The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Century Magazine, Vol. LXXXVI, No. 4, August, 1913, by Various.

Incidentally her head ached and her shoulders ached and her lungs ached, and the ankle-bones of both feet ached excruciatingly; but nothing of her felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression. Like a strip of lip-colored lead suspended from her poor little nose by two tugging, wire-gray wrinkles, her persistently conscientious sick-room smile seemed to be whanging aimlessly against her front teeth. The sensation was very unpleasant.

Looking back thus on the three spine-curving, chest-cramping, foot-twinging, ether-scented years of her hospital training, it dawned on the White Linen Nurse very suddenly that nothing of her ever had felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression.

Impulsively she sprang for the prim white mirror that capped her prim white bureau, and stood staring up into her own entrancing, bright-colored Nova Scotian reflection with tense, unwonted interest.

Except for the unmistakable smirk which fatigue had clawed into her plastic young mouth-lines, there was nothing special the matter with what she saw.

“Perfectly good face,” she attested judicially, with no more than common courtesy to her progenitors—“perfectly good and tidy-looking face, if only—if only—” her breath caught a trifle—“if only it didn’t look so disgustingly noble and—hygienic—and dollish.”

All along the back of her neck little sharp, prickly pains began to sting and burn.

“Silly—simpering—pink-and-white puppet!” she scolded squintingly, “I’ll teach you how to look like a real girl!”

Very threateningly she raised herself to[Pg 484] her tiptoes and thrust her glowing, corporeal face right up into the moulten, elusive, quicksilver face in the mirror. Pink for pink, blue for blue, gold for gold, dollish smirk for dollish smirk, the mirror mocked her seething inner fretfulness.

“Why, darn you!” she gasped—“why, darn you—why, you looked more human than that when you left the Annapolis Valley three years ago! There were at least tears in your face then, and cinders, and your mother’s best advice, and the worry about the mortgage, and the blush of Joe Hazeltine’s kiss.”

Furtively with the tip of her index-finger she started to search her imperturbable pink cheek for the spot where Joe Hazeltine’s kiss had formerly flamed.

“My hands are all right, anyway,” she acknowledged with vast relief. Triumphantly she raised both strong, stub-fingered, exaggeratively executive hands to the level of her childish blue eyes, and stood surveying the mirrored effect with ineffable satisfaction. “Why, my hands are—dandy!” she gloated. “Why, they’re perfectly dandy! Why, they’re wonderful! Why, they’re—” Then suddenly and fearfully she gave a shrill little scream. “But they don’t go with my silly doll-face,” she cried. “Why, they don’t! They don’t! My God! they don’t! They go with the Senior Surgeon’s scowling Heidelberg eyes. They go with the Senior Surgeon’s grim, gray jaw. They go with the—Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?”

Dizzily, with her stubby finger-tips prodded deep into every jaded facial muscle that she could compass, she staggered toward the air and, dropping down into the first friendly chair that bumped against her knees, sat staring blankly out across the monotonous city roofs that flanked her open window, trying very, very hard, for the first time in her life, to consider the general phenomenon of being a trained nurse.

All about her, as inexorable as anæsthesia, horrid as the hush of tomb or public library, lurked the painfully unmistakable sense of institutional restraint. Mournfully to her ear from some remote kitcheny region of pots and pans a browsing spoon tinkled forth from time to time with soft muffled resonance. Up and down every clammy white corridor innumerable young feet, born to prance and stamp, were creeping stealthily to and fro in rubber-heeled whispers. Along the somber fire-escape just below her windowsill, like a covey of snubbed doves, six or eight of her classmates were cooing and crooning together with excessive caution concerning the imminent graduation exercises that were to take place at eight o’clock that very evening. Beyond her dreariest ken of muffled voices, beyond her dingiest vista of slate and brick, on a far, faint hillside, a far, faint streak of April green went roaming jocundly skyward. Altogether sluggishly, as though her nostrils were plugged with warm velvet, the smell of spring and ether and scorched mutton-chops filtered in and out, in and out, in and out, of her abnormally jaded senses.

Taken all in all, it was not a propitious afternoon for any girl as tired and as pretty as the White Linen Nurse to be considering the general phenomenon of anything except April.

In the real country, they tell me, where the young spring runs as wild and bare as a nymph through every dull-brown wood and hay-gray meadow, the blasé farmer-lad will not even lift his eyes from the plow to watch the pinkness of her passing. But here in the prudish brick-minded city, where the young spring at her friskiest is nothing more audacious than a sweltering, winter-swathed madcap who has impishly essayed some fine morning to tiptoe down street in her soft, sloozily, green-silk-stockinged feet, the whole hobnailed population reels back aghast and agrin before the most innocent flash of the rogue’s green-veiled toes. And then, suddenly snatching off its own cumbersome winter foot-habits, goes chasing madly after her in its own prankish, varicolored socks.

Now, the White Linen Nurse’s socks were black, and cotton at that, a combination incontestably sedate. And the White Linen Nurse had waded barefoot through too many posied country pastures to experience any ordinary city thrill over the sight of a single blade of grass pushing scarily through a crack in the pavement, or a puny, concrete-strangled maple-tree flushing wanly to the smoky sky. Indeed, for three hustling, square-toed, rubber-heeled city years the White Linen Nurse had never even stopped to notice whether[Pg 485] the season was flavored with frost or thunder. But now, unexplainably, just at the end of it all, sitting innocently there at her own prim little bedroom window, staring innocently out across indomitable roof-tops, with the crackle of glory and diplomas already ringing in her ears, she heard instead, for the first time in her life, the gaily daredevil voice of the spring, a hoidenish challenge flung back at her, leaf-green, from the crest of a winter-scarred hill.

“Hello, White Linen Nurse!” screamed the saucy city Spring. “Hello, White Linen Nurse! Take off your homely starched collar, or your silly candy-box cap, or any other thing that feels maddeningly artificial, and come out! And be very wild!”

Like a puppy-dog cocking its head toward some strange, unfamiliar sound, the White Linen Nurse cocked her head toward the lure of the green-crested hill. Still wrestling conscientiously with the general phenomenon of being a trained nurse, she found her collar suddenly very tight, her tiny cap inexpressibly heavy and vexatious. Timidly she removed the collar, and found that the removal did not rest her in the slightest. Equally timidly she removed the cap, and found that even that removal did not rest her in the slightest. Then very, very slowly, but very, very permeatingly and completely, it dawned on the White Linen Nurse that never while eyes were blue, and hair was gold, and lips were red, would she ever find rest again until she had removed her noble expression.

With a jerk that started the pulses in her temples throbbing like two toothaches, she straightened up in her chair. All along the back of her neck the little blond curls began to crisp very ticklingly at their roots.

Still staring worriedly out over the old city’s slate-gray head to that inciting prance of green across the farthest horizon, she felt her whole being kindle to an indescribable passion of revolt against all hushed places. Seething with fatigue, smoldering with ennui, she experienced suddenly a wild, almost incontrollable, impulse to sing, to shout, to scream from the house-tops, to mock somebody, to defy everybody, to break laws, dishes, heads—anything, in fact, that would break with a crash.

And then at last, over the hills and far away, with all the outraged world at her heels, to run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and laugh, till her feet raveled out, and her lungs burst, and there was nothing more left of her at all—ever, ever, any more!

Discordantly into this rapturously pagan vision of pranks and posies broke one of her room-mates all a-whiff with ether, a-whir with starch.

Instantly with the first creak of the door-handle, the White Linen Nurse was on her feet, breathless, resentful, grotesquely defiant.

“Get out of here, Zillah Forsyth!” she cried furiously. “Get out of here quick, and leave me alone! I want to think.”

Perfectly serenely the new-comer advanced into the room. With her pale, ivory-tinted cheeks, her great limpid, brown eyes, her soft dark hair parted madonna-like across her beautiful brow, her whole face was like some exquisite composite picture of all the saints of history. Her voice also was amazingly tranquil.

“Oh, fudge!” she drawled. “What’s eating you, Rae Malgregor? I won’t either get out. It’s my room just as much as it is yours. And Helene’s just as much as it is ours. And, besides,” she added more briskly, “it’s four o’clock now, and, with graduation at eight and the dance afterward, if we don’t get our stuff packed up now, when in thunder shall we get it done?” Quite irrelevantly she began to laugh. Her laugh was perceptibly shriller than her speaking-voice. “Say, Rae,” she confided, “that minister I nursed through pneumonia last winter wants me to pose as ‘Sanctity’ for a stained-glass window in his new church! Isn’t he the softy?”

“Shall I do it?” mocked the new-comer. “Well, you just watch me! Four mornings a week in June at full week’s wages? Fresh Easter lilies every day? White silk angel-robes? All the high souls and high paints kowtowing around me? Why, it would be more fun than a box of monkeys. Sure I’ll do it.”

Expeditiously as she spoke, the new-comer reached up for the framed motto over her own ample mirror, and yanking it down with one single tug, began to busy[Pg 486] herself adroitly with a snarl in the picture-cord. Like a withe of willow yearning over a brook, her slender figure curved to the task. Very scintillatingly the afternoon light seemed to brighten suddenly across her lap. “You’ll Be A Long Time Dead!” glinted the motto through its sun-dazzled glass.

Still panting with excitement, still bristling with resentment, Rae Malgregor stood surveying the intrusion and the intruder. A dozen impertinent speeches were rioting in her mind. Twice her mouth opened and shut before she finally achieved the particular opprobrium that completely satisfied her.

“Bah! you look like a—trained nurse!” she blurted forth at last with hysterical triumph.

With a little gasp of dismay, Rae Malgregor sprang suddenly forward. Her eyes were flooded with tears.

“Why, that’s just exactly what’s the matter with me!” she cried. “My face is all worn out trying to look like a trained nurse! O Zillah, how do you know you were meant to be a trained nurse? How does anybody know? O Zillah! save me! Save me!”

Languorously Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work and laughed. Her laugh was like the accidental tinkle of sleigh-bells in midsummer, vaguely disquieting, a shiver of frost across the face of a lily.

“Save you from what, you great big overgrown, tow-headed doll-baby?” she questioned blandly. “For Heaven’s sake, the only thing you need is to go back to whatever toy-shop you came from and get a new head. What in creation’s the matter with you lately, anyway Oh, of course you’ve had rotten luck this past month but what of it? That’s the trouble with you country girls. You haven’t got any stamina.”

With slow, shuffling-footed astonishment Rae Malgregor stepped out into the center of the room. “Country girls!” she repeated blankly. “Why, you’re a country girl yourself.”

“I am not,” snapped Zillah Forsyth. “I’ll have you understand that there are nine thousand people in the town I come from, and not a rube among them. Why, I tended soda-fountain in the swellest drug store there a whole year before I even thought of taking up nursing. And I wasn’t as green when I was six months old as you are now.”

Slowly, with a soft-snuggling sigh of contentment, she raised her slim white fingers to coax her dusky hair a little looser, a little farther down, a little more madonna-like across her sweet, mild forehead, then, snatching out abruptly at a convenient shirt-waist, began with extraordinary skill to apply its dangly lace sleeves as a protective bandage for the delicate glass-faced motto still in her lap, placed the completed parcel with inordinate scientific precision in the exact corner of her packing-box, and then went on very diligently, very zealously, to strip the men’s photographs from the mirror on her bureau. There were twenty-seven photographs in all, and for each one she had there already cut and prepared a small square of perfectly fresh, perfectly immaculate, white tissue wrapping-paper. No one so transcendently fastidious, so exquisitely neat in all her personal habits, had ever before been trained in that particular hospital.

Very soberly the doll-faced girl stood watching the men’s pleasant paper countenances smoothed away one by one into their chaste white veilings, until at last, quite without warning, she poked an accusing, inquisitive finger directly across Zillah Forsyth’s shoulder.

