The Book of Susan. Lee Wilson Dodd
glance toward Phil.
"Elementary, all this, I admit. I apologize for restating it to a scholar. But such are the facts as science reveals them—are they not? You have to try somehow to go beyond science to get round them. And where do you go—you romantic idealists? Where can you go? Nowhere outside of yourselves, I take it. So you plunge, perforce, down below the threshold of reason into a mad chaos of instinct and desire and dream. And what there do you find? Bugaboos, my dear sir, simply bugaboos: divine orders, hells, heavens, purgatories, moral sanctions—all the wild insanity, in two words, that had made our wretched lives even less worth living than they could and should be!"
"Should? Why should?" asked Phil. "Granting your universe, who gives a negligible damn for a little discomfort more or less?"
"I do!" Maltby asserted. "I want all the comfort I can get; and I could get far more in a world of clear-seeing, secular egotists than I can in this mixed mess of superstitious, sentimental idealists which we choose to call civilized society! Take just one minor practical illustration: Say that some virgin has wakened my desire, and I hers. In a reasonable society we could give each other a certain amount of passing satisfaction. But do we do it? No. The virgin has been taught to believe in a mystical, mischievous something, called Purity! To follow her natural instinct would be a sin. If you sin and get caught on earth, society will punish you; and if you don't get caught here, you'll infallibly get caught hereafter—and then God will punish you. So the virgin tortures herself and tortures me—unless I'm willing to marry her, which would be certain to prove the worst of tortures for us both. And there you are."
It was at this point that Susan spoke from her window.
"Pearl and papa weren't married, Mr. Phar; but they didn't get much fun out of not being."
I confess that I felt a nervous chill start at the base of my spine and shiver up toward my scalp. Even Phil, the man of Indian gravity, looked for an instant perturbed.
"Susan!" I demanded sharply. "Have you been listening?"
"Mustn't I listen?" asked Susan. "Why not? Are you cross, Ambo?"
"The mischief's done," said Phil to me quietly; "better not make a point of it."
"Please don't be cross, Ambo," Susan pleaded, slipping through the window to the terrace and coming straight over to me. "Mr. Phar feels just the way papa did about things; only papa couldn't talk so splendidly. He had a very poor vocabulary"—"Vocabulary!" I gasped—"except nasty words and swearing. But he meant just what Mr. Phar means, inside."
Phil, as she ended, began to make strange choking noises and retired suddenly into his handkerchief. Maltby put down his glass and stared at Susan.
"Young person," he finally said, "you ought to be spanked! Don't you know it's an unforgivable sin to spy on your elders!"
"But you don't believe in sin," responded Susan calmly, without the tiniest suspicion of pertness in her tone or bearing. "You believe in doing what you want to. I wanted to hear what you were saying, Mr. Phar."
"Of course you did!" Phil struck in. "But next time, Susan, as a concession to good manners, you might let us know you're in the neighborhood—?"
Susan bit her lower lip very hard before she managed to reply.
"Yes. I will next time. I'm sorry, Phil." (Phil!) Then she turned to Maltby. "But I wasn't spying! I just didn't know you would any of you mind."
"We don't, really," I said. "Sit down, dear. You're always welcome." I had been doing some stiff, concentrated thinking in the last three minutes, and now I had taken the plunge. "The truth is, Susan," I went on, "that most children who live in good homes, who are what is called 'well brought up,' are carefully sheltered from any facts or words or thoughts which their parents do not consider wholesome or pleasant. Parents try to give their children only what they have found to be best in life; they try to keep them in ignorance of everything else."
"But they can't," said Susan. "At least, they couldn't in Birch Street."
"No. Nor elsewhere. But they try. And they always make believe to themselves that they have succeeded. So it's supposed to be very shocking and dangerous for a girl of your age to listen to the free conversation of men of our age. That's the reason we all felt a little guilty, at first, when we found you'd been overhearing us."
"How funny," said Susan. "Papa never cared."
"Good for him!" exclaimed Maltby. "I didn't feel guilty, for one! I refuse to be convicted of so hypocritically squeamish a reaction!"
"Oh!" Susan sighed, almost with rapture. "You know such a lot of words, Mr. Phar! You can say anything."
"Thanks," said Maltby; "I rather flatter myself that I can."
"And you do!" grunted Phil. "But words," he took up the dropped threads rather awkwardly, "are nothing in themselves, Susan. You are too fond of mere words. It isn't words that matter; it's ideas."
"Yes, Phil," said Susan meekly, "but I love words—best of all when they're pictures."
Phil frowned, without visible effect upon Susan. I saw that her mind had gone elsewhere.
"Ambo?"
"Yes, dear?"
"You mustn't ever worry about me, Ambo. My hearing or knowing things—or saying them. I—I guess I'm different."
Maltby's face was a study in suppressed amazement; Phil was still frowning. It was all too much for me, and I laughed—laughed from the lower ribs!
Susan laughed with me, springing from her chair to throw her arms tightly round my neck in one big joyous suffocating hug!
"Oh, Ambo!" she cried, breathless. "Isn't it going to be fun—all of us—together—now we can talk!"
VI
The following evening, after dinner, Maltby Phar, still a little ruffled by Susan's unexpected vivacities of the night before, retired to the library with pipe and book, and Susan and I sat alone together on the garden terrace. It was dusk. The heavy air of the past week had been quickened and purified by an afternoon thunderstorm. Little cool puffs came to us across a bed of glimmering white phlox, bearing with them its peculiar, loamy fragrance. Smoke from my excellent cigarette eddied now and then toward Susan.
Silence had stolen upon her as the afterglow faded, revealing the first patient stars. Already I had learned to respect Susan's silences. She was not, in the usual sense of uncertain temper, of nervous irritability, a moody child; yet she had her moods—moods, if I may put it so, of extraordinary definition. There were hours, not too frequent to be disturbing, when she withdrew; there is no better word for it. At such times her thin, alert little frame was motionless; she would sit as if holding a pose for a portrait, her chin a trifle lifted, her eyes focusing on no visible object, her hands lying—always with the palms upward—in her lap. I supposed that now, with the veiled yet sharply scented dusk, such a mood had crept upon her. But for once I was mistaken. Susan, this time, had not withdrawn; she was intensely aware.
"Ambo"—the suddenness with which she spoke startled me—"you ought to have lots of children. You ought to have a boy, anyway; not just a girl."
"A boy? Why, dear? Are you lonely?"
"Of course not; with you—and Phil!"
"Then whatever in the world put such a crazy——"
Susan interrupted; a bad habit of hers, never subsequently broken, and due, doubtless, to an instinctive impatience of foreseeable remarks.
"You're so awfully rich, Ambo. You could have dozens and not feel it—except that they'd get in your way sometimes and make your outside cross. But two wouldn't be much more trouble than one. It might seem