Chapter XVI

Edith found her new studies confining. There was no more revelry in the riches of the sand dunes, where the fringed gentian hides its glory. Invertebrates and embryos, microscope and microtome—such was the new order of the day. But she often dreamed back to her botany.

God’s love had spoken to her in the plants. The very breath she drew was sweetened for her by the leaves; girl and tree live by exchanging breath; you cannot feed lovers so. And what fair thought had she ever known but it grew fairer in the presence of flowers? She was wont to read the very skies in terms of a blossomy spectrum—violet, dahlia, hepatica, forget-me-not, larkspur, crocus, poppy, rose.

When God’s sunshine reached earth, love sprang to meet love. Into the thin leaves the earth sent up three elements, and His red and blue rays transformed them into food. Then, by admitting the stream of nitrogen, He transformed the leaf-sugar into living tissue, and at last into bodies like her own. The elements of her body would some day rejoin the circling streams, but she who followed His art could never die.

It was Trench who had unconsciously made her feel the sacredness of all this. And now what was suddenly happening to her under his conscious influence? He had talked about looking at things impersonally. Well, she had always so looked at food; she had never eaten her bread with tears because it was the defeated offspring of wheat-plants; but now even bread began to taste of blood. And now she could not look at living plants without recognising the terrible overcrowding. Death among plants, from the heartless oak to the hooked liana, was a systematic asphyxiation of infants.

When she turned to the insects, she could no longer rejoice in the little marriage-priestlings of the flowers. Once she had thought how wisely their unseen Bishop had assigned them—butterflies for the red, bees for the blue, moths for the white. But this was fancy; this was nature-faking. Trench would explain all that fertilisation in terms of equations. But when you got down to scientific bed rock, there was no language left. There wasn’t a verb along that path, and the result was that instead of regarding the flower-marriages in noble Ruskinian fashion, she now regarded them ignobly. Elsie, for instance, was a passionate red flower, and any passing butterfly like Edith might irritate her into unhallowed union with the nearest reckless red.

So much for the insects that live on nectar. Looking now at the rest of the two million species, she saw them as assassins. Their instinctive methods were diabolically ingenious and cruel. They presented a closed system of hunger, assassination, and rape.

Nor was it only the male that was inexorably and innocently hungry. The female scorpion and mantis eat the whole of their mates, during or after pairing. Even the cricket mutilates her mate. No wonder that Trench had evaded the discussion of crickets on the hearth.

She began to understand him. He regarded life as a unit, from bees to priests, and flowers to girls, and crickets to matrons. And it was to avoid becoming an utter misanthrope that he called it fate or machinery. But if she ever came to such a conclusion, life would not be worth living. That kind of view would paralyse her will. It would make all effort a farce.

The case was no better when she came to study the sea-animals. From the barely visible slipper-animalcule to the shark, it was an unrelieved system of assassination. And the formula of sea-water was nearly that of her own blood. She was the descendant of these assassins—before birth her neck had actually shown traces of gills. Of course in theory it made no difference who her ancestors were, if she had attained decency. But how could she be sure? She had a maw like the rest, and she liked small oysters alive. Was her spiritual life but a self-deceptive egotism? Was her anxiety over Bobbie merely nature’s way of providing a future defender of her appetite for expensive shell-fish?

“Nature” distributed claws and teeth and protective devices quite impersonally, and left the rest to chance. As things had worked out, the heavy-armoured trilobites were a failure, as heavy-armoured vessels might prove to be, in the war Trench thought so close at hand. The alert and active destroyers had inherited the earth. The especially triumphant tribes were three: the cricket-tribe, the bacteria, and man. Well, people didn’t worry about it. Preachers assured their audiences that Darwin was a back number.

