The Anatomy of Love

Front matter

Anatomy of Love

By ARTHUR STRINGER Author of “The Prairie Wife,” “Phantom Wires,” etc.

Chapter1

CHAPTER I.

“THERE is just one thing, Waggles, before you go.”

“Yes, sir,” Waggles replied meekly.

“I am overlooking this—er—this indiscretion on your part, though the fact remains that it was an indiscretion. Undergraduates of this college have been distinctly forbidden to study astronomy from the top of the tower with young ladies. But that matter we shall now regard as a closed issue. The question I wish to put to you is something more personal, something more vital.”

Waggles shifted uncomfortably. He stared furtively at the green baize table littered with books and papers, at the figurine of Astarte side by side with a bronze statuette of a many-breasted Goddess of Ephesus, at the shining round lenses of the dean's eyeglasses, which threw back the light from the green-globed reading lamp.

“Waggles,” continued the Dean of Amboro, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair and leaning his finger tips meditatively together, “what is love?”

“I beg pardon, sir?” gasped Waggles, recoiling visibly.

“That is a plain question put in plain words: Just what does this word 'love' imply to you?”

Waggles glanced toward the door.

“I really don't know, sir!”

“But aren't you in love?”

Waggles' color deepened. He remained silent, although a distinct tendency to edge toward the door did not escape the eyes of the Dean of Amboro.

“Then if you have experienced this most primary of all the instincts, surely you have some ideas about it. And surely, as a man of intelligence—of intelligence considerably above that of the ordinary Amboro undergraduate—you are able to articulate those ideas.”

Waggles, shifting from one foot to the other, felt that something was expected of him.

“But it's—it's not a simple thing,” he inspiredly protested.

“With that point, Waggles, you stand on perfectly sound ground. Herbert Spencer, in fact, has even ventured to anticipate you there. Clustering about the physical feeling constituting its nucleus are subsidiary feelings, such as those awakened by beauty of face and figure and those grounded on human: attachment, and reverence and self-esteem, together with love of appreciation, of sympathy, of freedom, even of property itself. And all these, under excitation, tend both to interact and unite into that immense aggregation which we so loosely designate as 'romantic love.'”

“Yes, sir,” acknowledged the non-committal Waggles.

“But the point is,” pursued the man of science behind the green baize table, “just what do we mean by romantic love?”

Waggles, feeling the searching lenses on him like headlights, remained uncomfortably silent.

“What, Waggles, is your opinion on that?” prompted the man of science.

“That's something I've—I've never gone into,” was Waggles' altogether inadequate reply.

“Precisely,” said the Dean of Amboro, with dolorous triumph. “And it's something that nobody else seems to want to go into. It's something that science itself has neglected, although Spencer acknowledges that perhaps, on the whole, this phenomenon of falling in love is the most interesting episode in the whole career of the ordinary man and woman. And if men decline to go into the matter, as you put it, how are we ever going to reach the truth about it?”

This question seemed to nonplus the discomfited Waggles.

“What's the good of trying to find out the truth about it?” he finally inquired.

“That question, Waggles, is not consistent with the spirit of science. Otherwise, one might ask what's the good of trying to find out the truth about anything!”

The only truth seeming to trouble Waggles at the moment was that a mild and moonlit night of early summer lay beyond those musty deanery walls, and that from the shadowy gloom of the huge maples just south of the tennis courts he could hear the broken sound of music and laughing voices. And not all of those voices, seeing it was commencement week, were the voices of men.

“So what, Waggles, are we going to do about it?” the older man asked, with the same weary tolerance that a nurse might use toward an incorrigibly fretful child.

Waggles, resenting that note of intellectual condescension, looked his tormentor squarely between the eyes.

“Why not ask the women something about it?” he demanded, backing out of the door as he spoke. This movement gave his question a not undesired touch of the valedictory.

The spectacled psychologist at the far side of the reading lamp sighed more heavily than before. For Waggles had hit on the one stumblingblock in the path of all ethnographic success. You simply couldn't ask women about such things. Questionnaires on that theme, Macraven had found, were only too sadly impossible.

