The Damnation of Theron Ware · Part III · Chapter 21 (1/2)

XXI

Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of storefronts along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion of picket-fences enclosing domestic lawns, forced upon Theron’s attention the fact that he was nearing home. It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal. He was not in the least hungry; still less did he feel any desire just now to sit about in that library living-room of his. Why should he go home at all? There was no reason whatever⁠—save that Alice would be expecting him. Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason. Wives, with their limited grasp of the realities of life, were always expecting their husbands to do things which it turned out not to be feasible for them to do. The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his life in explaining to his mate why it had been necessary to disappoint or upset her little plans for his comings and goings. It was in the very nature of things that it should be so.

Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps, then halted irresolutely, and after a minute’s hesitation, entered the small temperance restaurant before which, as by intuition, he had paused. The elderly woman who placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls he ordered, was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure, yet none the less she smiled at him, and spoke almost familiarly⁠—“I suppose Mrs. Ware is at the seaside, and you are keeping bachelor’s hall?”

“Not quite that,” he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meagre and distasteful repast, to avoid any further conversation.

There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him when he had paid his ten cents and got out on the street again. There was something interesting in the thought of Alice at the seaside. Neither of them had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for granted the most extravagant landsman’s conception of its curative and invigorating powers. It was apparent to him that he was going to pay much greater attention to Alice’s happiness and well-being in the future than he had latterly done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb new piano. He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And this seaside notion⁠—why, that was best of all.

His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their beauty. The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in mind’s eye, and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather pallid cheeks. He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and revivified would she have become, by the time he went down to the depot to meet her on her return.

For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside. It sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm, alone with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books, and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated themselves humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon it, expanded to embrace the priest’s and the doctor’s libraries; the thoughts which he longed to be alone with involved close communion with their thoughts. It could not but prove a season of immense mental stimulation and ethical broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and artistic side as well; the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his revery, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.

He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar’s house. His walk had brought him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad main highway which yet took on all sorts of sylvan charms, to a commanding site on the hillside. Below, in the valley, lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in factory smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon the surface of a broad plain piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting an oddly incongruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of the wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground, stretched a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage, peeping through which tiled turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences of those who, though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west, nor sawed the lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from the profits of this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on the one side of the road, and the nigh, weather-stained board fence of the racecourse on the other, completed the jumble of primitive rusticity and urban complications characterizing the whole picture.

Dr. Ledsmar’s house, toward which Theron’s impulses had been secretly leading him ever since Celia’s parting remark about the rheumatism, was of that spacious and satisfying order of old-fashioned houses which men of leisure and means built for themselves while the early traditions of a sparse and contented homogeneous population were still strong in the Republic. There was a hospitable look about its wide veranda, its broad, low bulk, and its big, double front door, which did not fit at all with the sketch of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.

Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being admitted by a Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback when the door was opened by the doctor himself. His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial, but the sense of awkwardness followed him into his host’s inner room and rested heavily upon his opening speech.

“I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill,” he said, laying aside his hat.

“It’s nothing at all,” replied Ledsmar. “Merely a stiff shoulder that I wear from time to time in memory of my father. It ought to be quite gone by nightfall. It was good of you to come, all the same. Sit down if you can find a chair. As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here. That’s it⁠—throw those things on the floor.”

Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his feet, and sat down. Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about him. Bookcases, chairs, tables, the corners of the floor, were all buried deep under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened books. One could hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window, as the doctor stepped across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas about the value of Chinese servants.

“I must thank you, first of all, doctor,” he began, “for your kindness in coming when I was ill. ‘I was sick, and ye visited me.’ ”

“You mustn’t think of it that way,” said Ledsmar; “your friend came for me, and of course I went; and gladly too. There was nothing that I could do, or that anybody could do. Very interesting man, that friend of yours. And his wife, too⁠—both quite out of the common. I don’t know when I’ve seen two such really genuine people. I should like to have known more of them. Are they still here?”

“They went yesterday,” Theron replied. His earlier shyness had worn off, and he felt comfortably at his ease. “I don’t know,” he went on, “that the word ‘genuine’ is just what would have occurred to me to describe the Soulsbys. They are very interesting people, as you say⁠—most interesting⁠—and there was a time, I dare say, when I should have believed in their sincerity. But of course I saw them and their performance from the inside⁠—like one on the stage of a theatre, you know, instead of in the audience, and⁠—well, I understand things better than I used to.”

The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a suggestion of inquiry in his glance, and Theron continued: “I had several long talks with her; she told me very frankly the whole story of her life⁠—and it was decidedly queer, I can assure you! I may say to you⁠—you will understand what I mean⁠—that since my talk with you, and the books you lent me, I see many things differently. Indeed, when I think upon it sometimes my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me. I can use no word for my new state short of illumination.”

Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm, interrogatory scrutiny of his. He did not seem disposed to take up the great issue of illumination. “I suppose,” he said after a little, “no woman can come in contact with a priest for any length of time without telling him the ‘story of her life,’ as you call it. They all do it. The thing amounts to a law.”