“Zillah,” she demanded peremptorily, “all the year I’ve wanted to know, all the year every other girl in our class has wanted to know—where did you ever get that picture of the Senior Surgeon? He never gave it to you in the world. He didn’t, he didn’t! He’s not that kind.”

Deeply into Zillah Forsyth’s pale, ascetic cheek dawned a most amazing dimple.

“Sort of jarred you girls some, didn’t it,” she queried, “to see me strutting round with a photo of the Senior Surgeon?” The little cleft in her chin showed suddenly with almost startling distinctness. “Well, seeing it’s you,” she grinned, “and the year’s all over, and there’s nobody left that I can worry about it any more, I don’t mind telling you in the least that I—bought it out of a photographer’s show-case. There, are you satisfied now?”

With easy nonchalance she picked up[Pg 487] the picture in question and scrutinized it shrewdly.

“Lord! what a face!” she attested. “Nothing but granite. Hack him with a knife, and he wouldn’t bleed, but just chip off into pebbles.” With exaggerated contempt she shrugged her supple shoulders. “Bah! how I hate a man like that! There’s no fun in him.” A little abruptly she turned and thrust the photograph into Rae Malgregor’s hand. “You can have it if you want to,” she said. “I’ll trade it to you for that lace corset-cover of yours.”

Like water dripping through a sieve the photograph slid through Rae Malgregor’s frightened fingers. With nervous apology she stooped and picked it up again, and held it gingerly by one remote corner. Her eyes were quite wide with horror.

“Oh, of course I’d like the—picture well enough,” she stammered, “but it wouldn’t seem—exactly respectable to—to trade it for a corset-cover.”

Expeditiously, with frank, non-sentimental fingers, Rae Malgregor tore the tough cardboard across, and again across, and once again across, and threw the conglomerate fragments into the waste-basket. And her expression all the time was no more, no less, than the expression of a person who would vastly rather execute his own pet dog or cat than risk the possible bungling of an outsider. Then, like a small child trotting with great relief to its own doll-house, she trotted over to her bureau, extracted the lace corset-cover, and came back with it in her hand, to lean across Zillah Forsyth’s shoulder again and watch the men’s faces go slipping off into oblivion. Once again, abruptly, without warning, she halted the process with a breathless exclamation.

“Oh, of course this waist is the only one I’ve got with ribbons in it,” she asserted irrelevantly, “but I’m perfectly willing to trade it for that picture.” She pointed out with unmistakably explicit finger-tip.

Chucklingly, Zillah Forsyth withdrew the special photograph from its half-completed wrappings.

“Oh, him?” she said. “Oh, that’s a chap I met on the train last summer. He’s a brakeman or something. He’s a—”

Perfectly unreluctantly Rae Malgregor dropped the fluff of lace and ribbons into Zillah’s lap and reached out with cheerful voraciousness to annex the young man’s picture to her somewhat bleak possessions. “Oh, I don’t care a rap who he is,” she interrupted briskly; “but he’s sort of cute-looking, and I’ve got an empty frame at home just that odd size, and mother’s crazy for a new picture to stick up over the kitchen mantelpiece. She gets so tired of seeing nothing but the faces of people she knows all about.”

Sharply Zillah Forsyth turned and stared up into the younger girl’s face, and found no guile to whet her stare against.

“Well, of all the ridiculous, unmitigated greenhorns!” she began. “Well, is that all you wanted him for? Why, I supposed you wanted to write to him. Why, I supposed—”

For the first time an expression not altogether dollish darkened across Rae Malgregor’s garishly juvenile blondness.

“Maybe I’m not quite as green as you think I am,” she flared up stormily. With this sharp flaring-up every single individual pulse in her body seemed to jerk itself suddenly into conscious activity again, like the soft, plushy pound-pound-pound of a whole stocking-footed regiment of pain descending single file upon her for her hysterical undoing. “Maybe I’ve had a good deal more experience than you give me credit for,” she hastened excitedly to explain. “I tell you—I tell you, I’ve been engaged!” she blurted forth with a bitter sort of triumph.

With a palpable flicker of interest Zillah Forsyth looked back across her shoulder.

As though the whole monogamous groundwork of civilization was threatened by the question, Rae Malgregor’s hands went clutching at her breast.

“Oh, Lordy!” she chuckled. “Oh, Lordy! Lordy! Why, I’ve been engaged four times just this past year.” In a sudden passion of fastidiousness, she bent down over the particular photograph in her hand and, snatching at a handkerchief,[Pg 488] began to rub diligently at a small smutch of dust in one corner of the cardboard. Something in the effort of rubbing seemed to jerk her small round chin into almost angular prominence. “And before I’m through,” she added, at least two notes below her usual alto tones—“and before I’m through, I’m going to get engaged to every profession that there is on the surface of the globe.” Quite helplessly the thin paper skin of the photograph peeled off in company with the smutch of dust. “And when I marry,” she ejaculated fiercely—“and when I marry, I’m going to marry a man who will take me to every place that there is on the surface of the globe. And after that—”

It was the other room-mate this time. The only real aristocrat in the whole graduating class, high-browed, high-cheek-boned, eyes like some far-sighted young prophet, mouth even yet faintly arrogant with the ineradicable consciousness of caste, a plain, eager, stripped-for-a-long-journey type of face—this was Helene Churchill. There was certainly no innocuous bloom of country hills and pastures in this girl’s face, nor any seething small-town passion pounding indiscriminately at all the doors of experience. The men and women who had bred Helene Churchill had been the breeders also of brick and granite cities since the world was new.

Like one vastly more accustomed to treading on Persian carpets than on painted floors, she came forward into the room.

“Hello, children!” she said casually, and began at once without further parleying to take down the motto that graced her own bureau-top.

It was the era when almost everybody in the world had a motto over his bureau. Helene Churchill’s motto was “Inasmuch As Ye Have Done It Unto One Of The Least Of These, Ye Have Done It Unto Me.” On a scroll of almost priceless parchment the text was illuminated with inimitable Florentine skill and color. A little carelessly, after the manner of people quite accustomed to priceless things, she proceeded now to roll the parchment into its smallest possible circumference, humming exclusively to herself all the while an intricate little air from an Italian opera.

So the three faces foiled each other, sober city girl, pert town girl, bucolic country girl, a hundred fundamental differences rampant between them, yet each fervid, adolescent young mouth tamed to the same monotonous, drolly exaggerated expression of complacency that characterizes the faces of all people who, in a distinctive uniform, for a reasonably satisfactory living wage, make an actual profession of righteous deeds.

Indeed among all the thirty or more varieties of noble expression which an indomitable Superintendent had finally succeeded in inculcating into her graduating class, no other physiognomies had responded more plastically perhaps than these three to the merciless imprint of the great hospital machine which, in pursuance of its one repetitive design, discipline, had coaxed Zillah Forsyth into the semblance of a lady, snubbed Helene Churchill into the substance of plain womanhood, and, still uncertain just what to do with Rae Malgregor’s rollicking rural immaturity, had frozen her face temporarily into the smugly dimpled likeness of a fancy French doll rigged out as a nurse for some gilt-edged hospital fair.

With characteristic desire to keep up in every way with her more mature, better educated classmates, to do everything, in fact, so fast, so well, that no one would possibly guess that she hadn’t yet figured out just why she was doing it at all, Rae Malgregor now, with quickly reconventionalized cap and collar, began to hurl herself into the task of her own packing. From her open bureau drawer, with a sudden impish impulse toward worldly wisdom, she extracted first of all the photograph of the young brakeman.

In mild-eyed surprise Helene Churchill glanced up from her work. “Your beau?” she corrected. “Why, that’s Zillah’s picture.”

“Well, it’s mine now,” snapped Rae Malgregor, with unexpected edginess. “It’s mine now, all right. Zillah said I could have him. Zillah said I could—write to him—if I wanted to,” she finished a bit breathlessly.

“Write to a man whom you don’t know?” she gasped. “Why, Rae! Why, it isn’t even very nice to have a picture of a man you don’t know.”

Mockingly to the edge of her strong white teeth Rae Malgregor’s tongue crept out in pink derision.

“Bah!” she taunted. “What’s nice? That’s the whole matter with you, Helene Churchill. You never stop to consider whether anything’s fun or not; all you care is whether it’s nice.” Excitedly she turned to meet the cheap little wink from Zillah’s sainted eyes. “Bah! What’s nice?” she persisted, a little lamely. Then suddenly all the pertness within her crumbled into nothingness. “That’s—the—whole trouble with you, Zillah Forsyth,” she stammered—“you never give a hang whether anything’s nice or not; all you care is whether it’s fun.” Quite helplessly she began to wring her hands. “Oh, how do I know which one of you girls to follow?” she demanded wildly. “How do I know anything? How does anybody know anything?”

Like a smoldering fuse the rambling query crept back into the inner recesses of her brain, and fired once more the one great question that lay dormant there. Impetuously she ran forward and stared into Helene Churchill’s face.

“How do you know you were meant to be a trained nurse, Helene Churchill?” she began all over again. “How does anybody know she was really meant to be one? How can anybody, I mean, be perfectly sure?” Like a drowning man clutching out at the proverbial straw, she clutched at the parchment in Helene Churchill’s hand. “I mean—where did you get your motto, Helene Churchill?” she persisted, with increasing irritability. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll tear the whole thing to pieces.”

“What’s the matter with you, Rae?” she quizzed sharply, and then, turning round casually to her book-case, began to draw from the shelves one by one her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, Robert Browning. “Oh, I did so want to go to China,” she confided irrelevantly; “but my family have just written me that they won’t stand for it. So I suppose I’ll have to go into tenement work here in the city instead.” With a visible effort she jerked her mind back again to the feverish question in Rae Malgregor’s eyes. “Oh, you want to know where I got my motto?” she asked. A flash of intuition brightened suddenly across her absent-mindedness. “Oh,” she smiled, “you mean you want to know just what the incident was that first made me decide to devote my life to humanity?”

A little shyly Helene Churchill picked up her copy of Marcus Aurelius and cuddled her cheek against its tender morocco cover.

“Really?” she questioned with palpable hesitation—“really, you want to know? Why, why—it’s rather a—sacred little story to me. I shouldn’t exactly want to have anybody—laugh about it.”

“I’ll laugh if I want to,” attested Zillah Forsyth, forcibly, from the other side of the room.

Like a pugnacious boy’s, Rae Malgregor’s fluent fingers doubled up into two firm fists.

“I’ll punch her if she even looks as though she wanted to,” she signaled surreptitiously to Helene.

Shrewdly for an instant the city girl’s narrowing eyes challenged and appraised the country girl’s desperate sincerity. Then quite abruptly she began her little story.

“Why, it was on an Easter Sunday, oh, ages and ages ago,” she faltered. “Why, I couldn’t have been more than nine years old at the time.” A trifle self-consciously she turned her face away from Zillah Forsyth’s supercilious smile. “And I was coming home from a Sunday-school festival in my best white muslin dress, with a big pot of purple pansies in my hand,” she hastened somewhat nervously to explain.[Pg 490] “And just at the edge of the gutter there was a dreadful drunken man lying in the mud, with a great crowd of cruel people teasing and tormenting him. And because—because I couldn’t think of anything else to do about it, I—I walked right up to the poor old creature, scared as I could be, and—and I presented him with my pot of purple pansies. And everybody of course began to laugh—to scream, I mean—and shout with amusement. And I, of course, began to cry. And the old drunken man straightened up very oddly for an instant, with his battered hat in one hand and the pot of pansies in the other, and he raised the pot of pansies very high, as though it had been a glass of rarest wine, and bowed to me as reverently as though he had been toasting me at my father’s table at some very grand dinner. And ‘Inasmuch,’ he said. Just that—‘Inasmuch.’ So that’s how I happened to go into nursing,” she finished as abruptly as she had begun. Like some wonderful phosphorescent manifestation her whole shining soul seemed to flare forth suddenly through her plain face.

