My Little Sister Part 28

"Why must you have wild thyme there?" he grumbled.

"So as not to disappoint the blue b.u.t.terflies," I said gravely. "They 'know a bank' and this is it. They've had an understanding with my mother about it for years. If they don't find thyme here they're annoyed. They go on dying out. My mother says a world without blue b.u.t.terflies would be a poor sort of place."

We talked irrelevancies for a moment more--the pa.s.sion of the convolvulus moth for petunias, and the other flowers the different sorts of moths and b.u.t.terflies preferred.

He was surprised to hear that for years my mother had taken all that trouble to please even the ordinary red admirals and spotted footmen and painted ladies. I explained that I was re-planting this thyme only to please my mother. "Personally," I had never bothered much about the b.u.t.terfly-garden, I said, in what he promptly called a superior tone.

I maintained that the pampered creatures were dreadful "slackers" and sybarites--all for colour and sweet scents.

He stood listening a moment to the bees' band playing in the rhododendron concert, and then he defended the b.u.t.terflies. b.u.t.terflies were much misunderstood. "In their way--and a very good way, too--they answer to the call."

"What call?"

"The call to serve the ends of life."

I looked up, surprised, from my fresh thyme patch, for general moralisings were not much in Eric's way. "What are the ends of life?"

"More life." There was a moment's pause. Then he said b.u.t.terflies were no more "idle" than bees and birds. Besides attending to their more immediate affairs they were pollen-bringers.

It was such solemn talk for b.u.t.terflies. I told him the two sulphur yellows reeling in the suns.h.i.+ne were laughing at him. "'Ends of life'

indeed! They simply _love_ bright colour and things that smell sweet...."

"Of course they love them!" Then he said something that sank deeper than any single sentence I ever heard: "Hating never created anything; all life comes from lovers."

At the moment that great saying only frightened me. And the strange thing was it seemed to frighten him.

We were very still for a moment. I thought even the little music of the honey bees had slackened. I and all the world waited--holding breath.

Then a gust of wind veered round the corner, and Eric turned up his collar. He asked if I wasn't cold. I was anything but cold. But I had noticed that after his long hours of motionless concentration indoors, Eric was very sensitive to chill. So I put off planting the rest of the thyme, and I took Eric up to the morning-room.

"What is he going to tell me?" I asked myself on the way. And though I asked, I thought I knew.

CHAPTER XXIII

ERIC'S SECRET

My sister and I breakfasted in the morning-room in those days, and we always had a fire for Bettina's sake on chilly mornings.

In the back of my mind I was hoping Eric's complaint of cold was an excuse. If my first impression had been right, if he had something to tell me, he would tell it better indoors. I should hear it better, sitting beside him.

The pang when he pa.s.sed the sofa by! I was wrong.... I was an idiot....

He drew up before the ungenerous little fire and began at once to speak with suppressed excitement of a "secret."

"----the sort of thing that--well, I wouldn't trust my own brother with it." And upon that he stopped short.

I did not say: "You can trust me." But I hardly breathed in the pause. I felt it all hung on whether he told me. What hung? Why, everything--whether life was going to be kind to me some day ...

whether it was well or ill that I had been born.

He seemed to be content with having told me there was a secret. For he changed the subject abruptly to the Bungalow, and what an adept Bootle was at inoculation and the preparation of cultures. Bootle possessed the great and glorious faculty of accuracy! One of the few men on earth whose account of a thing did not need to be checked.

Sitting over the fire that morning, Eric told me that the Bungalow was a laboratory. Very important work had been done there last autumn. (So _that_ was why he had stayed on!) "Tentative but highly significant results" had been arrived at--results which all these months of contest and putting to proof, in London and on the Continent, had not been able to upset.

"G.o.ds!" Eric exclaimed, with a startling vehemence. But this was a glorious place to work in! The best air in England! And the Bungalow had been an inspiration from on high! Far away from noise and interruption; and not merely for a few paltry hours. Great stretches of time to himself! Then you were so fit here. You slept. You had all your wits about you. As we knew, it was Hawkins's idea in the first place--that Eric should come down and rest. Well, now I was to hear something more about Hawkins. Hawkins was a kind of mascot. He not only was the best man they'd ever had in that chair at the University. He wasn't only a first-rate bacteriologist, and first-rate all-round man. There was something about Hawkins that struck fire out of other people. His rooms were a meeting-place for chaps keen about--well, about the things that matter. Hawkins gave a dinner at his club one night to some London University men and a couple of distinguished foreigners.

