by Philip Wylie
“It has taken long years to carry it to the point you have been privileged to observe. The inception of the idea was in my childhood. I used to think that if I were only invisible, I could work miracles. A day dream. When I delved into biochemistry, the notion persisted. And one day my dream and science met. That is, I thought suddenly that it might be done.
“The moment was dramatic. I was reading some material concerning belladonna—a drug derived from the deadly nightshade. Belladonna taken internally bleached the skin to a dead white. A different drug, acting more comprehensively—I thought—and behold! my quest began. Research was being made in the coal tar derivatives. I followed it for a variety of reasons. During the war the powerful bleaching effect of some of the derivatives was noted. I made a careful study of dichloramine-T and products made from it. I had first an objective, next a clue. The process has been carried now to invertebrates.
“I am still some distance from the achievement of my goal. You have made it possible for me to hurry. And now, suddenly, I find that you are sharing the world’s doubt, the world’s unfriendliness toward me. I perceive your worry, your secrecy, your growing hostility. My dream is that of a prophet—my treatment by my fellows the dishonor that the prophet has always endured.”
He stood up. “I will implore no man to bear with me. I have given you my complete confidence in return for your promise to keep it inviolate. I shall not press you to remain with me. It would be of inestimable assistance to have you do so.” He smiled at them softly, almost sadly. “With that thought, I wish to leave you.”
Baxter gazed after him as he disappeared through the trees. Daryl sat silently on the ground, with a feeling of sorrow and pity which was closely linked to one of shame.
Baxter’s face was bemused. There was sympathy in his eyes, yet his mouth was drawn taut with speculation. The girl spoke to him. “I didn’t know he was like that.”
“Twelve per cent of him is like that.”
“You mean—you think he was acting—kidding us?”
“No. Not exactly. I mean that he put his best foot forward. He told us what he thinks he is doing—what he pretends he is doing. He won’t admit even to himself his real purposes.”
“I believe you’re unkind.”
The young man shrugged. “I do myself. I’m unkind to twelve per cent of Carpenter. I presume you’re not going to defect—after this protracted eloquence?”
“No. I think I’ll stay. I think we both were hysterical. We judged him too quickly.” Then, in an innocent denial of the portent of her words she added, “Even you say that he will never carry the experiment to its end.”
Baxter chuckled. “It’s a beautiful convenience to have a feminine mind. You’re always right—willy-nilly.”
Daryl was resentful. “And a masculine mind is nothing but a map of suspicions.”
“Suspicions invariably justified.”
“Apple-sauce!”
And with that tart rejoinder they began a lover’s quarrel which made them very unhappy for eleven minutes and six seconds and was ameliorated after that time only by the strong embrace of his brown young arms and the touch of his hungry, febrile lips.
She rose. “Go ahead. Ameliorate.”
Baxter produced a cigarette. “A taunt, eh?” His eyes were merry.
She frowned. “I presume you are going to pack and leave me in this diabolical place.”
“With that lovely pet.”
“I wish he had picked on something else.”
“There’s nerve for you. Most ladies would be touched by the screaming meemies by the mere thought of Standard Oil.”
“Standard Oil?”
“We have to name it, don’t we?”
“Name what?”
“Name the octopus. I call it Standard Oil. That’s what Standard Oil always is in the political cartoons.”
Daryl stared at him. “I never heard of any one like you. Here we sit, with the most grotesque things going on—”
“A minute ago you claimed it was all sweetness and light.”
In fairness to him she should have laughed. He was mocking her, but beneath his mocking there was a deliberate effort to combat Carpenter’s soothing words—an effort necessary to her conscious mind even while she distrusted Carpenter and his work subconsciously. Daryl was not fickle. She stood on the shifting soil of a dozen quandaries. Carpenter’s work affected her less, perhaps, than Baxter. At one instant he petted her with an intimacy more than brotherly. At another he laughed at her. He refused to trust Carpenter and yet he had worked steadily for him. What she wanted most to know was his future disposal of himself—yet he had turned aside her single hint. She would not have admitted then that it was a hint.
She regarded him with what she intended to be baleful eyes. Instead, they were slightly perplexed eyes, turbulent eyes. “I’m going back to the house.”
“Exactly. So am I.”
“Really?”
“Yes. To stay.”
“Well!”
“I wouldn’t leave that bird for the sum of my personal fortune plus all I could borrow.”
“How faithful you are.” She had not moved. “I’m going.”
Baxter dropped a cigarette on the ground. He took two steps which brought him directly in front of her. For an instant they looked at each other. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat.
“Some day,” he said, “I’ll make a speech for you, Daryl. That old familiar speech which begins with a little rambling material about the moon and the stars, develops it into a nice simile about your eyes, touches on early Greece, on the fragrant hyacinths, on a few of the immortal lines of the major poets and dashes along through Helen and Paris—or was it Agamemnon—through Cleo and Mark Antony to you and me. I would like to say right here that I will be pretty good at that theme. I’ll try to do it in a gondola. Credit me with it now.