With still another sigh, he got up from his chair and went to the window. Beyond the shadowy maples, he could hear the lilt and throb of guitars, and the tinkle of mandolins, and rising above the music, now and then, the sound of light and youthful voices. And some of those voices were the voices of young women.

It was the old, the never-ending game. It made Macraven's thoughts go back to his own youth, to other nights of quiet moonlight, when he had leaned from a window in Oxford and heard much the same music and, across the level Magdalen lawns, had listened to much the same light and happy voices. And still later, in Heidelberg, he had often enough looked out on the same moonlight, on the same odorous beauty of earth and air, on the same unphilosophizing call of youth to youth. And there, too, at times he had been vaguely depressed by the sound of distant laughter and music.

In some way he had always seemed above it, barred off and detached from it. Instead of bending over mandolins, he had bent over microscope slides. And instead of living, he had been busy writing about life. Instead of climbing tower stairs with impressionable young women, after the manner of the redoubtable Waggles, he had struggled to make the name Amboro stand for something in the world of anthropology. But as he leaned out over the narrow stone sill, gazing across the deanery garden, already fragrant with its wealth of hyacinths, and out across the soft green of the campus, pallid in the flat moonlight, and up to the great gray tower that rose so sentinellike above the huddled college roofs, he felt a wayward sense of isolation creeping over him. He was no longer a young man. He was already entered, well entered, upon what his fellow worker in science had called “the plateau of life.” Something had faded and passed away, he scarcely knew what.

Yet it was only in fleeting and abstracted moments like this, he knew, that those years of effort crept back to him in any way touched with regret. That lost youth, he tried to tell him- self, had not been altogether a youth of unhappiness. Each season had known its accomplishment; each year had marked an advance. He had done what he had set out to do; Amboro had indeed been put on the map of anthropology, and behind him, under the green-shaded light on his sadly littered study table, lay the last pages of the third and final volume of his “Anatomy of Love.”

It was, in a way, his life work, or one phase of his life work—and it was finished. The last authority had been consulted, the last reference had been verified. There would be only the proof reading, and that would not begin until the early autumn. No tinkle of guitars, he felt, could ever carry to listening ears music more dulcet than that which had arisen from the quiet scratching of his gold-handled fountain pen as he had slowly written “Finis” at the foot of his last page. His college year, with all its avocational drudgery, was over. His work was done. And he was tired.

He turned back to the tower again, vague and blue above him in the soft moonlight. It had always stood there, a discreet and reticent friend to his midnight questionings, always grim and resolute and purposeful, always aloof, unaltering, silent in its aspiration, alone in its bald and unbending strength.

He shut the small diamond-paned windows sharply. Then he drew the curtains and turned a little wearily to his study table.

He had been working too hard, he told himself, as he pushed back the litter of papers before him. He had been living too long on the north side of life. The only tower he had watched had been that cloistral tower of granite. It was a tangible tower, and an enduring one, cold to the touch, somber to the eye. But beyond it, he had always indeterminately felt, there was some far-off sister tower, some frailer thing of softly fashioned ivory, the fragile abode of idleness and dreams, the pinnacle of poetry and longing. That was the tower his overstudious years had left untrodden; and that was the tower he most needed now, he told himself, before it was too late.

His line of thought was interrupted by a sudden knock on the door, and his listlessly authoritative “Come” was answered by the unlooked-for appearance of Taussig, the associate professor of philosophy.

The difference in the two men was marked. The associate professor of philosophy was short and stout. The eyes that shone out from under the shadows of his beetling brows were small, restless, almost furtive in their quickness of movement, had it not been for the settled good nature about the lines of the mouth. His vest was unbuttoned, and his dress, on the whole, tended toward untidiness, being redolent, as always, of strong tobacco.

John Herrin Macraven, on the other hand, was exceptionally tall. His shoulders were marked by that slight roundness—which is sometimes known as the scholar's stoop. His face was clean shaven, firm, and clear cut in outline, but given the appearance of being unusually long and ascetic by the high, smooth forehead. The nose, however, was straight and well chiseled, with the large nostril of physical strength, latent or neglected. The marked droop of the mouth corners, which gave the face its occasional aspect of grimness, might be taken as a conscious and deliberate assumption of the authoritative attitude, so kindly were the wide-set hazel eyes, so pensive their abstracted gaze.

