Still, and in spite of everything, the method was not working. His private life was beginning to interfere with it. If he had been able to spend another half an hour in the laboratory that day when he knew Becky was waiting discreetly a little way down the road, or even if he could have sent an overt message to her, saying that he was delayed thereby, then the tap would not have been left on and a quantity of new water would not have run into the water already separated according to its isotope, thus necessitating starting over. Work, love, his child—his demands did not seem to him exorbitant; he had had forethought and had made a schedule which anticipated all minor difficulties.
“Let us reconsider,” he said, assembling his girls again. “Let us consider that we have a method, embodied in this schedule. A method is better and bigger than a man.”
“Not always,” said Becky.
“How do you mean, not always, little one?”
“Cars really do act up like ours did the other day, René. We can’t stand before them and read them the schedule.”
“No, my darling,” he said excitedly. “It is to ourselves we read the schedule. We foresee—we have the motor examined, we have the tank filled.”
“Well, we’ll try to do better,” said Becky. “Won’t we, Noël? You and I—and the car.”
“You are joking, but I am serious.”
She came close to him.
“I’m not joking, darling. I love you with all my heart and I’m trying to do everything you say—even play tennis: though I’d rather run over and keep your house a little cleaner for you.”
“My house?” he stared around vaguely. “Why, my house is very clean. Aquilla’s sister comes in every other Friday.”
He had cause to remember this one Sunday afternoon a week later, when he had a visit from his chief assistant, Charles Hume, and his wife. They were old friends, and he perceived immediately the light of old friends bent on friendship in their eyes. And how was little Noël? They had had Noël in their house for a week the previous summer.
René called upstairs for Noël, but got no answer.
“She is in the fields somewhere.” He waved his hand vaguely. “All around, it is country.”
“All very well while the days are long,” said Dolores Hume. “But remember, there are such things as kidnapings.”
René shut his mind swiftly against a new anxiety.
“How are you, René?” Dolores asked. “Charles thinks you’ve been overdoing things.”
“Now, dear,” Charles protested, “I——”
“You be still. I’ve known René longer than you have. You two men fuss and fume over those jars all day and then René has his hands full with Noël all evening.”
Did René’s eyes deceive him, or did she look closely to see how he was taking this?
“Charles says this is an easy stage of things, so we wondered if we could help you by taking Noël while you went for a week’s rest.”
Annoyed, René answered abruptly: “I don’t need a rest and I can’t go away.” This sounded rude; René was fond of his assistant. “Not that Charles couldn’t carry on quite as well as I.”
“It’s really poor little Noël I’m thinking of as much as you. Any child needs personal attention.”
His wrath rising, René merely nodded blandly.
“If you won’t consider that,” Dolores pursued, “I wonder you don’t get a little colored girl to keep an eye on Noël in the afternoon. She could help with the cleaning. I’ve noticed that Frenchmen may be more orderly than American men, but not a bit cleaner.”
She drew her hand experimentally along the woodwork.
“Heavens!” she exclaimed, awed. Her hand was black, a particularly greasy, moldy, creepy black, with age-old furniture oil in it and far-drifted grime.
“What a catastrophe!” cried René. Only last week he had refused to let Becky clean the house. “I beg a thousand pardons. Let me get you——”
“It serves me right,” she admitted, “and don’t you do anything about it. I know this house like my pocket.”
When she had gone, Charles Hume said:
“I feel I ought to apologize to you for Dolores. She’s a strange woman, René, and she has no damn business butting into your affairs like this!”
He stopped. His wife was suddenly in the room again, and the men had an instant sense of something gone awry. Her face was shocked and hurt, stricken, as if she had been let down in some peculiarly personal way.
“You might not have let me go upstairs,” she said to René. “Your private affairs are your own, but if it was anybody but you, René, I’d think it was a rather bad joke.”
For a moment René was bewildered. Then he half understood, but before he could speak Dolores continued coldly:
“Of course I thought it was Noël in the tub, and I walked right in.”
René was all gestures now; he took a long, slow, audible breath; raising his hands slowly to his eyes, he shook his head in time to a quick “tck, tck, tck, tck.” Then, laying his cards on the table with a sudden downward movement of his arms, he tried to explain. The girl was the niece of a neighbor—he knew, even in the midst of his evasive words, that it was no use. Dolores was just a year or so older than that war generation which took most things for granted. He knew that previous to her marriage she had been a little in love with him, and he saw the story going out into the world of the college town. He knew this even when she pretended to believe him at the last, and when Charles gave him a look of understanding and a tacit promise with his eyes that he’d shut her up, as they went out the door.
“I feel so terrible,” mourned Becky. “It was the one day the water at the Slocums’ wouldn’t run at all, and I was so hot and sticky I thought I’d just jump in for two seconds. That woman’s face when it came in the door! ‘Oh, it’s not Noël,’ she said, and what could I say? From the way she stared at me, she ought to have seen.”
It was November and the campus was riotous once a week with violets and chrysanthemums, hot dogs and football badges, and all the countryside was a red-and-yellow tunnel of leaves around the flow of many cars. Usually René went to the games, but not this year. Instead he attended upon the activities of the precious water that was not water, that was a heavenlike, mysterious fluid that might cure mental diseases in the Phacochoerus, or perhaps only grow hair on eggs—or else he played valet to his catalyst, wound in five thousand dollars’ worth of platinum wire and gleaming dully at him every morning from its quartz prison.
He took Becky and Noël up there one day because it was unusually early. He was slightly disappointed because Noël was absorbed in an inspection of her schedule while he explained the experiments. The tense, sunny room seemed romantic to Becky, with its odor of esoteric gases, the faint perfumes of future knowledge, the low electric sizz in the glass cells.
“Daddy, can I look at your schedule one minute?” Noël asked. “There’s one dumb word that I never know what it means.”
He handed it toward her vaguely, for a change in the caliber and quality of the sound in the room made him aware that something was happening. He knelt down beside the quartz vessel with a fountain pen in his hand.
He had changed the conditions of his experiment yesterday, and now he noted quickly:
Flow of 500 c.c. per minute, temperature 255°C. Changed gas mixture to 2 vol. oxygen and 1.56 vol. nitrogen. Slight reaction, about 1 per cent. Changing to 2 vol. 0 and 1.76 vol. N. Temperature 283°C. platinum filament is now red-hot.
He worked quickly, noting the pressure gauge. Ten minutes passed; the filament glowed and faded, and René put down figure after figure. When he arose, with a rather far-away expression, he seemed almost surprised to see Becky and Noël still there.
“Well, now; that was luck,” he said.
“We’re going to be late to school,” Becky told him, and then added apologetically: “What happened, René?”
“It is too long to explain.”
“Of course you see, daddy,” said Noël reprovingly, “that we have to keep the schedule.”
“Of course, of course. Go along.” He kissed them each hungrily on the nape of the neck, watching them with pride and joy, yet putting them aside for a while as he walked around the laboratory with some of the unworldliness of
