Chapter VI: The Law of Selection

In actual mundane time, to use a somewhat halting expression, Professor Marmion’s walk had occupied about a couple of hours. His strange experiences had, of course, occupied none, since they had taken place beyond the bounds of Time.

Meanwhile, Miss Nitocris had finished her digest of the morning papers, given the cook a few directions, and then gone out on the lawn at the back of the house to have a quiet read and enjoy the soft air and sunshine of that lovely May morning. She lay down in a hammock chair in the shade of a fine old cedar at the bottom of the lawn, and began to read, and soon she began to dream. The news in the papers, even the most responsible of them, had been very serious. The shadow of war was once more rising in the East--war which, if it came, England could scarcely escape, and if it did Someone would have to go and fight in that most perilous of all forms of battle, torpedo attack.

The book she had taken with her was one of exceedingly clever verse written years before by just such another as herself; a girl, beautiful, learned, and yet absolutely womanly, and endowed, moreover, with that gift so rare among learned women, the gift of humour. Long ago, this girl had taken the fever in Egypt, and died of it; but before she died she wrote a book of poems and verses, which, though long forgotten--if ever known--by the multitude, is still treasured and re-read by some, and of these Miss Nitocris was one. Just now the book was open at the hundred and forty-third page, on which there is a portion of a poem entitled Natural Selection.

Miss Nitocris’ eyes alternately rested on the page for a few moments and then lifted and looked over the lawn towards the open French windows. The verses ran thus:

“But there comes an idealless lad, With a strut, and a stare, and a smirk; And I watch, scientific though sad, The Law of Selection at work.

“Of Science he hasn’t a trace, He seeks not the How and the Why, But he sings with an amateur’s grace And he dances much better than I.

“And we know the more dandified males By dance and by song win their wives-- ‘Tis a law that with Aves prevails, And even in Homo survives.”

“Just my precious papa’s ideas!” she murmured, with a toss of her head, and something like a little sniff. “What a nuisance it all is! Aristocracy of intellect, indeed! Just as if any of us, even my dear Dad, if he is considered one of the cleverest and most learned men in Europe, were anything more than what Newton called himself--a little child picking up pebbles and grains of sand on the shore of a boundless and fathomless ocean, and calling them knowledge. I’m not quite sure that that’s correct, but it’s something like it. Still, that’s not the question. How on earth am I to tell poor Mark? Oh dear! he’ll have to be ‘Mr Merrill’ now, I suppose. What a shame! I’ve half a mind to rebel, and vindicate the Law of Selection at any price. Ah, there he is. Well, I suppose I’ve got to get through it somehow.”

As she spoke, one of the French windows under the verandah opened, and a man in a panama hat, Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, came out and raised his hat as he stepped off the verandah.

With a sigh and a frown she closed the book sharply, got up and tossed it into the chair. No daintier or more desirable incarnation of the eternal feminine could have been imagined than she presented as she walked slowly across the lawn to meet the man whom the Law of Selection had designated as her natural mate, and whom her father, for reasons presently to be made plain, had forbidden her to marry on pain of exile from his affections for ever.

The face he turned towards her as she approached was not exactly handsome as an artist or some women would have defined the word, but it was strong, honest, and open--just the sort of face, in short, to match the broad shoulders, the long, cleanly-shaped, athletic limbs, and the five feet eleven of young, healthy manhood with which Nature had associated it.

A glance at his face and another one at him generally would, in spite of the costume, have convinced any one who knows the genus that Mark Merrill was a naval officer. He had that quiet air of restrained strength, of the instinctive habit of command which somehow or other does not distinguish any other fighting man in the world in quite the same degree. His name and title were Lieutenant-Commander Mark Gwynne Merrill, of His Majesty’s Destroyer Blazer, one of the coolest-headed and yet most judiciously reckless officers in the Service.

There was a light in his wide-set, blue-grey eyes, and a smile on his strong, well-cut lips which were absolutely boyish in their anticipation of sheer delight as she approached; and then, after one glance at her face, his own changed with a suddenness, which, to a disinterested observer, would have been almost comic.

“I’m awfully sorry, Mark,” she began, in a tone which literally sent a shiver--a real physical shiver--through him, for he was very, very much in love with her.

“What on earth is the matter, Niti?” he said, looking at the fair face and downcast eyes which, for the first time since he had asked the eternal question and she had answered it according to his heart’s desire, had refused to meet his. “Let’s have it out at once. It’s a lot better to be shot through the heart than starved to death, you know. I suppose it’s something pretty bad, or you wouldn’t be looking down at the grass like that,” he continued.

“Oh, it’s--it’s--it’s a beastly shame, that’s what it is, so there!” And as she said this Miss Nitocris Marmion, B.Sc., stamped her foot on the turf and felt inclined to burst out crying, just as a milkmaid might have done.

“Which means,” said Mark, pulling himself up, as a man about to face a mortal enemy would do, “that the Professor has said ‘No.’ In other words, he has decided that his learned and lovely daughter shall not, as I suppose he would put it, mate with an animal of a lower order--a mere fighting-man. Well, Miss Marmion----”

“Oh, don’t; please don’t!” she exclaimed, almost piteously, dropping into a big wicker armchair by the verandah and putting her hands over her eyes.

He had an awful fear that she was going to cry, and, as the Easterns say, he felt his heart turning to water within him. But her highly trained intellect came to her aid. She swallowed the sob, and looked up at him with clear, dry eyes.

“It isn’t quite that, Mark,” she continued. “You know I wouldn’t stand anything like that even from the dear old Dad. Much as I love him, and even, as you know, in some senses almost worship him, it isn’t that. It’s this theory of heredity of his--this scientific faith--bigotry, I call it, for it is just the same to him as Catholicism was to the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. In fact, I told him the other night that he reminded me of the Spanish grandee whose daughters were convicted of heresy by the Inquisition, and who showed his devotion to the Church by lighting the faggots which burned them with his own hands.”