Chapter XVII

Such was the interruption of Edith’s studies in December. She did as she had promised Clara, and easily found a sympathetic ally, who agreed to inquire casually about Elsie. Edith did more. She went to Hull-House, and laid the case before a woman who knew the young idealists of the West Side well. This lady also sent out casual inquiries, and sent them with system. The casual inquiring went on for two weeks, but with no results. It did, to be sure, reveal the fact that at least twenty acquaintances of Elsie Shaviro were wondering what had become of her. She had taken part in the work of a certain local, and her vivid personality was one to be missed.

Christmas came, and the Narciscos spent it with the Drummonds. Edith and Clara did not speak of Elsie, but they both felt the hovering of a shadow above the merry-making. When Edith had deposited the sleepy children and their motherly sister at the Narcisco rooms, and carried up dolls and Noah’s arks and Christmas mangers and a whole railway system, the two friends parted rather sadly.

During the holiday vacation Edith got into the habit of walking in places which she had never before visited. Her steps turned to regions where flimsy apartment buildings had sprung up like mushrooms—plants of saprophytic origin, able to explode their way through building laws. Often she would step into a vestibule and scan the names under the row of speaking tubes. But she never found Elsie’s name among them.

Fear is a great breeder of convictions, and Edith gradually made up her mind that Elsie had done what she had threatened to do. Elsie—she felt sure of it at last—had now a paramour. The right man had come along. He might be a man unhappily married, but with money enough to support a mistress. Or he might be some struggling young unmarried socialist.

In either case, Edith’s venture in philanthropy had come to grief. This was the result of setting herself up to instruct a brilliant physician.

Apparently it was the end of something. What did it matter whether life was photochemistry or divine handicraft? The laws of it were rigid, and it did not help to call them spiritual. In Elsie’s case the mating instinct had got the better of commonsense. Did it help matters to call the mating instinct human and commonsense divine?

She knew very well what Elsie would do if brought to account. She would quote her Westermarck. The Wahabies regard smoking as a mortal sin, adultery as a trivial one. Albanians feel that shooting a husband is nothing as compared with eating an egg on Saturday, and Osage Indians declare that an illegitimate is not a person. In short, Elsie would say that morality is only custom, and often silly custom.

All of which would be Elsie’s afterthought. The mating instinct had swept through her as something imperceptible to human senses sweeps through insects and brings them to each other across miles of perfumed air. But once irretrievably mated, she would find excuses to quiet her conscience. If now Edith were to consult Dr. Trench, he would say, “You are beginning to see things without prejudice. If Elsie’s child dies, she will revert to the faith of her fathers and say that it has gone to heaven.”

She felt a great need of blaming Elsie, but in the light of her recent studies she was tempted to regard her as an animal pure and simple. That passionate dark-eyed creature was once a single cell, and the chromosomes of it had settled her conduct from the moment of its fertilisation. This was fatalism, but Edith was on the point of accepting it, all for love of Elsie. How different from her first study of chromosomes, when she had rejoiced that Easter lilies have the same number as Easter brides. How different from her former assurance that chromosomes assure progress, because they refuse to transmit bad traits produced by bad surroundings.

Was it so terribly easy, then, to be warped by personal feeling from the scientific attitude? She would not yield without a struggle. How hard she tried in the next weeks to face the facts and live down her sense of helplessness. How earnestly she prayed to be delivered from the power of metaphor.

She had been as good a reader of the daily paper as the average woman, but now she did not open it. In January she did not know that German officers were acquitted of abusing civilians in Alsatia. In February she did not know that William of Wied accepted the throne of Albania, or that Mr. Carnegie gave two millions to the Church Peace Union, or that the Senate ratified treaties of arbitration with eight nations.

Nor was there any news from God. Every hour in the laboratory seemed to be closing the fetters about her. Under the microscope she found life all of one texture. Cells divided and sub-divided, death and life going hand in hand, neither quite distinguishable from the other. She saw the terrestrial web of life renewing itself automatically. It would continue to do so until a lowering temperature or a whiff of starry gas should end it.