“So that’s how you happened to go into nursing?” she quizzed impatiently. Her long straight nose was all puckered tight with interrogation. Her dove-like eyes were fairly dilated with slow-dawning astonishment. “You—don’t—mean,” she gasped—“you don’t mean that just for that?” Incredulously she jumped to her feet and stood staring blankly into the city girl’s strangely illuminated features. “Well, if I were a swell like you,” she scoffed, “it would take a heap sight more than a drunken man munching pansies and rum and Bible texts to—to jolt me out of my limousines and steam-yachts and Adirondack bungalows.”

Quite against all intention, Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth’s clashed together in the irremediable antagonism of caste, the plebeian’s scornful impatience with the aristocrat equaled only by the aristocrat’s condescending patience with the plebeian.

It was no more than right that the aristocrat should recover her self-possession first.

“Never mind about your understanding, Zillah dear,” she said softly. “Your hair is the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life.”

Along Zillah Forsyth’s ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red began to show. With much more nonchalance than was really necessary she pointed toward her half-packed trunk.

“It wasn’t Sunday-school I was coming home from when I got my motto,” she remarked dryly, with a wink at no one in particular. “And, so far as I know,” she proceeded with increasing sarcasm, “the man who inspired my noble life was not in any way particularly addicted to the use of alcoholic beverages.” As though her collar was suddenly too tight, she rammed her finger down between her stiff white neck-band and her soft white throat. “He was a New York doctor,” she hastened somewhat airily to explain. “Gee! but he was a swell! And he was spending his summer holidays up in the same Maine town where I was tending soda-fountain. And he used to drop into the drug store nights after cigars and things. And he used to tell me stories about the drugs and things, sitting up there on the counter, swinging his legs and pointing out this and that—quinine, ipecac, opium, hashish—all the silly patent medicines, every sloppy soothing-syrup! Lordy! he knew ’em as though they were people—where they come from, where they’re going to, yarns about the tropics that would kink the hair along the nape of your neck, jokes about your own town’s soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you yell for joy. Gee! but the things that man had seen and known! Gee! but the things that man could make you see and know! And he had an automobile,” she confided proudly. “It was one of those billion-dollar French cars, and I lived just round the corner from the drug store; but we used to ride home by way of—New Hampshire.”

“Gee! those nights!” she muttered. “Rain or shine, moon or thunder, tearing down those country roads at forty miles an hour, singing, hollering, whispering! It was him that taught me to do my hair like this instead of all the cheap rats and pompadours every other kid in town was wearing,” she asserted quite irrelevantly; then stopped with a furtive glance of suspicion toward both her listeners and mouthed her way delicately back to the beginning of her sentence again. “It was he that taught me to do my hair like this,” she repeated, with the faintest possible suggestion of hauteur.

For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her cheek a narrow streak of red began to show again.

“And he went away very sudden at the last,” she finished hurriedly.[Pg 491] “It seems he was married all the time.” Blandly she turned her wonderful face to the caressing light. “And—I hope he goes to hell,” she added.

With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene Churchill reached out an immediate conscientious hand to her.

“O Zillah,” she began, “O poor Zillah dear! I’m so sorry! I’m so—”

Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah Forsyth ignored the proffered hand.

“I don’t know what particular call you’ve got to be sorry for me, Helene Churchill,” she drawled languidly. “I’ve got my character, same as you’ve got yours, and just about nine times as many good looks. And when it comes to nursing—” Like an alto song pierced suddenly by one shrill treble note, the girl’s immobile face sharpened transiently with a single jagged flash of emotion. “And when it comes to nursing? Ha! Helene Churchill, you can lead your class all you want to with your silk-lined manners and your fuddy-duddy book-talk; but when genteel people like you are moping round all ready to fold your patients’ hands on their breasts and murmur, ‘Thy will be done,’ why, that’s the time that little ‘Yours Truly’ is just beginning to roll up her sleeves and get to work.”

With real passion her slender fingers went clutching again at her harsh linen collar. “It isn’t you, Helene Churchill,” she taunted, “that’s ever been to the Superintendent on your bended knees and begged for the rabies cases and the small-pox! Gee! you like nursing because you think it’s pious to like it; but I like it because I like it!” From brow to chin, as though fairly stricken with sincerity, her whole bland face furrowed startlingly with crude expressiveness. “The smell of ether,” she stammered, “it’s like wine to me. The clang of the ambulance gong? I’d rather hear it than fire-engines. I’d crawl on my hands and knees a hundred miles to watch a major operation. I wish there was a war. I’d give my life to see a cholera epidemic.”

As abruptly as it came, the passion faded from her face, leaving every feature tranquil again, demure, exaggeratedly innocent. With saccharine sweetness she turned to Rae Malgregor.

“Now, little one,” she mocked, “tell us the story of your lovely life. Having heard me coyly confess that I went into nursing because I had such a crush on this world, and Helene here brazenly affirm that she went into nursing because she had such a crush on the world to come, it’s up to you now to confide to us just how you happened to take up so noble an endeavor. Had you seen some of the young house doctors’ beautiful, smiling faces depicted in the hospital catalogue? Or was it for the sake of the Senior Surgeon’s grim, gray mug that you jilted your poor plowboy lover way up in the Annapolis Valley?”

“Why, Zillah,” gasped the country girl—“why, I think you’re perfectly awful! Why, Zillah Forsyth! Don’t you ever say a thing like that again! You can joke all you want to about the flirty young internes,—they’re nothing but fellows,—but it isn’t—it isn’t respectful for you to talk like that about the Senior Surgeon. He’s too—too terrifying,” she finished in an utter panic of consternation.

“Oh, now I know it was the Senior Surgeon that made you jilt your country beau,” taunted Zillah Forsyth, with soft alto sarcasm.

“I didn’t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine,” stormed Rae Malgregor, explosively. Backed up against her bureau, eyes flaming, breast heaving, little candy-box cap all tossed askew over her left ear, she stood defying her tormentor. “I didn’t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine,” she reasserted passionately. “It was Joe Hazeltine that jilted me; and we’d been going together since we were kids! And now he’s married the dominie’s daughter, and they’ve got a kid of their own ’most as old as he and I were when we first began courting each other. And it’s all because I insisted on being a trained nurse,” she finished shrilly.

With an expression of real shock, Helene Churchill peered up from her lowly seat on the floor.

“You mean,” she asked a bit breathlessly—“you mean that he didn’t want you to be a trained nurse? You mean that he wasn’t big enough, wasn’t fine enough, to appreciate the nobility of the profession?”

“Nobility nothing!” snapped Rae Malgregor.[Pg 492] “It was me scrubbing strange men with alcohol that he couldn’t stand for, and I don’t know as I exactly blame him,” she added huskily. “It certainly is a good deal of a liberty when you stop to think about it.”

Quite incongruously her big childish blue eyes narrowed suddenly into two dark, calculating slits.

“It’s comic,” she mused, “how there isn’t a man in the world who would stand letting his wife or daughter or sister have a male nurse; but look at the jobs we girls get sent out on! It’s very confusing.” With sincere appeal she turned to Zillah Forsyth. “And yet—and yet,” she stammered, “and yet when everything scary that’s in you has once been scared out of you, why, there’s nothing left in you to be scared with any more, is there?”

“That’s what Joe and I quarreled about, my first vacation home,” persisted Rae Malgregor. “It was a traveling salesman’s thigh. It was broken bad. Somebody had to take care of it; so I did. Joe thought it wasn’t modest to be so willing.” With a perplexed sort of defiance she raised her square little chin. “But, you see, I was willing,” she said. “I was perfectly willing. Just one single solitary year of hospital training had made me perfectly willing. And you can’t un-willing a willing even to please your beau, no matter how hard you try.” With a droll admixture of shyness and disdain, she tossed her curly blond head a trifle higher. “Shucks!” she attested, “what’s a traveling salesman’s thigh?”

“Shucks yourself!” scoffed Zillah Forsyth. “What’s a silly beau or two up in Nova Scotia to a girl with looks like you? You could have married that typhoid case a dozen times last winter if you’d crooked your little finger. Why, the fellow was crazy about you. And he was richer than Crœsus. What queered it?” she demanded bluntly. “Did his mother hate you?”

Like one fairly cramped with astonishment, Rae Malgregor doubled up very suddenly at the waist-line, and, thrusting her neck oddly forward after the manner of a startled crane, stood peering sharply round the corner of the rocking-chair at Zillah Forsyth.

“Did his mother hate me?” she gasped. “Did—his—mother—hate me? Well, what do you think? With me, who never even saw plumbing till I came down here, setting out to explain to her, with twenty tiled bath-rooms, how to be hygienic though rich? Did his mother hate me? Well, what do you think? With her who bore him—her who bore him, mind you—kept waiting down-stairs in the hospital anteroom half an hour every day on the raw edge of a rattan chair, waiting, worrying, all old and gray and scared, while little, young, perky, pink-and-white me is up-stairs brushing her own son’s hair and washing her own son’s face and altogether getting her own son ready to see his own mother! And then me obliged to turn her out again in ten minutes, flip as you please, ‘for fear she’d stayed too long,’ while I stay on the rest of the night? Did his mother hate me?”

As stealthily as an assassin she crept around the corner of the rocking-chair and grabbed Zillah Forsyth by her astonished linen shoulder.

“Did his mother hate me?” she persisted mockingly. “Did his mother hate me? My God! Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn’t hate us? Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn’t look upon a trained nurse as her natural-born enemy? I don’t blame ’em,” she added chokingly. “Look at the impudent jobs we get sent out on! Quarantined up-stairs for weeks at a time with their inflammable, diphtheretic bridegrooms while they sit down-stairs brooding over their wedding teaspoons! Hiked off indefinitely to Atlantic City with their gouty bachelor uncles! Hearing their own innocent little sister’s blood-curdling death-bed deliriums! Snatching their own new-born babies away from their breasts and showing them, virgin-handed, how to nurse them better! The impudence of it, I say, the disgusting, confounded impudence—doing things perfectly, flippantly, right, for twenty-one dollars a week—and washing—that all the achin’ love in the world don’t know how to do right just for love!” Furiously she began to jerk her victim’s shoulder. “I tell you it’s awful, Zillah Forsyth,” she insisted. “I tell you I just won’t stand it!”

With muscles like steel wire, Zillah[Pg 493] Forsyth scrambled to her feet, and pushed Rae Malgregor back against the bureau.

“For Heaven’s sake, Rae, shut up!” she said. “What in creation’s the matter with you to-day? I never saw you act so before.” With real concern she stared into the girl’s turbid eyes. “If you feel like that about it, what in thunder did you go into nursing for?” she demanded not unkindly.

Very slowly Helene Churchill rose from her lowly seat by her precious book-case and came round and looked at Rae Malgregor rather oddly.

“Yes,” she faltered, “what did you go into nursing for?” The faintest possible taint of asperity was in her voice.

Quite dumbly for an instant Rae Malgregor’s natural timidity stood battling the almost fanatic professional fervor in Helene Churchill’s frankly open face, the raw scientific passion, of very different caliber, but of no less intensity, hidden craftily behind Zillah Forsyth’s plastic features; then suddenly her own hands went clutching back at the bureau for support, and all the flaming, raging red went ebbing out of her cheeks, leaving her lips with hardly blood enough left to work them.

“I went into nursing,” she mumbled, “and it’s God’s own truth—I went into nursing because—because I thought the uniforms were so cute.”

Furiously, the instant the words were gone from her mouth, she turned and snarled at Zillah’s hooting laughter.