“How's love?” asked Taussig, as he dropped into a wide-armed rattan chair. The associate professor of philosophy, Macraven remembered, always asked that question, and Macraven himself always winced at it. There were times, indeed, when he strongly suspected that it was prompted by some possible incongruity between his personality and the paths of his research work.

“With me, it's at last a closed issue,” announced the man at the desk.

“On paper?” amended Taussig. There was still a touch of mockery in his tones.

“On paper,” solemnly conceded Macraven. “Excepting the fact, of course, that my next four years must go to a study of sexual selection.”

Taussig, nursing his pipe bowl, nodded comprehendingly.

“And you feel rather lost, I dare say, with the big job off your hands?”

“Yes, I feel rather lost,” acknowledged Macraven.

“You need a rest!” said Taussig judicially.

“I'm going to take one. Doctor Shotwell has asked me up to his place at Cedar Hills. I'm off, the first of the week.”

“But I saw somewhere that Shotwell was starting for London, to read that paper of his on 'Reconstructive An thropogeny?'”

“Precisely; and I've engaged to look after his place while he's away!”

Taussig smoked in silence for a moment or two.

“He has a daughter, if I remember correctly?” said the man in the armchair.

“Yes,” answered Macraven. “A mere child.” His last memory of Shotwell's offspring was that of an impish and spider-legged youngster who had once upset a bottle of ink over his fourth chapter of “The Mating of Mammals.”

“Hm! Do you know how old a child?” asked Taussig.

Macraven did not.

“Ah, that brings me back to young Sewell,” said Taussig, elliptically. “It's young Richard Ford Sewell of the fourth year. He's asked me to help him out of that Memorial Hall scrape with Ramsdell.”

“But why should we make an exception of young Sewell's case?” said the Dean of Amboro, with a sudden resumption of the academic mien.

“He tells me,” confessed Taussig, “that he hopes to be married pretty soon.”

“Poor devil!” said Macraven.

His companion smiled, understandingly. Macraven's most widely read book, through what always seemed to its author some inscrutable caprice of public taste, has been his “Woman Retrogressive.” From the purely scientific side, it had done little more, of course, than provide a new and startling viewpoint for the world of psychology. But it had marked its creator as a misogynist of uncompromising and self-confessed extremes.

“Sewell isn't a bad sort,” said Taussig.

“But what can I do?” Macraven.

“It occurred to me that you might have Miss Appleby speak to her uncle about it.” Taussig smiled as he watched the misogynist. “You see, you have so much more influence with her than the rest of us have.”

The ridiculousness of such an appeal was too much for Macraven's overtaxed nerves.

“I've told Dodson, my man, to admit Miss Anne Appleby to these rooms on no consideration!” he cried.

“But she goes everywhere in Amboro! You can't quarrel with a woman who claims no less than thirteen blood and marriage relationships on the teaching staff alone. And besides all that, she's your own cousin!”

“Pardon me—my stepsister's husband's second cousin!”

“But surely, when she looked after you—I mean brought you that black currant jam last winter, when you had influenza2”

“Again pardon me—Miss Appleby brought that jam against my obvious and expressed desires. Not only that, but when I was quite weak—not altogether myself, I mean—she dictatorily insisted that I should eat it.”

“It was remarkably good jam!” said Taussig reminiscently.

The professor of anthropology closed his open inkwell with a tart suddenness that seemed to imply that life could know no greater joy and relief than imprisoning within that same inkwell both Anne Appleby and her jam, for all time.

“Well,” said Taussig, rising, “I merely wanted to mention the fact that Miss Appleby would call herself, to-morrow, to talk it over with you.”

“Then I shan't see her!” cried Macraven.

“She'll argue you out of that,” said Taussig, from the doorway, with a wag of his head. “She always does!”

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.

When the professor of anthropology returned to his rooms from the president's office, early the next day, he found Anne Appleby awaiting him. She was in his big brown leather reading chair, idly twirling her long gloves. On her black waist, just under her little pearlike chin, reposed a vivid cluster of Roman jonquils.

“Good morning, O King of Knowledge!” said Anne, with her meekest bow, folding her hands.

