The Window-Gazer

CHAPTER XXVIII

Desire was smiling as she left Dr. Rogers' office. It was a smile compounded of derision and relief—a shamefaced smile which admitted an opinion of herself very far from flattering.

So occupied was she with her mental reactions that she had no attention to spare for the opposite side of the street and therefore missed the slightly peculiar action of her husband-by-courtesy. Professor Spence, when he had first caught sight of his wife had automatically paused, as if to call or cross over. It had become their friendly habit to inform each other of their daily plans and a cheery "whither away?" had risen naturally to the professor's lips. It rose to them, but did not leave them, for, in the intervening instant, he had grasped the fact of Desire's smiling abstraction and had sought its explanation in the place from which she had come. Desire calling at old Bones' office at this hour of the morning? Before he had recovered from the surprise of it, she had passed.

Time, which seems so mighty, is sometimes quite negligible. The most amazing mental illuminations may occupy only the fraction of a second. A light flashes and is gone—but meanwhile one has seen.

The professor's pause was hardly noticeable. He walked on at once. But years could not have instructed him more thoroughly than that one second. He had received a revelation. Like all revelations, he received it in its entirety and realized it piecemeal. His thoughts stumbled over each other in confusion.... Desire at John's office at this unusual hour? ... Desire in her prettiest frock and smiling ... smiling, and so lost in her own thoughts that she saw no one ... Desire ... John? ... What the devil!

Spence had a finicky dislike of strong language. He thought it savored of weakness, yet he found himself swearing heartily as he hurried on—meaningless swears which by their very childishness brought him back to common sense. His step slowed, he forced himself to be reasonable. He took a brief against his own unwarranted disturbance of mind and reduced it to argument. There was nothing at all strange, he pointed out, in Desire having called at old Bones' office at this, or any other, time of day (but what under heaven did she do it for?). She might easily have forgotten to tell the doctor some-thing. (What in thunder would she have to tell him?) She might have dropped in, in passing (at that hour of the morning?) merely to ask him over for some tennis (was the dashed telephone out of order?). Or she might have felt a trifle seedy (pshaw! her health was perfect—idiot!). Anyway she had a perfect right to see Dr. Rogers at any time and for any reason she might choose. (Yes, she had—that was the devil of it!)

At this point of his argument the professor was nearly-run down by a delivery boy on a bicycle and saved himself only by a sharp collision with a telegraph pole. This served to clear his brain somewhat. His confusion of thought dropped away. He began to look his revelation in the face—

"Desire—John?"

It was certainly possible! Why had he never seen it before? ... He had been warned. John himself had warned him—Old John who had been so palpably "hit" when he had first seen Desire at Friendly Bay. But he, Benis Spence, had laughed. Honestly laughed. No possibility of this possibility had troubled him. He simply had not seen it. And now—he saw. The thing italicised itself on his brain.

Granted that Desire might love, there was no reason on earth why she should not love John.

The conclusion seemed childishly simple and yet he had never seriously considered it. Why? Relentlessly he forced himself to answer why. It was because he had believed that when Desire woke to love, if she should so wake, she would wake to love for him! He tore this admission out of a shrinking heart and laughed at it. It was funny, quite funny in its ridiculous conceit.... But it hadn't been conceit, it had been assurance. Impossible to account for, and absurd as it seemed now, it was some-thing higher than vanity which had hidden in his heart that happy sense of kinship with Desire which had made John's warning seem an emptiness of words.

It was gone now, that wonderful sense of "belonging," swept away in the swift rush of startled doubt. Searching as it might, his mind could not find anywhere the faintest foothold for a belief that Desire, free to choose, should turn to him and not to another.

"I had better go and sleep this off somewhere," murmured the professor with a wry smile. "Mustn't let it get ahead of me. Mustn't make any more mistakes. This needs thinking out—steady now!"

He tried to forget his own problem in thinking of hers. It couldn't be very pleasant for her—this. And yet she had been smiling as she came out of John's office. Perhaps she did not know yet? On second thoughts, he felt sure that she did not know. He recognized the essentials of Desire. She was loyalty itself. And had he not reason to know from his own present experience that the beginnings of love can be very blind.

John, too—but with John it was different. John had given his warning. If the warning were to be justified he could not blame John. He could not blame anyone save his own too confident self. Why, oh why, had he been so sure? Had he not known that love is the most unaccountable of all the passions? How had he dared to build security on that subtle thing within himself which, without cause or reason, had claimed as his the unstirred heart of the girl he had married.

