Deportment--how to enter a drawing-room! Fiddle-faddle! How to enter the Kingdom of G.o.d! That"s more Susan"s style," cried Phil, with a most unaccustomed heat.
I laughed at him.
"Are you willing to take her on, Phil?" I asked. "I believe it"s been done; Epicurus had a female pupil or two."
"I have taken her on," Phil replied, quite without resentment. "Hadn"t you noticed it?"
"Yes," I said; "only, it"s the other way round."
"I"ve been appropriated, is that it?"
"Yes; by Susan. We all have, Phil. That vampire child is simply draining us, my dear fellow."
"All right," said Phil, after a second"s pause, "if she"s a _spiritual_ vampire, so much the better. Only, she"ll need a firm hand. We must give her suck at regular hours; draw up a plan. You can tackle the languages, if you like--aesthetics, and all that. I"ll pin her down to math and logic--teach her to _think_ straight. We can safely leave her to pick up history and sociology and such things for herself. You"ve a middling good library, and she"ll browse."
"Oh, she"ll browse! She"s browsing now."
"Poetry?" demanded Phil, suspicion in his tone, anxiety in his eyes.
"If she runs amuck with poetry too soon, there"s no hope for her. She"ll get to taking sensations for ideas, and that"s fatal. A mind like Susan"s----"
What further he said I missed; a distant tinkle from the front-door bell had distracted me.
It was Maltby Phar. He came out to us on the garden terrace, unexpected and unannounced.
"Whether you like it or not," he sighed luxuriously, "I"m here for a week. How"s the great experiment--eh? Am I too late for the bust-up?"
Then he nodded to Phil. "How are you, Mr. Farmer? Delighted to meet an old adversary! Shall it be swords or pistols this time? Or clubs? But I warn you, I"m no fit foe; I"m soft. Making up our mammoth Christmas Number in July always unnerves me. By the time I had looked over a dozen designs for our cover this morning and found Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar in every one of them, mounted on fancy camels, and heading for an exaggerated star in the right upper dark-blue corner, I succ.u.mbed to heat and profanity, turned "em all face downward, shuffled "em, grabbed one at random, and then fled for solace! Solace," he added, dropping into a wicker armchair, "can begin, if you like, by taking a cool, mellow, liquid form."
I rang.
Phil, I saw, was looking annoyed. He disliked Maltby Phar, openly disliked him; so I felt certain--I was perhaps rather hoping--that he would take this opportunity to escape. With Phil I was never then entirely at ease; but in those days I was wholly so with Maltby. Miss Goucher answered my summons in person, and I suggested a sauterne cup for my friends. Phil frowned on the suggestion, but Maltby beamed. The ayes had it, and Miss Goucher, who had remained neutral, withdrew. It was Phil"s chance; yet he surprised me by settling back and refilling his pipe.
"When you came, Mr. Phar," he said, his tone withdrawing toward formality, "we were discussing the education of Susan."
"Then I came just in time!" cried Maltby.
"For what?" I queried.
"I may prevent a catastrophe. If you"re really going to see this thing through, Boz"--his name for me--"for G.o.d"s sake do a little clear thinking first! Don"t drift. Don"t flounder. Don"t wallow. Sc.r.a.p all your musty, inbred prejudices once for all, and see that at least one kid on this filthy old planet gets a plain, honest, unsentimentalized account of what she is and what the world is. If you can bring yourself to do that, Susan will be unique. She will be the first educated woman in America."
""What she is and what the world is,"" repeated Phil, slowly. "What is the world, may I ask? And what is Susan?"
There was a felt tenseness in the moment; the hush before battle. We leaned forward a little from our easy-chairs, and no one of us noticed that Susan had slipped noiselessly to the window seat by the opened library window which gave upon the terrace. But there, as we later discovered, she was; and there, for the present silently, she remained.
"The world," began Maltby Phar sententiously, "is a pigsty."
"Very well," interrupted Phil; "I"ll grant you that to start with. What follows?"
"What we see about us," said Maltby.
"And what do we see?" asked Phil.
At this inopportune moment Miss Goucher reappeared, bearing a Sheffield tray, on which stood three antique Venetian goblets, and a tall pitcher of rare Bohemian gla.s.s, filled to the brim with an iced sauterne cup garnished with fresh strawberries and thin disks of pineapple. Nothing less suggestive of the conventional back-lot piggery could have been imagined. By the time a table had been placed, our goblets filled, and Miss Goucher had retired, Maltby had decided to try for a new opening.
"Excellent!" he resumed, having drained and refilled his goblet. "Now, Mr. Farmer, if you really wish to know what the world is, and what Susan is, I am ready. Have with you! And by the way, Boz," he interjected, sipping his wine, "your new housekeeper is one in a thousand. Mrs.