That was a mocking way of Anne's that always left Macraven more or less afraid of her. It had pleased him mightily, once, to think that Anne had adopted so many of his ideas as to the weaker sex that at his instigation she had eschewed barbaric jewelry and forsworn plumage in her headgear and expressed a horror of adorning herself in the primitive colors. That had been in the early and unsophisticated days of “Woman Retrogressive,” when his knowledge of the sex had been merely an empiric and an abstract one. In fact, he had been so carried away by that discipleship that he had rashly proposed marriage to the quite startled Anne, who had promptly refused him, on the ground, she said, that he was an agnostic and that she herself was too young to marry.

That had been six long years earlier in his career, and Anne had seemingly accepted single life with a strange and gentle placidity. Yet, during all that time, he had felt mysteriously apprehensive of this calm-eyed young lady who vacillated, in her relations with him, between that of a brusquely solicitous older sister and that of a mildly chastening young mother. He remembered only too well that it was a habit of Nature to chloroform her victims, as it were, before accomplishing the great cosmic processes, and he had always, since adopting the firm-fixed resolution that the celibate life was the only path through which he might reach his scholastic ends, fought fiercely and stubbornly against the subtly lethal influence that Anne seemed to shed around her.

He noticed, as he stepped to his study table, that one of his empty and neglected vases was filled with a heavy cluster of the same wonderful yellow flower that Anne herself was wearing. For some unfathomable reason a brick-red color slowly crept up to the young professor's high white temples as he sat looking at them.

“They were simply going to waste in my hothouse,” explained Anne, with a shrug. “And this room of yours is always so dowdy, you know!”

He looked at the flowers; then he looked at Anne; then he looked back at the flowers again.

“It's very good of you,” he said relentingly.

“It's rather good of you to take them,” answered Anne, with her preoccupied smile, looking about the walls to see if there were dust on his picture frames. “Why didn't you have that second window cut in your sleeping room?” she suddenly demanded.

“The building is not mine,” parried Macraven, almost irritably.

“But your lungs are your own,” said Anne mildly. Then she sighed. “There's one thing nice about a woman hater—he always tells you the truth, whether he means to or not.”

The professor of anthropology looked at Anne apprehensively. He sometimes found it hard to understand that enigmatic young lady, for all her appearance of brusque straightforwardness. He was about to speak; then he decided that silence was golden.

“You're going away,” said Anne, with conviction.

Anne's intuitions, at times, were startling.

“Yes, I want a rest,” said Macraven.

“I know it,” said Anne simply. She seemed to be struggling with a momentary temptation toward candor. “Couldn't I pack for you?” she demanded. Anne was the type of woman that takes an unreasonable and implacable delight in the exercise of the domestic attributes. She had even once insisted on sewing on buttons for the fellow in mathematics. “Why couldn't I pack for you?” she implored.

“You could do it only over Dodson's dead body, I'm afraid,” explained Macraven uneasily. He always felt afraid of Anne in that imploring mood. “Dodson is leaving me to-morrow.”

“Well, there's one thing I want you to do for me,” said Anne, suddenly sitting up straight and turning on him the soft artillery of her solemn smile.

“And that is?”

“I want you to be easy on Dickie Sewell.”

“If young Sewell has broken the rules of this college, he must suffer accordingly.”

“Yes, but supposing it's going to hurt somebody who is very near and dear to you,” persisted Anne.

“Good heavens, are you in love with young Sewell, too?” demanded Macraven.

“Thanks awfully,” said Anne, purring a little mockingly. “I never really knew you felt that way about me.” She grew suddenly sober, with an eloquent little outthrust of her upturned hands. “Instead of being merely just, be generous, this once!”

Macraven tried to explain to her the meaning and import of impersonal Duty.

“But I know he would be grateful,” said Anne, inconsequentially. “It would mean so much to him.”

The Dean of Amboro smiled a little wearily. It was an old cry, that; it always did mean so much to them, and they were all so ready to be grateful! So many times, year after year, they had come to him for help, and had pleaded their cause and passed out into the world, without so much as a word of gratitude. He did not resent it; he resented only the disillusionment it brought to his own breast.