“I’m a fellow—” he seemed to try to remember what sort he was—“I’m a fellow who has been equipped by the higher institutions of learning with what Mrs. Malaprop called a nice derangement of epitaphs. Some day I’ll brandish them for you. But meanwhile I would like to give you an excerpt from this brief.”
“Am I supposed to stand here?”
“No. We are technically supposed to sit.” They sat. “We go on. My life has been spent in a series of extra-normal bargains which reflect credit only upon my bump of disapproval of the common herd and its way of living. I came here rather faint heartedly. And when I jumped the Sinkak Express I was, I may say, stagnant. Up you came. My blood pressure rose at once. I liked you. I am not the hearth variety of male. No rag rugs, bed room slippers, Morris chairs, bickers with the up stairs maid, rubbers for rainy weather, little grey home and cosy wife policy has ever drawn me toward matrimony. Shall I go on, by the way?”
“Yes,” she said.
He moved close to her. “The remainder of the message is not susceptible to verbal expression.”
Some fifteen minutes later she said, “I like you when you talk. I like you better when you don’t.”
“Ambiguous.”
“Love, then.”
Baxter smiled. “Right. Love. Why the devil you should love me I don’t know. Trite, perhaps?”
“It’s good. Gives me a chance to tell you.”
“Splendid. I adore flattery. First?”
“You’re good looking.”
“Comes from the Carsons. My mother’s side.”
“And I like the way you talked to me when we met.”
“Those loquacious Carsons again!”
“And—you seemed to enjoy living so much.”
“I was. At the time—immensely.”
“That’s flattering me.”
“Not unduly.”
There was another interval. Daryl ended it by saying, “I suppose we should go and tell Carpenter. He’s the nearest thing to a relative I have.”
“Daryl.”
His tone had changed. She looked at him quickly. “Y
es?”
“Let’s not tell him.”
“Why—if you say not——”
“Remember my once intimating that he had a yen for you?”
“The most foolish thing you ever did.”
Baxter shook his head. “On the contrary. When you are looking at him—he is careful. But when he is watching you—I occasionally get a glimpse of things in his mind that you aren’t allowed to see.”
“But he has his work. Why in the world should he pay attention to me? Especially if he is going to become invisible. No girl would look twice at an invisible beau.” She laughed.
“I don’t think you understand Carpenter. His camouflage is good. It fools him, even, I think. But your coming to his house probably added an element to his life that had never been there before. I doubt if he has been in love ever. If he has, he was unquestionably rejected as soon as he let his emotions show. But he probably felt that he had a claim upon you. You were always available—always near. You were grateful. And he resented me from the day I came. He as much as told me that I was not to have anything to do with you.”
“He did!”
“He tried to gloss it over immediately. But he would never have said what he did say unless he had had a personal interest in you.”
“Maybe that was only to protect me. He didn’t know you.”
Baxter shook his head. “When you know a thing like that—you know it absolutely.”
“I can’t do much about it,” she said slowly. “I treated him like my uncle. He has always acted as if I was his niece—or even as if I was just his secretary.”
“He has more control over himself than most men. To a certain point. But do you realize how jealous he is of me? The fact that he left us here a little while ago is more alarming than it is negative. You and I aren’t brother and sister, you know.”
Her thoughts veered from the topic. “I was afraid—until just now—that you were always going to take a brotherly attitude toward me, though.”
“A flare-up of minxishness.” He kissed her. “The ends to which that man will go—to be serious again—are beyond belief. We have a pretty good sample of them on hand at the moment. But I’d like you to be desperately in earnest for a moment and to think what might happen if Carpenter began to covet you—the way he covets other things.”
“Do you think I’d let him?”
“It doesn’t rest with you.” Baxter tossed a fragment of the grass-split ledge into the river. “I suppose that the wisest thing you and I could do would be to walk right now to Sinkak, take a train to New York, and get married.”
“I won’t do it.”
He laughed uproariously. “No. You won’t. We won’t. Why? Because we’re two natural born fools. Because we’re bound to sit around here with a God-given audacity which must confound even the Giver and wait to see what happens. And that is precisely why I was moved to fall passionately in love with you. Understand it if you will. And because the air is thick with signs and portents that excite us, we sit here on the bank of this decidedly mediocre river making intermittent love and alternating it with speculation, like a couple of neurotics, instead of rushing into Lohengrin and a flat.”
“No. It’s because of convention. A girl can’t see a nice young man for a few weeks, kiss him once in broad daylight, and start ordering his groceries on the same day. We’re victims of circumstance.”
“Unadulterated blatherskite. A man is never a victim of anything except disease or physical accident. Your elegant blonde head is a-twitter with rationalizations for your reasons for sticking around here. I trust I have been one. And mine—although not blonde—is full of wondering. I wonder, for example, what will happen now that Carpenter has commenced taking his unpleasant brew.”
