The Debt

I

YOU remember--it's not so long ago--the talk there was about
Dredge's "Arrival of the Fittest"? The talk has subsided, but the
book of course remains: stands up, in fact, as the tallest thing of
its kind since--well, I'd almost said since "The Origin of Species."

I'm not wrong, at any rate, in calling it the most important
contribution yet made to the development of the Darwinian theory, or
rather to the solution of the awkward problem about which that
theory has had to make such a circuit. Dredge's hypothesis will be
contested, may one day be disproved; but at least it has swept out
of the way all previous conjectures, including of course Lanfear's
magnificent attempt; and for our generation of scientific
investigators it will serve as the first safe bridge across a
murderous black whirlpool.

It's all very interesting--there are few things more stirring to the
imagination than that sudden projection of the new hypothesis, light
as a cobweb and strong as steel, across the intellectual abyss; but,
for an idle observer of human motives, the other, the personal, side
of Dredge's case is even more interesting and arresting.

Personal side? You didn't know there was one? Pictured him simply as
a thinking machine, a highly specialized instrument of precision,
the result of a long series of "adaptations," as his own jargon
would put it? Well, I don't wonder--if you've met him. He does give
the impression of being something out of his own laboratory: a
delicate scientific instrument that reveals wonders to the
initiated, and is absolutely useless in an ordinary hand.

In his youth it was just the other way. I knew him twenty years ago,
as an awkward lout whom young Archie Lanfear had picked up at
college, and brought home for a visit. I happened to be staying at
the Lanfears' when the boys arrived, and I shall never forget
Dredge's first appearance on the scene. You know the Lanfears always
lived very simply. That summer they had gone to Buzzard's Bay, in
order that Professor Lanfear might be near the Biological Station at
Wood's Holl, and they were picnicking in a kind of sketchy bungalow
without any attempt at elegance. But Galen Dredge couldn't have been
more awe-struck if he'd been suddenly plunged into a Fifth Avenue
ball-room. He nearly knocked his shock head against the low doorway,
and in dodging this peril trod heavily on Mabel Lanfear's foot, and
became hopelessly entangled in her mother's draperies--though how he
managed it I never knew, for Mrs. Lanfear's dowdy muslins ran to no
excess of train.

When the Professor himself came in it was ten times worse, and I saw
then that Dredge's emotion was a tribute to the great man's