“There's nothing I can do,” he said, a little wearily.

A fleeting look of pity crept into Anne's eyes, at the lines of fatigue on his face. That look in her eyes made him very guarded and watchful.

“That's all I ask, you see,” she cried, with another of her sudden changes of tone. “That's all that will be necessary—just to do nothing.” Then she added, softly: “I've attended to all the rest of the faculty.”

He would have laughed, had he been more at his ease. When he looked up again, she had risen and was standing above him with her hand outstretched.

“Good-by,” she said. “Have a good rest and a jolly time!”

And before he realized it, she had fluttered out, and the room was empty. As he sat there, deep in thought, with the tips of his long fingers held lightly together, he first tried to recall their talk, and then tried to reframe in his mind her face as she had looked down at him.

Anne Appleby was a woman of twenty-seven, unmarried, and of independent means. An open brow, not altogether untouched with its mysterious serenities, bore testimony to the full intellectual control of that emotional warmth which the rich, yet softly turned lips only too eloquently confessed. Yet this mouth was both tender and humorous. Her eyes were gray, large, and intelligent. Unscrupulous in her efforts toward the engagement of affection—since with that invincible ally she had long since learned she could best control people—she was still courageous enough to make enemies for the sake of a friend, or to shock friends for the sake of an enemy. There was a tradition in Amboro that either the field captain or the class president of each term for eleven years back had duly, but hopelessly proposed to her, and had, of course, been promptly, yet tenderly rejected.

Not that Anne was a coquette in the ordinary sense of that odious word. It had always seemed to be her sportsmanlike principle to kill only what was needed for camp; she would surrender to no impulse for slaughter for the mere sake of the killing. She was still young enough to talk with her contented victims as a sister might, and yet quite oldish enough to act toward them as a mother should—an elusive and unstable association that seldom tended toward peace of mind in the objects of her keenly impersonal solicitude. Yet Anne, at times, could be the soul of sobriety; she was reserved even to primness; her indiscretions were open ones, and usually due to a mingling of carelessly defiant impulse and a warm-hearted and ever-active domesticity. In fact, so wide were her relationships by blood and marriage, so ready were her sympathies, and so numerous the army of infants named after her—so went the Amboro tradition—that for seven years and more the passing away of some namesake or kindred had kept Anne Appleby in a state of continuous mourning—though there were those who held that it was all because she thought she looked her best in black.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III.

Macraven, with his butterfly nets and his microscopes beside him, peered uneasily up and down the lonely little station platform. From a near-by clover field, in full bloom, echoed the call of bobolinks. From somewhere in the remoter distance came the sound of pounding; then a dog barked, and the morning grew silent again. The only figure in sight was that of a much bewhiskered and ferret-eyed workman, placidly squatting beside a row of track lamps, at the far end of the bald little platform.

“Can you tell me if I am right in assuming that this is Cedar Hills?” asked Macraven, weighed down by the loneliness of the place and some wordless sense of impending calamity.

“It be!” responded the lamp cleaner, with a gently forgiving nod toward the station sign, where the name stood in letters a foot high.

“If I am not mistaken, the fruit farm of Doctor Ezra Shotwell is somewhere in this neighborhood?”

“It be!”

“Then could you please tell me about how far away?”

The lamp cleaner sat and studied for a moment or two.

“'Bout four mile!”

The distant sound of hammering broke forth again, and a dog barked dismally once more through the morning quietness. All the world, it seemed to the Dean of Amboro, had fallen asleep. He turned again to his uncommunicative companion.

“Could you tell me the best way of getting there?”

“Be yuh goin' there?”

“I be!” retorted the professor, exasperated.

The old lamp cleaner slowly wheeled about and pointed to a clump of willows beyond the clover field.

“The Harkins boy is waitin' for yuh there with the Shotwell team, I guess. Scart to death o' the train, he says. Ain't takin' no chances on another runaway!”

Even as he spoke, a team of prancing bays, with heads high and ears forward, emerged from the shadow of the willows. Macraven looked at them with gathering distrust. The youth who was holding the reins could have been little more than twelve or thirteen years of age. The professor promptly decided that if only four miles separated him from the Shotwell farm, he preferred to walk.

