Before Morgan could answer, Charley swaggered over to him, slapped him on the shoulder. “You tell her, old boy, that the business I’m in would kill you in a year. It’s a high pressure deal, what I mean. Have a cigar?”
Morgan took his pipe out of his jacket pocket. “I’ll smoke this, thanks.”
“Make sure you don’t take that smelly thing in the house, Morgan,” Sara said.
Charley had left matches on Morgan’s chair arm. He filled his pipe, took the packet of matches and struck one. The match burned with a horrid red flame and a chemical snake came writhing out of the end of it. Morgan stared at it in horror and dropped the match. The four of them roared at him. After a few moments he managed a feeble smile.
“Great gag, hey?” Charley said when he could speak. “Picked those up this afternoon. Almost as good as that dribble glass, hey Doc? You remember the glass?”
“How could he forget?” Robert said.
Sara left the porch and went into the kitchen. Alice sat on the swing beside Robert. Her glass was half-empty. Her face was flushed. Charley sat in the rocker that Sara had vacated. Morgan let their conversation wash around him like the sea washing around rocks. He found it puzzling that he was never able to find anything of the slightest interest in their conversation.
He smoked his pipe and waited for dinner. Sara had a knack of achieving the ultimate in tastelessness from even the freshest garden vegetables. The smells that floated out of the kitchen were vaguely sour.
Morgan smoked his pipe and remembered that after dinner he would be able to go into his study, shut the door and be absolutely alone. In the study he could lick the wounds of the day and steel himself for the morrow.
He sat at the table, huddled over his plate, eating from a sense of duty. He thought of the paper he had been working on for three years. A good paper. When it was published he would get letters from over the world, congratulating him on his new classification system for the subspecies of butterfly, classification dependent on the timing of the phases of metamorphosis.
Suddenly he realized that he had been asked a question. He looked up. They were all looking at him. “What was that?”
“I’ll repeat it, Doc. It’s like this. With my new job, I got to have office space. A headquarters. I could rent an office in town, but it would be handier here. I was wondering if you’d give up that room of yours. Hell, you don’t seem to use it for anything that I can see.”
“No!” Morgan said loudly, his eyes wide. “No!” He thought of the unending evenings when he would be trapped in the’ bosom of his family, condemned to sit among them, half alive. How could he work? Where would he find that solitude on which he depended? He looked at Sara with quick appeal. Surely she would stand by him!
“Charles is absolutely correct, Morgan. You use that room as an excuse for being selfish and antisocial. I’ve been waiting for years for a good excuse to root you out of there. This is it. We can turn that room over to someone who will get some practical use out of it.”
Morgan stood up, his hands trembling as he held onto the back of his chair. “No! He can’t have it!” he said desperately.
“Look at him!” Sara said with a savage smile. “A little boy losing his candy cane. For heaven’s sake, Morgan. Grow up! Where are all the papers you were going to write in that study of yours? Where is the wonderful fame you were going to have? You might as well face things. The best thing you can do is try to hold your job until they’re willing to retire you. Now stop acting like a child and march into that study and start packing those silly trays of bugs.”
“I won’t do it!” Morgan said hoarsely. Charley was looking at him with an injured expression. Robert was frankly enjoying the scene. Alice was battling hiccups.
Sara lost her smile. “Take your choice, Morgan. Either pack that nonsense yourself, or I’ll clear that place out tomorrow while you’re at class. And I might not be very careful about what goes in the incinerator.”
Morgan looked into the eyes of his virtuous wife for three seconds. Ail the fight went out of him. With heavy tread he went to his study, bolted the door behind him and drew the shades. He turned on the desk light.
He stood by the desk and his eyes had an unaccustomed sting as he looked around at the small and cluttered room in which he spent so many peaceful and happy hours. The huge desk, the crowded bookshelves he had made, the display trays where, under glass, the insect wings glowed with rare and delicate beauty.
A new specimen was on the spreading board. The desk lamp picked up the ovals of brilliant turquoise at the base of the wings. They were his creatures, the moths and the butterflies. Small living things, intent with instinct, unaccountably beautiful.
He sat for a long time at the desk, staring down into the drawer he had opened. In the drawer was the metallic blue sheen of an automatic. He touched it with his fingertips and the chill of the metal entered his soul.
He envied the insects, envied them in the unthinking beauty of their involuntary death.
There was no insect but what struggled against the net, struggled for its small life. And he, Morgan Nestor, would give up life with no struggle.
He shut the desk drawer violently.
For many years he had watched the life cycles of the moths and butterflies, watched the soft worm become inert and hard, watched the splitting, the emergence of a creature of loveliness which perched and slowly dried its mystic wings before the first flight.
His envy of their escape was a roar in his ears. “Unfair!” he thought. “Unfair!” For within one lifespan they existed twice — once earthbound; once creatures of the warm and fragile air.
He knew so well each stage of the process, each instinctive larval transformation.
All thought of packing was gone. He stood near the desk in strange ecstasy, sensing more clearly than ever before, the mystic sequence of changes encompassed by the small dusty bodies he had pinned to the frames.
He wished suddenly that he had never used a killing jar, a net, the spreading boards, the insect pins. His kinship with them was clear and distinct.
Vaguely he realized that that he was wasting time, that he should try to sort out the things to be saved, the things to be thrown away. He tried to remember what Sara had said, and she seemed an alien being, a creature of another race, another life rhythm. Her features were indistinct.
The green shade of the desk lamp cast a soft light in the room.
All of them out there were alien. He could hear the distant harshness of their voices.
Suddenly he began to undo the buttons of his shirt with fingers that were unruly and awkward. He stripped off all his clothes, stood naked by the desk. He heard a distant humming, as of the vast beating of many wings.
The drone filled his soul, a deep and heady rhythm that spoke to him of freedom and of far places.
He stood very straight, slowly drawing his arms up so that his fists were under his chin, his elbows together at his stomach. There was an itching harshness about his skin, and a sense of urgency.
When he fell it was without shock or pain, and almost without noise. He lay on his stomach on the floor, his arms under him, and both legs had somehow become a unit, a single unit, joined from ankle to hip.
He looked along the floor level, and the fibres of the rug were harsh and strange. Too dry.
They should have been of a moist greenness. He yearned for the grass, dimly remembered some oddly upright creature that had hit at the grass with a club.
A tingling ran down the surface of his skin along the forearms that had merged with his chest, along the tops of the thighs and shins that had joined together.