A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950 — page 61: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

60 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY muscles obey his will, to sense ‘‘the mar- ried harmony of form and function,” yet the thought of Stasia still obtruded. He wanted her! He needed her! To him the sight of her sweet, wistful face, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, had become almost obsessions, in their intense evocation of desire. And, as the memory of her rose before his mind, he thrilled with unspoken hopes, with passion he himself dared not admit or give free rein to. A score of times he found his tongue shaping her name, his lips about to speak, to question I] Vecchio. Where was she? he burned to ask. Why had she thus been taken from him? How long must she remain away? Yet, though everything im- pelled him to these queries, he restrained himself. For nothing, he knew could be gained by exciting the old man’s already evident uneasiness in this respect. That I] Vecchio had taken her away for the very purpose of avoiding any possible romance between her and the American, Dennison did not for a moment fail to suspect. Well he knew the European idea, the old dowry system, the marriages often arranged by proxy years before they can be consummated. “Tn all probability,” he thought, setting his jaw a little grimly, “In all probability she’s already betrothed to some petty bourgeois down in Cette, or in someone of those provincial towns. What thoughts are these of mine? Why should I, a foreigner, a stranger, a chance arrival, entertain such mad ideas?” Yet he could not put them away. Again and again he found himself dwelling on this one train of reasoning. And not all the old man’s talk of olive-growth and viticulture, phylloxera, and parasites, not all his own labor with the hoe and prun- ing-knife, not all his stern self-prohibition, could for long hold nature’s thoughts from surging back again. “Bah! What folly is this?” he angrily demanded of himself, at last, when—all the trees of the southernmost tier having been spaded round—I! Vecchio bade |_ombard bring a huge, brimming jug of milk, with figs, cheese-cakes, and honey. ““What madness? What am I thinking of ? Why should I entertain such chimeras? Am I insane, to think such thoughts?” Down in the shade he sat, at ease, and looked with a strange frown at the sunlit parterres, the lawns, and groves of this delightful place. “Ts not all this,” he wondered, “‘merely the physical reaction of the great change which has taken place and still is taking place in me? Surely, my thoughts are not of Stasia, but of womankind in general! Had any other woman been at hand, would it not have been the same?” Peseush his mind passed a memory of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and of Lysander’s waking after Puck had an- nointed his eyes with the magic blossom; of Lysander’s love for Helen; of all the strangely whimsical complications follow- ing that sport of the fairy-people. Well- used to psychic analyses, he seemed to see a parallel in his own case. Silently he ate, while the old man watched him with a shrewd, yet unobtrusive eye. “What?” thought the American. “Am I so foolish as to consider marrying a little French girl of hardly twenty years, who’s never even been to Paris and who knows practically nothing of the world? Whose principal diversions seem to be her-music and her fancy-work, with a little landscape painting now and then? Come, come! This cannot, must not be!” Ii Vecchio, pouring him another glass of foaming milk, interrupted his reflec- tions. “Let us drink deep of this,” remarked the old man. ‘“‘Next to my lost Alkahest, this is the veritable elixir. You know Mechnikoff’s work, of course? I have all my milk, here, inoculated with his lactic bacillus. Have been doing so ever since he first announced it. A marvelous dis- covery, that; and a more marvelous man! I place him and Gabriel Petit together on one plane. You know Petit’s researches with radium injections ?” Dennison shook his’ head _absent- mindedly. Abstruse scientific speculation was not what he wanted today. Some- thing very different lay in his mind. II Vecchio’s words hardly penetrated his consciousness. The patriarch gazed at him with a dry, calculating look, which Dennison failed to note. Between the American’s eyes a wrin- kle of perplexity creased his brow. Still COMICLOC|S (C(O)