IV
There proved to be little difficulty in getting myself appointed Susan's guardian. No one else wanted the child.
I promised the court to do my best for her; to treat her, in fact, as I would my own flesh and blood. It might well be, I said, that before long I should legally adopt her. In any event, if this for some unforeseen reason proved inadvisable, I assured the court that Susan's future would be provided for. The court benignly replied that, as it stood, I was acting very handsomely in the matter; very handsomely; no doubt about it. But there was a dim glimmer behind the juridic spectacles that seemed to imply: "Handsomely, my dear sir, but whether wisely or no is another question, which, as the official champion of widows and orphans, I am not called upon to decide."
It was with a new sense of responsibility that I opened an account in Susan's name with a local savings bank, and a week later added a short but efficient codicil to my will.
In the meantime – but with alert suspicions – I interviewed several highly recommended applicants for Miss Disbrow's deserted post; only to find them wanting. Poor things! Combined, they could hardly have met all the requirements, æsthetic and intellectual, which I had now set my heart upon finding in one lone governess for Susan! It would have needed, by this, a subtly modernized Hypatia to fulfill my ideal.
I might, of course, have waited for October to send Susan to a select private school in the vicinage, patronized by the little daughters of our more cautious families. It was, by neighborly consent, an excellent school, where carefully sterilized cultures – physical, moral, mental, and social – were painlessly injected into the blue blood streams of our very nicest young girls. I say that I might have done so, but this is a euphemism. On the one hand, I shrank from exposing Susan to possible snubs; on the other, a little bird whispered that Miss Garnett, principal of the school, would not care to expose her carefully sterilized cultures to an alien contagion. Bearers of contagion – whether physical, moral, mental, or social – were not sympathetic to Miss Garnett's clientèle. In Mrs. Parrot's iron phrase, there are places for such.
Public schools, to wit! But in those long-past days – before Susan taught me that there are just two kinds of persons, big and little; those you can do nothing for, because they can do nothing for themselves, and those you can do nothing for, because they can do everything for themselves – in those days, I admit that I had my own finicky fears. Public schools were all very well for the children of men who could afford nothing better. They had, for example, given Bob Blake's daughter a pretty fair preliminary training; but they would never do for Ambrose Hunt's ward. Noblesse– or, at any rate, largesse—oblige.
Yet here was a quandary: Public schools, in my estimation, being too vulgar for Susan; and Susan, in the estimation of Hillhouse Avenue, being too vulgar for private ones; yea, and though I still took cognizance, no subtly modernized Hypatia coming to me highly recommended for a job – how in the name of useless prosperity was I to get poor little Susan properly educated at all!
It was Susan who solved this difficulty for me, as she was destined to solve most of my future difficulties, and all of her own.
She soon turned the public world about her into an extra-select, super-private school. She impressed all who came into contact with her, and made of them her devoted – if often unconscious – instructors. And she began by impressing Miss Goucher and Nora and Sonia, and Philip Farmer, assistant professor of philosophy in Yale University; and Maltby Phar, anarchist editor of The Garden Exquisite; and – first and chiefly – me.
The case of Phil Farmer was typical. Phil and I had been classmates in the dark backward and abysm, and we were still, in a manner of speaking, friends. I mean that, though we had few tastes in common, we kept on liking each other a good deal. Phil was a gentle-hearted, stiff-headed sort of man, with a conscience – formed for him and handed on by a long line of Unitarian ministers – a conscience which drove him to incredible labor at altitudes few of us attain, and where even Phil, it seemed to me, found breathing difficult. Not having been thrown with much feminine society on his chosen heights, he had remained a bachelor. The Metaphysical Mountains are said to be infested with women, but they cluster, I am told, below the snow line. Phil did not even meet them by climbing through them; he always ballooned straight up for the Unmelting; and when he occasionally dropped down, his psychic chill seldom wore entirely off before he was ready to ascend again. This protected him; for he was a tall, dark-haired fellow whose features had the clear-cut gravity of an Indian chieftain; his rare, friendly smile was a delight. So he would hardly otherwise have escaped.
Perhaps once a week it was his habit to drop in after dinner and share with me three or four pipes' worth of desultory conversation. We seldom talked shop; since mine did not interest him, nor his me. Mostly we just ambled aimlessly round the outskirts of some chance neutral topic – who would win the big game, for example. It amused neither of us, but it rested us both.
One night, perhaps a month after Susan had come to me, I returned late from a hot day's trip to New York – one more unsuccessful quest after Hypatia Rediviva – and found Phil and Susan sitting together on the screened terrace at the back of my house, overlooking the garden. It was not my custom to spend the muggy midsummer months in town, but this year I had been unwilling to leave until I could capture and carry off Hypatia Rediviva with me. Moreover, I did not know where to go. The cottage at Watch Hill belonged to Gertrude, and was in consequence no longer used by either of us. As a grass widower I had, in summer, just travelled about. Now, with a ward of fourteen to care for, just travelling about no longer seemed the easiest solution; yet I hated camps and summer hotels. I should have to rent a place somewhere, that was certain; but where? With the world to choose from, a choice proved difficult. I was marking time.
My stuffy fruitless trip had decided me to mark time no longer. Hypatia or no Hypatia, Susan must be taken to the hills or the sea. It was this thought that simmered in my brain as I strolled out to the garden terrace and overheard Susan say to Phil: "But I think it's much easier to believe in the devil than it is in God! Don't you? The devil isn't all-wise, all-good, all-everything! He's a lot more like us."
