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Lucy of the Stars
Lucy of the Stars
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An excerpt from the beginning of:
Lucy of the Stars
I
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
A WORD, a glance, the smallest thing may tell half of the story. From the half to the whole there is the difference between a wireless which may still be ticking out its call when the ship goes down and a wireless which is answered. The shining moments of this work-a-day world come when, in joyous interchange of signals, word is met by word, or glance by glance, or thought by thought.
Lucy's shining moment came with a telegram from Arthur, although not with his first, in which, from Christiania, he announced that he had left Lord Mordaunt's yacht and was about to return to London. As she slowly tore up the form she wondered why this should concern her. Was she his agent, to meet him at the train? His butler, to have his house open for him?
Outrunning him on his journey came a letter:
"My hosts are very lovable," he wrote, in late August, "and nothing is quite so clear as that they are in nowise responsible for my being depressed and bored. I consult my diary and find that to-day is the twenty-eighth, and we left on the fourteenth. Undeniably, then, I have been only two weeks away. Possibly I am still in the coma of some new midsummer disease that will not let me concentrate my mind long enough to read even a novel through. I have tried three and finished none. Two weeks! It seems two months!"
There followed a page and more about people and places. This part Lucy skimmed, and, returning to the study of the sentences quoted, she found them one moment intelligible, the next confusing.
The second telegram, which came only a few hours after the letter, dispelled previous doubts; filled in previous lapses with sudden comprehension.
"I have found out the cause and the cure. I have something to tell you. Will you see me this afternoon, please?"
It was three already. He would come at four for tea. She pressed her cheeks with her fingertips and felt them burning. Her breath came in quick gasps as she thrilled with the significance of a crisis—new, strange, delicious, terrible.
"I must think! I wouldn't know what to say or do. I can't—I can't see him to-day!"
She sprang up, rang the bell, and told the maid that she would be in to nobody for the rest of the day. Then she dropped again into the big chair before the glow of the low fire—which had been laid to take the chill out of the room in early September—to ponder upon herself and her position.
There was too much fear for the future for her to take time to bemoan what was lost. Nothing now could alter the fact that when she and Arthur met again it would be as two new beings. Their old, simple, charming comradeship was dead. What was to take its place?
Who was to know better than she, with her experience of the social world, that the son of an earl, story-books to the contrary notwithstanding, does not seek the daughter of a poor foreign scholar as his bride. No more does that world generally seek acquaintances in the old, unfashionable part of London where she lived. When Dr. von Kar came to England, eighteen years before, he chose the house which he had since occupied for a characteristic reason. It was even then a relic of days of more air and less gregariousness—this old mansion, which is still set in an oasis of green occupying space enough for half a dozen villas.
"I am within hearing of the roar of London, which I love," said the doctor, with that German flattening of his r's and French lengthening of his z's which made his tongue as cosmopolitan as his mind. "That roar is the sound of the surf which is England's border, and of her individual freedom and strife. At the same time, I have an English lawn between my gate and the porch and an English lawn at the rear, where I may pace up and down in the long twilight of June evenings."
Later, he had another reason, equally in keeping with his humour. He made the location of his house a test of friendship. "Those who really care for me," he said, "will come here as readily as they would go to the West End, and those who do not care for me I do not want." The scholars came primarily on account of his scientific achievements; but they also came partly, and some friends came solely, because he had that rare quality of being likeable without any effort on his part.
Carriages began to arrive in numbers soon after the daughter had reached womanhood. "You know that old German doctor man," to use the words of a certain lady who said that she was the discoverer of Lucy, "the one with the grand manner and that quaint accent which is so much prettier than native English? He is a great friend of old Brent's. They write pamphlets about bugs together—either bugs or beetles; I am not quite sure whether they are the same, are you?
Lucy of the Stars
I
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
A WORD, a glance, the smallest thing may tell half of the story. From the half to the whole there is the difference between a wireless which may still be ticking out its call when the ship goes down and a wireless which is answered. The shining moments of this work-a-day world come when, in joyous interchange of signals, word is met by word, or glance by glance, or thought by thought.
Lucy's shining moment came with a telegram from Arthur, although not with his first, in which, from Christiania, he announced that he had left Lord Mordaunt's yacht and was about to return to London. As she slowly tore up the form she wondered why this should concern her. Was she his agent, to meet him at the train? His butler, to have his house open for him?
Outrunning him on his journey came a letter:
"My hosts are very lovable," he wrote, in late August, "and nothing is quite so clear as that they are in nowise responsible for my being depressed and bored. I consult my diary and find that to-day is the twenty-eighth, and we left on the fourteenth. Undeniably, then, I have been only two weeks away. Possibly I am still in the coma of some new midsummer disease that will not let me concentrate my mind long enough to read even a novel through. I have tried three and finished none. Two weeks! It seems two months!"
There followed a page and more about people and places. This part Lucy skimmed, and, returning to the study of the sentences quoted, she found them one moment intelligible, the next confusing.
The second telegram, which came only a few hours after the letter, dispelled previous doubts; filled in previous lapses with sudden comprehension.
"I have found out the cause and the cure. I have something to tell you. Will you see me this afternoon, please?"
It was three already. He would come at four for tea. She pressed her cheeks with her fingertips and felt them burning. Her breath came in quick gasps as she thrilled with the significance of a crisis—new, strange, delicious, terrible.
"I must think! I wouldn't know what to say or do. I can't—I can't see him to-day!"
She sprang up, rang the bell, and told the maid that she would be in to nobody for the rest of the day. Then she dropped again into the big chair before the glow of the low fire—which had been laid to take the chill out of the room in early September—to ponder upon herself and her position.
There was too much fear for the future for her to take time to bemoan what was lost. Nothing now could alter the fact that when she and Arthur met again it would be as two new beings. Their old, simple, charming comradeship was dead. What was to take its place?
Who was to know better than she, with her experience of the social world, that the son of an earl, story-books to the contrary notwithstanding, does not seek the daughter of a poor foreign scholar as his bride. No more does that world generally seek acquaintances in the old, unfashionable part of London where she lived. When Dr. von Kar came to England, eighteen years before, he chose the house which he had since occupied for a characteristic reason. It was even then a relic of days of more air and less gregariousness—this old mansion, which is still set in an oasis of green occupying space enough for half a dozen villas.
"I am within hearing of the roar of London, which I love," said the doctor, with that German flattening of his r's and French lengthening of his z's which made his tongue as cosmopolitan as his mind. "That roar is the sound of the surf which is England's border, and of her individual freedom and strife. At the same time, I have an English lawn between my gate and the porch and an English lawn at the rear, where I may pace up and down in the long twilight of June evenings."
Later, he had another reason, equally in keeping with his humour. He made the location of his house a test of friendship. "Those who really care for me," he said, "will come here as readily as they would go to the West End, and those who do not care for me I do not want." The scholars came primarily on account of his scientific achievements; but they also came partly, and some friends came solely, because he had that rare quality of being likeable without any effort on his part.
Carriages began to arrive in numbers soon after the daughter had reached womanhood. "You know that old German doctor man," to use the words of a certain lady who said that she was the discoverer of Lucy, "the one with the grand manner and that quaint accent which is so much prettier than native English? He is a great friend of old Brent's. They write pamphlets about bugs together—either bugs or beetles; I am not quite sure whether they are the same, are you?
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