for he paid no attention.
“They finally got the girl to sleep,” Ace informed me. “Had to give her opium. No report yet this morning.”
“Oh,” I said lamely, conscious I should have asked after her without waiting for him to volunteer the news. “Oh. Do you suppose we'll find out who she is?”
“Mr. H. telegraphed the sheriff first thing. It'll all depend how interested he is, and that's not likely to be very. What's to drink, Hiro?”
“Imitation tea, made from dried weeds; imitation coffee made from burnt barley. Which'll you have?”
I didn't see why he stressed the imitation; genuine tea and coffee were drunk only by the very rich. Most people preferred “tea” because it was less obnoxious than the counterfeit coffee. Perversely, I said, “Coffee, please.”
He set a large cup of brown liquid before me which had a tantalizing fragrance quite different from that given off by the beverage I was used to. I added milk and tasted, aware he was watching my reaction.
“Why,” I exclaimed, “this is different. I never had anything like it in my life. It's wonderful.”
“C8 H10 O2,” said Agati with an elaborate air of indifference. “Synthetic. Specialty of the house.”
“So chemists are good for something after all,” remarked Ace.
“Give us a chance,” said Agati; “we could make beef out of wood and silk out of sand.”
“You're a physicist like B—like Miss Haggerwells?” I asked Ace.
“I'm a physicist, but not like Barbara. No one is. She's a genius. A great creative genius.”
“Chemists create,” said Agati sourly; “physicists sit and think about the universe.”
“Like Archimedes,” said Ace.
How shall I write of Haggershaven as my eyes first saw it twenty-two years ago? Of the rolling acres of rich plowed land, interrupted here and there by stone outcroppings worn smooth and round by time, and trees in woodlots or standing alone strong and unperturbed? Of the main building, grown by fits and starts from the original farmhouse into a great, rambling eccentricity, stopping short of monstrosity only by its complete innocence of pretense? Shall I describe the two dormitories, severely functional, escaping harshness because they had not been built by carpenters and, though sturdy enough, betrayed the amateur touch in every line? Or the cottages and apartments, two, four, at most six rooms, for the married fellows and their families? These were scattered all over, some so avid for privacy that one could pass unknowing within feet of the concealing trees or shrubbery, others bold in the sunshine on knolls or in hollows.
I could tell of the small shops, the miniature laboratories, the inadequate observatory, the heterogeneous assortment of books which was both less and more than a library, the dozens of outbuildings. But these things were not the Haven. They were merely the least of its possessions. For Haggershaven was not a material place at all, but a spiritual freedom. Its limits were only the limits of what its fellows could do or think or inquire. It was circumscribed only by the outside world, not by internal rules and taboos, competition or curriculum.
Most of this I could see for myself, much of it was explained by Ace. “But how can you afford the time to take me all around this way?” I asked. “I must be interfering with your own work.”
He grinned. “This is my period to be guide, counselor, and friend to those who've strayed in here, wittingly or un. Don't worry, after you're a fellow you'll get told off for all the jobs, from shoveling manure to gilding weathercocks.”
I sighed. “The chances of my getting to be a fellow are minus nothing. Especially after last night.”
He didn't pretend to misunderstand. “Barbara'll come out of it. She's not always that way. As her father says, she's high-strung, and she's been working madly. And to tell the truth,” he went on in a burst of frankness, “she really doesn't get on too well with other women. She has a masculine mind.”
I have often noticed that men not strikingly brilliant themselves attribute masculine minds to intelligent women on the consoling assumption that feminine minds are normally inferior. Ace, however, was manifestly innocent of any attempt to patronize.
“Anyway,” he concluded, “she has only one vote.”
I didn't know whether to take this as a pledge of support or mere politeness. “Isn't it wasteful, assigning a chemist like Dr. Agati to kitchen work? Or isn't he a good chemist?”
“Just about the best there is. His artificial tea and coffee would bring a fortune to the Haven if there were a profitable market; even as it is it'll bring a good piece of change. Wasteful? What would you have us do, hire cooks and servants?”
“They're cheap enough.”
“Or frightfully expensive. Specialization, the division of labor, is certainly not cheap in anything but dollars and cents, and not always then. And it's unquestionably wasteful in terms of equality. And I don't think there's anyone at the Haven who isn't an egalitarian.”
“But you do specialize and divide labor. Don't tell me you swap your physics for Agati's chemistry.”
“In a way we do. Of course, I don't set up as an experimenter, any more than he does as a speculator. But there have been plenty of times I've worked under his direction when he needed an assistant who didn't know anything but had a strong back.”
“All right,” I said, “but I still don't see why you can't hire a cook and some dishwashers.”
“Where would our equality be then? What would happen to our fellowship?”
Haggershaven's history, which I got little by little, was more than a link with the past; it was a possible hint of what might have been if the War of Southron Independence had not interrupted the American pattern. Barbara's great-great-grandfather, Herbert Haggerwells, had been a Confederate major from North Carolina who, as conquerors sometimes do, had fallen in love with the then fat Pennsylvania countryside. After the war he had put everything—not much by Southron standards, but a fortune in depreciated, soon to be repudiated, United States greenbacks—into the farm which later formed the nucleus of Haggershaven. Then he married a local girl and transformed himself into a Northerner.
Until I became too accustomed to notice it anymore I used to stare at his portrait in the library, picturing in idle fancy a possible meeting on the battlefield between this aristocratic gentleman with his curling mustache and daggerlike imperial and my own plebian Granpa Hodgins. But the chance of their ever having come face-to-face was much more than doubtful; I, who had studied both their likenesses, was the only link between them.
“Hard-looking character, ay?” commented Ace. “This was painted when he was mellow; imagine him twenty years earlier. Pistols cocked and Juvenal or Horace or Seneca in the saddlebags.”
“He was a cavalry officer, then?”
“I don't know. Don't think so as a matter of fact. Saddlebags was just my artistic touch. They say he was a holy terror; discipline and all that—it sort of goes with a man on horseback. And the old Roman boys are pure deduction; he was that type. Patronized several writers and artists; you know: 'Drop down to my estate and stay a while,' and they stayed five or ten years.”
But it was Major Haggerwells's son who, seeing the deterioration of Northern colleges, had invited a few restive scholars to make their home with him. They were free to pursue their studies under an elastic arrangement which permitted them to be self-supporting through work on the farm.
Thomas Haggerwells's father had organized the scheme further, attracting a larger number of schoolmen who contributed greatly to the material progress of the Haven. They patented inventions, marketless at home, which brought regular royalties from more industrialized countries. Agronomists improved the Haven's crops and took in a steady income from seed. Chemists found ways of utilizing otherwise wasted by-products; proceeds from scholarly works—and one more popular than scholarly—added to the funds. In his will, Volney Haggerwells left the properties to the fellowship.
I suppose I expected there would be some uniformity, some basic type characterizing the fellows. Not that Barbara, or Ace, or Hiro Agati resembled a stereotype at any point, any more than I did myself, but then I was not one of the elect nor likely to be. Even after I had met more than half of them the notion persisted that there must be some stamp on them proclaiming what they were.
Yet as I wandered about the Haven, alone or with Ace, the people I met were quite diverse, more so by far than in the everyday world. There were the ebullient and the glum, the talkative and the laconic, the bustling and the slow moving. Some were part of a family, others lived ascetically, withdrawn from the pleasures of the flesh.
