The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 8

John Herrin Macraven came down to breakfast in his new flannels. As he had -feared, it was an extremely ill-fitting suit, much too loose in the shoulders and much too long in the legs. His new neckties, too—he had sent for colored ones—were of far too vivid and flaming a crimson to blend readily with his scholastic sobriety of taste. But Sybil, before whom, with intent and malice aforethought, he suddenly presented himself, clasped her hands in open and unmistakable delight.

“And isn't it funny?” she said, tucking away a letter she had been reading, “Anne says she has just given up wearing mourning herself.”

The young professor tried to imagine Anne in anything but black. It was as hard as trying to imagine Sybil in anything but pink and white and blue. Then he felt the large white pearl buttons on his coat and adjusted his gayly tinted tie. After all, there was something rejuvenating in this marching with the young.

“And Anne will be here in two days more!” said Sybil thoughtfully, across the coffee cups.

Five days had already slipped past, and Macraven demanded of an unanswering heaven and earth just where they had gone. One morning, he knew, they had walked to the woods, for the veranda-box ferns. Once they had gathered wild strawberries along the river bank, and twice they had gone fishing. There had, too, been one long day of steady rain, through which the professor had read in the silent old crimson-curtained library. He had almost welcomed that day indoors, but after half an hour with her book, Sybil had called it stupid, and declared that reading made her sleepy. Then she had yawned and gone to the window, and yawned again, and turned still again toward the man reading in the faded armchair. And the young professor had been so deep in his volume that she had left him there alone, for an hour or mtre, before he had discovered the fact. After all, she was so young and light and capricious! He could not expect her to be like—well, like Anne, for instance. He would have been able to talk things over with Anne, point by point; she had the knack of giving him ideas. But Anne, of course, was solid prose. She did not fit in with a holiday mood. She did not throb and pulse with the light meter of poetry, as did Sybil.

To-day, he remembered, he was to gather pond lilies with Sybil.

To gather pond lilies! And far off in the world vast issues were impending, and great problems were solving, and feverish hands were clutching at some new torch of truth, while he would be paddling about in a green rowboat. He smiled a little at the Arcadian simplicity of the thought. Yet why should gathering pond lilies not be as important as the building of empires or the elucidation of a new element! He was not so narrow and musty as he had been, he told himself, and open air and exercise and freedom from worry and light and engaging company—were these not all excellent stimuli?

It was a warm and brooding day of early summer. The sky was a high- arched dome of pulsating turquoise. The trees were full-leaved and motionless. The blossom was maturing into the young fruit; the mother wing fluttering about the crowded nest. A touch of maturity after adolescence, a feeling in all nature for the more sober prose after the wilder vernal poetry, seemed to fill the warming earth.

A vague sense of something impending and climactic took possession of the young professor of anthropology as he walked beside the silent and brooding Sybil down through the orchard and the second meadow to the river where the boat was moored. It was Nature asking no longer mere dream and rhapsody, but demanding achievement and surrender. And it. tended, in some way, to make the young scholar rather silent, and secretly uncomfortable.

“What makes you so solemn looking?” demanded Sybil.

“I was thinking how lovely you look in that white muslin dress,” he equivocated airily. He felt that he had achieved a highly creditable stroke, for he was delivered of the open compliment without even a blush.

But his triumph was short-lived.

“That sounds mushy, and just, like Dickie!” declared Sybil, with a little lip curl of disdain, resenting some tacit note of condescension in his tone. “And besides; it's not muslin; it's dimity.”

“And who is Dickie?” demanded her companion, raising his voice a little mockingly on the diminutive, feeling something familiar in the sound of the name. He felt that he would strongly dislike this young gentleman of the diminutive name.

“Oh, you'll find out!” temporized Sybil. She walked on with knitted brows for a few moments; then she stopped and placed her hand on the other's arm. “You won't mind if I tell you something?” she began hesitatingly. “It's—it's something you must always keep a secret.” '

The young professor promised, and waited expectantly.

“Dickie is Richard—Richard Ford Sewell! I've coaxed Anne to bring him up with her for a couple of weeks. It's so poky, you know!”

Richard Ford Sewell, fhe philanderer, the idler, the drone of Amboro!

“Anne thought it would be nice,” murmured the humble Sybil.

“But why?” demanded the other.

“Why, for company!”

“But company for whom—for Anne, do you mean?” He hated mysteries, and he was beginning to get impatient over it all.

Sybil swallowed hard, as if struggling to keep back some untimely flood either of tears or laughter, he could not tell which.

“Yes, for Anne,” she answered.

“Oh,” he said, with a look of relief.

It was his turn to walk on with knitted brows. He was recalling numerous matters pertaining to Master Richard Ford Sewell of Amboro.

“But look here!” he broke out suddenly. “I don't think this young Sewell is the sort of chap for Anne to be going about with! As I remember him, he's a cheeky”

“He is,” agreed Sybil. “The cheekiest alive!”