“Well, I had to do something,” she attested. The defense was like a flat blade slapping the air.

Desperately she turned to Helene Churchill’s goading, faintly supercilious smile, and her voice edged suddenly like a twisted sword.

“Well, the uniforms are cute,” she parried. “They are! They are! I bet you there’s more than one girl standing high in the graduating class to-day who never would have stuck out her first year’s bossin’ and slops and worry and death if she’d had to stick it out in the unimportant-looking clothes she came from home in. Even you, Helene Churchill, with all your pious talk, the day they put your coachman’s son in as new interne and you got called down from the office for failing to stand when Mr. Young Coachman came into the room, you bawled all night. You did, you did, and swore you’d chuck your whole job and go home the next day if it wasn’t that you’d just had a life-size photo taken in full nursing costume to send to your brother’s chum at Vale! So there!”

“Sure the uniforms are cute,” she slashed back at Zillah Forsyth. “That’s the whole trouble with ’em. They’re so awfully, masqueradishly cute! Sure I could have gotten engaged to the typhoid boy. It would have been as easy as robbing a babe. But lots of girls, I notice, get engaged in their uniforms, feeding a patient perfectly scientifically out of his own silver spoon, who don’t seem to stay engaged so specially long in their own street clothes, bungling just plain naturally with their own knives and forks. Even you, Zillah Forsyth,” she hacked—“even you, who trot round like the ‘Lord’s anointed’ in your pure white togs, you’re just as Dutchy-looking as anybody else come to put you in a red hat and a tan coat and a blue skirt.”

Mechanically she raised her hands to her head as though with some silly thought of keeping the horrid pain in her temples from slipping to her throat, her breast, her feet.

“Sure the uniforms are cute,” she persisted a bit thickly. “Sure the typhoid boy was crazy about me. He called me his ‘holy chorus girl.’ I heard him raving in his sleep. Lord save us! What are we to any man but just that?” she questioned hotly, with renewed venom. “Parson, actor, young sinner, old saint—I ask you frankly, girls, on your word of honor, was there ever more than one man in ten went through your hands who didn’t turn out soft somewhere before you were through with him? Mawking about your ‘sweet eyes’ while you’re wrecking your optic nerves trying to decipher the dose on a poison bottle! Mooning over your wonderful likeness to the lovely young sister they never had! Trying to kiss your finger-tips when you’re struggling to brush their teeth! Teasin’ you to smoke cigarettes with ’em when they know it would cost you your job!”

Impishly, without any warning, she crooked her knee and pointed one homely,[Pg 494] square-toed shoe in a mincing dancing step. Hoidenishly she threw out her arms and tried to gather Helene and Zillah both into their compass.

“Oh, you holy chorus girls!” she chuckled, with maniacal delight. “Everybody all together, now! Kick your little kicks! Smile your little smiles! Tinkle your little thermometers! Steady, there! One, two, three! One, two, three!”

With a shrill little scream of pain, Rae Malgregor’s hands went flying back to her temples. Like a person giving orders in a great panic, she turned authoritatively to her two room-mates, her fingers all the while boring frenziedly into her temples.

“Now, girls,” she warned, “stand well back! If my head bursts, you know, it’s going to burst all slivers and splinters, like a boiler.”

Somewhere in the dusty, indifferent street a bird’s note rang out in one wild, delirious ecstasy of untrammeled springtime. To all intents and purposes the sound might have been the one final signal that Rae Malgregor’s jangled nerves were waiting for.

“Oh, I am crazy, am I?” she cried, with a new, fierce joy. “Oh, I am crazy, am I? Well, I’ll go ask the Superintendent and see if I am. Oh, surely they wouldn’t try and make me graduate if I really was crazy!”

Madly she bolted for her bureau, and, snatching her own motto down, crumpled its face securely against her skirt, and started for the door. Just what the motto was no one but herself knew. Sprawling in paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face down to the wall for three tantalizing years.

“No, you don’t!” Zillah cried now, as she saw the mystery threatening meanly to escape her.

“No, you don’t!” cried Helene. “You’ve seen our mottos, and now we’re going to see yours!”

Almost crazed with new terror, Rae Malgregor went dodging to the right, to the left, to the right again, cleared the rocking-chair, a scuffle with padded hands, climbed the trunk, a race with padded feet, reached the door-handle at last, yanked the door open, and with lungs and temper fairly bursting with momentum, shot down the hall, down some stairs, down some more hall, down some more stairs to the Superintendent’s office, where, with her precious motto still clutched securely in one hand, she broke upon that dignitary’s startled, near-sighted vision like a young whirlwind of linen and starch and flapping brown paper. Breathlessly, without prelude or preamble, she hurled her grievance into the older woman’s grievance-dulled ears.

“Give me back my own face!” she demanded peremptorily. “Give me back my own face, I say! And my own hands! I tell you, I want my own hands! Helene and Zillah say I’m insane! And I want to go home!”

Like a short-necked animal elongated suddenly to the cervical proportions of a giraffe, the Superintendent of Nurses reared up from her stoop-shouldered desk-work, and stared forth in speechless astonishment across the top of her spectacles.

Exuberantly impertinent, ecstatically self-conscious, Rae Malgregor repeated her demand. To her parched mouth the very taste of her own babbling impudence refreshed her like the shock and prickle of cracked ice.

“I tell you, I want my own face again, and my own hands!” she reiterated glibly. “I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders—and the other human expressions,” she explained. “And the nice, grubby country hands that go with that sort of a face.”

Very accusingly she raised her finger and shook it at the Superintendent’s perfectly livid countenance.

“Oh, of course I know I wasn’t very much to look at; but at least I matched. What my hands knew, I mean, my face knew. Pies or plowing or May-baskets, what my hands knew my face knew. That’s the way hands and faces ought to work together. But you—you with all your rules and your bossing, and your everlasting ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’ you’ve snubbed all the know-anything out of my face and made my hands nothing but two disconnected machines for somebody else to run. And I hate you! You’re a monster! You’re a—Everybody hates you!”

Mutely then she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and waited for the Superintendent to smite her dead. The smite, she felt sure, would be a noisy one. First of all, she reasoned, it would fracture her skull. Naturally then, of course, it would splinter her spine. Later, in all probability, it would telescope her knee-joints. And never indeed, now that she came to think of it, had the arches of her feet felt less capable of resisting so terrible an impact. Quite unconsciously she groped out a little with one hand to steady herself against the edge of the desk.

“There! There!” crooned the Superintendent’s voice, with a most amazing tolerance.

“But I won’t ‘there, there!’” snapped Rae Malgregor. Her eyes were wide open again now, and extravagantly dilated.

“But I won’t ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’” stormed Rae Malgregor. Never before in her three years’ hospital training had she seen her arch-enemy, the Superintendent, so utterly disarmed of irascible temper and arrogant dignity, and the sight perplexed and maddened her at one and the same moment. “But I won’t ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’” Desperately she jerked her curly blond head in the direction of the clock on the wall. “Here it’s four o’clock now,” she cried, “and in less than four hours you’re going to try and make me graduate, and go out into the world—God knows where—and charge innocent people twenty-one dollars a week, and washing, likelier than not, mind you, for these hands,” she gestured, “that don’t coördinate at all with this face,” she grimaced, “but with the face of one of the house doctors or the Senior Surgeon or even you, who may be ’way off in Kamchatka when I need him most!” she finished, with a confused jumble of accusation and despair.

Still with unexplainable amiability the Superintendent whirled back into place in her pivot-chair, and with her left hand, which had all this time been rummaging busily in a lower desk drawer, proffered Rae Malgregor a small fold of paper.

“Here, my dear,” she said, “here’s a sedative for you. Take it at once. It will quiet you perfectly. We all know you’ve had very hard luck this past month, but you mustn’t worry so about the future.” The slightest possible tinge of purely professional manner crept back into the older woman’s voice. “Certainly, Miss Malgregor, with your judgment—”

“With my judgment?” cried Rae Malgregor. The phrase was like a red rag to her. “With my judgment? Great heavens! that’s the whole trouble! I haven’t got any judgment! I’ve never been allowed to have any judgment! All I’ve ever been allowed to have is the judgment of some flirty young medical student or the house doctor or the Senior Surgeon or you!”

“Don’t you see that my face doesn’t know anything?” she faltered, “except just to smile and smile and smile and say ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Yes, sir’?” From curly blond head to square-toed, common-sense shoes her little body began to quiver suddenly like the advent of a chill. “Oh, what am I going to do,” she begged, “when I’m ’way off alone—somewhere in the mountains or a tenement or a palace, and something happens, and there isn’t any judgment round to tell me what I ought to do?”

Abruptly in the doorway, as though summoned by some purely casual flicker of the Superintendent’s thin fingers, another nurse appeared.

“Yes, I rang,” said the Superintendent. “Go and ask the Senior Surgeon if he can come to me here a moment, immediately.”

“The Senior Surgeon?” gasped Rae Malgregor. “The Senior Surgeon?” With her hands clutching at her throat she reeled back against the wall for support. Like a shore bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree stripped in one second of its leafage, she stood there, utterly stricken of temper or passion or any animating human emotion whatsoever.

“Oh, now I’m going to be expelled! Oh, now I know I’m going to be expelled!” she moaned listlessly.

Very vaguely into the farthest radiation of her vision she sensed the approach of a man. Gray-haired, gray-suited, as grayly dogmatic as a block of granite, the Senior Surgeon loomed up at last in the doorway.

“Oh, there’s nothing at all the matter, sir,” she stammered. “It’s only—it’s only that I’ve just decided that I don’t want to be a trained nurse.”

With a gesture of ill-concealed impatience the Superintendent shrugged the absurd speech aside.

“Dr. Faber,” she said, “won’t you just please assure Miss Malgregor once more that the little Italian boy’s death last week was in no conceivable way her fault—that nobody blames her in the slightest, or holds her in any possible way responsible?”

“And the Portuguese woman the week before that,” interrupted Rae Malgregor, dully.

“Stuff and nonsense!” said the Senior Surgeon. “It’s nothing but coincidence, pure coincidence. It might have happened to anybody.”

“And she hasn’t slept for almost a fortnight,” the Superintendent confided, “nor touched a drop of food or drink, as far as I can make out, except just black coffee. I’ve been expecting this breakdown for some days.”

“And—the—young—drug-store—clerk—the—week—before—that,” Rae Malgregor resumed with singsong monotony.

Bruskly the Senior Surgeon stepped forward and, taking the girl by her shoulders, jerked her sharply round to the light, and, with firm, authoritative fingers, rolled one of her eyelids deftly back from its inordinately dilated pupil. Equally bruskly he turned away again.

“Nothing but moonshine!” he muttered. “Nothing in the world but too much coffee dope taken on an empty stomach—‘empty brain,’ I’d better have said. When will you girls ever learn any sense?” With search-light shrewdness his eyes flashed back for an instant over the haggard, gray lines that slashed along the corners of her quivering, childish mouth. A bit temperishly he began to put on his gloves. “Next time you set out to have a ‘brain-storm,’ Miss Malgregor,” he suggested satirically, “try to have it about something more sensible than imagining that anybody is trying to hold you personally responsible for the existence of death in the world. Bah!” he ejaculated fiercely. “If you are going to fuss like this over cases hopelessly moribund from the start, what in thunder are you going to do some fine day when, out of a perfectly clear and clean sky, security itself turns septic, and you lose the President of the United States or a mother of nine children—with a hang-nail?”

“But I wasn’t fussing, sir!” protested Rae Malgregor, with a timid sort of dignity. “Why, it never had occurred to me for a moment that anybody blamed me for anything.” Just from sheer astonishment her hands took a new clutch into the torn, flapping corner of the motto that she still clung desperately to even at this moment.

