To Sharlee this seemed one of the most pathetic of all his confidences; she offered no comment.
"You were in the churchyard," stated Mr. Queed. "I was there just ahead of you. I was struck with that motto or text on the headstone, and shall look it up when I get home. I have been making a more careful study of your Bible this autumn and have found it exceptionally interesting. You, I suppose, subscribe to all the tenets of the Christian faith?"
Sharlee hesitated. "I"m not sure that I can answer that with a direct yes, and I _will_ not answer it with any sort of no. So I"ll say that I believe in them all, modified a little in places to satisfy my reason."
"Ah, they are subject to modification, then?"
"Certainly. Aren"t you? Am not I? Whatever is alive is subject to modification. These doctrines," said she, "are evolving because they have the principle of life in them."
"So you are an evolutionist?"
"The expert in evolutionary sociology will hardly quarrel with me for that."
"The expert in evolutionary sociology deals with social organisms, nations, the human race. Your Bible deals with Smith, Brown, and Jones."
"Well, what are your organisms and nations but collections of my Smiths, Browns, and Joneses? My Bible deals with individuals because there is nothing else to deal with. The individual conscience is the beginning of everything."
"Ah! So you would found your evolution of humanity upon the increasing operation of what you call conscience?"
"Probably I would not give _all_ the credit to what I call conscience.
Probably I"d give some of it to what I call intellect."
"In that case you would almost certainly fall into a fatal error."
"Why, don"t you consider that the higher the intellectual development the higher the type?"
"Suppose we go more slowly," said Mr. Queed, intently plucking a dead bough from an overhanging young oak.
"How do you go about measuring a type? When you speak of a high type, exactly what do you mean?"
"When I speak of a high type," said Sharlee, who really did not know exactly what she meant, "I will merely say that I mean a type that is high--lofty, you know--towering over other types."
She flaunted a gloved hand to suggest infinite alt.i.tude.
"You ought to mean," he said patiently, "a type which most successfully sketches the civilization of the future, a type best fitted to dominate and survive. Now you have only to glance at history to see that intellectual supremacy is no guarantee whatever of such a type."
"Oh, Mr. Queed, I don"t know about that."
"Then I will convince you," said he. "Look at the French--the most brilliant nation intellectually among all the European peoples. Where are they in the race to-day? The evolutionist sees in them familiar symptoms of a retrogression which rarely ends but in one way. Look at the Greeks. Every schoolboy knows that the Greeks were vastly the intellectual superiors of any dominant people of to-day. An anthropologist of standing a.s.sures us that the intellectual interval separating the Greek of the Periclean age from the modern Anglo-Saxon is as great as the interval between the Anglo-Saxon and the African savage.
Point to a man alive to-day who is the intellectual peer of Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates. Yet where are the Greeks? What did their exalted intellectual equipment do to save them in the desperate struggle for the survival of the fittest? The Greeks of to-day are selling fruit at corner stands; Plato"s descendants shine the world"s shoes. They live to warn away the most casual evolutionist from the theory that intellectual supremacy necessarily means supremacy of type. Where, then, you may ask, does lie the principle of triumphant evolution? Here we stand at the innermost heart of every social scheme. Let us glance a moment," said Mr. Queed, "at Man, as we see him first emerging from the dark hinterlands of history."
So, walking through the sweet autumn woods with the one girl he knew in all the world--barring only Miss Miller--Queed spoke heartily of the rise and fall of peoples and the destiny of man. Thus conversing, they came out of the woods and stood upon the platform of the rudimentary station.
The line ran here on an elevation, disappearing in the curve of a heavy cut two hundred yards further north. In front the ground fell sharply and rolled out in a vast green meadow, almost treeless and level as a mill-pond. Far off on the horizon rose the blue haze of a range of foothills, upon which the falling sun momentarily stood, like a gold-piece edge-up on a table. Nearer, to their right, was a strip of uncleared woods, a rainbow of reds and pinks. Through the meadow ran a little stream, such as a boy of ten could leap; for the instant it stood fire-red under the sun.
Sharlee, obtaining the floor for a moment, asked Queed how his own work had been going. He told her that in one sense it had not been going at all: not a chapter written from May to September.
"However," he said, with an unclouded face, "I am now giving six hours a day to it. And it is just as well to go slow. The smallest error of angle at the centre means a tremendous going astray at the circ.u.mference. I--ahem--do not feel that my summer has been wasted, by any means. You follow me? It is worth some delay to be doubly sure that I put down no plus signs as minuses."
"Yes, of course. How beautiful that is out there, isn"t it?"
