The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 1

HERE is just one thing, Waggles, before you go.”

“Yes, sir,” Waggles replied meekly.

“I am overlooking this—er—this indiscretion on your part, though the fact remains that it was an indiscretion. Undergraduates of this college have been distinctly forbidden to study astronomy from the top of the tower with young ladies. But that matter we shall now regard as a closed issue. The question I wish to put to you is something more personal, something more vital.”

Waggles shifted uncomfortably. He stared furtively at the green baize table littered with books and papers, at the figurine of Astarte side by side with a bronze statuette of a many-breasted Goddess of Ephesus, at the shining round lenses of the dean's eyeglasses, which threw back the light from the green-globed reading lamp.

“Waggles,” continued the Dean of Amboro, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair and leaning his finger tips meditatively together, “what is love?”

“I beg pardon, sir?” gasped Waggles, recoiling visibly.

“That is a plain question put in plain words: Just what does this word 'love' imply to you?”

Waggles glanced toward the door.

“I really don't know, sir!”

“But aren't you in love?”

Waggles' color deepened. He remained silent, although a distinct tendency to edge toward the door did not escape the eyes of the Dean of Amboro.

“Then if you have experienced this most primary of all the instincts, surely you have some ideas about it. And surely, as a man of intelligence—of intelligence considerably above that of the ordinary Amboro undergraduate—you are able to articulate those ideas.”

Waggles, shifting from one foot to the other, felt that something was expected of him.

“But it's—it's not a simple thing,” he inspiredly protested.

“With that point, Waggles, you stand on perfectly sound ground. Herbert Spencer, in fact, has even ventured to anticipate you there. Clustering about the physical feeling constituting its nucleus are subsidiary feelings, such as those awakened by beauty of face and figure and those grounded on human: attachment, and reverence and self-esteem, together with love of appreciation, of sympathy, of freedom, even of property itself. And all these, under excitation, tend both to interact and unite into that immense aggregation which we so loosely designate as 'romantic love.'”

“Yes, sir,” acknowledged the non-committal Waggles.

“But the point is,” pursued the man of science behind the green baize table, “just what do we mean by romantic love?”

Waggles, feeling the searching lenses on him like headlights, remained uncomfortably silent.

“What, Waggles, is your opinion on that?” prompted the man of science.

“That's something I've—I've never gone into,” was Waggles' altogether inadequate reply.

“Precisely,” said the Dean of Amboro, with dolorous triumph. “And it's something that nobody else seems to want to go into. It's something that science itself has neglected, although Spencer acknowledges that perhaps, on the whole, this phenomenon of falling in love is the most interesting episode in the whole career of the ordinary man and woman. And if men decline to go into the matter, as you put it, how are we ever going to reach the truth about it?”

This question seemed to nonplus the discomfited Waggles.

“What's the good of trying to find out the truth about it?” he finally inquired.

“That question, Waggles, is not consistent with the spirit of science. Otherwise, one might ask what's the good of trying to find out the truth about anything!”

The only truth seeming to trouble Waggles at the moment was that a mild and moonlit night of early summer lay beyond those musty deanery walls, and that from the shadowy gloom of the huge maples just south of the tennis courts he could hear the broken sound of music and laughing voices. And not all of those voices, seeing it was commencement week, were the voices of men.

“So what, Waggles, are we going to do about it?” the older man asked, with the same weary tolerance that a nurse might use toward an incorrigibly fretful child.

Waggles, resenting that note of intellectual condescension, looked his tormentor squarely between the eyes.

“Why not ask the women something about it?” he demanded, backing out of the door as he spoke. This movement gave his question a not undesired touch of the valedictory.

The spectacled psychologist at the far side of the reading lamp sighed more heavily than before. For Waggles had hit on the one stumblingblock [sic] in the path of all ethnographic success. You simply couldn't ask women about such things. Questionnaires on that theme, Macraven had found, were only too sadly impossible.