“For Heaven’s sake, stop crackling that brown paper!” stormed the Senior Surgeon.

“But I wasn’t crackling the brown paper, sir! It’s crackling itself,” persisted Rae Malgregor, very softly. The great blue eyes that lifted to his were brimming full of misery. “Oh, can’t I make you understand, sir?” she stammered. Appealingly she turned to the Superintendent. “Oh, can’t I make anybody understand? All I was trying to say, all I was trying to explain, was that I don’t want to be a trained nurse—after all.”

“Why not?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, with a rather noisy click of his glove fasteners.

The explosive wrath on the Senior Surgeon’s countenance seemed to be directed suddenly at the Superintendent.

“Is this an afternoon tea?” he asked tartly. “With six major operations this morning, and a probable meningitis diagnosis ahead of me this afternoon, I think I might be spared the babblings of an hysterical nurse.” Casually over his shoulder he nodded at the girl. “You’re a fool,” he said, and started for the door.

Just on the threshold he turned abruptly and looked back. His forehead was furrowed like a corduroy road, and the one rampant question in his mind at the moment seemed to be mired hopelessly between his bushy eyebrows.

“Lord!” he exclaimed a bit flounderingly, “are you the nurse that helped me last week on that fractured skull?”

Jerkily the Senior Surgeon retraced his footsteps into the office and stood facing her as though with some really terrible accusation.

“And the freak abdominal?” he quizzed sharply. “Was it you who threaded that needle for me so blamed slowly and calmly and surely, while all the rest of us were jumping up and down and cursing you for no brighter reason than that we couldn’t have threaded it ourselves if we’d had all eternity before us and all hell bleeding to death?”

Quite bluntly the Senior Surgeon reached out and lifted one of her hands to his scowling professional scrutiny.

“God!” he attested, “what a hand! You’re a wonder. Under proper direction you’re a wonder. It was like myself working with twenty fingers and no thumbs. I never saw anything like it.”

Almost boyishly the embarrassed flush mounted to his cheeks as he jerked away again. “Excuse me for not recognizing you,” he apologized gruffly, “but you girls all look so much alike!”

As though the eloquence of Heaven itself had suddenly descended upon a person hitherto hopelessly tongue-tied, Rae Malgregor lifted an utterly transfigured face to the Senior Surgeon’s grimly astonished gaze.

“Yes, yes, sir!” she cried joyously; “that’s just exactly what the trouble is; that’s just exactly what I was trying to express, sir: my face is all worn out trying to ‘look alike.’ My cheeks are almost sprung with artificial smiles. My eyes are fairly bulging with unshed tears. My nose aches like a toothache trying never to turn up at anything. I’m smothered with the discipline of it. I’m choked with the affectation. I tell you, I just can’t breathe through a trained nurse’s face any more. I tell you, sir, I’m sick to death of being nothing but a type. I want to look like myself. I want to see what life could do to a silly face like mine if it ever got a chance. When other women are crying, I want the fun of crying. When other women look scared to death, I want the fun of looking scared to death.” Hysterically again, with shrewish emphasis, she began to repeat: “I won’t be a nurse! I tell you I won’t! I won’t!”

“Pray what brought you so suddenly to this remarkable decision?” scoffed the Senior Surgeon.

“A letter from my father, sir,” she confided more quietly—“a letter about some dogs.”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. A trifle speculatively for an instant she glanced at the Superintendent’s face and then back again to the Senior Surgeon’s. “Yes, sir,” she repeated with increasing confidence, “up in Nova Scotia my father raises hunting-dogs. Oh, no special fancy kind, sir,” she hastened in all honesty to explain, “just dogs, you know; just mixed dogs, pointers with curly tails, and shaggy-coated hounds, and brindled spaniels, and all that sort of thing; just mongrels, you know, but very clever. And people, sir, come all the way from Boston to buy dogs of him, and once a man came way from London to learn the secret of his training.”

“Well, what is the secret of his training?” quizzed the Senior Surgeon with the sudden eager interest of a sportsman. “I should think it would be pretty hard,” he acknowledged, “in a mixed gang like that to decide just what particular game was suited to which particular dog.”

“Yes, that’s just it, sir,” beamed the White Linen Nurse. “A dog, of course, will chase anything that runs,—that’s just dog,—but when a dog really begins to care for what he’s chasing, he—wags! That’s hunting. Father doesn’t calculate, he says, on training a dog on anything he doesn’t wag on.”

“Yes, but what’s that got to do with you?” asked the Senior Surgeon, a bit impatiently.

With ill-concealed dismay the White Linen Nurse stood staring blankly at the Senior Surgeon’s gross stupidity.

“Why, don’t you see?” she faltered.[Pg 498] “I’ve been chasing this nursing job three whole years now, and there’s no wag to it.”

“Oh, hell!” said the Senior Surgeon. If he hadn’t said “Oh, hell!” he would have grinned. And it hadn’t been a grinny day, and he certainly didn’t intend to begin grinning at any such late hour as that in the afternoon. With his dignity once reassured, he then relaxed a trifle. “For Heaven’s sake, what do you want to be?” he asked not unkindly.

With an abrupt effort at self-control Rae Malgregor jerked her head into at least the outer semblance of a person lost in almost fathomless thought.

“Why, I’m sure I don’t know, sir,” she acknowledged worriedly. “But it would be a great pity, I suppose, to waste all the grand training that’s gone into my hands.” With sudden conviction her limp shoulders stiffened a trifle. “My oldest sister,” she stammered, “bosses the laundry in one of the big hotels in Halifax, and my youngest sister teaches school in Moncton. But I’m so strong, you know, and I like to move things round so, and everything, maybe I could get a position somewhere as general housework girl.”

With a roar of amusement as astonishing to himself as to his listeners, the Senior Surgeon’s chin jerked suddenly upward.

“You’re crazy as a loon!” he confided cordially. “Great Scott! If you can work up a condition like this on coffee, what would you do on malted milk?” As unheralded as his amusement, gross irritability overtook him again. “Will—you—stop—rattling that brown paper?” he thundered at her.

“But I’m not rattling it, sir!” she protested. “I’m simply trying to hide what’s on the other side of it.”

From behind her desk the austere Superintendent twisted her neck most informally to decipher the scrawling hieroglyphics. “Don’t Ever Be Bumptious!” she read forth jerkily with a questioning, incredulous sort of emphasis.

“Don’t ever be bumptious!” squinted the Senior Surgeon perplexedly through his glass.

“Yes, my motto,” repeated Rae Malgregor, with the slightest perceptible tinge of resentment. “And it’s a perfectly good motto, too. Only, of course, it hasn’t got any style to it. That’s why I didn’t want the girls to see it,” she confided a bit drearily. Then palpably before their eyes they saw her spirit leap into ineffable pride. “My father gave it to me,” she announced briskly, “and my father said that, when I came home in June, if I could honestly say that I’d never once been bumptious all my three years here, he’d give me a heifer. And—”

“Well, I guess you’ve lost your heifer,” said the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

“Lost my heifer?” gasped the girl. Big-eyed and incredulous, she stood for an instant staring back and forth from the Superintendent’s face to the Senior Surgeon’s. “You mean,” she stammered—“you mean that I’ve been bumptious just now? You mean that, after all these years of meachin’ meekness, I’ve lost?”

Plainly even to the Senior Surgeon and the Superintendent the bones in her knees weakened suddenly like knots of tissue-paper. No power on earth could have made her break discipline by taking a chair while the Senior Surgeon stood, so she sank limply down to the floor instead, with two great solemn tears welling slowly through the fingers with which she tried to cover her face.

“And the heifer was brown, with one white ear; it was awful’ cunning,” she confided mumblingly. “And it ate from my hand, all warm and sticky, like loving sand-paper.” There was no protest in her voice, or any whine of complaint, but merely the abject submission to fate of one who from earliest infancy had seen other crops blighted by other frosts. Then tremulously, with the air of one who just as a matter of spiritual tidiness would purge her soul of all sad secrets, she lifted her entrancing, tear-flushed face from her strong, sturdy, utterly unemotional fingers and stared with amazing blueness, amazing blandness, into the Senior Surgeon’s scowling scrutiny.

“And I’d named her for you,” she said—“I’d named her Patience, for you!”

Instantly then she scrambled to her knees to try and assuage by some miraculous apology the horrible shock which she read in the Senior Surgeon’s face.

“Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn’t scientific,” she pleaded desperately. “Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn’t scientific at all; but up where I live, you know, instead of praying for anybody, we—we name a young animal for the virtue that that person seems to need the most. And if you tend the young animal carefully, and train it right, why—it’s just a superstition, of course, but—Oh, sir,” she floundered hopelessly, “the virtue you needed most in your business was what I meant! Oh, really, sir, I never thought of criticizing your character!”

Gruffly the Senior Surgeon laughed. Embarrassment was in the laugh, and anger, and a fierce, fiery sort of resentment against both the embarrassment and the anger, but no possible trace of amusement. Impatiently he glanced up at the fast-speeding clock.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, “I’m an hour late now!” Scowling like a pirate, he clicked the cover of his watch open and shut for an uncertain instant. Then suddenly he laughed again, and there was nothing whatsoever in his laugh this time except just amusement.

“See here, Miss—Bossy Tamer,” he said, “if the Superintendent is willing, go get your hat and coat, and I’ll take you out on that meningitis case with me. It’s a thirty-mile run, if it’s a block, and I guess if you sit on the front seat it will blow the cobwebs out of your brain—if anything will,” he finished not unkindly.

Like a white hen sensing the approach of some utterly unseen danger, the Superintendent seemed to bristle suddenly in every direction.

“Bah! So are some of the most useful of the French verbs,” snapped the Senior Surgeon. In the midst of authority his voice could be inestimably soft and reassuring; but sometimes on the brink of asserting said authority he had a tone that was distinctly unpleasant.

Hazily for an instant Rae Malgregor stood staring into the Superintendent’s uncordial face. “I’d—I’d apologize,” she faltered, “but I don’t even know what I said. It just blew up.”

Perfectly coldly and perfectly civilly the Superintendent received the overture.

“It was quite evident, Miss Malgregor, that you were not altogether responsible at the moment,” she conceded in common justice.

Heavily then, like a person walking in her sleep, the girl trailed out of the room to get her coat and hat.

Slamming one desk-drawer after another, the Superintendent drowned the sluggish sound of her retreating footsteps.

“There goes my best nurse,” she said grimly, “my very best nurse. Oh, no, not the most brilliant one,—I didn’t mean that,—but the most reliable, the most nearly perfect human machine that it has ever been my privilege to see turned out, the one girl that, week in, week out, month after month and year after year, has always done what she’s told, when she was told, and the exact way she was told, without questioning anything, without protesting anything, without supplementing anything with some disastrous original conviction of her own. And look at her now!” Tragically the Superintendent rubbed her hand across her worried brow. “Coffee you said it was?” she asked skeptically. “Are there any special antidotes for coffee?”

With a queer little quirk to his mouth, the gruff Senior Surgeon jerked his glance back from the open window where, like the gleam of a slim tomboyish ankle, a flicker of green went scurrying through the tree-tops.

“What’s that you asked?” he quizzed sharply. “Any antidotes for coffee? Yes, dozens of them; but none for spring.”

