________________________________________________
_ When Professor Linyard came back from his holiday in the Maine woods
the air of rejuvenation he brought with him was due less to the
influences of the climate than to the companionship he had enjoyed
on his travels. To Mrs. Linyard's observant eye he had appeared to
set out alone; but an invisible traveller had in fact accompanied
him, and if his heart beat high it was simply at the pitch of his
adventure: for the Professor had eloped with an idea.
No one who has not tried the experiment can divine its exhilaration.
Professor Linyard would not have changed places with any hero of
romance pledged to a flesh-and-blood abduction. The most fascinating
female is apt to be encumbered with luggage and scruples: to take up
a good deal of room in the present and overlap inconveniently into
the future; whereas an idea can accommodate itself to a single
molecule of the brain or expand to the circumference of the horizon.
The Professor's companion had to the utmost this quality of
adaptability. As the express train whirled him away from the
somewhat inelastic circle of Mrs. Linyard's affections, his idea
seemed to be sitting opposite him, and their eyes met every moment
or two in a glance of joyous complicity; yet when a friend of the
family presently joined him and began to talk about college matters,
the idea slipped out of sight in a flash, and the Professor would
have had no difficulty in proving that he was alone.
But if, from the outset, he found his idea the most agreeable of
fellow-travellers, it was only in the aromatic solitude of the woods
that he tasted the full savour of his adventure. There, during the
long cool August days, lying full length on the pine-needles and
gazing up into the sky, he would meet the eyes of his companion
bending over him like a nearer heaven. And what eyes they
were!--clear yet unfathomable, bubbling with inexhaustible laughter,
yet drawing their freshness and sparkle from the central depths of
thought! To a man who for twenty years had faced an eye reflecting
the obvious with perfect accuracy, these escapes into the
inscrutable had always been peculiarly inviting; but hitherto the
Professor's mental infidelities had been restricted by an unbroken
and relentless domesticity. Now, for the first time since his
marriage, chance had given him six weeks to himself, and he was
coming home with his lungs full of liberty.
It must not be inferred that the Professor's domestic relations were
defective: they were in fact so complete that it was almost
impossible to get away from them. It is the happy husbands who are
really in bondage; the little rift within the lute is often a
passage to freedom. Marriage had given the Professor exactly what he
had sought in it; a comfortable lining to life. The impossibility of
rising to sentimental crises had made him scrupulously careful not
to shirk the practical obligations of the bond. He took as it were a
sociological view of his case, and modestly regarded himself as a
brick in that foundation on which the state is supposed to rest.
Perhaps if Mrs. Linyard had cared about entomology, or had taken
sides in the war over the transmission of acquired characteristics,
he might have had a less impersonal notion of marriage; but he was
unconscious of any deficiency in their relation, and if consulted
would probably have declared that he didn't want any woman bothering
with his beetles. His real life had always lain in the universe of
thought, in that enchanted region which, to those who have lingered
there, comes to have so much more colour and substance than the
painted curtain hanging before it. The Professor's particular veil
of Maia was a narrow strip of homespun woven in a monotonous
pattern; but he had only to lift it to step into an empire.
This unseen universe was thronged with the most seductive shapes:
the Professor moved Sultan-like through a seraglio of ideas. But of
all the lovely apparitions that wove their spells about him, none
had ever worn quite so persuasive an aspect as this latest
favourite. For the others were mostly rather grave companions,
serious-minded and elevating enough to have passed muster in a
Ladies' Debating Club; but this new fancy of the Professor's was
simply one embodied laugh. It was, in other words, the smile of
relaxation at the end of a long day's toil: the flash of irony that
the laborious mind projects, irresistibly, over labour
conscientiously performed. The Professor had always been a hard
worker. If he was an indulgent friend to his ideas, he was also a
stern task-master to them. For, in addition to their other duties,
they had to support his family: to pay the butcher and baker, and
provide for Jack's schooling and Millicent's dresses. The
Professor's household was a modest one, yet it tasked his ideas to
keep it up to his wife's standard. Mrs. Linyard was not an exacting
wife, and she took enough pride in her husband's attainments to pay
for her honours by turning Millicent's dresses and darning Jack's
socks, and going to the College receptions year after year in the
same black silk with shiny seams. It consoled her to see an
occasional mention of Professor Linyard's remarkable monograph on
the Ethical Reactions of the Infusoria, or an allusion to his
investigations into the Unconscious Cerebration of the Amoeba.
