully thirty yards, running faster and faster until his outstretched hands slammed into the side of the building, and his head immediately afterward, though not nearly so hard. Lance saw it rebound, and then Meadows pressed the building away from him like the good Lord setting aside Satan, turned and weaved through the door.

  Lance rubbed a while at his compressed biceps, and suddenly shuddered briefly, but quite as violently as a wet dog. He entered the great hall and quietly crossed to the inside door to the lab and peered through. Evelyn Meadows was crumpled on a wooden bench, his right hand extended toward a stirring rod, and an expression of ineffable peace on his dirty face. He was fast asleep.

  Lance sighed and went to the storage for a light blanket, which he brought back and spread over the slumberer. Softly, softly, like a nurse soothing the troubled slumber of a sick child, Lance whispered, “Wretched unnatural swine … why didn’t you tell me?”

  He plodded up the covered stair to Barrowbridge.

  “Mr. Barrowbridge,” he asked wearily, “would a governess do?”

  9.

  MISS CALLOW WAS FLATTERED.

  Miss Callow had been flattered every day for a week now, what with the new obedience she got from the girls, the respectful astonishment granted her by Sir Gregory, and most of all the daily presence of the grave young godling from Featherfront. Of the latter flattery Lance was of course aware, since he had planned it. She familiarized him with the others, gushing out her
impressions with all the irresistibility of the newly open-hearted.

  “They peep through the curtains when you come, the little dears. Barby jumps up and down and says ‘He’s walking! He’s walking!’ or ‘He’s riding!’ and Bella pushes her away from the window and she cries. Haha! The dears. Bella asked her father if when he was knighted he was given a suit of armor. She wanted him to lend you the suit of armor as a sort of game, so she could see you come riding up in the sunlight, the silly thing, imagine, armor in these times, and borrowed from a man his size!” She looked up at him and showed her teeth and the edges of her eyes, neither of which were quite white; her incisors looked like molars. “And since we’ve been walking every day, they watch me and watch me, wondering what I do, what I say, that makes you notice me; they obey so nicely and pay attention every minute. And then there’s poor dear Sir Gregory; I dare say he never noticed me in his life before except as an item ‘governess’ in his accounts and at his table. Since our little walks began, I can never so much as pass him in the hall but he stops and turns and watches me by, as much as to say, how do you do it, Callow! There’s a pipit”

  Lance gravely inspected the flight of a small brown bird which flew like, and looked like, most other small brown birds his city-bred eyes had encountered. He made an interested sound, however. Even as alchemy had been Meadows’ bait, “natural philosophy” had been hers. “Natural philosophy,” in Hepzibah Callow’s lexicon, was very nearly what would one day be called “biology.” All living things were within its compass. The “philosophy” part of it was an untiring effort to link all things into one great shapely analogy; as the flowers do, so do the bees, and as the bees, cattle, camels and cormorants; as these do, so should man. It was a shockingly long time before Lance saw the pitfall in this. Having little interest in the specifics to begin with, it was only surprising that he caught up with the generalities when he did.

  “Dragonfly,” she would croon, holding the four-winged horror four inches from his mouth, while, since he would not, his chin retreated and retreated until he was only neck, with a white frightened gash of a mouth, from nostrils to collarbone. He was morally certain that the monster would escape and zipzip! sew up his lips. “You see this little, ah, probe? It’s a daddy dragonfly. They mate on the wing, swoo-ooping and climbing,” she would beam. Or a swarm of bees big enough to pull down a grape-arbor: “The queen’s in there, calling and calling, and oh! they all want her.” He learned about vixen and she-bears, and the latter’s proclivity for licking their shapeless young into final form with their strong wet warm tongues (and heard the words used strongly, wetly, warmly, by a tongue that shot out and oozed back like a hermit-crab); he learned about chad, meati, the fundus and the sphygnum, and a great many other answers to questions he wouldn’t dream of phrasing.

  It was all scholarly, impersonal; she made no direct analogies. She discussed all things unblushingly because she never touched upon a single thing upon which contemporary usage demanded a blush. The analogies were there, however, pervasively, atmospherically there. There were times when in spite of himself Lance was carried away by the ubiquity of her intimations, and saw flashes of her world, through which crawled, climbed, flew, scurried, struggled and strove organ paired with organ. His mien was calm and his discourse was polite, but underneath he felt a rising tide of horror as he learned and learned things and things. My God, he would cry inwardly, date-palms too?

  He went to Barrowbridge about it. “I can’t catch her up,” he said ruefully; “The faster I run, the faster she goes, but she’s behind me. Surely this isn’t what you had in mind.”

  “Seize the initiative, boy. Push a little sooner, a little harder than she bargains for.”

  “Push a capful of wind over a precipice,” Lance grumbled. “You haven’t seen her.”

  “No.”

  So he brought her. It meant only a few minutes’ longer walk, time enough to apologize for the primitive state of the residence of a scholar and a scientist. Mindful of the old man’s counsel, he put an arm about her shoulders as he explained. As soon as he had finished his statement she made this speech: “I have never done this before. However, if you feel as I do that there are currents in nature which should not be denied, and if you will be ordinarily civil to me in my ignorance, I should be glad to learn the mortal version of the dragonflies’ coupled flight.” That is what she said, “coupled flight.” Lance took his arm off her shoulder and walked holding it slightly away from his side, not trusting its effect on people it touched.

