Part 16 (1/2)

There is something in a silent egg which moves one's deeper emotions--something solemn in its embryotic inertia, something awesome in its featureless immobility.

I know of nothing on earth which is so totally lacking in expression as an egg. The great desert Sphinx, brooding through its veil of sand, has not that tremendous and meaningless dignity which wraps the colorless oval effort of a single domestic hen.

I held the hand of the young Countess very tightly. Her fingers closed slightly.

Then and there, in the solemn presence of those emotionless eggs, I placed my arm around her supple waist and kissed her.

She said nothing. Presently she stooped to observe the thermometer.

Naturally, it registered 95 Fahrenheit.

”Susanne,” I said, softly.

”Oh, we must go up-stairs,” she whispered, breathlessly; and, picking up her silken skirts, she fled up the cellar-stairs.

I turned out the gas, with that instinct of economy which early wastefulness has implanted in me, and followed the Countess Suzanne through the suite of rooms and into the small reception-hall where she had first received me.

She was sitting on a low divan, head bent, slowly turning a sapphire ring on her finger, round and round.

I looked at her romantically, and then--

”Please don't,” she said.

The correct reply to this is:

”Why not?”--very tenderly spoken.

”Because,” she replied, which was also the correct and regular answer.

”Suzanne,” I said, slowly and pa.s.sionately.

She turned the sapphire ring on her finger. Presently she tired of this, so I lifted her pa.s.sive hand very gently and continued turning the sapphire ring on her finger, slowly, to harmonize with the cadence of our unspoken thoughts.

Towards midnight I went home, walking with great care through a new street in Paris, paved exclusively with rose-colored blocks of air.

XII

At nine o'clock in the evening, July 31, 1900, the International Congress was to a.s.semble in the great lecture-hall of the Belgian Scientific Pavilion, which adjourned the Tasmanian Pavilion, to hear the Countess Suzanne d'Alzette read her paper on the ux.

That morning the Countess and I, with five furniture vans, had transported the five great incubators to the platform of the lecture-hall, and had engaged an army of plumbers and gas-fitters to make the steam-heating connections necessary to maintain in the incubators a temperature of 100 Fahrenheit.

A heavy green curtain hid the stage from the body of the lecture-hall.

Behind this curtain the five enormous eggs reposed, each in its incubator.

The Countess Suzanne was excited and calm by turns, her cheeks were pink, her lips scarlet, her eyes bright as blue planets at midnight.

Without faltering she rehea.r.s.ed her discourse before me, reading from her type-written ma.n.u.script in a clear voice, in which I could scarcely discern a tremor. Then we went through the dumb show of exhibiting the uxen eggs to a frantically applauding audience; she responded to countless supposit.i.tious encores, I leading her out repeatedly before the green curtain to face the great, damp, darkened auditorium.