I stopped short and shamelessly listened.
"That's an interesting concept," responded Phil, with his slow, friendly gravity. "You mean, I suppose, that if we must be anthropomorphic, we ought at least to be consistent."
"Wouldn't it be funny," said Susan, "if I did mean that without knowing it?" There was no flippancy, no irony in her tone. "'An-thro-po-mor-phic.. '" she added, savoring its long-drawn-outness. Susan never missed a strange word; she always pounced on it at once, unerringly, and made it hers.
"That's a Greek word," explained Phil.
"It's a good word," said Susan, "if it has a tremendous lot packed up in it. If it hasn't, it's much too long."
"I agree with you," said Phil; "but it has."
"What?" asked Susan.
"It would take me an hour to tell you."
"Oh, I'm glad!" cried Susan. "It must be a wonderful word! Please go on till Ambo comes!"
I decided to take a bath, and tiptoed softly and undetected away.
V
After that evening Phil began to drop in every two or three nights, and he did not hesitate to tell me that the increasing frequency of his visits was due to his progressive interest in Susan.
"She's a curious child," he explained; which was true in any sense you chose to take it, and all the way back to the Latin curiosus, "careful, diligent, thoughtful; from cura, care," and so on..
"I've never seen much of children," Phil continued; "never had many chances, as it happens. My sister has three boys, but she's married to a narrow-gauge missionary, and lives – to call it that – in Ping Lung, or some such place. I've the right address somewhere, I think – in a notebook. Bertha sends me snapshots of the boys from time to time, but I can't say I've ever felt lonely because of their exile. Funny. Perhaps it's because I never liked Bertha much. Bertha has a sloppy mind – you know, with chance scraps of things floating round in it. Nothing coheres. But you take this youngster of yours, now – I call her yours – "
"Do!" I interjected.
"Well, there's the opposite extreme! Susan links everything up, everything she gets hold of – facts, fancies, guesses, feelings; the whole psychic menagerie. Chains them all together somehow, and seems to think they'll get on comfortably in the same tent. Of course they won't – can't – and that's the danger for her! But she's stimulating, Hunt" – Phil always called me Hunt, as if just failing whole-heartedly to accept me – "she's positively stimulating! A mind like that must be trained; thoroughly, I mean. We must do our best for her."
The "we" amused me and – yes, I confess it – nettled me a little.
"Don't worry about that," I said, and more dryly than I had meant to; "I'm combing the country now for a suitable governess."
"Governess!" Phil snorted. "You don't want a governess for Susan. You want, for this job," he insisted, "a male intellect – a vigorous, disciplined male intellect. Music, dancing, water colors – pshaw! Deportment – how to enter a drawing-room! Fiddle-faddle! How to enter the Kingdom of God! 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 – æsthetics, 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 succumbed 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 God's sake do a little clear thinking first! Don't drift. Don't flounder. Don't wallow. Scrap 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 glass, 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, hells, 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 damn for a little discomfort more or less?"
"I do!" Maltby asserted. "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 superstitious, sentimental idealists which we choose to call civilized society! Take just one minor practical illustration: Say that some virgin has wakened my desire, and I hers. In a reasonable society we could give each other a certain amount of passing 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 God 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 glass 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.
"Yes. I will next time. I'm sorry, Phil." (Phil!) Then she turned to Maltby. "But I wasn't spying! I just didn't know you would any of you mind."
"We don't, really," I said. "Sit down, dear. You're always welcome." I had been doing some stiff, concentrated thinking in the last three minutes, and now I had taken the plunge. "The truth is, Susan," I went on, "that most children who live in good homes, who are what is called 'well brought up,' are carefully sheltered from any facts or words or thoughts which their parents do not consider wholesome or pleasant. Parents try to give their children only what they have found to be best in life; they try to keep them in ignorance of everything else."
"But they can't," said Susan. "At least, they couldn't in Birch Street."
"No. Nor elsewhere. But they try. And they always make believe to themselves that they have succeeded. So it's supposed to be very shocking and dangerous for a girl of your age to listen to the free conversation of men of our age. That's the reason we all felt a little guilty, at first, when we found you'd been overhearing us."
"How funny," said Susan. "Papa never cared."
"Good for him!" exclaimed Maltby. "I didn't feel guilty, for one! I refuse to be convicted of so hypocritically squeamish a reaction!"
"Oh!" Susan sighed, almost with rapture. "You know such a lot of words, Mr. Phar! You can say anything."
"Thanks," said Maltby; "I rather flatter myself that I can."
"And you do!" grunted Phil. "But words," he took up the dropped threads rather awkwardly, "are nothing in themselves, Susan. You are too fond of mere words. It isn't words that matter; it's ideas."
"Yes, Phil," said Susan meekly, "but I love words – best of all when they're pictures."
Phil frowned, without visible effect upon Susan. I saw that her mind had gone elsewhere.
"Ambo?"
"Yes, dear?"
"You mustn't ever worry about me, Ambo. My hearing or knowing things – or saying them. I – I guess I'm different."
Maltby's face was a study in suppressed amazement; Phil was still frowning. It was all too much for me, and I laughed – laughed from the lower ribs!
Susan laughed with me, springing from her chair to throw her arms tightly round my neck in one big joyous suffocating hug!
"Oh, Ambo!" she cried, breathless. "Isn't it going to be fun – all of us – together – now we can talk!"