“Spring?” sniffed the Superintendent. A little shiveringly she reached out and gathered a white knitted shawl about her shoulders. “Spring? I don’t see what spring’s got to do with Rae Malgregor or any other young outlaw in my graduating class. If graduation came in November, it would be just the same. They’re a set of ingrates, every one of them.” Vehemently she turned aside to her card-index of names, and slapped the cards through one by one without finding one[Pg 502] single soothing exception. “Yes, sir, a set of ingrates,” she repeated accusingly. “Spend your life trying to teach them what to do and how to do it, cram ideas into those that haven’t got any, and yank ideas out of those who have got too many; refine them, toughen them, scold them, coax them, everlastingly drill and discipline them: and then just as you get them to a place where they move like clockwork, and you actually believe you can trust them, then graduation day comes round, and they think they’re all safe, and every single individual member of the class breaks out and runs amuck with the one daredevil deed she’s been itching to do every day the last three years! Why, this very morning I caught the president of the senior class with a breakfast tray in her hands stealing the cherry out of her patient’s grape-fruit, and three of the girls reported for duty as bold as brass with their hair frizzed tight as a nigger doll’s. And the girl who’s going into a convent next week was trying on the laundryman’s derby hat as I came up from lunch. And now, now—” the Superintendent’s voice became suddenly a little hoarse—“and now here’s Miss Malgregor intriguing to get an automobile ride with you!”

“Eh?” cried the Senior Surgeon, with a jump. “My God! is this an insane asylum? Is it a nervine?” Madly he started for the door. “Order a ton of bromides,” he called back over his shoulder. “Order a car-load of them, fumigate the whole place with them, fumigate the whole damned place!”

Half-way down the lower hall, all his nerves on edge, all his unwonted boyish impulsiveness quenched nauseously like a candle-flame, he met and passed Rae Malgregor without a sign of recognition.

“God! How I hate women!” he kept mumbling to himself as he struggled clumsily all alone into the torn sleeve lining of his thousand-dollar mink coat.

Like a train-traveler coming out of a long, smoky, smothery tunnel into the clean-tasting light, the White Linen Nurse came out of the prudish, smelling hospital into the riotous mud-and-posie promise of the young April afternoon.

The god of hysteria had certainly not deserted her. In all the full effervescent reaction of her brain-storm, fairly bubbling with dimples, fairly foaming with curls, light-footed, light-hearted, most ecstatically light-headed, she tripped down into the sunshine as though the great harsh granite steps that marked her descent were nothing more nor less than a gigantic old horny-fingered hand passing her blithely out to some deliciously unknown Lilliputian adventure.

As she pranced across the soggy April sidewalk to what she supposed was the Senior Surgeon’s perfectly empty automobile, she became aware suddenly that the rear seat of the car was already occupied.

Out from an unseasonable snuggle of sable furs and flaming red hair a small peevish face peered forth at her with frank curiosity.

With unmistakable hostility the haughty little face retreated into its furs and its red hair.

“Hush!” commanded a shrill childish voice. “Hush, I say! I’m a cripple and very bad-tempered. Don’t speak to me!”

“Oh, my glory!” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “Oh, my glory, glory, glory!” Without any warning whatsoever, she felt suddenly like nothing at all, rigged out in an exceedingly shabby old ulster and an excessively homely black slouch-hat. In a desperate attempt at tangible tomboyish nonchalance, she tossed her head, and thrust her hands down deep into her big ulster pockets. That the black hat reflected no decent featherish consciousness of being tossed, that the big threadbare pockets had no bottoms to them, merely completed her startled sense of having been in some way blotted right out of existence.

Behind her back the Senior Surgeon’s huge fur-coated approach dawned blissfully like the thud of a rescue-party.

But if the Senior Surgeon’s blunt, wholesome invitation to ride had been perfectly sweet when he prescribed it for her in the Superintendent’s office, the invitation had certainly soured most amazingly in the succeeding ten minutes. Abruptly now, without any greeting, he reached out and opened the rear door of the car, and nodded curtly for her to enter.

Instantly across the face of the Little Crippled Girl already ensconced in the tonneau a single flash of light went zigzag[Pg 503]ging crookedly from brow to chin, and was gone again.

“Hello, fat Father!” piped the shrill little voice. “Hello, fat Father!” So subtly was the phrase mouthed, to save your soul you could not have proved just where the greeting ended and the taunt began.

There was nothing subtle, however, about the way in which the Senior Surgeon’s hand shot out and slammed the tonneau door bang-bang again on its original passenger. His face was crimson with anger. Bruskly he pointed to the front seat.

As meek as an oiled machine she scuttled to her appointed place. Once more in smothered giggle and unprotesting acquiescence she sensed the resumption of eternal discipline. Already in just this trice of time she felt her rampant young mouth resettle tamely into lines of smug, determinate serenity. Already across her idle lap she felt her clasped fingers begin to frost and tingle again like a cheerfully non-concerned bunch of live wires waiting the one authoritative signal to connect somebody, anybody, with this world or the next. Already the facile tip of her tongue seemed fairly loaded and cocked like a revolver with all the approximate “Yes, sirs,” and “No, sirs,” that she thought she should probably need.

But the only immediate remarks that the Senior Surgeon addressed to any one were addressed distinctly to the crank of his automobile.

“Damn a chauffeur who gets drunk the one day of the year when you need him most!” he muttered under his breath, as with the same exquisitely sensitive fingers that could have dissected like a caress the nervous system of a humming-bird, or reset unbruisingly the broken wing of a butterfly, he hurled his hundred and eighty pounds of infuriate brute strength against the calm, chronic, mechanical stubbornness of that auto crank. “Damn!” he swore on the upward pull, “Damn!” he gasped on the downward push, “Damn!” he cursed and sputtered and spluttered. Purple with effort, bulging-eyed with strain, reeking with sweat, his frenzied outburst would have terrorized the entire hospital staff.

With an odd little twinge of homesickness, the White Linen Nurse slid cautiously out to the edge of her seat so that she might watch the struggle better. For thus, with dripping foreheads and knotted neck-muscles and breaking backs and rankly tempestuous language, did the untutored men-folk of her own beloved home-land hurl their great strength against bulls and boulders and refractory forest trees. Very startlingly, as she watched, a brand-new thought went zigzagging through her consciousness.

Was it possible, was it even so much as remotely possible, that the great Senior Surgeon, the great, wonderful, altogether formidable, altogether unapproachable Senior Surgeon, was just a—was just a—

Stripped ruthlessly of all his social superiority, of all his professional halo, of all his scientific achievement, the Senior Surgeon stood suddenly forth before her a mere man, just like other men. Just exactly like other men? Like the sick drug clerk? Like the new-born millionaire baby? Like the doddering old Dutch gaffer? The very delicacy of such a thought drove the blood panic-stricken from her face. It was the indelicacy of the thought that brought the blood surging back again to brow, to cheeks, to lips, even to the tips of her ears.

Glancing up casually from the roar and rumble of his abruptly repentant engine, the Senior Surgeon swore once more under his breath to think that any woman sitting perfectly idle and non-concerned in a nine-thousand-dollar car should have the nerve to flaunt such a furiously strenuous color.

Bristling with resentment and mink furs, he strode around the fender and stumbled with increasing irritation across the White Linen Nurse’s knees to his seat. Just for an instant his famous fingers seemed to flash with apparent inconsequence toward one bit of mechanism and another. Then, like a huge portentous pill floated on smoothest syrup, the car slid down the yawning street into the congested city.

Altogether monotonously in terms of pain and dirt and drug and disease the city wafted itself in and out of the White Linen Nurse’s well-grooved consciousness.[Pg 504] From every filthy street corner sodden age or starved babyhood reached out its fluttering pulse to her. Then as suddenly sweet as a draft through a fever-tainted room, the squalid city freshened into jocund, luxurious suburbs, with rollicking tennis-courts, and flaming yellow Forsythia blossoms, and green-velvet lawns prematurely posied with pale exotic hyacinths and great scarlet splotches of lusty tulips.

Beyond this hectic horticultural outburst the leisurely spring faded out again into April’s naturally sallow colors.

As glossy and black as an endless type-writer ribbon, the narrow, tense state road seemed to wind itself everlastingly in and in and in on some hidden spool of the car’s mysterious mechanism. Clickety-click, click, clack, faster than any human mind could think, faster than any human hand could finger, hurtling up hazardous hills of thought, sliding down facile valleys of fancy, roaring with emphasis, shrieking with punctuation, the great car yielded itself perforce to fate’s dictation.

Robbed successively of the city’s humanitarian pang, of the suburb’s esthetic pleasure, the White Linen Nurse found herself precipitated suddenly into a mere blur of sight, a mere chaos of sound. In whizzing speed and crashing breeze, houses, fences, meadows, people, slapped across her eyeballs like pictures on a fan. On and on and on through kaleidoscopic yellows and rushing grays the great car sped, a purely mechanical factor in a purely mechanical landscape.

Rigid with concentration, the Senior Surgeon stared like a dead man into the intrepid, on-coming road.

Intermittently from her green plushy lap-robes the Little Crippled Girl struggled to her feet, and, sprawling clumsily across whosever shoulder suited her best, raised a brazenly innocent voice, deliberately flatted, in a shrill and maddeningly repetitive chant of her own making, to the effect that

Intermittently from the front seat the Senior Surgeon’s wooden face relaxed to the extent of a grim mouth twisting distractedly sidewise in one furious bellow:

Nothing else happened at all until at last, out of unbroken stretches of winter-staled stubble, a high, formal hemlock hedge and a neat, pebbled driveway proclaimed the Senior Surgeon’s ultimate destination.

Cautiously now, with an almost tender skill, the big car circled a tiny, venturesome clump of highway violets and crept through a prancing, leaping fluff of yellow collie dogs to the door of the big stone house. Instantly from inestimable resources a liveried serving-man appeared to help the surgeon from his car, another to take his coat, another to carry his bag.

Lingering for an instant to stretch his muscles and shake his great shoulders, the Senior Surgeon breathed into his cramped lungs a friendly impulse as well as a scent of budding cherry-trees.

“You may come in with me if you want to, Miss Malgregor,” he conceded. “It’s an extraordinary case. You will hardly see another one like it.” Palpably he lowered his already almost indistinguishable voice. “The boy is young,” he confided; “about your age, I should guess, a college foot-ball hero, the most superbly perfect specimen of young manhood it has ever been my privilege to behold. It will be a long case. They have two nurses already, but would like another. The work ought not to be hard. Now, if they should happen to—fancy you!” In speechless expressiveness his eyes swept estimatingly over sun-parlors, stables, garages, Italian garden, rapturous, blue-shadowed mountain view, every last intimate detail of the mansion’s wonderful equipment.

Like a drowning man feeling his last floating spar wrenched away from him, the White Linen Nurse dug her fingernails frantically into every reachable wrinkle and crevice of the heavily upholstered seat.

“Oh, but, sir, I don’t want to go in!” she protested passionately.[Pg 505] “I tell you, sir, I’m quite done with all that sort of thing. It would break my heart. It would—oh, sir, this worrying about people for whom you’ve got no affection, it’s like sledding without any snow! It grits right down on your naked nerves. It—”

Before the Senior Surgeon’s glowering, incredulous stare her heart began to plunge and pound again, but it plunged and pounded no harder, she realized suddenly, than when in the calm, white hospital precincts she was obliged to pass his terrifying presence in the corridor and murmur an inaudible “Good morning” or “Good evening.” “After all, he’s nothing but a man, nothing but a man, nothing but a mere, ordinary, two-legged man,” she reasoned over and over to herself. With a really desperate effort she smoothed her frightened face into an expression of utter guilelessness and peace, and smiled unflinchingly right into the Senior Surgeon’s rousing anger as she had once seen an animal trainer smile into the snarl of a crouching tiger.

“Th—ank you very much,” she said: “but I think I won’t go in, sir, thank you! My—my face is still pretty tired.”

“Idiot!” snapped the Senior Surgeon as he turned on his heel and started up the steps.

From the green plushy robes on the back seat the White Linen Nurse could have sworn that she heard a sharply ejaculated, maliciously joyful “Ha!” piped out. But when both she and the Senior Surgeon turned sharply round to make sure, the Little Crippled Girl, in apparently complete absorption, sat amiably extracting tuft after tuft of fur from the thumb of one big sable glove, to the rumbling, singsong monotone of “He loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not.”

