Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man Part 18

But, although she had at last finished and done with school, Mary Virginia didn't come home to us as we had hoped she would. Her mother had other plans, which failed to include little Appleboro. Why should a girl with such connections and opportunities be buried in a little town when great cities waited for just such with open and welcoming arms? The best we got then was a photograph of our girl in her graduation frock--slim wistful Mary Virginia, with much of her dear angular youthfulness still clinging to her.

It was Mrs. Eustis herself who kept us posted, after awhile, of the girl's later triumphant progress; the sensation she created, the bored world bowing to her feet because she brought it, along with name and wealth, so fresh a spirit, so pure a beauty. There was a certain autocratic old Aunt of her mother's, a sort of awful high priestess in the inmost shrine of the sacred elect; this Begum, delighted with her young kinswoman, ordered the rest of her world to be likewise delighted, and the world agreeing with her verdict, Mary Virginia fared very well. She was feted, photographed, and paragraphed. Her portrait, painted by a rather obscure young man, made the painter famous. In the hands of the Begum the pretty girl blossomed into a great beauty. The photograph that presently came to us quite took our breath away, she was so regal.

"She will never, never again be at home in little Appleboro," said my mother, regretfully. "That dear, simple, pa.s.sionate, eager child we used to know has gone forever--life has taken her. This beautiful creature's place is not here--_she_ belongs to a world where the women wear t.i.tles and tiaras, and the men wear kings' orders. No, we could never hope to hold her any more."

"But we could love her, could we not? Perhaps even more than those fine ladies with tiaras and t.i.tles and those fine gentlemen with orders, whom your fancy conjures up for her," said I crisply, for her words stung. They found an echo in my own heart.

"Love her? Oh, but of course! But--love counts for very, very little in the world which claims Mary Virginia now, Armand. Ambition stifles him." I was silent. I knew.

As for John Flint, he looked at that photograph and turned red.

"Good Lord! To think I had nerve to send _her_ a few b.u.t.terflies last year ... told _her_ to play like they meant more! I somehow couldn't get the notion in my head that she'd grown up.... I never could think of her except as a sort of kid-angel, because I couldn't seem to bear the idea of her ever being anything else but what she was. Well ...

she's not, any more. And I've had the nerve to give a few insects to the Queen of Sheba!"

"Bos.h.!.+" said Laurence, st.u.r.dily. "She ought to be glad and proud to get that tray, and I'll bet you Mary Virginia's delighted with it.

She's her father's daughter as well as her mother's, please. As for Appleboro not being good enough for her, that's piffle, too, p't.i.te Madame, and I'm surprised at you! Her own town is good enough for any girl. If it isn't, let her just pitch in and help make it good enough, if she's worth her salt. Not that Mary Virginia isn't scrumptious, though. Lordy, who'd think this was the same kid that used to b.u.mp my head?"

"She turns heads now, instead of b.u.mping them," said my mother.

"Oh, she's not the only head-turner Appleboro can boast of!" said the young man grandly. "We've always been long on good-lookers in Carolina, whatever else we may lack. They're like berries in their season."

"But the berry season is short and soon over, my son: and there are seasons when there are no berries at all--except preserved ones,"

suggested my mother, with that swift, curious cattiness which so often astounds me in even the dearest of women.

"Dare you to tell that to the Civic League!" chortled Laurence. "I'll grant you that Mary Virginia's the biggest berry in the patch, at the height of a full season. But look at her getup! Don't doodads and fallals, and hen-feathers in the hair, and things twisted and tied, and a slithering train, and a clothesline length of pearls and such, count for something? How about Claire Dexter, for instance? She mayn't have a Figure like her Aunt Sally Ruth, but suppose you dolled Claire up like this? A flirt she was born and a flirt she will die, but isn't she a perfect peach? That reminds me--that ungrateful minx gave two dances rightfully mine to Mr. Howard Hunter last night. I didn't raise any ructions, because, to tell you the truth, I didn't much blame her.

That fellow really knows how to dance, and the way he can convey to a girl the impression that he's only alive on her account makes me gnash my teeth with green-and-blue envy. No wonder they all dote on him! No home complete without this handsome ornament!" he added.

My mother's lips came firmly together.

"It is a great mistake to figure Mephistopheles as a rather blase brunette," she remarked crisply. "I am absolutely certain that if you could catch the devil without his mask you'd find him a perfect blonde."

"Nietzsche's blonde beast, then?" suggested Laurence, amused at her manner.

"That same blonde beast is perhaps the most magnificent of animals," I put in. For alone of my household I admired immensely Mr. Inglesby's secretary. He was the only man I have ever known to whom the term 'beautiful' might be justly applied, and at the word's proper worth.

