clean air about the place—a perpetual tingle of expectancy, as though someone coming into New York for the very first time on one of the trains had thrown his joyous anticipation high in the air and the cottage had caught it and breathed it and kept it forever.
Up the hairpin driveway to the house, one spring afternoon, toiled a miniature automobile in its lowest gear. Its little motor grunted and moaned as it took the last steep grade, a miniature Old Faithful appearing around its radiator cap. At the foot of the brownstone porch steps it stopped, and a miniature lady slid out from under the wheel. But for the facts that she was wearing an aviation mechanic’s coveralls, and that her very first remark—an earthy epithet directed at the steaming radiator—was neither ladylike nor miniature, she might have been a model for the more precious variety of Mother’s Day greeting card.
Fuming, she reached into the car and pressed the horn button. The quavering ululation that resulted had its desired effect. It was answered instantly by the mighty howl of a Great Dane at the peak of aural agony. The door of the house crashed open and a girl rushed out on the porch, to stand with her russet hair ablaze in the sunlight, her lips parted, and her long eyes squinting against the light reflected from the river. “What—Mother! Mother, darling—is that you? Already? Tiny!” she rapped as the dog bolted out of the open door and down the steps. “Come back here!”
The dog stopped. Mrs. Forsythe scooped a crescent wrench from the ledge behind the driver’s seat and brandished it. “Let him come, Alistair,” she said grimly. “In the name of sense, girl, what are you doing with a monster like that? I thought you said you had a dog, not a Shetland pony with fangs. If he messes with me, I’ll separate him from a couple of those twelve-pound feet and bring him down to my weight. Where do you keep his saddle? I thought there was a meat shortage in this part of the country. Whatever possessed you to take up your abode with that carnivorous dromedary, anyway? And what’s the idea of buying a barn like this, thirty miles from nowhere and perched on a precipice to boot, with a stepladder for a driveway and an altitude fit to boil water at eighty degrees Centigrade? It must take you forever to make breakfast. Twenty-minute eggs, and then they’re raw. I’m hungry. If that Danish basilisk hasn’t eaten everything in sight, I’d like to nibble on about eight sandwiches. Salami on whole wheat. Your flowers are gorgeous, child. So are you. You always were, of course. Pity you have brains. If you had no brains, you’d get married. A lovely view, honey, lovely. I like it here. Glad you bought it. Come here, you,” she said to Tiny.
He approached this small specimen of volubility with his head a little low and his tail down. She extended a hand and held it still to let him sniff it before she thumped him on the withers. He waved his unfashionable tail in acceptance and then went to join the laughing Alistair, who was coming down the steps.
“Mother, you’re marvelous. And you haven’t changed a bit.” She bent and kissed her. “What on earth made that awful noise?”
“Noise? Oh—the horn.” Mrs. Forsythe busily went about lifting the hood of the car. “I have a friend in the shoelace business. Wanted to stimulate trade for him. Fixed this up to make people jump out of their shoes. When they jump they break the laces. Leave their shoes in the street. Thousands of people walking about in their stocking feet. More people ought to, anyway. Good for the arches.” She pointed. There were four big air-driven horns mounted on and around the little motor. Over the mouth of each was a shutter, so arranged that it revolved about an axle set at right angles to the horn, so that the bell was opened and closed by four small DC motors. “That’s what gives it the warble. As for the beat-note, the four of them are tuned a sixteenth-tone apart. Pretty?”
“Pretty,” Alistair conceded with sincerity. “No—please don’t demonstrate it again, Mother! You almost wrenched poor Tiny’s ears off the first time.”
“Oh—did I?” Contritely, she went to the dog. “I didn’t mean to, honey-poodle, really I didn’t.” The honey-poodle looked up at her with somber brown eyes and thumped his tail on the ground. “I like him,” said Mrs. Forsythe decisively. She put out a fearless hand and pulled affectionately at the loose flesh of Tiny’s upper lip. “Will you look at those tusks! Great day in the morning, dog, reel in some of that tongue or you’ll turn yourself inside out. Why aren’t you married yet, chicken?”
“Why aren’t you?” Alistair countered.
Mrs. Forsythe stretched. “I’ve been married,” she said, and Alistair knew now her casualness was forced. “A married season with the likes of Dan Forsythe sticks with you.” Her voice softened. “Your daddy was all kinds of good people, baby.” She shook herself. “Let’s eat. I want to hear about Tiny. Your driblets and drablets of information about that dog are as tantalizing as Chapter Eleven of a movie serial. Who’s this Alec creature in St. Croix? Some kind of native—cannibal, or something? He sounds nice. I wonder if you know how nice you think he is? Good heavens, the girl’s blushing! I only know what I read in your letters, darling, and I never knew you to quote anyone by the paragraph before but that old scoundrel Nowland, and that was all about ductility and permeability and melting points. Metallurgy! A girl like you mucking about with molybs and durals instead of heartbeats and hope chests!”
“Mother, sweetheart, hasn’t it occurred to you at all that I don’t want to get married? Not yet, anyway.”
“Of course it has! That doesn’t alter the fact that a woman is only forty per cent a woman until someone loves her, and only eighty per cent a woman until she has children. As for you and your precious career I seem to remember something about a certain Marie Sklodowska who didn’t mind marrying a fellow called Curie, science or no science.”
“Darling,” said Alistair a little tiredly as they mounted the steps and went into the cool house, “once and for all, get this straight. The career, as such, doesn’t matter at all. The work does. I like it. I don’t see the sense in being married purely for the sake of being married.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, child, neither do I!” said Mrs. Forsythe quickly. Then, casting a critical eye over her daughter, she sighed, “But it’s such a waste!”
“What do you mean?”
Her mother shook her head. “If you don’t get it, it’s because there’s something wrong with your sense of values; in which case, there’s no point in arguing. I love your furniture. Now, for pity’s sake feed me and tell me about this canine Carnera of yours.”
Moving deftly about the kitchen while her mother perched like a bright-eyed bird on a utility ladder, Alistair told the story of her letters from Alec and Tiny’s arrival.
“At first he was just a dog. A very wonderful dog, of course, and extremely well trained. We got along beautifully. There was nothing remarkable about him but his history, as far as I could see, and certainly no indication of…of anything. I mean, he might have responded to my name the way he did because the syllabic content pleased him.”
“It should,” said her mother complacently. “Dan and I spent weeks at a sound laboratory graphing a suitable name for you. Alistair Forsythe. Has a beat, you know. Keep that in mind when you change it.”
“Mother!”
“All right, dear. Go on with the story.”
“For all I knew, the whole thing was a crazy coincidence. Tiny didn’t respond particularly to the sound of my name after he got here. He seemed to take a perfectly normal, doggy pleasure in sticking around, that was all.
“Then, one evening after he had been with me about a month, I found out he could read.”
“Read!” Mrs. Forsythe toppled, clutched