Still there were moments when the healthy indifference of Jack and
Millicent reacted on the maternal sympathies; when Mrs. Linyard
would have made her husband a railway-director, if by this
transformation she might have increased her boy's allowance and
given her daughter a new hat, or a set of furs such as the other
girls were wearing. Of such moments of rebellion the Professor
himself was not wholly unconscious. He could not indeed understand
why any one should want a new hat; and as to an allowance, he had
had much less money at college than Jack, and had yet managed to buy
a microscope and collect a few "specimens"; while Jack was free from
such expensive tastes! But the Professor did not let his want of
sympathy interfere with the discharge of his paternal obligations.
He worked hard to keep the wants of his family gratified, and it was
precisely in the endeavor to attain this end that he at length broke
down and had to cease from work altogether.
To cease from work was not to cease from thought of it; and in the
unwonted pause from effort the Professor found himself taking a
general survey of the field he had travelled. At last it was
possible to lift his nose from the loom, to step a moment in front
of the tapestry he had been weaving. From this first inspection of
the pattern so long wrought over from behind, it was natural to
glance a little farther and seek its reflection in the public eye.
It was not indeed of his special task that he thought in this
connection. He was but one of the great army of weavers at work
among the threads of that cosmic woof; and what he sought was the
general impression their labour had produced.
When Professor Linyard first plied his microscope, the audience of
the man of science had been composed of a few fellow-students,
sympathetic or hostile as their habits of mind predetermined, but
versed in the jargon of the profession and familiar with the point
of departure. In the intervening quarter of a century, however, this
little group had been swallowed up in a larger public. Every one now
read scientific books and expressed an opinion on them. The ladies
and the clergy had taken them up first; now they had passed to the
school-room and the kindergarten. Daily life was regulated on
scientific principles; the daily papers had their "Scientific
Jottings"; nurses passed examinations in hygienic science, and
babies were fed and dandled according to the new psychology.
The very fact that scientific investigation still had, to some
minds, a flavour of heterodoxy, gave it a perennial interest. The
mob had broken down the walls of tradition to batten in the orchard
of forbidden knowledge. The inaccessible goddess whom the Professor
had served in his youth now offered her charms in the market-place.
And yet it was not the same goddess after all, but a pseudo-science
masquerading in the garb of the real divinity. This false goddess
had her ritual and her literature. She had her sacred books, written
by false priests and sold by millions to the faithful. In the most
successful of these works, ancient dogma and modern discovery were
depicted in a close embrace under the lime-lights of a hazy
transcendentalism; and the tableau never failed of its effect. Some
of the books designed on this popular model had lately fallen into
the Professor's hands, and they filled him with mingled rage and
hilarity. The rage soon died: he came to regard this mass of
pseudo-literature as protecting the truth from desecration. But the
hilarity remained, and flowed into the form of his idea. And the
idea--the divine, incomparable idea--was simply that he should
avenge his goddess by satirizing her false interpreters. He would
write a skit on the "popular" scientific book; he would so heap
platitude on platitude, fallacy on fallacy, false analogy on false
analogy, so use his superior knowledge to abound in the sense of the
ignorant, that even the gross crowd would join in the laugh against
its augurs. And the laugh should be something more than the
distension of mental muscles; it should be the trumpet-blast
bringing down the walls of ignorance, or at least the little stone
striking the giant between the eyes. _
Read next: CHAPTER II
Table of content of Descent of Man
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
