Wild Heart by Patricia Gaffney Read Free Book Online Page B

of his, and a new kind of acceptance. They were .. . they were greeting each other. Another moment passed, and Sydney said, "Hello," quite naturally. His smile came slowly, full of awareness. In one more second he would have spoken to her, there wasn't a doubt in her mind.
    "Why did you open your eyes?" Her father shuffled through the gate, notebook under his arm, his querulous voice spoiling everything. "He might've gone closer, who knows? Confirms my hunch, though. Try it with Philip next. It's eyes; eyes are the thing. Go up and get West, will you? Want him to see this." He started scribbling furiously in his book, no longer aware of her.
    She had stood, but when she took a step toward the lost man, he backed away from her. She couldn't read his face; the emotions passing over it moved too swiftly. She wanted to touch him, tell him—something, she didn't know what. That she wasn't in on this, it wasn't her idea. She was filled with dismay, and she thought he was, too. She reached out, but he moved then, not seeing her hand, and retreated to the low-branching willows at the end of the garden. Gone; no getting him back now.
    "Excuse me," she muttered to O'Fallon, who was blocking the gate. He grinned and shifted, but not enough; she would have to brush his body to pass through. Hot anger boiled over with no warning. "Damn it, get out of my way!" she said succinctly, and he fell back, guilty, amazed, glancing toward her father to see if he'd heard. She pushed past him and sprinted for the house.
     
     
    15 June 1893
    Personal Notes
     
    We progress. Goading O.M. to anger and testing his potential for violence do not interest me; West overruled. What I'm after is reconciling with this blank slate, this tabula rasa, the contradiction between survival of the fittest and acts of apparent selflessness, even self-sacrifice. Ants confounded Darwin; only species that seems to thrive on altruism. Altruistic behavior means benefiting another individual at some cost to oneself. According to survival of fittest theory, the bully, cheat, or cannibal ought to prosper, conquer all. So how to account for ants? Darwin eventually explained them away as members of one family, then applied natural selection to the family as a unit, as if it were an individual.
    What about an unsocialized human being? How much would he sacrifice for the good of the "family"? But perhaps O.M. is no longer uncivilized; despite precautions, perhaps our "kindnesses "—feeding, clothing, housing him — have corrupted the essential thing in him, his wildness, that we wanted to exploit. Should know soon. Any rate, too late to go backward. Unfortunate, ironic, etc. But all's not lost. Plenty to do, and we can still get a book out of him.
     
     
    Papa made everyone sit in a circle around the little garden pond. They were seven: Sydney, Philip, Sam, Charles, O'Fallon, Inger—the Swedish maid, dragooned into participating after Aunt Estelle had refused—and the lost man.
    By prearrangement, Charles opened a bag of apples, took one, and passed the bag to his left. Sydney took an apple, passed the bag to Sam. And so on, until Inger took the last piece of fruit and handed the bag, empty, to the man. He knew it was empty; he could tell by the weight. With disbelief on his face, he reached inside anyway and felt around the bottom of the bag. He pulled his hand out slowly. By now they were all munching on their apples, looking casual, making small talk—as they'd been instructed. No one was supposed to look at him, that was Papa's job, but Sydney couldn't stop herself. Using the low brim of her sun hat for a shield, she glanced sideways at him across Charles's lap.
    And wished she hadn't. What was the point of this unkind experiment? To test the "innate sense of fairness and justice," her father claimed, but Sydney thought it was just mean. She wished he would get angry and snatch somebody's damned apple—preferably O'Fallon's—right out of his mouth. Instead he looked