The Disturbing Charm.

by Berta Ruck.

PART I

CHAPTER I

THE COMING OF THE CHARM

"Yet I am bewitched with the rogue's company; if the rascal had not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged; it could not be else; I have drunk medicines."

Shakespeare.

The letter said:

"_... And this discovery, sent herewith, will mark an Epoch in the affairs of the world!_

"_Half the trouble in that world arises from the fact that human beings are continually falling in Love_ ... with the wrong people. _Sir, have you ever wondered why this should be?_"

The old Professor of Botany stood looking at this mysterious typewritten letter, addressed to him, with the rest of his large mail, at the hotel in Western France where he was staying in the fourth autumn of the War with his young niece and secretary. He smiled as he came to the last words. "Had he ever wondered!" How many nights of his youth had been wasted in stormily "wondering----?" Strangers who write to celebrities do stumble on intimate matters sometimes.

He read on:

"_Why should one girl set her affections upon the man who of all others will make her the worst possible husband? All her friends foresee, and warn her. She herself realizes it vaguely.

But to her own destruction she loves him. What has caused this catastrophe? Some small and secret Force; one microbe can achieve a pestilence._"

"Yes, indeed," murmured Professor Howel-Jones, nodding his ma.s.sive old white head. He had been on the point of tossing the letter into the waste-paper basket, but something made him read on.

"_Another young man, why must he desire the one pretty woman who can never give him happiness? She is 'pure as ice, chaste as snow' ... dull as ditch-water; he, full of fire and dreams.

He swears he'll teach her to respond to Pa.s.sion; marries her.

Another tragedy!_"

How like himself again, the Professor mused, going back to the days when he had worn his Rugby International cap with more pride than he now wore his foreign degrees. That memory set him staring out of the big balconied window of his room, over the wide French lagoon, past the barrier of sandhills with their pointing phare, to where, miles away, the irregular white line of the Atlantic rollers crashed and spouted on the reefs. They had been crashing out those thunderous questions to the sands on his football days, they would be tossing their appeals to the sky long after his learning and his n.o.bel Prize were forgotten. Why, then, should an anonymous correspondent remind him of old unrest?

For all that, he went on reading:

"_Each of us knows a list of these stories. How avert them? By seeking out and planting only in the right soil the root of good or evil, the Love-germ. All through the ages Man has recognized its existence; the ancients with their philtres and amulets. Shakespeare embodies it in an herb. We moderns accept it as an enigma; have you never heard it said of a woman_, 'She is not actually pretty, but she has the Disturbing Charm, whatever it is'?"

"The Disturbing Charm!" ... Ah, he knew it! _She_ had possessed it, the girl he had never married, the girl who had pa.s.sed him over for his brother the sea-captain, and who had become the mother of Olwen, his niece. Olwen would be coming in a few minutes to straighten and sort all those drifts of paper on the roomy work-table which no hand but hers, in the whole of the hotel, was allowed to touch. He thought, half-amusedly: "Better not let that little Olwen get hold of this letter."

The letter ended:

"_Sir, you shall not be worried with technicalities. Believe only this, that the life study of the writer of this letter has at last been crowned with success. In the small packet enclosed there is sealed up the result of years of Research, with directions for its use. The inventor lacks courage for experimenting. But you, learned Sir, you, the gifted author of 'The Loves of the Ferns,' will not shrink from responsibility in the cause of Science._

"_Should you wish to procure more of the invention, there is enclosed the address of a box at a newspaper office where you may apply._

"_With all good wishes from_

"_Your obedient servant_,

"_The Inventor._"

A deep genial laugh broke from the old man's wide chest.

He threw the letter and its enclosure on to the table, on the top of his notes for the chapter on "Edible Fungi."

"Mad--sentimental mad!" he commented. "Most lunatics think themselves inventors, that's why most inventors are considered lunatics." He drew up a chair and began making hay of the papers before him, in search of the other file of notes.

The large room which the Professor had had cleared of the bed and most of the other furniture was full of air and sunshine and of that polished cleanliness which few English rooms achieve. White walls and parquet floor shone like mirrors, mirrors like diamonds; the gla.s.s of the open windows was clear as the morning air that lay between the hotel and the pine-forest on the one side, the lagoon on the other. The resinous sigh of the pines mingled with the warm, lung-lifting breath of the sea. It was a glorious morning--too glorious for work indoors....

Professor Howel-Jones looked hard at his notes, but for once he scarcely saw them. He knew that the letter he had just read was the work of a sentimental lunatic, but for all that it had set a string vibrating. As the old man sat there, his brown eyes abstracted under the thatch of hair as white as seeding clematis, he looked like some clean-shaven modern Druid seeing visions. He did, at that moment, see a vision.

He saw an endless procession of those people who have loved or married (or both) the wrong person.

He saw the lads who have chosen out of their cla.s.s; barmaids, "bits of fluff."

He saw the girls who have married out of their generation.

He saw the flirts, who wear an attachment as they wear a hat, tied for life to the affection that is true as steel. (Dreadful for both of them!)

Also the young men who treat Love as a cross between a meal and a music-hall joke, plighted to the shy idealists.

He saw the Bohemian married to the curate.

Likewise the attractive young rake, fettered to the frump.

He saw the women born for motherhood, left lonely spinsters for want of charm to attract.

He saw the mothers who sighed for freedom, resenting the nursery.

He saw the Anything, wedded to the Anything _But_.

Yes; he saw for that moment nothing but the wholesale gigantic Blunder of the mis-mating of the world.

No doubt it was all crystallized for him in one tender image; Olwen's dead mother, the girl he should have married. He sighed and smiled.

"Pity there's no putting things right, as that lunatic suggests," he thought. "There would be an invention worth boasting about! Wireless wouldn't be in it, or X-rays. Pity it isn't all true...."

A tap at the door interrupted his musings. The softest of girl's voices asked, "Are you ready for me, Uncle?"

"Yes!" he called out, jerking himself back into the world of realities.