“I thought he had something to do with Darwin and the missing link.”
She gazed at him pityingly from the heights of a vast superiority. “Darwin did some valuable preliminary work,” she instructed him; “although Wallace really guessed it all first. Now Mendel, Bateson, are the important names. They were busy with the beginnings; and, among the beginnings, plants are the most suggestive.” She indicated a small row of budding sweet peas. “Perhaps, in those flowers, the whole secret of the universe will be found; perhaps the mystery of our souls will be explained; isn't it thrilling! The secret of inheritance may sleep in those buds—if they are white it will prove... oh, a thousand things, and among them that father is the most wonderful scientist alive; it will explain heredity and control it, make a new kind of world possible, a world without the most terrible diseases. What church, what saint, what god, has really done that?” she demanded. “Stupid priggish figures bending out of their gold-plated heavens!”
Her enthusiasm communicated a thrill to him as he regarded the still, withdrawn mystery of the plants. For the first time he thought of them as alive, as he was alive; he imagined them returning his gaze, his interest, exchanging—critically, in their imperceptible, chaste tongue—their unimpassioned opinions of him. It was a disturbing possibility that the secret of his future, of life and death, might lurk in the flowers to unfold on those slender stems. He was oppressed by a feeling of a world crowded with invisible, living forms, of fields filled with billions of grassy inhabitants, of seas, mountains, made up of interlocking and contending lives; every breath, he felt, absorbed races of varied individuals. He thought, too, of people as plants, as roses—Oh, Eliza!—as nettles, rank weeds, crimson lilies. And, vaguely, this hurt him; something valuable, something sustaining, vanished from his unformulated, instinctive conception of life; the world of men, their aims, their courage, ideals, lost their peculiar beauty, their importance; the past, rising from the mold through those green tubes and vanishing into a future of dissolving gases, shrunk, stripped of its glamor, to an affair of little moment.
Outside, as he descended the lawn, the sun had the artificial glitter of an incandescent light; the trees waved their arms at him threateningly. Then, with a shrug of his normal young shoulders, he relinquished the entire conception; he forgot it. He recklessly permeated a universe of airy atoms with the smoke of a Dulcina. “That's a woolly delusion,” he pronounced.
That evening he burnished the car, and mounted the ladder to his room late. But the evening following, detained to perform a trivial task, found him seated upon the porch, enveloped in the fragrant clouds of Habana leaf.
XXXVIII
ANNOT, as now he mentally termed her, dressed in the inevitable yellow, was swinging a satin slipper on the point of her foot; her father was, if possible, more greyly withdrawn than before.
“To-night,” the biologist finally addressed his daughter, “your mother has been dead eighteen years.... She hated science; she said it had destroyed my heart. Impossible—a purely functionary pump. The illusions of emotions are cerebro-spinal reflexes, only that. She said that I cared more for science than—than herself.” He raised his head sharply, “I was forced to tell her the truth, in common honor: science first.... Tears are an automatic escapement to protect the vision. But women have no logic, little understanding; hopelessly romantic, a false quantity—romance, dangerous. I was away when she died ... Borneo, Aurignacian strata had been discovered, a distinct parallel with the Maurer jaw. Death is only a change of chemical activity,” he shot at Anthony in a voice not entirely steady, “the human entity a passing agglomeration, kinetic.... Love is a mechanical principle, categorically imperative,” his voice sank, became diffuse. “Absolute science, selfless.