by Philip Wylie
Carpenter picked it up. “Well?”
“Painted with some sort of cellulose?”
“Fungus. You felt it, eh?”
Baxter held out his hand. He bent over the stone, fingering its fantastic crop, smelling it, holding it up to the light. At last he smiled.
“May I be permitted to congratulate you?”
Carpenter set the stone on the table. “You see?”
“The optical properties yielded—”
“To what proved to be a simple and harmless treatment.”
Baxter nodded. “I know a man who would give a quarter of a million for your notes.”
Carpenter stared for an instant and then said. “Ha! A quarter of a million! They are worth billions. Billions, Baxter. Now.” He seated himself again. “I must have first your sworn promise to keep absolute secrecy regarding this work.”
“Might be superfluous to ask me to swear, mightn’t it?”
“I won’t apologize. I may be hurting your pride. I may be impugning your honor. This is the culmination of my life work. And I cannot afford to take chances.”
“Very well. The oath is taken, then.”
“I want you to help me. I hope you will remain with me for some time. The labor that lies ahead is enough for a dozen men. I can’t take that many into my confidence. I am forced to hurry. The people here in Sinkak are writhing at the privacy I have attained in their midst. They have tried to investigate me twice. I thought I would have seclusion here. Instead, I have persecution. They constitute a very real hazard—as you will discover. Moreover, I am an impatient man. I must succeed before I am too old. I must do twenty years of work in one or two. Is that clear?”
“Partially. What do you mean by success?” Baxter was lighting another cigarette and regarding Carpenter with the calm inquisitiveness that is the right of a prospective employee.
“We will attempt to move toward one goal. Mind you—” and his voice rose to thunder—“this is the nucleus of my plan—that goal will be to transpose a living human being to the same state as the fungus you have seen.”
Baxter’s eyebrows lifted. “You won’t get many volunteers.”
“I shall use myself.”
“Supposing you can’t get back—resume visibility, as it were?”
“I shall not be interested in getting back.” He was now standing before Baxter as he had stood before Daryl. In mood and gesture he repeated his wild ecstasy of the morning. “I have an end in mind that will be pursued after the experiment is finished.”
“Which is?”
“I will reform the world!”
Baxter was still calm. The man who stood before him, mountainous, volcanic, his eyes livid with the thoughts that palpitated behind them, was scarcely master of himself. Here was the quintessence of his fanaticism; here was revenge for a life of slights and repressions, here was a biological ideal carried to its emotional apex, a white-hot scientific martyrdom. Baxter’s imagination investigated branches of the situation. He perceived that Carpenter might not be a maniac and might also become insane. He realized that to follow Carpenter in his work would be an experience in pure science that few men could have the opportunity to enjoy. Most of all, he saw the predicament in which the girl would be if Carpenter’s mind suffered cataclysm—or if Carpenter followed his eccentric path to achievement.
The elements he had sought in life were here: adventure, vast possibility, the workings of an intelligent mind. To them was added a new factor: the security of another person. When he had learned that Daryl would be in the same house, he had decided to stay. His reasons for staying were now multiplied.
There had been a long pause at the end of Carpenter’s declaration. Baxter was not interested in how the vehement scientist would reform the world: the hypothetical point of beginning was too far away. He was more inclined to meet situations as they rose. Carpenter was certainly not invisible. He almost surely would never be invisible. Meanwhile—there would be problems.
“Well?” Carpenter put the word as a final question.
“I’d be glad to work with you.”
“Excellent.” He turned his attention to mundane facts. “I’ve had a room arranged for you. When I remodeled the house I made living quarters for six persons.” He took a gold watch from the side pocket of his coat. “It’s too late to do anything now. We’ll get ready for dinner.”
“Fine.”
“One thing. My niece—I presume she told you that she is really no relation?”
“No,” Baxter said.
Carpenter considered that and shrugged. “The daughter of my adopted brother. Came here recently. Destitute. I employ her to keep the laboratory in order. She is capable. You will understand that her position in the house is subject to my decisions.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing. She is merely on probation.” For an instant Carpenter seemed uneasy. “You will see little of her in any case.”
“If you are inviting me to see little of her—” Baxter spoke even more slowly, more precisely than was his custom.
“Nothing of the kind. Merely that we will be busy. I hoped eventually that Miss Carpenter would—”
“Would what?”
Carpenter took his assistant by the arm. “Come. We’ll have dinner.”
Daryl and Baxter, had no opportunity to talk privately for three days. Mrs. Treadle or Carpenter was usually present when they were together. Neither wished to make an obvious effort to meet the other alone. The chance came when the housekeeper was up stairs and the scientist was working by himself. It was dark out doors. There had been a thaw and the March wind was dulcet. The suddenness of their opportunity put them under some constraint.
Baxter resolved it. “If I’m not being too personal, I’d like to say that the greatest tragedy of the Mortland Farms is that you work only in the morning.”
“Meaning that you want me to wear my fingers to the bone?”
