



Produced by Charles Aldarondo.  HTML version by Al Haines.









THE DESCENT OF MAN

AND OTHER STORIES


BY EDITH WHARTON






TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE DESCENT OF MAN, AND OTHER STORIES



The Descent of Man

The Other Two

Expiation

The Lady's Maid's Bell

The Mission of Jane

The Reckoning

The Letter

The Dilettante

The Quicksand

A Venetian Night's Entertainment





THE DESCENT OF MAN

I


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.


II

The Professor, on presenting his card, had imagined that it would
command prompt access to the publisher's sanctuary; but the young man
who read his name was not moved to immediate action. It was clear that
Professor Linyard of Hillbridge University was not a specific figure to
the purveyors of popular literature. But the publisher was an old
friend; and when the card had finally drifted to his office on the
languid tide of routine he came forth at once to greet his visitor.

The warmth of his welcome convinced the Professor that he had been
right in bringing his manuscript to Ned Harviss. He and Harviss had
been at Hillbridge together, and the future publisher had been one of
the wildest spirits in that band of college outlaws which yearly turns
out so many inoffensive citizens and kind husbands and fathers. The
Professor knew the taming qualities of life. He was aware that many of
his most reckless comrades had been transformed into prudent
capitalists or cowed wage-earners; but he was almost sure that he could
count on