“Do you mean he's ever cheeky to—to you?” demanded her guardian.

“Always!” declared Sybil.

Something in her tone seemed to imply that this “cheek” was not so objectionable as one might imagine. The young professor even stopped to picture a scene in which he himself might be winningly impudent. His imagination, browsing over the wide range of possibilities, led him far astray, and Sybil, once cleared of her confession, made it a point that his thoughts should not return to that earlier topic.

“That's why I like you so much,” she said, with a sudden deeper note of seriousness, and he noticed, for the first time, that her hand was resting on his arm, confidently. “I like you because I know you—you would never try to be cheeky.”

He fidgeted a little, not knowing whether to be glad or miserable.

“I was afraid you thought I was, a bit,” he murmured.

“Oh, never!' she assured him, trustfully picking a thread from the lapel of his coat. The light fingers, still resting on his arm, seemed to send a genial warmth from his elbow up through all his six feet of sentinel guardianship.

“That's why I've always believed in bashful men,” she went on. “You know you're fearfully bashful!”

“Oh, I say!” he demurred contentedly.

“But I mean it,” she continued. “Anne says so, too. I remember her saying that when a grown man is bashful, it shows he's still a boy at heart. Who ever heard of a criminal blushing, or a roué stammering, she used to ask. The man who.is bashful is still sensitive, still has all the finer feelings. He can't be old and worn out and tired of it all, And women always like a man who's new at things—they like to lead and teach him, you know; and they can do it without being afraid, with the really bashful man. For there's always hope for the man who blushes!”

She was not such a child, after all, this wisp of worldly-wise womanhood in her dimity gown. Timeless intuitions, he felt, echoed out of her careless laughter; the wisdom of the ages slept entombed in her young bosom. He had been too unguarded and given to impulse with her. She had seemed so natural and ingenuous, he had thought that he had been merely responding to candor with candor.

“But we've had enough of all this solemn talking,” she went on. “And just above the bend of the river, there, is father's row of black Tartarian cherries. I saw Terence making a scarecrow yesterday to keep the robins away, so that must mean they're fit to eat!”

She clapped her hands with delight, under the widespread cherry boughs, as she peered upward and saw the purplish-black glow of the ripened fruit.

“I love them!” she cried, ecstatically, and he saw, with startled eyes, that she was no longer the woman, but a child again. “Don't you?”

He acknowledged that he did.

“We'll have to climb for 'em!” she said, throwing off her light coat and flinging back her loosened hair.

“Not for me, thank you!” said the professor, with great dignity. This sort of thing must have its limits, painful as it might be to point them out to her.

“Pooh!” said Sybil, unperturbed. “You take that tree, and I'll take this one!”.

“I'd prefer not,” said the other, backing away.

“Don't be a poke!” said Sybil. “I've done this since I was ten years old! And if you've never eaten cherries off the tree, you don't know what living is.”

The young professor still backed away, doggedly, for already she was clambering up among the lower branches of a near-by tree. He could hear her movements amid the screening foliage. Then he became aware that she was shooting cherry pits at him.

He waited patiently, indignantly, wrathfully, but still she ate. She threw him a handful of the ripest and blackest and biggest on the tree, but he refused to touch them. He would have taken his departure in high dudgeon, only, before he was aware of it, she had clambered down through the thick leafage, swung for a moment from a lower bough that drooped with her weight, and then dropped lightly to the ground.

Her hair was tumbled and blown across her face, her mouth was stained with cherry juice, and an audacious and reckless light shone from her eyes.

“Shocked?” she asked, tying back her hair.

He did not answer.

His sternness seemed to frighten her. That had been his intention. Still agam, a change swept across her face. She came over to him, slowly, penitently, and once more he saw in her not the child, but the woman, intuitive, adroit, embattled, a mysterious something to be feared and opposed and combated. Yet what was there to be afraid of, he asked himself—with only leaves and silence, sunlight and water, and a hoydenish tomboy of a girl, near him?

“You're not angry, are you?” the solemn tomboy was asking, almost against his shoulder.

Instinctively, automatically, imvoluntarily, his arms went out, and in another moment would have caught and held her, had not the goddess of the lonely heights of science benignantly stooped to him in his moment of need. Tangled in Sybil's hair he caught sight of a gypsy-moth cocoon. It was the Ocneria dispar, he remembered, and an excellent specimen.

It was only a moment's pause, but in that moment the charm was broken, the spell had withered. A consciousness of conspiracy against his freedom, his ego, his sex, crept through him. His arms dropped to his sides; he fell back before her threatening touch.

“Let's—let's go for the boat!” he cried with a gasp, mopping his forehead.

“Very well,” answered Sybil, quietly, meditatively, as she stooped for her jacket.

She caught up with him and went along at his side, and as she did so, she moistened her cherry-stained lips. It was a movement strangely like that of a young tigress that had fallen upon its first taste of blood, and then had been denied its second.