  Meadows broke out of the house as they came into view, turned right about and broke in again. Lance led Miss Callow to the laboratory door and they entered just in time to see Meadows’ left heel flip out of sight. Miss Callow marched to the center of the tall cluttered room and moved her two tense hands together and upward as if they were full of sand which she was letting trickle out between the quivering fingers. “Ah, science,” she intoned. “Science …” and then turned to Lance, baring her front fangs in a worshipful smile. Over her shoulder Lance saw Meadows’ head appear in the doorway, its hollow eyes fixed on Miss Callow’s three-quarter rear profile.

  “Come,” said Lance, and went toward the doorway. By the time they reached it, Meadows was disappearing out the front. He seated her on the settle before the fireplace and excused himself, and went round through the kitchen to the covered stair. At its foot he paused, his nostrils aquiver. The air was spoonable-thick with the combined odors of rotten celery and rancid butter. He looked about and saw the mute girl, Johnson, perched on a high stool by a window, which she had closed as far as possible on her arm, leaving a bandaged portion outside in the fresh air. He called a question to her, but she merely turned dumb brute eyes to him and away. He shrugged and mounted.

  He found Barrowbridge lying in bed next the wall with his eye fixed to his gimlet-hole. “I say,” said the barrister, “these are barefaced times, enough so that the Monthly Review hints it sinful that our poor mad George III should be left unshaven. Yet look at yon paramour of yours, Lanky. Methinks if a body must wear a mustache it ought to be kept trimmed.”

  “Ay, she’s a beauty,” said Lance, and explained what had happened for a mere touch upon the shoulder.

  “Jolly good thing you didn’t touch her knee,” said the old man in high amusement. “She’d bring you a litter of twelve.”

  With some heat Lance snapped, “I’d count myself fortunate could I lie abed and be a sage while you cast your innocence at yon hairy limbo.”

  “Advice,” said Barrowbridge, leveling his eyebrows, “is worth generally what you pay for it. I was in error to give it to you gratis, Lanky; you have it devalued. There is also a saying, I think Portugee, to the end that one should never give advice, lest one be blamed for the consequences to fools who follow it.”

  “Mr. Barrowbridge,” said Lance piteously, “what am I going to do?”

  The old man applied his eye to the gimlet-hole again, and turned away shaking his head. Then he was still for a while. His eyes snapped open. “There’s a—”

  “—way out, if only you can think of it,” finished Lance for him.

  Unsmiling, but with his eyes a-twinkle, Barrowbridge said, “Thank you, lad. Now, do you escort the lady home, and we’ll apply ourselves to the matter.”

  “Very well … I know you will, sir, and thank you. … What’ve you done to Johnson? She smells like an exhumation.”

  “Not I! ’Twas your associate there. She burned herself on a faggot in the stove and he’s treating it. He has a theory, I think, that evil has a magnetism for evil, and he’s applied yon serpent-spit to her to draw the poison.”

  “Heaven preserve her!” Lance bolted down the stairs and ran to the servant. He knocked open the casement and drew her away from it; the odor from the dressing fairly knocked him down. He held a handkerchief to his mouth and with his free hand tore off the dressing. The forearm was flayed and shiny in a patch six inches long, and covered with a yellow-green tallowy substan
ce which was obviously the author of the stench. He plunged the arm into a deep firkin of wash-water where at least it was sealed off from the air, took two great handsful of soft soap, and working under water, scrubbed away the medicament, while the mute made screaming faces. When he drew the arm out it still smelled worse than a living thing should but at least one might stay within a township of it. He picked up the bandage from the floor with a stick and consigned it to the flames, and found a fair white cloth to bind the arm with.

  “Now do you scrub yon greasy spot where the bandage lay, and get that firkin downstream of here. Don’t bring it back, either. And after this conceal thy wounds from Mr. Meadows; come to me or to Mr. Barrowbridge. See you don’t go near the laboratory until you get that bandage as dirty as the one I burned.”

  Tears came silently; the heavy creature pressed his hand shyly and turned away. Well hang it, he thought, where would we get another mute if she took a poisoning?

  He went round to the great hall, and stopped dead at the sight which confronted him. Miss Callow was on the settle where he had left her, but now she sat bolt upright and even a little back-leaning. She had a forced and uncertain smile on her face and was saying, “How do you do?” in the tones of one who has made the same observation at least three times with no response. And advancing on her wordlessly, a step at a time with stops between, was Meadows. As a child Lance had learned that if one street urchin wishes to disconcert another he need only stare fixedly at the other’s forehead, close over the eyes. The victim will try to meet the other’s gaze and cannot; nothing makes a man appear more mad than a fixed and unreachable stare like that. He saw here that one need not be an urchin to be disconcerted. Miss Callow was more than disconcerted; if she didn’t bolt she would faint, and now. “Meadows!”

  Meadows glanced at him and the spell was broken. “Mr. Meadows, Miss Callow.”