第5章

Two months later Bernard Longueville was at Venice, still under the impression that he was leaving Italy.

He was not a man who made plans and held to them.

He made them, indeed--few men made more--but he made them as a basis for variation. He had gone to Venice to spend a fortnight, and his fortnight had taken the form of eight enchanting weeks.

He had still a sort of conviction that he was carrying out his plans; for it must be confessed that where his pleasure was concerned he had considerable skill in accommodating his theory to his practice. His enjoyment of Venice was extreme, but he was roused from it by a summons he was indisposed to resist.

This consisted of a letter from an intimate friend who was living in Germany--a friend whose name was Gordon Wright.

He had been spending the winter in Dresden, but his letter bore the date of Baden-Baden. As it was not long, I may give it entire.

"I wish very much that you would come to this place. I think you have been here before, so that you know how pretty it is, and how amusing. I shall probably be here the rest of the summer.

There are some people I know and whom I want you to know.

Be so good as to arrive. Then I will thank you properly for your various Italian rhapsodies. I can't reply on the same scale--I have n't the time. Do you know what I am doing?

I am making love. I find it a most absorbing occupation.

That is literally why I have not written to you before.

I have been making love ever since the last of May.

It takes an immense amount of time, and everything else has got terribly behindhand. I don't mean to say that the experiment itself has gone on very fast; but I am trying to push it forward. I have n't yet had time to test its success; but in this I want your help. You know we great physicists never make an experiment without an 'assistant'--a humble individual who burns his fingers and stains his clothes in the cause of science, but whose interest in the problem is only indirect. I want you to be my assistant, and I will guarantee that your burns and stains shall not be dangerous.

She is an extremely interesting girl, and I really want you to see her--I want to know what you think of her. She wants to know you, too, for I have talked a good deal about you.

There you have it, if gratified vanity will help you on the way.

Seriously, this is a real request. I want your opinion, your impression. I want to see how she will affect you.

I don't say I ask for your advice; that, of course, you will not undertake to give. But I desire a definition, a characterization; you know you toss off those things.

I don't see why I should n't tell you all this--I have always told you everything. I have never pretended to know anything about women, but I have always supposed that you knew everything.

You certainly have always had the tone of that sort of omniscience. So come here as soon as possible and let me see that you are not a humbug. She 's a very handsome girl."

Longueville was so much amused with this appeal that he very soon started for Germany. In the reader, Gordon Wright's letter will, perhaps, excite surprise rather than hilarity; but Longueville thought it highly characteristic of his friend.

What it especially pointed to was Gordon's want of imagination--a deficiency which was a matter of common jocular allusion between the two young men, each of whom kept a collection of acknowledged oddities as a playground for the other's wit.

Bernard had often spoken of his comrade's want of imagination as a bottomless pit, into which Gordon was perpetually inviting him to lower himself. "My dear fellow," Bernard said, "you must really excuse me; I cannot take these subterranean excursions.

I should lose my breath down there; I should never come up alive.

You know I have dropped things down--little jokes and metaphors, little fantasies and paradoxes--and I have never heard them touch bottom!" This was an epigram on the part of a young man who had a lively play of fancy; but it was none the less true that Gordon Wright had a firmly-treading, rather than a winged, intellect. Every phrase in his letter seemed, to Bernard, to march in stout-soled walking-boots, and nothing could better express his attachment to the process of reasoning things out than this proposal that his friend should come and make a chemical analysis--a geometrical survey--of the lady of his love. "That I shall have any difficulty in forming an opinion, and any difficulty in expressing it when formed--of this he has as little idea as that he shall have any difficulty in accepting it when expressed." So Bernard reflected, as he rolled in the train to Munich. "Gordon's mind," he went on, "has no atmosphere; his intellectual process goes on in the void.

There are no currents and eddies to affect it, no high winds nor hot suns, no changes of season and temperature.

His premises are neatly arranged, and his conclusions are perfectly calculable."