"Of course, we talked shop. We argued and stirred one another up, and the sparks flew. When the rest had gone Hawkins and I stayed talking in the smoking-room. About an idea"--Eric looked round to see that the door was shut--"a new idea I was working at for dealing with cancer."

"Dealing!" I echoed, leaning forward. "You mean curing?"

"----I told Hawkins about an experiment I'd been making. As I've said, Hawkins is very intelligent. But he contested my conclusions. I grew hot. We argued. I told him more and more. Hawkins thought my experiments too rough-and-ready. Even if they weren't rough-and-ready, to be conclusive they must be tried on an extended scale. I stood up for the validity of tests, on a small scale, done with an infinity of care--a ruthless spending of the investigator rather than multiplication of the subject. All the same, I couldn't deny that precious time was being wasted and many lives. Hawkins was right. I did need a trained staff, and I needed--oh, ma.s.ses of things I had not got, and had no prospect of getting. We had tried the forlorn hope of a Government grant--and failed. We agreed that, in working out an idea like mine, the crucial danger lay in premature publicity. We are in a cleft stick in these matters. Without the right people knowing, believing, helping, it is hard--pretty nearly impossible--to go forward. I sat, rather dejected, and stared at the fire. The smoking-room had been empty except for a little, dried-up old man, who was half asleep over the evening papers. A few minutes after Hawkins had gone out to pay his bill, the little old man waked up and went to a writing-table. In a half-minute or so I looked round, and he was standing quite near me, warming his back at the fire.

"'I've been eavesdropping,' he said. Lord! I was scared. How much had I given away? 'I don't know anything about this subject,' he said. 'But I've an idea you do. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on it. My name's Pearmain,' he said, and he showed me the signature on a cheque. 'A thousand pounds to start you.' He laid the cheque down on the little table among the matches and cigar-ends. 'You can let me know when you need more,' he said. He fished a card out of an inside pocket, and chucked it on top of the cheque. Naturally I was staggered. He _seemed_ right enough in his head, but I was sure he couldn't be.... When Hawkins came back I introduced him. We talked awhile longer. Then the old man said good-night. The next day I cashed the cheque. I gave up my post in the hospital, and I gave up ... a lot of things. After that I invested every ounce of energy I had in this undertaking. For three solid years I've done nothing, thought about nothing, except the one thing."

His eyes were s.h.i.+ning as a lover's might, I thought. The sting of jealousy poisoned my pleasure in being taken into his confidence--a renewed antagonism to the work, work, always work, that made its triumphant claim.

"You pretend to be more inhuman than you are," I said. "For you don't forget that you can help people who have only ordinary everyday troubles."

"Oh, yes, I do," he laughed. "I'll have nothing to do with ordinary, everyday troubles."

"You helped us----"

"Oh, that's different--an exception. Just for once...." He seemed to excuse himself, for wasting time on us. He said the most extravagant things. "A revolution might have swept England. I should have gone on attenuating serums and inoculating guinea-pigs."

It may have been something in my manner, or just my silence, that pulled him up. He spoke of the share we at Duncombe had had in "what's happened."

"When I was clean worked out and dead-beat, I came here."

We hadn't any notion of the "rest and refreshment--the----" He looked at me out of those clear red-brown eyes of his, and seemed to deliberate.

A sense of delicious panic seized me. "And--the--the experiments. How do they come on?" I asked, but I wasn't thinking of them at all.

"That," he said, sinking his voice--"that's just what I'm coming to; though I hoped I shouldn't tell you. I didn't mean to say anything at all this morning, except that I was going to be a hermit for these next days. But you aren't a chatterbox. The fact is ... last night I believe I stumbled on the secret."

I don't know what I said, but it pleased him. His eyes were full of gentle brilliancy. "Yes, yes," he said. "I knew _you'd_ understand."

Oh, it was good to see him with that light in his face!

And we sat there, with the morning sun s.h.i.+ning over us, and just looked gladness at each other. Then I said I thought he must be the happiest man in England.

He half put out his hand, and drew it back. "I am to find that out, too, very soon," he said. The clock downstairs chimed ten. Eric jumped up like a person with a train to catch.

He had taken me into his counsels prematurely like this, he said, because he wanted to feel sure that I wasn't putting any wrong construction on the fact of his burying himself for these next days. "I like to think you are understanding. If I have any good news, I'll come and tell you. If you don't hear, you'll know I don't dare let go my clue even for an hour, except to sleep."

And now he must go.