Part 7 (1/2)

To cla.s.sify correctly is not something one learns in a day, be he never so willing and eager; as one may discover who cares to take half a dozen plain, obscurely-colored small moths, and attempts to put them in their proper places.

Mr. Flint tried it--and those wretched creatures _wouldn't_ stay put.

It seemed to him that every time he looked at them they ought to be somewhere else; always there was something--a bar, a stripe, a small distinctive spot, a wing of peculiar shape, antennae, or palpi, or spur, to differentiate them.

”Where the Sam Hill,” he blazed, ”do all these footy little devils come from, anyhow? Where am I to put a beast of a bug when the next one that's exactly like it is entirely different the next time you look at it? There's too much beginning and no end at all to this game!”

For all that, he followed them up. I saw with pure joy that he refused to dismiss anything carelessly, while he scorned to split hairs. He had a regular course of procedure when he was puzzled. First he turned the new insect over and over and glared at it from every possible angle; then he rumpled his hair, gritted his teeth, squared his shoulders and hurled himself into work.

There was, for instance, the common Dione Vanillae, that splendid Gulf Fritillary which haunts all the highways of the South. She's a long-wing, but she's not a Heliconian; she's a silver-spot, but she's not an Argynnis. She bears a striking family likeness to her fine relations, but she has certain structural peculiarities which differentiate her. Whose word should he take for this, and why?

Wherein lay those differences? He began, patiently, with her cylinder-shaped yellow-brown, orange-spotted caterpillar, on the purple pa.s.sion flowers in our garden; he watched it change into a dark-brown chrysalis marked with a few pale spots; he saw emerge from this the red-robed lady herself, with her long fulvous forewings, and her shorter hind wings smocked with black velvet, and her under-frock flushed with pinkish orange and spangled with silver. And yet, in spite of her long marvelous tongue--he was beginning to find out that no tool he had ever seen, and but few that G.o.d Himself makes, is so wonderful as a b.u.t.terfly's tongue--she hadn't been able to tell him that about herself which he most wished to find out. _That_ called for a deeper knowledge than he as yet possessed.

But he knew that other men knew. And he had to know. He meant to know.

For the work gripped him as it does those marked and foreordained for its service. That marvelous world in which the Little People dwell--a world so absolutely different from ours that it might well be upon another planet--began to open, slowly, slowly, one of its many mysterious doors, allowing him just glimpse enough of what magic lay beyond to fire his heart and to whet his appet.i.te. And he couldn't break into that world with a jimmy. It was burglar-proof. That portal was so impervious to even the facile fingers of Slippy McGee, that John Flint must pay the inevitable and appropriate toll to enter!

Westmoreland had replaced his crutches with a wooden leg, and you might see him stumping about our grounds, minutely examining the underside of shrubs and bushes, the bark of trees, poking into corners and crannies, or sc.r.a.ping in the mold under the fallen leaves by the fences, for things which no longer filled him with aversion and disgust, but with the student's interest and pleasure.

”Think of me being in the same world with 'em all these years and not knowing a thing about 'em when there's so much to know, and under my skin stark crazy to learn it, only I didn't know I even wanted to know what I really want to know more than anything else, until I had to get dumped down here to find it out! I get the funniest sort of a feeling, parson, that all along there's been a Me tucked away inside my hide that's been loving these things ever since I was born. Not just to catch and handle 'em, and stretch out their little wings, and remember the names some bughouse high-brow wished on 'em, though all that's in the feeling, too; it's something else, if I could make you understand what I mean.”

I laughed. ”I think I do understand,” said I. ”I have a Me like that tucked away in mine, too, you know.”

He looked at me gravely. ”Parson,” said he, earnestly, ”there's times I wish you had a dozen kids, and every one of 'em twins! It's a shame to think of some poor orphans swindled out of such a daddy as you'd have made!”

”Why,” said I, smiling, ”_You_ are one of my twins.”

”Me?” He reflected. ”Maybe half of me might be, parson,” he agreed, ”but it's not safe for a skypilot to be caught owning a twin like the other half.”

”I'm pinning my faith to _my_ half,” said I, serenely.

”Now, why?” he asked, with sudden fierceness. ”I turn it over and over and over: it looks white on the outside, but I can't to save me figure out _why_ you're doing it. Parson, _what_ have you got up your sleeve?”

”Nothing but my arm. What should you think?”

”I don't know what to think, and that's the straight of it. What's your game, anyhow? What in the name of G.o.d are you after?”

”Why, I think,” said I, ”that in the name of G.o.d I'm after--that other You that's been tucked away all these years, and couldn't get born until a Me inside mine, just like himself, called him to come out and be alive.”

He pondered this in silence. Then:

”I'll take your word for it,” said he. ”Though if anybody'd ever told me I'd be eating out of a parson's hand, I'd have pushed his face in for him. Yep, I'm Fido! _Me!_”

”At least you growl enough,” said I, tartly.

He eyed me askance.

”Have I got to lick hands?” he snarled.

I walked away, without a reply; through my shoulder-blades I could feel him glaring after me. He followed, hobbling:

”Parson!”