So, for a thousand days he wore his grief down, and eventually he found that his daughter was growing up and that work really was the best thing with which to fill a life. He settled down, and existence became as foreshortened as the rhythm of the college itself.
“My relations with my daughter,” he used to say, in those days, “are becoming what you call the Electra complex. If man was an adaptable animal, I should develop a lap and a very comfortable bosom and become a real mother to her, but I cannot. So, how can I put a stop to this father-and-daughter complex we are developing between us?”
The problem solved itself in its own terms. René was in love with youth, and one day he saw Becky Snyder’s beauty peering over the back of a cut-down flivver stalled on the Lincoln Highway. It was an old flivver, even for its old-flivverish function of bearing young love from nook to nook. Jokes climbed feebly upon its sides and a great “Bingham H.S. 1932” defaced—if one can call it that—the radiator. René du Cary, aloof as any university don spending an afternoon on his bicycle, would have passed it with a shrug of amusement, if he had not suddenly perceived the cause of the flivver’s motionless position in the road—a deeply intoxicated young man was draped across the wheel.
“Now, this is too bad,” he thought, when, with his bicycle in the back seat, he was conducting the car toward its destination. He kept imagining Noël in a like situation. Only when they had returned the young man and his movable couch to the bosom of his family, and he sat with Becky and her deaf aunt on the farmhouse stoop, did he realize how authentically, radiantly beautiful she was and want to touch her hair and her shining face and the nape of her neck—the place where he kissed Noël good night.
She walked with him to the gate.
“You must not permit that young man to call on you,” he said. “He’s not good for you.”
“Then what do I do?” She smiled. “Sit home?”
He raised his hands.
“Are there no more solid citizens in this village?”
Becky looked impatient, as if he ought to know there weren’t.
“I was engaged to a nice fellow that died last year,” she informed him, and then with pride: “He went to Hamilton. I was going to the spring dance with him. He got pneumonia.”
“I’m sorry,” said René.
“There’re no boys around here. There was a man said he’d get me a job on the stage in New York, but I know that game. My friend here—a girl, I mean—she goes to town to get picked up by students. It’s just hard luck for a girl to be born in a place like this. I mean, there’s no future. I met some men through playing tennis, but I never saw them again.”
He listened as the muddled concepts poured forth—the mingled phrases of debutante, waif and country girl. The whole thing confused him—the mixture of innocence, opportunism, ignorance. It made him feel very foreign and far off.
“I will collect some undergraduates,” he surprised himself by promising. “They should appreciate living beauty, if they appreciate nothing else.”
But that wasn’t the way it worked out. The half dozen seniors, the lady who came to pour tea on his porch, recognized, before half an hour had passed, that he was desperately in love with the girl, that he didn’t know it, that he was miserable when two of the young men made engagements with her. Next time she came, there were no young men.
“I love you and I want you to marry me,” he said.
“But I’m simply—— I don’t know what to say. I never thought——”
“Don’t try to think. I will think for us both.”
“And you’ll teach me,” she said pathetically. “I’ll try so hard.”
“We can’t be married for seven more months because—— My heavens, you are beautiful!”
It was June then, and they got to know each other in a few long afternoons in the swing on the porch. She felt very safe with him—a little too safe.
That was the first time when the provision in Edith’s will really bothered René. The seven specified years would not be over until December, and the interval would be difficult. To announce the engagement would be to submit Becky to a regents’ examination by the ladies of the university. Because he considered himself extravagantly lucky to have discovered such a prize, he hated the idea of leaving her to rusticate in Bingham. Other connoisseurs of beauty, other discerning foreigners, might find her stalled on the road with unworthy young men. Moreover, she needed an education in the social civilities and, much as the railroad kings of the pioneer West sent their waitress sweethearts to convents in order to prepare them for their high destinies, he considered sending Becky to France with a chaperon for the interval. But he could not afford it, and ended by installing her with the Slocums next door.
“This schedule,” he said to her, “is the most important thing in our lives; you must not lose your copy.”
“No, dearest.”
“Your future husband wants a lot; he wants a beautiful wife and a well-brought-up child, and his work to be very good, and to live in the country. There is limited money. But with method,” he said fiercely—“method for one, method for all—we can make it go.”
“Of course we can.”
After she had kissed him and clung to him and gone, he sat looking out at the squirrels still toiling in the twilight.
“How strange,” he thought. “For the moment my rôle is that of supérieure in a convent. I can show my two little girls about how good work is, and about politeness. All the rest one either has or hasn’t.
“The schedule is my protection; for now I will have no more time to think of details, and yet they must not be educated by the money changers of Hollywood. They should grow up; there is too much of keeping people children forever. The price is too high; the bill is always presented to someone in the end.”
His glance fell on the table. Upon it, carefully folded, lay a familiar-looking paper—the typewritten oblongs showed through. And on the chair where Becky had sat, its twin rested. The schedules, forgotten and abandoned, remained beside their maker.
“Mon Dieu!” he cried, his fingers rising to his young gray hair. “Quel commencement! Noël!”
II
With a sort of quivering heave like the attempt of a team to move a heavy load, René’s schedule got in motion. It was an uncertain motion—the third day Noël lost her schedule and went on a school botany tour, while Aquilla’s brother—a colored boy who had some time ago replaced a far-wandering houseman, but had never quite acquired a name of his own in the household—waited for her two hours in front of the school, so that Becky missed her tennis lesson and Mlle. Ségur, inconvenienced, complained to René. This was on a day that René had passed in despair trying to invent a process for keeping the platinum electrodes nicely blurred in a thousand glass cells. When he came home he blew up and Noël, at his request, had her supper in bed.
Each day plunged him deeper into his two experiments. One was his attempt to develop the catalyst upon which he had stumbled; the second was based on the new knowledge that there are two kinds of water. Should his plan of decomposing electrolytically one hundred thousand gallons of water yield him the chance of studying the two sorts spectrographically, the results might be invaluable. The experiment was backed by a commercial firm as well as by the Foundation, but it was already running into tens of thousands of dollars—there was the small power plant built for his use, the thousand platinum electrodes, each in its glass jar, as well as the time consumed in the difficult and tedious installation of the apparatus.
Necessarily, the domestic part of the day receded in importance. It was nice to know that his girls were safe and well occupied, that there would be two faces waiting for him eagerly at home. But for the moment he could not divert any more energy to his family. Becky had tennis and a reading list she had asked him for. She wanted