With still another sigh, he got up from his chair and went to the window. Beyond the shadowy maples, he could hear the lilt and throb of guitars, and the tinkle of mandolins, and rising above the music, now and then, the sound of light and youthful voices. And some of those voices were the voices of young women.

It was the old, the never-ending game. It made Macraven's thoughts go back to his own youth, to other nights of quiet moonlight, when he had leaned from a window in Oxford and heard much the same music and, across the level Magdalen lawns, had listened to much the same light and happy voices. And still later, in Heidelberg, he had often enough looked out on the same moonlight, on the same odorous beauty of earth and air, on the same unphilosophizing call of youth to youth. And there, too, at times he had been vaguely depressed by the sound of distant laughter and music.

In some way he had always seemed above it, barred off and detached from it. Instead of bending over mandolins, he had bent over microscope slides. And instead of living, he had been busy writing about life. Instead of climbing tower stairs with impressionable young women, after the manner of the redoubtable Waggles, he had struggled to make the name Amboro stand for something in the world of anthropology. But as he leaned out over the narrow stone sill, gazing across the deanery garden, already fragrant with its wealth of hyacinths, and out across the soft green of the campus, pallid in the flat moonlight, and up to the great gray tower that rose so sentinellike above the huddled college roofs, he felt a wayward sense of isolation creeping over him. He was no longer a young man. He was already entered, well entered, upon what his fellow worker in science had called “the plateau of life.” Something had faded and passed away, he scarcely knew what.

Yet it was only in fleeting and abstracted moments like this, he knew, that those years of effort crept back to him in any way touched with regret. That lost youth, he tried to tell him- self, had not been altogether a youth of unhappiness. Each season had known its accomplishment; each year had marked an advance. He had done what he had set out to do; Amboro had indeed been put on the map of anthropology, and behind him, under the green-shaded light on his sadly littered study table, lay the last pages of the third and final volume of his “Anatomy of Love.”

It was, in a way, his life work, or one phase of his life work—and it was finished. The last authority had been consulted, the last reference had been verified. There would be only the proof reading, and that would not begin until the early autumn. No tinkle of guitars, he felt, could ever carry to listening ears music more dulcet than that which had arisen from the quiet scratching of his gold-handled fountain pen as he had slowly written “Finis” at the foot of his last page. His college year, with all its avocational drudgery, was over. His work was done. And he was tired.

He turned back to the tower again, vague and blue above him in the soft moonlight. It had always stood there, a discreet and reticent friend to his midnight questionings, always grim and resolute and purposeful, always aloof, unaltering, silent in its aspiration, alone in its bald and unbending strength.

He shut the small diamond-paned windows sharply. Then he drew the curtains and turned a little wearily to his study table.

He had been working too hard, he told himself, as he pushed back the litter of papers before him. He had been living too long on the north side of life. The only tower he had watched had been that cloistral tower of granite. It was a tangible tower, and an enduring one, cold to the touch, somber to the eye. But beyond it, he had always indeterminately felt, there was some far-off sister tower, some frailer thing of softly fashioned ivory, the fragile abode of idleness and dreams, the pinnacle of poetry and longing. That was the tower his overstudious years had left untrodden; and that was the tower he most needed now, he told himself, before it was too late.

His line of thought was interrupted by a sudden knock on the door, and his listlessly authoritative “Come” was answered by the unlooked-for appearance of Taussig, the associate professor of philosophy.

The difference in the two men was marked. The associate professor of philosophy was short and stout. The eyes that shone out from under the shadows of his beetling brows were small, restless, almost furtive in their quickness of movement, had it not been for the settled good nature about the lines of the mouth. His vest was unbuttoned, and his dress, on the whole, tended toward untidiness, being redolent, as always, of strong tobacco.

John Herrin Macraven, on the other hand, was exceptionally tall. His shoulders were marked by that slight roundness—which is sometimes known as the scholar's stoop. His face was clean shaven, firm, and clear cut in outline, but given the appearance of being unusually long and ascetic by the high, smooth forehead. The nose, however, was straight and well chiseled, with the large nostril of physical strength, latent or neglected. The marked droop of the mouth corners, which gave the face its occasional aspect of grimness, might be taken as a conscious and deliberate assumption of the authoritative attitude, so kindly were the wide-set hazel eyes, so pensive their abstracted gaze.