Spence returned home with lagging step. The old distaste for familiar things, which he thought had gone with the coming of Desire, was heavy upon him. The gate of his pleasant home shut behind him like a prison gate. In short, Benis Spence paid for a moment's enlightenment with a bad day and a night that was no better.

By the morning he had won through. One must carry on. And the advantage of a quiet manner is that no one notices when it grows more quiet.

Desire was already in the library when he entered it. She looked very crisp and cool. It struck Spence for the first time that she was dressing her part—the neat, dark skirt and laundered blouse, blackbowed at the neck in a perfect orgy of simplicity, were eminently secretarial. How beautifully young she was!

Desire looked up from her note-book with business-like promptitude.

"I think," she said, "that we are quite ready to go on with the thirteenth chapter."

"But I think," said Benis, "that it would be much nicer to go fishing."

"Why?"

"Well, it's Friday, for one thing. Do you really think it safe to begin the thirteenth chapter on a Friday?"

His secretary's smile was dutiful, but her lips were firm. "We didn't do a thing-yesterday," she reminded him. "I couldn't find you anywhere and no one knew where you were."

"I was—just around," vaguely.

"Not around here," Desire was uncompromising. "Benis, I think we should really be more businesslike. We should have talked this thirteenth chapter over yesterday. I see you have a note here for some opening paragraphs on The Apprehension of Color in Primitive Minds—"

A cascade of goblin laughter from Yorick interrupted her.

"Yorick is amused," said Benis. "He knows all about the apprehension of color in primitive minds. He advises us to go fishing."

Desire watched him stroke the bird's bent head with a puzzled frown.

"I wish you wouldn't joke about—this," she said slowly. "You don't want that habit of mind to affect your serious work."

Spence looked up surprised.

"The whole character of the book is changing," went on Desire resolutely. "It will all have to be revised and brought into harmony. I'm sure you've felt it yourself. In a book like this the treatment must be the same throughout. I've heard you say that a hundred times. It doesn't matter what the treatment is, the necessary thing is that it be consistent. Isn't that right?"

"Certainly."

"Well—yours isn't!"

Spence forgot the parrot (who immediately pecked his finger). He almost forgot that he had suffered an awakening and had passed a bad night. Desire interested him in the present moment as she always did. She was—what was she? "Satisfying" was perhaps the best word for it. Just to be with her seemed to round out life.

"Prove it!" said he with some heat.

For half an hour he listened while she proved it with great energy and a thorough knowledge of her facts. He listened because he liked to listen and not because she was telling him anything new. He knew just where his "treatment" of his material had changed, and he knew, as Desire did not, what had changed it. For the change was not really in the treatment at all, but in himself.

This book had been his earliest ambition. It had been the sole companion of his thoughts for years. It had been the little idol which must be served. Without a word of it being written, it had grown with his growth. His notes for it comprised all that he had filched from life. He had not hurried. He was leisurely by nature. Then had come the war, lifting him out of all the things he knew. And, after the war, its great weariness. Not until he had met Desire and found, in her fresh interest, something of his own lost enthusiasm, had he been able to work again. Then, in a glow of recovered energy, the book had been begun. And all had gone well until the book's inspirer had begun to usurp the place of the book itself. (Spence smiled as he realized that Desire was painstakingly tracing the course of her self-caused destruction.) How could he think of the book when he wanted only to think of her? Insensibly, his gathered facts had begun to lose their prime importance, his deductions had lost their sense of weight, all that he had done seemed strangely insignificant—it was like looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope. The great book was a star which grew steadily smaller.

The proportion was wrong. He knew that. But at present he could do nothing to readjust it. Two interests cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The book interest had simply succumbed to an interest older and more potent.

"In this chapter, the Sixth," Desire was saying, "you seem to lose some of the serious purpose which is a prominent note in the opening chapters. You begin to treat things casually. You almost allow yourself to be humorous. Now is this supposed to be a humorous book, or is it not?"

"Oh—not. Distinctly not."

"Well then, don't you see? If you had treated the thing in that semi-humorous manner all through and continued in that vein you would produce a certain definite type of book. The critics would probably say—"

"I know, spare me!"

"They would say," sternly, "that 'Professor Spence has a light touch.' That 'he has treated his subject in a popular manner.'" (The professor groaned.) "But that isn't a patch upon what they will say if you mix up your styles as you are doing at present."

"But—well, what do you advise?"

Desire sucked her pencil. (He had given up trying to cure her of this poisonous habit.)