Such a man as this, a two-handed sword gripped in his steel fists, a wolfskin across his broad shoulders and eagle-wings at either side the helmet that crowns his yellow hair, looks at one out of many a red, red page of the past with just such blue, dangerous, and cloudless eyes. Rolling and reeking decks have known him, and falling walls, and shrieks, and flames mounting skyward, and viking sagas, and drinking-songs roared from bra.s.s throats, and terrible hymns to Odin Allfather in the midwatches of Northern nights.

He had called upon me shortly after his arrival, his ostensible reason being my work among his mill-people. I think he liked me, later. At any rate, I had seen much of him, and I was indebted to him for more than one shrewd and practical suggestion. If at times I was chilled by what seemed to me a ruthless and cold-blooded manner of viewing the whole great social question I was nevertheless forced to admire the almost mathematical perfection to which he had reduced his system.

"But you wish to deal with human beings as with figures in a sum," I objected once.

"Figures," he smiled equably, "are only stubborn--on paper. When they're alive they're fluid and any clever social chemist can reduce them to first principles. It's really very simple, as all great things are: _When in doubt, reach the stomach!_ There you are! That's the universal eye-opener."

"My dear friend," he added, laughing, "don't look so horrified. _I_ didn't make things as they are. Personally, I might even prefer to say, like Mr. Fox in the old story, _'It was not so. It is not so. And G.o.d forbid it should be so!'_ But I can't, truthfully, and therefore--I don't. I accept what I can't help. Self-preservation, we all admit, is the first law of nature. Now I consider myself, and the cla.s.s I represent, as beings much more valuable to the world than, let's say, your factory-hands, your mill-workers, your hewers of wood and drawers of water. Thus, should the occasion arise, I should most unhesitatingly use whatever weapons law, religion, civilization itself, put into my hands, without compunction and possibly what some cavilers might call without mercy; having at stake a very vital issue--the preservation of my kind, the protection of my cla.s.s against Demos."

He spoke without heat, calmly, looking at me smilingly with his fine intelligent eyes: there was even much of truth in his frank statement of his case. Always has Dives spoken thus, law-protected, dining within; while without the doors of the sick civilization he has brought about, Lazarus lies, licked by the dogs of chance. No, this man was advocating no new theory; once, perhaps, I might have argued even thus myself, and done so with a clean conscience. This man was merely an opportunist. I knew he would never "reach their stomachs"

unless he thought he had to. Indeed, since his coming, things had changed greatly at the mills, and for the better.

"The day of the great G.o.d Gouge," he had said to Inglesby, "is pa.s.sing. It's bad business to overwork and underpay your hands into a state of chronic insurrection. That means losing time and scamping work. The square deal is not socialism nor charity nor a matter of any one man's private pleasure or conscience--it's cold hard common sense and sound scientific business. You get better results, and that's what you're after."

Perhaps it was because Appleboro offered, at that time, very little to amuse and interest that keen mind of his, that the b.u.t.terfly Man amused and interested Hunter so much. Or perhaps, proud as he was, even he could not wholly escape that curious likableness which drew men to John Flint.

He was delighted with our collection. He could appreciate its scope and value, something to which all Appleboro else paid but pa.s.sing heed. John Flint declared that most folks came to see our b.u.t.terflies just as they would have run to see the dog-faced boy or the bearded lady--merely for something to see. But this man's appreciation and praise were both sincere and encouraging. And as he never allowed anything or anybody unusual or interesting to pa.s.s him by without at least sampling its savor, he formed the habit of strolling over to the Parish House to talk with the limping man who had come there a dying tramp, was now a scientist, with the manner and appearance of a gentleman, and who spoke at will the language of two worlds. That this once black sheep had strayed of his own will and pleasure from some notable fold Hunter didn't for a moment doubt. Like all Appleboro, he wouldn't have been at all surprised to see this prodigal son welcomed into the bosom of some Fifth Avenue father, and have the fatted calf dressed for him by a chef whose salary might have hired three college professors. Hunter had known one or two such black sheep in his time; he fancied himself none too shrewd in thus penetrating Flint's rather obvious secret.

My mother watched the secretary's comings and goings at the Parish House speculatively. Not even the fact that he quoted her adored La Rochefoucauld, in flawless French, softened _her_ estimate.

"If he even had the semblance of a heart!" said she, regretfully. "But he is all head, that one."

Now, I am a simple man, and this cultivated and handsome man of the world delighted me. To me immured in a mill town he brought the modern world's best. He was a window, for me, which let in light.