Parrot was admirable; I"ve been absurdly regretting her loss. But Mrs.
Parrot never quite rose to _this_!"
Phil"s tongue clicked an impatient protest against the roof of his mouth. "I am still unenlightened, Mr. Phar."
"True," said Maltby. "That"s the worst of you romantic idealists. It"s your permanent condition." He settled back in his chair, and fell to his old trick of slowly caressing the back of his left hand with the palm of his right. "The world, my dear Mr. Farmer," he continued, "the universe, indeed, as we have come gradually to know it, is an infinity of blindly clashing forces. They have always existed, they will always exist; they have always been blind, and they always will be. Anything may happen in such an infinity, and we--this world of men and microbes--are one of the things which has temporarily happened. It"s regrettable, but it is so.
And though there is nothing final we can do about it, and very little in any sense, still--this curious accident of the human intellect enables us to do something. We can at least admit the plain facts of our horrible case. Here, a self-realizing accident, we briefly are. Death will dissipate us one by one, and the world in due time. That much we know. But while we last, why must we add imaginary evils to our real ones, and torment ourselves with false hopes and ridiculous fears?
"Why can"t each one of us learn to say: "I am an accident of no consequence in a world that means nothing. I might be a stone, but I happen to be a man. Hence, certain things give me pleasure, others pain.
And, obviously, in an accidental, meaningless world I can owe no duty to anyone but myself. I owe it to myself to get as much pleasure and to avoid as much pain as possible. Unswerving egotism should be my law.""
He paused to sip again, with a side glance toward Phil.
"Elementary, all this, I admit. I apologize for restating it to a scholar. But such are the facts as science reveals them--are they not?
You have to try somehow to go beyond science to get round them. And where do you go--you romantic idealists? Where _can_ you go? Nowhere outside of yourselves, I take it. So you plunge, perforce, down below the threshold of reason into a mad chaos of instinct and desire and dream. And what _there_ do you find? Bugaboos, my dear sir, simply bugaboos: divine orders, h.e.l.ls, heavens, purgatories, moral sanctions--all the wild insanity, in two words, that had made our wretched lives even less worth living than they could and should be!"
"_Should?_ Why _should_?" asked Phil. "Granting your universe, who gives a negligible d.a.m.n for a little discomfort more or less?"
"I do!" Maltby a.s.serted. "I want all the comfort I can get; and I could get far more in a world of clear-seeing, secular egotists than I can in this mixed mess of superst.i.tious, sentimental idealists which we choose to call civilized society! Take just one minor practical ill.u.s.tration: Say that some virgin has wakened my desire, and I hers. In a reasonable society we could give each other a certain amount of pa.s.sing satisfaction. But do we do it? No. The virgin has been taught to believe in a mystical, mischievous something, called Purity! To follow her natural instinct would be a sin. If you sin and get caught on earth, society will punish you; and if you don"t get caught here, you"ll infallibly get caught hereafter--and then G.o.d will punish you. So the virgin tortures herself and tortures me--unless I"m willing to marry her, which would be certain to prove the worst of tortures for us both.
And there you are."
It was at this point that Susan spoke from her window.
"Pearl and papa weren"t married, Mr. Phar; but they didn"t get much fun out of not being."
I confess that I felt a nervous chill start at the base of my spine and shiver up toward my scalp. Even Phil, the man of Indian gravity, looked for an instant perturbed.
"Susan!" I demanded sharply. "Have you been listening?"
"Mustn"t I listen?" asked Susan. "Why not? Are you cross, Ambo?"
"The mischief"s done," said Phil to me quietly; "better not make a point of it."
"Please don"t be cross, Ambo," Susan pleaded, slipping through the window to the terrace and coming straight over to me. "Mr. Phar feels just the way papa did about things; only papa couldn"t talk so splendidly. He had a very poor vocabulary"--"Vocabulary!" I gasped--"except nasty words and swearing. But he meant just what Mr.
Phar means, _inside_."
Phil, as she ended, began to make strange choking noises and retired suddenly into his handkerchief. Maltby put down his gla.s.s and stared at Susan.
"Young person," he finally said, "you ought to be spanked! Don"t you know it"s an unforgivable sin to spy on your elders!"
"But you don"t believe in sin," responded Susan calmly, without the tiniest suspicion of pertness in her tone or bearing. "You believe in doing what you want to. _I_ wanted to hear what you were saying, Mr.
Phar."
"Of course you did!" Phil struck in. "But next time, Susan, as a concession to good manners, you might let us know you"re in the neighborhood--?"
Susan bit her lower lip very hard before she managed to reply.