“Meaning that when you go, there is no light left except the electricity—which is by comparison equivalent to total darkness. All morning I am ecstatic. All afternoon I dodder.”
“Then—you’re being too personal.”
“Which you would not say if you meant it—being a person of manners.”
“Some day you’ll guess so far ahead of yourself that you’ll never be able to figure your way back.”
“True. It happened to me in my infancy. I was three years old. I dropped my Horace for a little quiet thinking on the subject of anthropomorphology. For one instant I had the whole problem of the relation of spirit and matter in a nutshell. And I never recovered. My mother came home from a hard afternoon of whist at the Ladies’ Aid. I was a changed baby. I grew up with a distorted mind.”
“Too bad.”
“As you say, too bad. But my early training serves me in good stead now.”
“In what way?”
Baxter’s voice lowered. “Your uncle—is genius personified. He travels in seven-league boots.”
“He is making progress?”
“So much that I think I am frightened.”
“Frightened?”
Baxter nodded. “Something like it. I’m not trying to alarm you. Just to prepare you. He may not carry out his intentions to their fullest degree. Probably will not. But there will be some items in that laboratory this summer that would make my old dean wobble at the knees. And somehow—somehow, damn it all—if you will pardon the expression—I get what we may call the creeps, the meemies or the jitters thinking about it. Don’t you?”
Daryl looked at him searchingly. “Are you serious?”
“Yes and no. Doesn’t this place get on your nerves? Doesn’t he? That dogged, relentless way he works. Never sleeps. And this house. Damn it, my dear—to repeat myself—the whole opus makes me grow chilly in contemplation. I feel little drafts of cold air. They trickle along my spine. And the walls in my bed room start whispering at night. ‘Look out, gents,’ is the burden of their words. Somethi
ng dreary is afoot.”
“You’re trying to spoil my sleep.”
“No. You’re too sanguine, on the contrary. I expect you began by defending Uncle William—what a disrespectful idea!—to Mrs. Treadle. The idea seems to stick with you in the laboratory. You go around smiling and helping a rather fussy eccentric at his precious monkey-business. That man is a mountain of mind and heaven itself doesn’t know what he plans to do.”
“Why do we stay here, then?”
Baxter bowed. “Thanks for the ‘we.’ We stay here because we don’t believe those little prickings of superstition very implicitly. Partly because we do. We stay here because we know that if anything amiss does take place, it would be a good idea to have some one around to sound the alarm besides Mrs. Treadle. Don’t we? We are the barrier between the helpless world and a potential danger. We are spies.”
“It doesn’t seem very real to me.”
“Be patient. It may become all too real.” Suddenly Baxter’s attitude changed. He stopped smiling and leaned across the table toward her. “May I do something unkind and something I have no right to do?”
“What?”
“Ask a question.”
“I won’t promise to answer.”
“Good enough. Tell me—if you will. Are you at all in love with Carpenter?”
Daryl gasped. The sound, unaccompanied by words, was sufficient for Baxter. He smiled again. “Good. I thought not. That makes things better and more difficult, because he is terribly in love with you.”
“Now,” she said, “I think it is you who are crazy.”
His answer confounded her. “I think we should give the A. & P. a try anyhow. You know, grocery stores depend on competition for quality. Unremitting patronage breeds mediocrity. Don’t you think so, Mrs. Treadle?” Then Daryl understood why he had changed the subject.
Carpenter in love with her! That night, lying in her bed, Daryl entertained a retinue of strange thoughts. First, she was overcome by loneliness. She awoke to her circumstances. At the same time she gained a small perspective on her position.
She had been born in an uncouth village in the West. Her father a doctor, her mother a school teacher. They had been ambitious for their child, but the best fruit those ambitions could bear was to send her through a distant High School and start her in Normal School afterward. First the father had died and then the mother. They had always been poor, always struggling. Daryl could not remember when a nickel had not had a definite monetary value. She could not remember when her mother had not been over-weary and her father drained to his last resource of energy.
The brightest spots of her life had been furnished by school, by books, by the radio and the motion pictures. Her mind was active and acquisitive. She was given no opportunity by life to become sentimental. Her generation was not sentimental—least of all the offspring of the people in her neighborhood.
Daryl had been matter-of-fact about her life. She had educated herself far beyond the mere memorized facts of the classroom. She had never intended to remain in Tree City. There had been no love for her there except from her parents—little companionship, constant work taking care of her mother and her home.
Her mother’s death, which she had expected for a long time, marked the beginning of her adventure. Yet she could not go into it as most girls of eighteen could go—subsidised by their families and reassured by the knowledge of a haven kept open in case of distress. School, dishwashing, dusting, nursing her invalid mother became for a little while the sordid minutia of settling a mortgaged estate. She called on her few friends. Tree City was no land of opportunity. She knew she must go while she could afford to go at all.
She had the letter to William Carpenter. She was determined not to use it except in case of dire necessity. She went to Chicago and was unfortunate in her search for employment. She persevered until her money was nearly all gone. Then she went to the home of her uncle, the gigantic man of mystery of whom her father had seldom made mention, of whom her mother’s description was baffling.