"That great blonde!" said Madame, wonderingly. "He is so designedly fascinating I wonder you fail to see the wheels go 'round. However, let me admit that I thank G.o.d devoutly I am no longer young and susceptible. Consider the terrible power such a man might exert over an ardent and unsophisticated heart!"

It was Hunter who had brought me a slim book, making known to me a poet I had otherwise missed.

"You are sure to like Bridges," he told me, "for the sake of one verse. Have you ever thought _why_ I like you, Father De Rance?

Because you amuse me. I see in you one of life's subtlest ironies: A Greek beauty-wors.h.i.+per posing as a Catholic priest--in Appleboro!" He laughed. And then, with real feeling, he read in his resonant voice:

"I love all beautiful things: I seek and adore them.

G.o.d has no better praise, And man in his hasty days, Is honored for them."

When at times the secretary brought his guests to see what he pleasingly enough termed Appleboro's one claim to distinction, the b.u.t.terfly Man did the honors to the manner born. Drawer after drawer and box after box would he open, patiently answering and explaining.

And indeed, I think the contents were worth coming far to see. Some of them had come to us from the ends of the earth; from China and j.a.pan and India and Africa and Australia, from the Antilles and Mexico and South America and the isles of the Pacific; from many and many a lonely missionary station had they been sent us. Even as our collection grew, the library covering it grew with it. But this was merely the most showy and pleasing part of the work. That which had the greatest scientific worth and interest, that upon which John Flint's value and reputation were steadily mounting, was in less lovely and more destructive forms of insect life. Beside this last, a labor calling for the most unremitting, painstaking, persevering research, observation, and intelligence, the painted beauties of his b.u.t.terflies were but as precious play. For in this last he was wringing from Nature's reluctant fingers some of her dearest and most deeply hidden secrets. He was like Jacob, wrestling all night long with an unknown angel, saying st.u.r.dily:

"I will not let thee go except thou tell me thy name!" Like Jacob, he paid the price of going halt for his knowledge.

I like to think that Hunter understood the enormous value of the naturalist's work. But I fancy the silent and absorbed student himself was to his mind the most interesting specimen, the most valuable study. It amused him to try to draw his reticent host into familiar and intimate conversation. Flint was even as his name.

Oddly enough, Hunter shared the b.u.t.terfly Man's liking for that unspeakable Book of Obituaries, and I have seen him take a batch of them from his pocket as a free-will offering. I have seen him, who had all French, Russian and English literature at his fingers' ends, sit chuckling and absorbed for an hour over that fearful collection of lugubrious verse and worse grammar; pausing every now and then to cast a speculative and curious glance at his impa.s.sive host, who, paying absolutely no attention to him, bent his whole mind, instead, upon some tiny form in a balsam slide mount under his microscope.

"Why don't you admire Mr. Hunter?" I was curious to know.

"But I do admire him." Flint was sincere.

"Then if you admire him, why don't you like him?"

He reflected.

"I don't like the expression of his teeth," he admitted. "They're too pointed. He looks like he'd bite. I don't think he'd care much who he bit, either; it would all depend on who got in his way."

Seeing me look at him wonderingly, he paused in his work, stretched his legs under the table, and grinned up at me.

"I'm not saying he oughtn't to put his best foot foremost," he agreed.

"We'd all do that, if we only knew how. And I'm not saying he ought to tell on himself, or that anybody's got any business getting under his guard. I don't hanker to know anybody's faults, or to find out what they've got up their sleeves besides their elbows, unless I have to.

Why, I'd as soon ask a fellow to take off his patent leathers to prove he hadn't got bunions, or to unb.u.t.ton his collar, so I'd be sure it wasn't fastened onto a wart on the back of his neck. Personally I don't want to air anybody's b.u.mps and bunions. It's none of my business. I believe in collars and shoes, myself. _But_ if I see signs, I can believe all by my lonesome they've got 'em, can't I?"

"Exactly. Your deductions, my dear Sherlock, are really marvelous. A gentleman wears good shoes and clean collars--wherefore, you don't like the expression of his teeth!" said I, ironically.

"Slap me on the wrist some more, if it makes you feel good," he offered brazenly. "For he may--and I sure don't." His grin faded, the old pucker came to his forehead.

"Parson, maybe the truth is I'm not crazy over him because people like him get people like me to seeing too plainly that things aren't fairly dealt out. Why, think a minute. That man's got about all a man can have, hasn't he? In himself, I mean. And if there's anything more he fancies, he can reach out and get it, can't he? Well, then, some folks might get to thinking that folks like him--get more than they deserve.