"We'll be enchanted," Alicia said instantly. "When can we have them, please?"
"Now!" cried the doctor, with brightening eyes. "By jingo, I'll get 'em this minute, and plant 'em for you, too!"
And he did. He was on his knees, trowel in hand, shouting to Riedriech, who had come outside for a few minutes' happy arguing with his good friend the doctor, that the socialist argument boiled down amounts to about this—that one should do without boiled eggs for breakfast now, in order that the proletariat may have baked hen for dinner in the millennium; which is lunacy; anybody with a modicum of brains—
"Brains!" snorted Riedriech. "What is it you know about brains? No doctor knows what is on the inside of brains! You make tinkerings mit the inside plumbings, Gott bewahre! and cut up womens and cats and such-like poor little dumb beasts and says you, 'Now I know all about the brains of man.' It is right there where you are wrong, Comrade Geddes!"
"Habet!" said Comrade Geddes.
"Look you," said the old visionary, with sudden passion, "look you on the little bulb here, so dirty and ugly you hide him in the ground quick. So! But by and by comes up green shoots, and blossoms. So it is with the great thoughts of men, the deep race-thoughts, Comrade Geddes—seeds, bulbs, germs, all of them, in the ugly husks of the common people. Out of our muck and grime they come, the little green shoots which the fool will say is poison, maybe, but which the wise know and labor and make room for. I, Riedriech, and workers like me, we go into our graves nothing but husks. But it is out of the buried hearts of us comes green things growing; and then—die Blumen! die Blumen!" said the cabinet-maker, with a still, far-away look.
"And," he finished, with a sad smile, "it is our flowers that you put in vases of gold on your altars. And you say, 'Listen: Jesus the carpenter talks plain words to his fishermen friends.' And, 'Hush! Burns the plowman makes songs in the field!'"
The doctor looked up, and his eyes were very tender; his smile made me wonder. With a swift, friendly hand he patted the rougher hand of the other. And it was at this opportune moment that Mary Magdalen led around a corner of Hynds House no less personages than Mrs. Haile and Miss Martha Hopkins. Their eyes fell upon Doctor Richard Geddes. They looked at each other. They looked at Alicia and me. And I knew their thoughts: "Sirens, both of you!" said Miss Hopkins's eyes.
"How do you do, Doctor Geddes!" said both ladies, as demurely as cats. I should have felt like a boy caught stealing jam. He went right on planting bulbs.
"Hello, Martha. What's on the carpet now?" he greeted that lady, airily. "Writing another paper on 'The Ironic Note in Chivalry'? How about 'The Effect of the Pre-Raphaelites upon the Feeble-minded'? Or is it the 'Relation of the Child to Its Mother,' this time?"