BENJAMIN McNEIL MURDOCK
cause I hadn't been able to make you look around. And father's dead. And I've been so lonely. I began to be afraid. I was so happy when I woke this morning and knew you were coming." She even laughed brokenly. "Get your coat and hat. I want to see our— I want to see the house."
14
And that is their story. I don't know what to make of it, any more than I know what to make of Murdock's disproof of the mechanistic theory and his belief that the plants themselves have a creative intelligence and some sort of dumb world-soul of their own. But I know this: hearing those two, watching them, seeing the deep and smiling trust of their way of looking at each other while they spoke and listened and remembering that weedy life of poverty and ignorance and murder and kleptomania from which he came—I felt that I could believe any miracle of the immortal spirit, any mysticism of the creative intelligence, any hope of the transcending soul. Science may say what it pleases of Benjamin McNeil Murdock. He is, to me, his own disproof of a dead mechanical world and the philosophy of the microscope.
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