“How's love?” asked Taussig, as he dropped into a wide-armed rattan chair. The associate professor of philosophy, Macraven remembered, always asked that question, and Macraven himself always winced at it. There were times, indeed, when he strongly suspected that it was prompted by some possible incongruity between his personality and the paths of his research work.

“With me, it's at last a closed issue,” announced the man at the desk.

“On paper?” amended Taussig. There was still a touch of mockery in his tones.

“On paper,” solemnly conceded Macraven. “Excepting the fact, of course, that my next four years must go to a study of sexual selection.”

Taussig, nursing his pipe bowl, nodded comprehendingly.

“And you feel rather lost, I dare say, with the big job off your hands?”

“Yes, I feel rather lost,” acknowledged Macraven.

“You need a rest!” said Taussig judicially.

“I'm going to take one. Doctor Shotwell has asked me up to his place at Cedar Hills. I'm off, the first of the week.”

“But I saw somewhere that Shotwell was starting for London, to read that paper of his on 'Reconstructive An thropogeny?'”

“Precisely; and I've engaged to look after his place while he's away!”

Taussig smoked in silence for a moment or two.

“He has a daughter, if I remember correctly?” said the man in the armchair.

“Yes,” answered Macraven. “A mere child.” His last memory of Shotwell's offspring was that of an impish and spider-legged youngster who had once upset a bottle of ink over his fourth chapter of “The Mating of Mammals.”

“Hm! Do you know how old a child?” asked Taussig.

Macraven did not.

“Ah, that brings me back to young Sewell,” said Taussig, elliptically. “It's young Richard Ford Sewell of the fourth year. He's asked me to help him out of that Memorial Hall scrape with Ramsdell.”

“But why should we make an exception of young Sewell's case?” said the Dean of Amboro, with a sudden resumption of the academic mien.

“He tells me,” confessed Taussig, “that he hopes to be married pretty soon.”

“Poor devil!” said Macraven.

His companion smiled, understandingly. Macraven's most widely read book, through what always seemed to its author some inscrutable caprice of public taste, has been his “Woman Retrogressive.” From the purely scientific side, it had done little more, of course, than provide a new and startling viewpoint for the world of psychology. But it had marked its creator as a misogynist of uncompromising and self-confessed extremes.

“Sewell isn't a bad sort,” said Taussig.

“But what can I do?” Macraven.

“It occurred to me that you might have Miss Appleby speak to her uncle about it.” Taussig smiled as he watched the misogynist. “You see, you have so much more influence with her than the rest of us have.”

The ridiculousness of such an appeal was too much for Macraven's overtaxed nerves.

“I've told Dodson, my man, to admit Miss Anne Appleby to these rooms on no consideration!” he cried.

“But she goes everywhere in Amboro! You can't quarrel with a woman who claims no less than thirteen blood and marriage relationships on the teaching staff alone. And besides all that, she's your own cousin!”

“Pardon me—my stepsister's husband's second cousin!”

“But surely, when she looked after you—I mean brought you that black currant jam last winter, when you had influenza”

“Again pardon me—Miss Appleby brought that jam against my obvious and expressed desires. Not only that, but when I was quite weak—not altogether myself, I mean—she dictatorily insisted that I should eat it.”

“It was remarkably good jam!” said Taussig reminiscently.

The professor of anthropology closed his open inkwell with a tart suddenness that seemed to imply that life could know no greater joy and relief than imprisoning within that same inkwell both Anne Appleby and her jam, for all time.

“Well,” said Taussig, rising, “I merely wanted to mention the fact that Miss Appleby would call herself, to-morrow, to talk it over with you.”

“Then I shan't see her!” cried Macraven.

“She'll argue you out of that,” said Taussig, from the doorway, with a wag of his head. “She always does!”