flushed with heat and impatience while trying to answer a letter from his mother. Across his legs lay another of her gifts, a breakfast tray inlaid with a mosaic quotation from the Rubaiyat; atop that sat Hugh’s thus-far blank piece of writing paper. Mrs. Allison’s letter of April 11, lost between a pillow and the silk-covered comforter, expressed relief over the just-commenced withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina, but so casually that a reader might have thought she was referring to some forty-eight-hour episode instead of a twelve-year occupation. This was her manner, a disproportion universally regarded as charming, even if it also caused, as it did in the incident she reported two paragraphs below, the merciless excoriation of a local shopkeeper who lacked the proper shade of green ribbon.
Mrs. Allison’s husband, a shy lawyer more interested in gambling than the courthouse, deferred to her in all things that didn’t directly involve cards or horses or dice. Hugh, while growing up, had often tearfully taken the side of some housemaid or cook who’d displeased her. These days he paid attention only to the airier portions of her long epistolary monologues, replying with a light breeze of his own. “Yes, Mother,” he began writing. “I had read that the troops were leaving. See what miracles Rutherfraud B. has performed? The other day he spoke to the deaf-mutes at their college here, after viewing marvels of botany and rhetoric they had managed without their full five senses. The Star, alas, makes no mention of his having delivered any of them from silence with a clap on the ears.”
Deciding to forgo his waistcoat for a venture outside his lodgings, he sealed the letter and tucked it behind his belt. The jade clock showed three-quarters past seven, time for him to go dine somewhere along High Street on his way down to Foggy Bottom.
A street or two from his rooms, not far from an oyster house that looked suitable, he passed the offices of the American Tract Society, where a plainly dressed sidewalk solicitor invited him to put money into any of three boxes: one for the destitute; another for the missions;and the last for a special collection of “$2,000 to print a life of Christ in the language of Japan.”
The undauntedness of this last scheme—its humble reaching through space and time to connect two points—appealed to Hugh’s feelings, which these days tended to quicken only when a nerve connecting them to his intellectual occupations was tripped. The hand-painted sign of this gentle tractarian proved just such a stimulus; Hugh reached into his trousers pocket and extracted a half-dollar, which he tossed into the third container.
“God bless you, sir,” said the man behind the money box.
“And God love you,” Hugh replied, with a smile, having recovered his merriment and faithlessness.
Walking away, a tract in his right hand, he pondered the collector’s evident belief in the usefulness of his work, and the certainty with which he had no doubt accepted his post on the pavement. Hugh himself had spent the past few weeks irritated by the pointless task he had been given to perform by the overworked and temporary Lieutenant Commander Davis. Pulled from the double-star investigation he’d been making without much enthusiasm, he was now chasing, all on his own, one fitfully visible comet, plotting its course for a report that would be filed to the Observatory’s credit, something the Navy’s budget-makers could tally, like a sortie performed or a sinking accomplished. Hugh feared for Commodore Sands’s old free rein; if the elder Davis’s permanent replacement arrived with a taste for quantifiable results, Hugh Allison might never find himself acting as anything but a small supply ship for the fanfared voyages of Simon Newcomb.
Who besides himself might be under the dome tonight? And what sort of sky would greet him once he crossed New Hampshire Avenue? Would the fog be low enough
Mrs. Allison’s husband, a shy lawyer more interested in gambling than the courthouse, deferred to her in all things that didn’t directly involve cards or horses or dice. Hugh, while growing up, had often tearfully taken the side of some housemaid or cook who’d displeased her. These days he paid attention only to the airier portions of her long epistolary monologues, replying with a light breeze of his own. “Yes, Mother,” he began writing. “I had read that the troops were leaving. See what miracles Rutherfraud B. has performed? The other day he spoke to the deaf-mutes at their college here, after viewing marvels of botany and rhetoric they had managed without their full five senses. The Star, alas, makes no mention of his having delivered any of them from silence with a clap on the ears.”
Deciding to forgo his waistcoat for a venture outside his lodgings, he sealed the letter and tucked it behind his belt. The jade clock showed three-quarters past seven, time for him to go dine somewhere along High Street on his way down to Foggy Bottom.
A street or two from his rooms, not far from an oyster house that looked suitable, he passed the offices of the American Tract Society, where a plainly dressed sidewalk solicitor invited him to put money into any of three boxes: one for the destitute; another for the missions;and the last for a special collection of “$2,000 to print a life of Christ in the language of Japan.”
The undauntedness of this last scheme—its humble reaching through space and time to connect two points—appealed to Hugh’s feelings, which these days tended to quicken only when a nerve connecting them to his intellectual occupations was tripped. The hand-painted sign of this gentle tractarian proved just such a stimulus; Hugh reached into his trousers pocket and extracted a half-dollar, which he tossed into the third container.
“God bless you, sir,” said the man behind the money box.
“And God love you,” Hugh replied, with a smile, having recovered his merriment and faithlessness.
Walking away, a tract in his right hand, he pondered the collector’s evident belief in the usefulness of his work, and the certainty with which he had no doubt accepted his post on the pavement. Hugh himself had spent the past few weeks irritated by the pointless task he had been given to perform by the overworked and temporary Lieutenant Commander Davis. Pulled from the double-star investigation he’d been making without much enthusiasm, he was now chasing, all on his own, one fitfully visible comet, plotting its course for a report that would be filed to the Observatory’s credit, something the Navy’s budget-makers could tally, like a sortie performed or a sinking accomplished. Hugh feared for Commodore Sands’s old free rein; if the elder Davis’s permanent replacement arrived with a taste for quantifiable results, Hugh Allison might never find himself acting as anything but a small supply ship for the fanfared voyages of Simon Newcomb.
Who besides himself might be under the dome tonight? And what sort of sky would greet him once he crossed New Hampshire Avenue? Would the fog be low enough
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