How hard her heart was becoming. But she had not come to the university to harden her heart. Whatever God was, she must trust Him. Had He not guided Dr. Trench’s hand to the saving of Bobbie’s life? Yes—though now it was piteously necessary to look more closely into the process of that salvation. Bobbie had been saved from the membrane in his throat. And the membrane was only a bed of foliage; the poison was a secretion of little stems. The diphtheretic bacillus was merely a colourless plant with a vicarious method of blooming. It turned a rosy cheek to violet, and a carnation lip to iris, and triumphed at last in one great heavy white blossom. If God made that plant, Dr. Trench had saved Bobbie from God. But perhaps God was not a physical cause at all. Perhaps he was like heaven or Elijah—yet to come. She felt a bitter sense of the ludicrous.

Plunged in her new troubles, she saw but little of her new friends. But when Elsie’s summaries of Westermarck suddenly ceased, she decided to go and ask why. On a crisp Sunday afternoon in the middle of December she was starting out for this purpose when Clara Narcisco came round the corner.

“Giorno, madonna mia! It feels good to little Clara, this nice coat that Edith said was too small for her—and Edith had better go to confession for telling a whopper. Invite me in to your palazzo, si piaca.”

“Clara Narcisco, the colour on your cheeks is too rich for words. I’m going to kiss them so hard that I’ll leave a white spot on both of them. There! Come in out of the cold.”

When they were snug in Edith’s room, before the glowing grate, Clara began:

“Madonna mia, I’m worried sick.”

“You’re a good friend, Clara, and here you are. Is it your father?”

“No, it’s Elsie. Last night I had a call from her mother. Just think of it—that poor old Sheeny coming to see a Catholic girl, and hardly able to speak two words. I don’t know which she thought was worse, the plaster shrine with the bambino, or the newspapers I had down to keep the floor clean, or me alone with two kids. I was putting Maria to bed, and Maria didn’t want to go to bed when she saw Mrs. Shaviro; she wanted to run away. Mrs. Shaviro has the biggest black eyes you ever saw.”

“I’ve seen her. What did she want?”

“She wanted to know if I knew where Elsie was. She had to tell there was a heavy scrap at home. Mrs. Shaviro was talking to Elsie about never going to church. She called it School, or something like that. Aloro, Elsie got mad and said she would lead her own life, and she just packed up and beat it. Wasn’t that fierce?”

Edith reflected. “It was fierce—certainly. But I don’t understand. I can’t see her getting angry about nothing.”

“Well, I’ve heard her call the sheeny prayers nonsense. But I ain’t through yet. I says, ‘Mrs. Shaviro,’ I says, ‘why don’t you send one of the boys to follow Elsie and see where she’s living,’ and Mrs. Shaviro says she done it and Elsie give the kid the go-by. Then she asked me to find out, and I said I would, and was going to talk to Elsie about it, and ecco! Elsie don’t show up at the shop.”

“She may be sick.”

“She ain’t sick. I went straight to Ischl.”

“That was right. You and I have the same idea.”

“I’ll bet we have. I says, ‘Mr. Ischl, why ain’t Elsie Shaviro here? Have you been saying something to her that makes her feel insulted?’ He takes something out of a pigeonhole and shoves it over to me and it was two weeks old and in it she says she appreciates the fair way Ischl has treated the shop, but she is going to quit after two weeks because she is not going to work any more in a factory and she is giving him notice.”

“Clara, this is serious. What do you make of it?”

“Cosi Iddio mi aiuti! I ain’t got no more idea than you have. This last two or three weeks she was the happiest I ever seen her, and now it’s just like she was killed by a street car.”

“Clara, did you ever know of any other girl’s disappearing this way?”

“Oh, yes. But it don’t seem possible Elsie has gone wrong.”

“Don’t good girls ever take rooms for themselves, so as to avoid mothers that don’t understand them?”

“It may be. I shouldn’t wonder if there was girls that had the nerve to do that, but oh, dear—that don’t help us none. I wish I could just forget it.”

“We can’t, Clara! Did she ever go with anybody, so far as you know?”

Clara shook her head.

“Well, Clara dear, there is only one thing I can think of to do. There are plenty of young socialists in the university, and to-morrow I will find out what girl among them is most worthy of our confidence. And I will tell that girl what our trouble is, and ask her to keep a quiet lookout.”

“I knew you would know the answer.”

“Let’s not be too sure, Clara, but we three girls must stick together. And we won’t think evil of her.”