“Taking it!”
“Internally. In small doses. Behind that screen of his. Every few hours. For two or three days.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I haven’t had a chance.”
Daryl was shocked. “That means——”
The man at her side was suddenly grim. “That means, my dear, a whole lot. It means that all our friend and employer has said about the long time of experimentation lying ahead is subject to great suspicion. It means that his plans are farther along than he would have us believe. I have a hunch that you are included in his plans and I have a hunch that I am.”
“But——”
“Suppose we amble up to that uncanny house at a moderate pace and see what’s afoot?”
“Am I supposed to go without being kissed?”
“Verily, you are not. Not by—by a mile.”
The return of Daryl and Baxter to the one-time farm house marked the beginning of the appalling events which followed immediately in rapid succession. Up to the hour of that return the elements conspiring to form those events had been hypothecated by them. The fungus had set their imaginations whirling. The rose had acted as an articulation of nebulous ideas, thrust vividly into a period of doldrums and perpetual routine. The octopus had contributed its moment of drama. Above all those matters was the person of Carpenter himself. Each item in the ascending scale of abnormalities was caused if not presented directly by him. He towered above them. His voice rolled over them. He kept Daryl half hypnotized and he fascinated Baxter. The swift changing of his moods, the days of silent preoccupation which generally characterized him, and the often bitter, sometimes saddened retrospection which he turned on his uneasy past gave a bizarre cast to their days.
Neither the girl nor the young scientist and adventurer were taken from ordinary molds. They represented no common type from their generation. He combined several types: the artistic urbanity of the connoisseur, the keen mind of the laboratory investigator, the cold courage of the sportsman, were part of him. Beyond that he was personable, whimsical, an intense worker who nevertheless gave the appearance of indolence, and one who fell easily into reverie. Dangers and fears that would be toxic to ordinary men acted as mild stimulants upon him. That he did a thing lightly was no indication of the importance he attributed to it.
Daryl understood him quickly. She had been taught a modesty that did not allow self-admissions; her fondness for him had been something she could not assert even in her most inward consciousness until he announced a reciprocation. After that it was necessary to say little more. The latter condition was more typical of their era: they loved each other. Very well; the world would not topple and the sky would not turn rose; some day they would probably get married—as every one else did—and that was that. Why should they say more?
The world was very little different to them as they approached the Mortland place. The paths they would follow had been united; they were undoubtedly happier than, perhaps, they had expected ever to be. They saw no reason for fatuity in that. Happiness was a thing to be consummated not in any hour but in a long life. Much lay between them and that future—much that they realized could not yet be known.
Carpenter was waiting for them in the kitchen. Humanities had oozed from him; he was again taciturn. It became evident presently that he had been at some pains to persuade Mrs. Treadle to remain in the house; Baxter’s bleeding arm had upset her to the point of resignation of her post. He had raised her salary—his usual method of curbing her prejudices—and she had grudgingly prepared the noon meal. It was also obvious to them that the scientist had waited impatiently for their return from the river’s edge. He had not anticipated so long a delay.
When they sat down to eat he commenced a conversation—a thing he did rarely at mealtime.
“Now that you’re back, there is one thing more I would like to add to what I have already said.”
Baxter, who had been staring at him since their arrival in the house, answered significantly, “I think I’ve already prognosticated what you’re going to say.”
Carpenter frowned. “I doubt it.”
His assistant raised his eyebrows. “Suppose I mentioned that there was a full length mirror in the labora
tory between my bench and yours and that in the last day or two the end of the screen has been a few inches away from the wall.”
Into Carpenter’s eyes came a curious expression. He bent over the table and glowered at Baxter. “You’ve watched me, eh?”
“Not watched. Occasionally I couldn’t avoid noticing the reflection of your back. It is broad, you know.”
“And—” the booming voice was full of menacing interrogation.
“Why—I saw that you were sampling your compound.”
“And!” Louder now.
“One expects results.” Baxter stirred his coffee and returned the stare with innocent eyes.
“Ah!” Carpenter faced his foster niece. “Did he tell you that?”
“He said something about it.” Her words were calm defiance. The scientist was checked, puzzled by them. The workings of his mind were visible on his face. If she defied him, it meant that she had found new strength. New strength meant an allegiance with Baxter. And such an allegiance could scarcely be Platonic.
Instead of answering her he attacked his food with ferocity. A few minutes sufficed to empty his plate. The other two glanced covertly at each other, but their eyes were unreadable. His polemic moods were familiar. This fresh indignation was more subtle, more profound than any they had witnessed. The reconciliation he had attempted was already proving futile.
He waited for Baxter to finish. Then he said, Back to work.”
Daryl watched with anxiety as they went into the laboratory together. The metal door slammed. She began her afternoon wait which, on this afternoon, was stretched into an infinity. Behind that heavy portal Carpenter and Baxter had their last conference as employer and employee.
Instead of going to work Carpenter leaned against the bench where his assistant usually worked.