“Air yuh the man from Amboro they was lookin' for yisterday?” languidly inquired the lamp cleaner.

“Yesterday?” echoed Macraven, in alarm. “Surely I wired the right date!”

He peered through his pocket note-book with a sigh of distress. His friend viewed him with forbearance modified by compassion, slowly wagging his head up and down.

“She said as yuh might be a little queerlike.”

“Who said I'd be 'queerlike'?” demanded the other.

“That gurl o' Shotwell's. She druv through with that team o' bays o' theirs yisterday. Waited a hull hour and a half for the up train. When the train did pull in, that team o' hers run away, lickety-split. Smashed a hind spring afore the gurl could git 'em sawed off 'n the wind!”

“Was she hurt?”

“No, but she was mad!” He wagged his head again, in silent memory of the scene. She's a high-stepper, that gurl! Then she cooled down and said I was to hev yuh sent over to the farm, if yuh got in when nobody was round—said I was to try and git some little wits in my head—he-he—and look out for a middle-aged gen'leman with thin legs!”

An inconsequential feeling of irritability crept over the young professor of anthropology. He was, obviously, in the land of the Barbaroi, where worth went unrecognized.

He left instructions for the Harkins boy to carry his traps on to the farm, whither he would follow on foot. A walk of four miles through the fresh country air would brush the cobwebs from his brain and give him a chance to think things out and perhaps swing back to a more cheerful point of view.

He sighed as he resumed his journey down the little winding roadway, between slopes of resinous pine, through orchard lands stippled with light and shade, and along rolling pasture fields threaded with a flashing and tumbling little rivulet; for he had suddenly thought of his telegram and his arrival one day too late. After all, it was just as well that he was getting away from his work. Twice, old Ramsdell, the professor of Greek, had accused him of absently carrying off his gold-headed umbrella. Once, too, he had worn his house coat into the lecture hall—a very comfortable garment that Anne Appleby had quilted and trimmed with scarlet military braid for him. He had been grinding too hard. The quiet life of the country had much to be said in its favor.

For a moment he almost envied Shotwell, his old friend who had been dean of the same “residence,” had lectured in the same halls, and had worried along on the same frugal salary. But seven years before, the older man had startled both Amboro and the outer world by the unexpected publication of his romantic novel, “Princess Impossible.” He had plaintively enough cried his apologies for it, before his gently smiling academic friends; but in clubs and car seats, in boudoirs and libraries, half a million readers had sighed and wept over its well-stiffened mush of adventure and its well-candied meringue of sentiment. Little had they imagined, all the while, that the “Shirley Legrange” of the eleven-editioned romance was Ezra Ingraham Shotwell, M.A., Ph.D., F.A.S.L., author of “Racial Evolution.” Yet, ironically enough, the returns from that eleven-editioned frolic in easy-handed eroticism had given the overworked Amboro lecturer a belated chance to cut loose from academic confinement and to take unto himself the many-acred estate where he now toyed with the hybridization of orchard fruits and labored in secluded ease and content on the sixth and last volume of his colossal “Evolutionary Series.”

Again the young professor of anthropology sighed, as he came to a stop in the narrow, winding road and gazed absently about him at the murmuring woods, the softly rolling. fields, the shadowy thickets from which the birds were singing. That was all he asked for—freedom, such as his old friend had found, to do his own work in his own way. And here, at least, he would be free from all danger of entangling alliances.

It was not that he was so match afraid of women—he prided himself that he knew them too well for that—it was more that he was afraid of his own racial instincts, calling to him so arbitrarily out of the tomb of the past. Nor was he uncertain of what course to choose. When one was wedded to one's profession, one was better off, frankly, without women about. Anne herself had always agreed with him on that—and then she would casually ask, ten minutes later, why he had gone out in the sleet without his rubbers, and if he was eating his meals on time. Or she would intimately demand, as she picked a piece of lint from his carpet, if Dodson was airing the deanery blankets properly. She had even come and bullied him about that new window and sent a chimney cleaner to the deanery when his grate refused to draw. He had often heard that it was the practical and housewifely sort of woman, from the day of the cave dweller down to that of the auto user, who ensnared men.