His eyes followed hers over the sunset s.p.a.ces. "No, it is too quiet, too monotonous. If there must be scenery, let it have some originality and character. You yourself are very beautiful, I think."
Sharlee started, almost violently, and colored perceptibly. If a text-book in differential calculus, upon the turning of a page, had thrown problems to the winds and begun gibbering purple poems of pa.s.sion, she could not have been more completely taken aback. However, there was no mistaking the utter and veracious impersonality of his tone.
"Oh, do you think so? I"m very glad, because I"m afraid not many people do...."
Mr. Queed remained silent. So far, so good; the conversation stood in a position eminently and scientifically correct; but Sharlee could not for the life of her forbear to add: "But I had no idea you ever noticed people"s looks."
"So far as I remember, I never did before. I think it was the appearance of your eyes as you looked out over the plain that attracted my attention. Then, looking closer, I noticed that you are beautiful."
The compliment was so unique and perfect that another touch could only spoil it. Sharlee immediately changed the subject.
"Oh, Mr. Queed, has the Department you or Colonel Cowles to thank for the editorial about the reformatory this morning?"
"Both of us. He suggested it and I wrote it. So you really cannot tell us apart?"
She shook her head. "All this winter we shall work preparing the State"s mind for this inst.i.tution, convincing it so thoroughly that when the legislature meets again, it simply will not dare to refuse us. When I mention we and us, understand that I am speaking to you Departmentally.
After that there are ten thousand other things that we want to do. But everything is so immortally slow! We are not allowed to raise our fingers without a hundred years" war first. Don"t you ever wish for money--oceans and oceans of lovely money?"
"Good heavens, no!"
"I do. I"d pepper this State with inst.i.tutions. Did you know," she said sweetly, "that I once had quite a little pot of money? When I was one month old."
"Yes," said Queed, "I knew. In fact, I had not been here a week before I heard of Henry G. Surface. Major Brooke speaks of him constantly, Colonel Cowles occasionally. Do you," he asked, "care much about that?"
"Well," said Sharlee, gently, "I"m glad my father never knew."
From half a mile away, behind the bellying woodland, a faint hoot served notice that the city-bound car was sweeping rapidly toward them. It was on the tip of Queed"s tongue to remind Miss Weyland that, in the case of Fifi, she had taken the ground that the dead did know what was going on upon earth. But he did not do so. The proud way in which she spoke of _my father_ threw another thought uppermost in his mind.
"Miss Weyland," he said abruptly, "I made a--confidence to you, of a personal nature, the first time I ever talked with you. I did not, it is true, ask you to regard it as a confidence, but--"
"I know," interrupted Sharlee, hurriedly. "But of course I _have_ regarded it in that way, and have never spoken of it to anybody."
"Thank you. That was what I wished to say."
If Sharlee had wanted to measure now the difference that she saw in Mr.
Queed, she could have done it by the shyness that they both felt in approaching a topic they had once handled with the easiest simplicity.
She was glad of his sensitiveness; it became him better than his early callousness. Sharlee wore a suit of black-and-gray pin-checks, and it was very excellently tailored; for if she purchased but two suits a year, she invariably paid money to have them made by one who knew how.
Her hat was of the kind that other girls study with cool diligence, while feigning engrossment in the conversation; and, repairing to their milliners, give orders for accurate copies of it. From it floated a silky-looking veil of gray-white, which gave her face that airy, cloud-like setting that photographers of the baser sort so pa.s.sionately admire. The place was as windy as Troy; from far on the ringing plains the breeze raced and fell upon this veil, ceaselessly kicking it here and there, in a way that would have driven a strong man lunatic in seven minutes. Sharlee, though a slim girl and no stronger than another, remained entirely unconscious of the behavior of the veil; long familiarity had bred contempt for its boisterous play; and, with her eyes a thousand miles away, she was wishing with her whole heart that she dared ask Mr. Queed a question.
Whereupon, like her marionette that she worked by a string, he opened his mouth and gravely answered her.
"I have three theories about my father. One is that he is an eccentric psychologist with peculiar, not to say extraordinary, ideas about the bringing up of children. Another is that because of his own convenience or circ.u.mstances, he does not care to own me as I am now. The third is that because of my convenience or circ.u.mstances, he thinks that I may not care to own him as he is now. I have never heard of or from him since the letter I showed you, nearly nine months ago. I rather incline to the opinion," he said, "that my father is dead."
"If he isn"t," said Sharlee, gently, as the great car whizzed up and stopped with a jerk, "I am very sure that you are to find him some day.
If he hadn"t meant that, he would never have asked you to come all the way from New York to settle here--do you think so?"