The young minister’s veins responded with a pleasurable thrill to the use of the word “priest” in obvious allusion to himself. “Perhaps in fairness I ought to explain,” he said, “that in her case it was only done in the course of a long talk about myself. I might say that it was by way of kindly warning to me. She saw how I had become unsettled in many⁠—many of my former views⁠—and she was nervous lest this should lead me to⁠—to⁠—”

“To throw up the priesthood,” the doctor interposed upon his hesitation. “Yes, I know the tribe. Why, my dear sir, your entire profession would have perished from the memory of mankind, if it hadn’t been for women. It is a very curious subject. Lots of thinkers have dipped into it, but no one has gone resolutely in with a searchlight and exploited the whole thing. Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all the stages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying dreams of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much as heard in their waking hours; they pass through the lust for digging caves, building fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows and arrows⁠—all remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones, marbles, and so on at regular stated periods of the year which they instinctively know, just as they were played in the Bronze Age, and heaven only knows how much earlier. But the boy goes through all this, and leaves it behind him⁠—so completely that the grown man feels himself more a stranger among boys of his own place who are thinking and doing precisely the things he thought and did a few years before, than he would among Kurds or Eskimo. But the woman is totally different. She is infinitely more precocious as a girl. At an age when her slow brother is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period, she has flown way ahead to a kind of medieval stage, or dawn of medievalism, which is peculiarly her own. Having got there, she stays there; she dies there. The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare. He goes on, if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain in the dark ages, where she belongs. If he happens to be a fool, which is customary, he stops and hangs around in her vicinity.”

Theron smiled. “We priests,” he said, and paused again to enjoy the words⁠—“I suppose I oughtn’t to inquire too closely just where we belong in the procession.”

“We are considering the question impersonally,” said the doctor. “First of all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract women. They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. Even the cleverest of them are secretly afraid of omens, and respect auguries. Think of the broadest women you know. One of them will throw salt over her shoulder if she spills it. Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the bubbles in a spoon. Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of tea-grounds. They make the constituency to which an institution based on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally appeal. Secondly, there is the personality of the priest.”

“Yes,” assented Ware. There rose up before him, on the instant, the graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes.

“Women are not a metaphysical people. They do not easily follow abstractions. They want their dogmas and religious sentiments embodied in a man, just as they do their romantic fancies. Of course you Protestants, with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this than celibates do, but even with you there is a great deal in it. Why, the very institution of celibacy itself was forced upon the early Christian Church by the scandal of rich Roman ladies loading bishops and handsome priests with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying favor with women of wealth, and marrying them or wheedling their fortunes from them, debauched the whole priesthood. You should read your Jerome.”

“I will⁠—certainly,” said the listener, resolving to remember the name and refer it to the old bookseller.

“Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman’s attitude toward the priest survives. She desires to see him surrounded by flowerpots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like to curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh! It makes one sick!”

Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with a dry little laugh. “Come, let me show you round a bit,” he said. “My shoulder is easier walking than sitting.”

“Have you never written a book yourself?” asked Theron, getting to his feet.

“I have a thing on serpent-worship,” the scientist replied⁠—“written years ago.”

“I can’t tell you how I should enjoy reading it,” urged the other.

The doctor laughed again. “You’ll have to learn German, then, I’m afraid. It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits as a serious book. I haven’t a copy of the edition in English. That was all exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity, like Burton’s Arabian Nights. Come this way, and I will show you my laboratory.”

They moved out of the room, and through a passage, Ledsmar talking as he led the way. “I took up that subject, when I was at college, by a curious chance. I kept a young monkey in my rooms, which had been born in captivity. I brought home from a beer hall⁠—it was in Germany⁠—some pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. He jumped toward it, then screamed and ran back shuddering with fright. I couldn’t understand it at first. Then I saw that the curled pretzel, lying there on the floor, was very like a little coiled-up snake. The monkey had never seen a snake, but it was in his blood to be afraid of one. That incident changed my whole life for me. Up to that evening, I had intended to be a lawyer.”

Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point of the anecdote. He looked now, without much interest, at some dark little tanks containing thick water, a row of small glass cases with adders and other lesser reptiles inside, and a general collection of boxes, jars, and similar receptacles connected with the doctor’s pursuits. Further on was a smaller chamber, with a big empty furnace, and shelves bearing bottles and apparatus like a drugstore.

It was pleasanter in the conservatory⁠—a low, spacious structure with broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side of the roof. The plants were mostly orchids, he learned. He had read of them, but never seen any before. No doubt they were curious; but he discovered nothing to justify the great fuss made about them. The heat grew oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden. He paused under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. Everything seemed old-fashioned and natural and delightfully free from pretence in the big, overgrown field of flowers and shrubs.

Theron recalled with some surprise Celia’s indictment of the doctor as a man with no poetry in his soul. “You must be extremely fond of flowers,” he remarked.