call biology. It is biology in its largest aspects.
“I know I express myself incoherently, but I’ve tried to hammer out
the idea. It came to me as you were talking, so I was not primed
and ready to deliver it. You spoke yourself of the human frailty
that prevented one from taking all the factors into consideration.
And you, in turn, – or so it seems to me, – leave out the
biological factor, the very stuff out of which has been spun the
fabric of all the arts, the warp and the woof of all human actions
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and achievements.”
To Ruth’s amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that
the professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance
for Martin’s youth. Professor Caldwell sat for a full minute,
silent and fingering his watch chain.
“Do you know,” he said at last, “I’ve had that same criticism
passed on me once before – by a very great man, a scientist and
evolutionist, Joseph Le Conte. But he is dead, and I thought to
remain undetected; and now you come along and expose me.
Seriously, though – and this is confession – I think there is
something in your contention – a great deal, in fact. I am too
classical, not enough up-to-date in the interpretative branches of
science, and I can only plead the disadvantages of my education and
a temperamental slothfulness that prevents me from doing the work.
I wonder if you’ll believe that I’ve never been inside a physics or
chemistry laboratory? It is true, nevertheless. Le Conte was
right, and so are you, Mr. Eden, at least to an extent – how much I
do not know.”
Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when she had got him
aside, whispering:-
“You shouldn’t have monopolized Professor Caldwell that way. There
may be others who want to talk with him.”
“My mistake,” Martin admitted contritely. “But I’d got him stirred
up, and he was so interesting that I did not think. Do you know,
he is the brightest, the most intellectual, man I have ever talked
with. And I’ll tell you something else. I once thought that
everybody who went to universities, or who sat in the high places
in society, was just as brilliant and intelligent as he.”
“He’s an exception,” she answered.
“I should say so. Whom do you want me to talk to now? – Oh, say,
bring me up against that cashier-fellow.”
Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have
wished better behavior on her lover’s part. Not once did his eyes
flash nor his cheeks flush, while the calmness and poise with which
he talked surprised her. But in Martin’s estimation the whole
tribe of bank cashiers fell a few hundred per cent, and for the
rest of the evening he labored under the impression that bank
cashiers and talkers of platitudes were synonymous phrases. The
army officer he found good-natured and simple, a healthy, wholesome
young fellow, content to occupy the place in life into which birth
and luck had flung him. On learning that he had completed two
years in the university, Martin was puzzled to know where he had
stored it away. Nevertheless Martin liked him better than the
platitudinous bank cashier.
“I really don’t object to platitudes,” he told Ruth later; “but
what worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent,
superior certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken
to do it. Why, I could give that man the whole history of the
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Reformation in the time he took to tell me that the Union-Labor
Party had fused with the Democrats. Do you know, he skins his
words as a professional poker-player skins the cards that are dealt
out to him. Some day I’ll show you what I mean.”
“I’m sorry you don’t like him,” was her reply. “He’s a favorite of
Mr. Butler’s. Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest – calls him
the Rock, Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can
well be built.”
“I don’t doubt it – from the little I saw of him and the less I
heard from him; but I don’t think so much of banks as I did. You
don’t mind my speaking my mind this way, dear?”
“No, no; it is most interesting.”
”
Yes,” Martin went on heartily, “I’m no more than a barbarian
getting my first impressions of civilization. Such impressions
must be entertainingly novel to the civilized person.”
“What did you think of my cousins?” Ruth queried.
“I liked them better than the other women. There’s plenty of fun
in them along with paucity of pretence.”
“Then you did like the other women?”
He shook his head.
“That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological poll-
parrot. I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like
Tomlinson, there would be found in her not one original thought.
As for the portrait-painter, she was a positive bore. She’d make a
good wife for the cashier. And the musician woman! I don’t care
how nimble her fingers are, how perfect her technique, how
wonderful her expression – the fact is, she knows nothing about
music.”
“She plays beautifully,” Ruth protested.
“Yes, she’s undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but
the intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her. I asked her
what music meant to her – you know I’m always curious to know that
particular thing; and she did not know what it meant to her, except
that she adored it, that it was the greatest of the arts, and that
it meant more than life to her.”
“You were making them talk shop,” Ruth charged him.
“I confess it. And if they were failures on shop, imagine my
sufferings if they had discoursed on other subjects. Why, I used
to think that up here, where all the advantages of culture were
enjoyed – ” He paused for a moment, and watched the youthful shade
of himself, in stiff-rim and square-cut, enter the door and swagger
across the room. “As I was saying, up here I thought all men and
women were brilliant and radiant. But now, from what little I’ve
seen of them, they strike me as a pack of ninnies, most of them,
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and ninety percent of the remainder as bores. Now there’s
Professor Caldwell – he’s different. He’s a man, every inch of him
and every atom of his gray matter.”
Ruth’s face brightened.
“Tell me about him,” she urged. “Not what is large and brilliant –
I know those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse. I am
most curious to know.”
“Perhaps I’ll get myself in a pickle.” Martin debated humorously
for a moment. “Suppose you tell me first. Or maybe you find in
him nothing less than the best.”
“I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for
two years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression.”
“Bad impression, you mean? Well, here goes. He is all the fine
things you think about him, I guess. At least, he is the finest
specimen of intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a
secret shame.”
“Oh, no, no!” he hastened to cry. “Nothing paltry nor vulgar.
What I mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the
bottom of things, and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes
believe to himself that he never saw it. Perhaps that’s not the
clearest way to express it. Here’s another way. A man who has
found the path to the hidden temple but has not followed it; who
has, perhaps, caught glimpses of the temple and striven afterward
to convince himself that it was only a mirage of foliage. Yet
another way. A man who could have done things but who placed no
value on the doing, and who, all the time, in his innermost heart,
is regretting that he has not done them; who has secretly laughed
at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more secretly, has yearned
for the rewards and for the joy of doing.”
“I don’t read him that way,” she said. “And for that matter, I
don’t see just what you mean.”
“It is only a vague feeling on my part,” Martin temporized. “I
have no reason for it. It is only a feeling, and most likely it is
wrong. You certainly should know him better than I.”
From the evening at Ruth’s Martin brought away with him strange
confusions and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in his
goal, in the persons he had climbed to be with. On the other hand,
he was encouraged with his success. The climb had been easier than
he expected. He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with
false modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the beings