“Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman’s attitude toward the priest survives. She desires to see him surrounded by flowerpots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like to curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh! It makes one sick!”
Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with a dry little laugh. “Come, let me show you round a bit,” he said. “My shoulder is easier walking than sitting.”
“Have you never written a book yourself?” asked Theron, getting to his feet.
“I have a thing on serpent-worship,” the scientist replied—“written years ago.”
“I can’t tell you how I should enjoy reading it,” urged the other.
The doctor laughed again. “You’ll have to learn German, then, I’m afraid. It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits as a serious book. I haven’t a copy of the edition in English. That was all exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity, like Burton’s Arabian Nights. Come this way, and I will show you my laboratory.”
They moved out of the room, and through a passage, Ledsmar talking as he led the way. “I took up that subject, when I was at college, by a curious chance. I kept a young monkey in my rooms, which had been born in captivity. I brought home from a beer hall—it was in Germany—some pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. He jumped toward it, then screamed and ran back shuddering with fright. I couldn’t understand it at first. Then I saw that the curled pretzel, lying there on the floor, was very like a little coiled-up snake. The monkey had never seen a snake, but it was in his blood to be afraid of one. That incident changed my whole life for me. Up to that evening, I had intended to be a lawyer.”
Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point of the anecdote. He looked now, without much interest, at some dark little tanks containing thick water, a row of small glass cases with adders and other lesser reptiles inside, and a general collection of boxes, jars, and similar receptacles connected with the doctor’s pursuits. Further on was a smaller chamber, with a big empty furnace, and shelves bearing bottles and apparatus like a drugstore.
It was pleasanter in the conservatory—a low, spacious structure with broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side of the roof. The plants were mostly orchids, he learned. He had read of them, but never seen any before. No doubt they were curious; but he discovered nothing to justify the great fuss made about them. The heat grew oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden. He paused under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. Everything seemed old-fashioned and natural and delightfully free from pretence in the big, overgrown field of flowers and shrubs.
Theron recalled with some surprise Celia’s indictment of the doctor as a man with no poetry in his soul. “You must be extremely fond of flowers,” he remarked.
Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder. “They have their points,” he said briefly. “These are all dioecious here. Over beyond are monoecious species. My work is to test the probabilities for or against Darwin’s theory that hermaphroditism in plants is a late byproduct of these earlier forms.”
“And is his theory right?” asked Mr. Ware, with a polite show of interest.
“We may know in the course of three or four hundred years,” replied Ledsmar. He looked up into his guest’s face with a quizzical half-smile. “That is a very brief period for observation when such a complicated question as sex is involved,” he added. “We have been studying the female of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and we haven’t arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions.”
They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more forward of which were beginning to show bloom. “Here another task will begin next month,” the doctor observed. “These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums, or snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose. Humblebees bore holes through their base, to save the labor of climbing in and out of the flowers, and we don’t quite know yet why some hive-bees discover and utilize these holes at once, while others never do. It may be merely the old-fogy conservatism of the individual, or there may be a law in it.”
These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom to bother his head about. Theron looked, as he was bidden, at the rows of hives shining in the hot sun on a bench along the wall, but offered no comment beyond a casual, “My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow she never got around to it. They say it pays very well, though.”
“The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the nectar of the Epipactis latifolia, though it is sweet to our taste, and wasps are greedy for it, would pay,” commented the doctor. “Not like a blue rhododendron, in mere money, but in recognition. Lots of men have achieved a half-column in the Encyclopedia Britannica on a smaller basis than that.”
They stood now at the end of the garden, before a small, dilapidated summerhouse. On the bench inside, facing him, Theron saw a strange recumbent figure stretched at full length, apparently sound asleep, or it might be dead. Looking closer, with a startled surprise, he made out the shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman. He turned toward his guide in the expectation of a