The experiences of this drab existence had given her sternness and courage greater than can be found in most girls of her age. Her intelligence had been sharpened rather than dulled by them. But it was to that life rather than to her nature that much of her behavior in the first weeks at Sinkak were attributable. She failed to return Baxter’s facetious banter in kind, not because her wits were too slow, but because no one had talked to her in that way before then. It was fresh, original and stimulating to her. Yet she did not feel that she should take part in it. By the same token she accepted the routine of the laboratory without demur. Women such as Mrs. Treadle were familiar in all their small-minded and tortuous aspects to her. So was buying at the store for the next day, so eating in the kitchen, so the empty evenings—which would have driven other girls to desperation.
Her father had taught her to drive a car when she was very young—before they had no car. Her knowledge of academic subjects, intensified by her reading, was considerable. She had been quiet and sober for so long that it scarcely occurred to her that by nature she might be something else. In contrast to her parents, her health was unfailing. Above all, she was shy. She was easily dominated—outwardly. Her thoughts, as they had always, remained her solace, her entertainment, her refuge. The thought that her beauty was capital had not entered her head, although she knew, as any one but an imbecile would know, that she was far from ugly.
With this sombre background, this old-world morality and new-world mentality, she had immediately fitted into Carpenter’s scheme of work. She regarded Baxter as a person beyond her true grasp—not from a feeling of inferiority, but because she considered herself a stranger in this place. She felt that his advances were superficial and largely polite—a sort of decoration he carried everywhere with him.
On this particular night, however, things took on different hues. Baxter had wanted to know if she loved Carpenter. Loved him! She dismissed the idea. But the fact that some one else had thought of it perplexed her. She loved no one. She was grateful to him. And Baxter had added that her denial made things better—and more difficult. Most girls in a similar situation would make every effort from the start to create a consciousness of their sex. Daryl was surprised that any such consciousness had developed.
She was equally puzzled by Baxter’s statement that Carpenter loved her. It seemed senseless, unfounded. It even startled her to consider that such a thing might be possible. That would ruin her position. She would have to leave. But she could not believe it. The idea was almost terrifying—certainly much more abhorrent than Baxter’s half-frivolous predictions of what would come out of Carpenter’s experiments.
Nothing more was said about it. The next day was like its predecessors. And the next. A week passed. Baxter began to work in the evening. Meals became hasty and silent. Once Mrs. Treadle took a day off and Daryl cooked and did the housework. Baxter made a joke about her roast. She replied with a criticism of the pajamas she had found on his bed when she made it. Purple and yellow. Carpenter stalked from the room. The week’s diversion ended there.
Baxter brought the rose to her on the first of April. She was standing on the back porch. He came through the door.
“I’ve got a present for you.”
“Present?”
He held out—nothing. “Like it?”
“It’s lovely. What is it—a puppy or a pin cushion?”
“Excellent,” he said. “A rose.” He moved his fingers and something touched her face. She put her hand on the spot. Again, something touched her hand. “Take it—it’s a rose.”
Then he put the stem between her fingers. “I’ve removed the thorns.”
Daryl understood. She felt along the flower until she reached the blossom. She smelled it and its fragrance was unimpeachable. She could not see it at all. “You’ve been making invisible roses?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“April Fool’s Day.”
She to
uched her cheek with the invisible bloom. “That’s all it’s good for.”
“True. No color. No visibility. A rose you can’t see at all is worth very little.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I.”
“What did you make it for?”
Baxter sighed. “It’s a long story. But a rose is much farther along the evolutionary scale than a fungus.”
She was silent for a moment. “Oh, I see. This represents progress.”
“A great deal.” He took the flower from her hand and tossed it into the yard. “You see—there’s the moral. It would take you hours to find it among those weeds now.”
“You could smell it.”
“So you could!” He stared into the fading sky. “I’ll remember that. Bloodhounds. I wonder if there are any around here.”
“Bloodhounds wouldn’t find a rose for you.”
“No. Other things.” Suddenly he put both hands on her shoulders. His dark eyes were steady and sincere. “Daryl, old kid, you’re pretty young to get into a thing like this. I’ve stuck to my guns mighty closely lately. And I will for some time. But remember this. If you ever have any trouble, one word will bring old Bromwell rushing from the wings. I might add that I’m nutty about you. Might. I wouldn’t be apt to at this stage. Well—”
With that he turned and went back to the kitchen. She stood stock still. She could feel her heart beating heavily, feel the places on her shoulders where his hands had rested—not lightly. Tears welled in her eyes for no evident reason. She walked out in the yard and groped aimlessly in the weeds for the rose.
The rhapsody of spring was lifting its mighty voice, the sun was bright, the sere and tattered field around the house had become green. Baxter whistled at his work and Carpenter’s scowl had no effect on him. Even Mrs. Treadle wore a less intolerant expression. The monotonous spell of winter was broken. In Sinkak automobiles skidded through the muddy roads. Carpenters banged and painters swished on the trellises and tracks in the amusement park.