Bristling with unutterable contempt for all femininity, the Senior Surgeon proceeded on up the steps between two solemn-faced lackeys.

“Father!” wailed a feeble little voice. “Father!” There was no shrillness in the tone now, or malice, or any mischievous thing; just desolation, the impulsive, panic-stricken desolation of a little child left suddenly alone with a stranger. “Father!” the frightened voice ventured forth a tiny bit louder. But the unheeding Senior Surgeon had already reached the piazza. “Fat Father!” screamed the little voice. Barbed now like a shark-hook, the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon’s dormant sensibilities. As one fairly yanked out of his thoughts, he whirled around in his tracks.

Helplessly the Little Girl sat staring from a lackey’s ill-concealed grin to her father’s smoldering fury. Quite palpably she began to swallow with considerable difficulty. Then as quick as a flash a diminutively crafty smile crooked across one corner of her mouth.

“Father,” she improvised dulcetly—“Father, may—may I sit in the White Linen Nurse’s lap?”

Just for an instant the Senior Surgeon’s narrowing eyes probed mercilessly into the reekingly false little smile. Then altogether brutally he shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t care where in thunder you sit,” he muttered, and went on into the house.

With an air of unalterable finality the massive oak door closed after him. In the resonant click of its latch the great wrought-iron lock seemed to smack its lips with ineffable satisfaction.

Wringing suddenly round with a whish of starched skirts, the White Linen Nurse knelt up in her seat and grinned at the Little Crippled Girl.

Against all possible expectancy, the Little Crippled Girl burst out laughing. The laugh was wild, ecstatic, extravagantly boisterous, yet awkward withal, and indescribably bumpy, like the first flight of a cage-cramped bird.

Quite abruptly the White Linen Nurse sat down again, and began nervously with the wrist of her chamois glove to polish the slightly tarnished brass lamp at her elbow. Equally abruptly after a minute she stopped polishing and looked back at the Little Crippled Girl.

“Why in thunder should I want to sit in your lap?” she quizzed harshly. Every accent of her voice, every remotest intonation, was like the Senior Surgeon’s at his worst. The suddenly forked eyebrow, the snarling twitch of the upper lip, turned the whole delicate little face into a grotesque but desperately unconscious caricature of the grim-jawed father.

As though the father himself had snubbed her for some unimaginable fami[Pg 506]liarity, the White Linen Nurse winced back in hopeless confusion. Just for sheer shock, short-circuited with fatigue, a big tear rolled slowly down one pink cheek.

“Don’t cry, Pretty!” she whispered. “Don’t cry! It’s my legs. I’ve got fat iron braces on my legs, and people don’t like to hold me.”

Half the professional smile came flashing back to the White Linen Nurse’s mouth.

“Oh, I just adore holding people with iron braces on their legs,” she affirmed, and, leaning over the back of the seat, proceeded with absolutely perfect mechanical tenderness to gather the poor, puny, surprised little body into her own strong, shapely arms. Then dutifully snuggling her shoulder to meet the stubborn little shoulder that refused to snuggle to it, and dutifully easing her knees to suit the stubborn little knees that refused to be eased, she settled down resignedly in her seat again to await the return of the Senior Surgeon. “There! there! there!” she began quite instinctively to croon and pat.

“Don’t say ‘There! there!’” wailed the Little Girl, peevishly. Her body was suddenly stiff as a ramrod. “Don’t say ‘There! there!’ If you’ve got to make any noise at all, say ‘Here! here!’”

“Here! here!” droned the White Linen Nurse. “Here! here! here! here!” On and on and interminably on, “Here! here! here! here!”

At the end of about the three hundred and forty-seventh “Here!” the Little Girl’s body relaxed, and she reached up two fragile fingers to close the White Linen Nurse’s mouth. “There, that will do,” she sighed contentedly. “I feel better now. Father does tire me so.”

“Father tires you?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. The giggle that followed the gasp was not in the remotest degree professional. “Father tires you?” she repeated accusingly. “Why, you silly Little Girl, can’t you see it’s you that makes father so everlastingly tired?” Impulsively with her one free hand she turned the Little Girl’s listless face to the light. “What makes you call your nice father ‘fat father’?” she asked with real curiosity. “What makes you? He isn’t fat at all. He’s just big. Why, whatever possesses you to call him ‘fat father,’ I say? Can’t you see how mad it makes him?”

“Why, of course it makes him mad,” said the Little Girl, with plainly reviving interest. Thrilled with astonishment at the White Linen Nurse’s apparent stupidity, she straightened up perkily, with inordinately sparkling eyes. “Why, of course it makes him mad,” she explained briskly. “That’s why I do it. Why, my parpa never even looks at me unless I make him mad.”

“’S-’sh!” said the White Linen Nurse. “Why, you mustn’t ever say a thing like that! Why, your marma wouldn’t like you to say a thing like that.”

Jerking bumpily back against the White Linen Nurse’s unprepared shoulder, the Little Girl prodded a pallid finger-tip into the White Linen Nurse’s vivid cheek. “Silly pink-and-white nursie!” she chuckled, “don’t you know there isn’t any marma?” Cackling with delight over her own superior knowledge, she folded her little arms and began to rock herself convulsively to and fro.

“Why, stop!” cried the White Linen Nurse, “now you stop! Why, you wicked little creature, laughing like that about your poor dead mother! Why, just think how bad it would make your poor parpa feel!”

With instant sobriety the Little Girl stopped rocking, and stared perplexedly into the White Linen Nurse’s shocked eyes. Her own little face was all wrinkled up with earnestness.

“But the parpa didn’t like the marma,” she explained painstakingly. “The parpa never liked the marma. That’s why he doesn’t like me, I heard cook telling the iceman once, when I wasn’t more than ten minutes old.”

Desperately, with one straining hand, the White Linen Nurse stretched her fingers across the Little Girl’s babbling mouth. Equally desperately, with the other hand, she sought to divert the Little Girl’s mind by pushing the fur cap back from her frizzy red hair, and loosening her sumptuous coat, and jerking down vainly across two painfully obtrusive white ruffles the awkwardly short, hideously bright little purple dress.

“I think your cap is too hot,” she began casually, and then proceeded with in[Pg 507]creasing vivacity and conviction to the objects that worried her most. “And those—those ruffles,” she protested; “they don’t look a bit nice being so long.” Resentfully she rubbed an edge of the purple dress between her fingers. “And a little girl like you, with such bright-red hair, ought not to wear purple,” she admonished with real concern. “Now, whites and blues, and little soft pussy-cat grays—”

Mumblingly through her finger-muzzled mouth, the Little Girl burst into explanations again.

“Oh, but when I wear gray,” she persisted, “the parpa never sees me; but when I wear purple he cares, he cares most awfully,” she boasted with a bitter sort of triumph. “Why, when I wear purple, and frizz my hair hard enough, no matter who’s there, or anything, he’ll stop right off short in the middle of whatever he’s doing, and rear right up so perfectly beautiful and mad and glorious, and holler right out, ‘For Heaven’s sake, take that colored Sunday supplement away!’”

Almost tenderly the Little Girl reached up and drew the White Linen Nurse’s ear close down to her own snuggling lips.

Quite against all intention, the White Linen Nurse giggled. Floundering to recover her dignity, she plunged into a new error. “Poor little dev—” she began.

“Yes,” sighed the Little Girl, complacently, “that’s just what the parpa calls me.” Fervidly she clasped her little hands together. “Yes, if I can only make him mad enough daytimes,” she asserted, “then at night, when he thinks I’m asleep, he comes and stands by my cribbyhouse like a great black shadow-bear, and shakes and shakes his most beautiful head and says, ‘Poor little devil! poor little devil!’ Oh, if I can only make him mad enough daytimes!” she cried out ecstatically.

“Why, you naughty little thing!” scolded the White Linen Nurse, with an unmistakable catch in her voice. “Why, you naughty, naughty little thing!”

Like the brush of a butterfly’s wing, the child’s hand grazed the White Linen Nurse’s cheek.

“I’m a lonely little thing,” she confided wistfully. “Oh, I’m an awfully lonely little thing!” With really shocking abruptness the old malicious smile came twittering back to her mouth. “But I’ll get even with the parpa yet,” she threatened joyously, reaching out with pliant fingers to count the buttons on the White Linen Nurse’s dress. “Oh, I’ll get even with the parpa yet!” In the midst of the passionate assertion her rigid little mouth relaxed in a most mild and innocent yawn.

“Oh, of course,” she yawned, “on wash-days and ironing-days and every other workday in the week he has to be away cutting up people, ’cause that’s his lawful business; but Sundays, when he doesn’t really need to at all, he goes off to some kind of a green, grassy club all day long and plays golf.” Very palpably her eyelids began to droop. “Where was I?” she asked sharply. “Oh, yes, ‘the green, grassy club.’ Well, when I die,” she faltered, “I’m going to die specially on some Sunday when there’s a big golf game, so he’ll just naturally have to give it up and stay home and amuse me—and help arrange the flowers. The parpa’s crazy about flowers. So am I,” she added broodingly. “I raised almost a geranium once. But the parpa threw it out. It was a good geranium, too. All it did was just to drip the tiniest-teeniest bit over a book and a writing and somebody’s brains in a dish. He threw it at a cat. It was a good cat, too. All it did was to—”

A little jerkily her drooping head bobbed forward and then back again. Her heavy eyes were almost tight shut by this time, and after a moment’s silence her lips began moving dumbly like one at silent devotions. “I’m making a little poem now,” she confided at last. “It’s about—you and me. It’s a sort of a little prayer.” Very, very softly she began to repeat:

Abruptly she stopped and stared up suspiciously into the White Linen Nurse’s eyes. “Ha!” she mocked,[Pg 508] “you thought I was going to say, ‘If I should die before I wake,’ didn’t you? Well, I’m not.”

Very stiffly the Little Girl pursed her lips. “It’s plenty generous enough when it’s all done!” she said severely. “And I’ll thank you, Miss Malgregor, not to interrupt me again!” With excessive deliberateness she went back to the first line of her poem and began all over again:

“Why, that’s a—a cunning little prayer,” yawned the White Linen Nurse. Most certainly of course she would have smiled if the yawn hadn’t caught her first. But now in the middle of the yawn it was a great deal easier to repeat the “very cunning” than to force her lips into any new expression. “Very cunning, very cunning,” she kept crooning conscientiously.

Modestly, like some other successful authors, the Little Girl flapped her eyelids languidly open and shut for three or four times before she acknowledged the compliment. “Oh, cunning as any of ’em,” she admitted offhandishly. Only once again did she open either mouth or eyes, and this time it was merely one eye and half a mouth. “Do my fat iron braces hurt you?” she mumbled drowsily.

Five minutes later, the child who didn’t particularly care about being held, and the girl who didn’t particularly care about holding her, were fast asleep in each other’s arms, a naughty, nagging, restive little hornet all hushed up and a-dream in the heart of a pink wild-rose!

Stalking out of the house in his own due time the Senior Surgeon reared back aghast at the sight.

“Well, I’ll be hanged!” he muttered. “Most everlastingly hanged! Wonder what they think this is? A somnolent kindergarten show? Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!”

Awkwardly, on the top step, he struggled alone into his cumbersome coat. Every tingling nerve in his body, every shuddering sensibility, was racked to its utmost capacity over the distressing scenes he had left behind him in the big house. Back in that luxuriant sick-room, youth incarnate lay stripped root, branch, leaf, bud, blossom, fruit, of all its manhood’s promise. Back in that erudite library, culture personified, robbed of all its fine philosophy, sat babbling illiterate street-curses into its quivering hands. Back in that exquisite pink-and-gold boudoir, blonded fashion, ravished for once of all its artistry, ran stumbling round and round in interminable circles like a disheveled hag. In shrill crescendos and discordant basses, with heart-piercing jaggedness, with blood-curdling raspishness, each one, boy, father, mother, meddlesome relative, competent or incompetent assistant, indiscriminate servant, filing his separate sorrow into the Senior Surgeon’s tortured ears.