"I've thought about that. If you were not so—so temperamental, I would say go back and begin again. But that is risky. It will be better to go on, I think, trying to recapture the more serious style, until the whole book it at least in some form. Then you will know exactly where you are and what is necessary to harmonize the whole. You can then rewrite the 'off' chapters, bringing them into line. This is a recognized literary method, I believe."

"Is it? Good heavens!"

"I read it in a book."

"Then it must be literary. All right. I'm agreeable. But at present—"

"At present," firmly, "the main thing is to go on."

"This morning?"

"Certainly."

"But I don't want to go on this morning. That is the flaw in your literary method. It makes me go on whether I want to or not. Now the really top-notchers never do that. They are as full of stoppages as a freight train. Fact. They only create when the spirit moves them."

"Aren't you thinking of Quakers?" suggested Desire sweetly. "Besides you are not creating. You are compiling—a very different thing."

"But what is the use of compiling an off chapter when I know it is going to be an off one?"

Desire threw down her pencil.

"Oh, Benis," she said. "I don't like this. Don't let us play with words. Surely you are not getting tired—you can't be."

Her eyes, urgent and truth-compelling, forced an answer.

"I don't quite know," he said. "But I am certainly off work at present. There may be all kinds of reasons. You will have to be patient, Desire."

"Then," in a low voice, "it isn't only indolence?"

He was moved to candor. "It isn't indolence at all. I have always been a fairly good worker, and will be again. But the driving force has shifted. I have not been doing good work and I know it. The more I know it the worse the work will become.... It doesn't matter, really, child," he added gently, seeing that she had turned away. "The world can wait for the bit of knowledge I can give it."

Desire, whose face was invisible, took a moment to answer this. When she did her voice was carefully with-out expression.

"Then this ends my usefulness. You will not need me any more."

The professor, who had been nursing his knee on the corner of the desk, straightened up so suddenly that he heard his spine click.

"What's this?" he said. (Good heavens—the girl was as full of surprises as a grab-bag!)

"It was for the book you needed me, was it not? That was my share of our partnership."

("Now you've done it!" shouted an exultant voice in the professor's brain. "Oh, you are an ass!")

"Shut up!" said Spence irritably. "I wasn't talking to you," he explained apologetically. "It's just a horrid little devil I converse with sometimes. What I meant was—" He did not seem to know what he meant and looked rather helplessly out of the window. "Oh, I say," he said presently, "you are not going to—to act like that, are you? Agitation's so frightfully bad for me. Ask old Bones."

"You are not agitated," said Desire coldly. "Please be serious."

"I am. Deuced serious. And agitated too. You ought to think twice before you startle me like that—just when everything was going along so nicely."

"I am only reminding you of your own agreement," stubbornly. "I want to be of use."

"Very selfish of you. Can't you think of someone else once in a while?"

"Selfish? Because I want to help?"

"Certainly. I wonder you don't see it! Think of the mornings I've put in on this dashed book just because you wanted to help. I have to be polite, haven't I?—up to a point. But when you begin to blame me for doing poorly what I do not want to do at all I begin to see that my self-sacrifice is not appreciated."

"You are talking nonsense."

"Perhaps I am. But it was you who started it. When you said I did not need you, you said a very nonsensical thing. And a very unkind thing, too. A man does not like to talk of—his need. But, now that we have come to just this point, let us have it out. Surely our partnership was not quite as narrow as you suggest? The book is a detail. It is L. part of life which will fit in somewhere—an important part in its right place—but it isn't the whole pattern." He smiled whimsically. "Do not think of me as just an animated book, my dear—if you can help it. And remember, no matter how we choose to interpret our marriage, you are my wife. And my very good comrade. The one thing which could ever change my need of you is your greater need of—of someone else."

The last words were casual enough but the look which accompanied them was keen, and a sense of relief rose gratefully in the professor as no sign of disturbance appeared upon the thoughtful face of his hearer.

"Is Benis here, my dear?" asked Aunt Caroline opening the door. "Oh yes, I see that he is. Benis, you are wanted on the 'phone. If you would take my advice, which you never do, you would have an extension placed in this room. Then you could always just answer and save Olive a great deal of bother. Not that I think maids ought to mind being bothered. They never did in my time. But it would be quite simple for you, when you are writing here, to attend to the 'phone. Perhaps if the butcher heard a man's voice occasionally he might be more respectful. I do not expect much of tradespeople, as you know, but if the butcher—"

"Is it the butcher who wishes to speak to me, Aunt?"

"Good gracious, no. It's long distance. Why don't you hurry? ... Men have no idea of the value of time," she added as the professor vanished. "My dear you must not let Benis overwork you. He doesn't intend to be unkind, but men never think."