With one of those sudden revulsions to materialism which is liable to overwhelm any man who delves too long at a time in the brutally unconventional issues of life and death, the Senior Surgeon stepped down into the subtle, hyacinth-scented sunshine with every latent human greed in his body clamoring for expression before it, too, should be hurtled into oblivion. “Eat, damn you, and drink, damn you, and be merry, damn you, for tomorrow even you, Lendicott R. Faber, may have to die!” brawled and rebrawled through his mind like a ribald phonograph tune.

At the edge of the bottom step a precipitous lilac branch that must have budded and bloomed in a single hour smote him stingingly across his cheek. “Laggard!” taunted the lilac branch.

With the first crunching grit of gravel under his feet, something transcendently naked and unashamed that was neither brazen sorrow nor brazen pain thrilled across his startled consciousness. Over the rolling, marshy meadow, beyond the succulent willow-hedge that hid the winding river, up from some fluent, slim canoe, out from a chorus of virile young tenor voices, a little passionate love-song, divinely tender, most incomparably innocent, came stealing palpitantly forth into that inflammable spring world without a single vestige of accompaniment on it!

Wrenched like a sob out of his own lost youth, the Senior Surgeon’s faltering college memories took up the old refrain:

Just for an instant a dozen long-forgotten pictures lanced themselves poignantly into his brain: dingy, incontrovertible old recitation-rooms where young ideas flashed as bright and futile as parade swords; elm-shaded slopes where lithe young bodies lolled on green velvet grasses to expound their harshest cynicisms; book-history, book-science, book-economics, book-love,—all the paper passion of all the paper poets swaggering imperiously on boyish lips that would have died a thousand bashful deaths before the threatening imminence of a real girl’s kiss! Magic days, with youth the one glittering, positive treasure on the tree of life, and woman still a mystery!

“Woman a mystery?” Harshly the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon’s brain. Croakingly in that instant all the grim, gray scientific years re-overtook him, swamped him, strangled him. “Woman a mystery? O ye gods! And youth? Bah! Youth! A mere tinsel tinkle on a rotting Christmas-tree!”

Furiously with renewed venom he turned and threw his weight again upon the stubbornly resistant crank of his automobile.

Vaguely disturbed by the noise and vibration, the White Linen Nurse opened her big drowsy blue eyes upon him.

“Don’t—jerk it so!” she admonished hazily; “you’ll wake the Little Girl!”

“Well, what about my convenience, I’d like to know?” snapped the Senior Surgeon, in some astonishment.

Heavily the White Linen Nurse’s lashes shadowed down again across her sleep-flushed cheeks.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, wake up there!” bellowed the Senior Surgeon above the sudden roar of his engine.

Adroitly for a man of his bulk he ran around the radiator and jumped into his seat. Joggled unmercifully into wakefulness, the Little Girl greeted his return with a generous, if distinctly non-tactful, demonstration of affection. Grabbing the unwitting fingers of his momentarily free hand, she tapped them proudly against the White Linen Nurse’s plump pink cheek.

“See, I call her ‘Peach’!” she boasted joyously, with all the triumphant air of one who felt assured that mental discrimination such as this could not possibly fail to impress even a person as naturally obtuse as a father.

“Yes, you,” snapped the Senior Surgeon, explosively, half an hour later, after interminable miles of absolute silence and dingy yellow field-stubble and bare, brown alder-bushes.

Truly out of the ascetic habit of his daily life, “where no rain was,” as the Bible would put it, it did seem to him distinctly foolish, not to say careless, not to say out and out incendiary, for any girl to go blushing her way like a fire-brand through a world so palpably populated by young men whose heads were tow, and whose hearts indisputably tinder rather than tender.

Then plainly begrudging this second inexcusable interruption of his most vital musings concerning spinal meningitis, he scowled his way savagely back again into his own grimly established trend of thought.

Excited by so much perfectly good silence that nobody seemed to be using, the Little Crippled Girl ventured gallantly forth once more into the hazardous conversational land of grown-ups.

Fathoms deep in abstraction, the Senior Surgeon stared unheeding into the whizzing black road. Pulses and temperatures and blood-pressures were seething in his[Pg 510] mind; and sharp sticks and jagged stones and the general possibilities of a puncture; and murmurs of the heart and râles of the lungs; and a most unaccountable knock-knock-knocking in the engine; and the probable relation of middle-ear disease; and the perfectly positive symptoms of optic neuritis; and a damned funny squeak in the steering-gear.

To add to his original concentration, the Senior Surgeon’s linen collar began to chafe him maddeningly under his chin. The annoyance added two scowls to his already blackly furrowed face, and at least ten miles an hour to his running time, but nothing whatsoever to his conversational ability.

“Father,” the Little Girl whimpered with faltering courage. Then panic-stricken, as wiser people have been before her, over the dreadful spookish remoteness of a perfectly normal human being who refuses either to answer or even to notice your wildest efforts at communication, she raised her waspish voice in its shrillest, harshest war-cry.

“Fat Father! Fat Father! F-A-T F-A-T-H-E-R!” she screeched out frenziedly at the top of her lungs.

The gun-shot agony of a wounded rabbit was in the cry, the last gurgling gasp of strangulation under a murderer’s reeking fingers, catastrophe unspeakable, disaster now irrevocable.

Clamping down his brakes with a wrench that almost tore the insides out of his engine, the Senior Surgeon brought the great car to a staggering standstill.

Limply the Little Girl stretched down from the White Linen Nurse’s lap till she could nick her toe against the shiniest woodwork in sight. Altogether aimlessly her small chin began to burrow deeper and deeper into her big fur collar.

“For God’s sake, what do you want?” demanded the Senior Surgeon. Even yet along his spine the little nerves crinkled with shock and apprehension. “For God’s sake, what do you want?”

Helplessly the child lifted her turbid eyes to his. With unmistakable appeal, her tiny hand went clutching out at one of the big buttons on his coat. Desperately for an instant she rummaged through her brain for some remotely adequate answer to this most thunderous question, and then retreated precipitously as usual to the sacristy of her own imagination.

Short of complete annihilation, there was no satisfying vengeance whatsoever that the Senior Surgeon’s exploding passion could wreak upon his offspring. Complete annihilation being unfeasible at the moment, he merely climbed laboriously out of the car, re-cranked the engine, climbed laboriously back into his place, and started on his way once more. All the red, blustering rage was stripped completely from him. Startlingly rigid, startlingly white, his face was like the death-mask of a pirate.

Pleasantly excited by she didn’t know exactly what, the Little Girl resumed her beloved falsetto chant, rhythmically all the while with her puny iron-braced legs beating the tune into the White Linen Nurse’s tender flesh.

Frenziedly as a runaway horse trying to escape from its own pursuing harness and carriage, the Senior Surgeon poured increasing speed into both his own pace and the pace of his tormentor. Up hill, down dale, screeching through rocky echoes, swishing through blue-green spruce-lands, dodging indomitable boulders, grazing lax, treacherous embankments, the great car scuttled homeward. Huddled behind his steering-wheel like a warrior behind his shield, every body muscle taut with strain, every facial muscle diabolically calm, the Senior Surgeon met and parried successively every fresh onslaught of yard, rod, mile.

Then suddenly in the first precipitous descent of a mighty hill, the whole earth[Pg 511] seemed to drop out from under the car. Down, down, down, with incredible swiftness and smoothness, the great machine went diving toward abysmal space! Up, up, up, with incredible bumps and bouncings, trees, bushes, stone walls went rushing to the sky!

Gasping surprisedly toward the Senior Surgeon the White Linen Nurse saw his grim mouth yank round abruptly in her direction as it yanked sometimes in the operating-room with some sharp, incisive order of life or death. Instinctively she leaned forward for the message.

Not over-loud, but strangely distinct, the words slapped back into her straining ears:

“If it will rest your face any to look scared, by all means do so. I’ve lost control of the machine,” called the Senior Surgeon, sardonically, across the roar of the wind.

The phrase excited the White Linen Nurse, but it did not remotely frighten her. She was not in the habit of seeing the Senior Surgeon lose control of any situation. Merely intoxicated with speed, delirious with ozone, she snatched up the Little Girl close, close to her breast.

“We’re flying!” she cried. “We’re dropping from a parachute! We’re—”

Swoopingly, like a sled striking glare, level ice, the great car swerved from the bottom of the hill into a soft rolling meadow. Instantly from every conceivable direction, like foes in ambush, trees, stumps, rocks reared up in threatening defiance.

Tighter and tighter the White Linen Nurse crushed the Little Girl to her breast. Louder and louder she called in the Little Girl’s ear.

“Scream!” she shouted. “There might be a bump! Scream louder than a bump! Scream! Scream! S-c-r-e-a-m!”

In that first overwhelming, nerve-numbing, heart-crunching terror of his whole life as the great car tilted up against a stone, plowed down into the mushy edge of a marsh, and skidded completely round, crash-bang into a tree, it was the last sound that the Senior Surgeon heard—the sound of a woman and child screeching their lungs out in diabolical exultancy!

(The second instalment of this three-part serial story will be published in the September CENTURY.)

“FROM behind the house mounts the murmuring of the river,” is the opening phrase of the first volume of “Jean-Christophe.” The last chapter of the last volume represents St. Christopher crossing the river, with “the Child, the day that is to be,” upon his shoulder; and beneath all the intervening pages the river flows, emerging ever and anon with whisperings, babblings, and gurglings, with purlings, trillings, and trumpetings, with roarings, swishings, and swashings, with plashings, splashings, and crashings. “There are human lives,” says Romain Rolland, “that are placid lakes; others are great, open skies wherein the clouds sail; others, fertile plains; others, jagged peaks. Jean-Christophe has always seemed to me to be a river.”

This preoccupation with the river, amounting almost to an obsession, is probably due to the prominence of water in the landscape in which Romain Rolland’s early years were passed. Clamecy, the little town of the Morvan in which he was born (January 29, 1866), is situated on the Nivernais Canal, in the angle formed by the junction of the rivers Beuvron and Yonne. The volume entitled “Antoinette” is replete with memories of the scenes of his childhood. In it he has described lovingly and charmingly not Clamecy itself, but a representative community of the same province, which is one of the most heavily wooded, as well as one of the most picturesque, of France, and little infested by tourists; and he has portrayed a family which, despite deliberate and ingenious disguises, bears a close resemblance to his own.

Furthermore, the refined and altogether lovable Olivier Jeannin is more like Romain Rolland than is his hero, the often insupportable Jean-Christophe Krafft, whom his creator, unwittingly perhaps, made something of a cad and a good deal of a boor, a “fresh,” bumptious fellow, always going about with a chip on his shoulder, looking for trouble.

In the Morvan, the physical type of the Gauls remains exceptionally pure, and of this type Romain Rolland is an almost perfect specimen. He is tall, he is spare; he is very blond, and his eyes are very blue. Despite a tendency to pallor and a slight stoop, he appears to be of the wiry breed that is capable of doing a great deal of hard work without excessive fatigue;[Pg 515] but those who should know affirm that his “fine faculties were imprisoned by nature in a feeble and ailing body,” and that he has always been a close approach to an invalid in consequence. His demeanor is austere, and he is prone to long silences; but when he breaks his silences, he breaks them with a vengeance, like a pent-up torrent sweeping away a dam, and one sees that his austerity is only a cloak for sensitiveness, for passion, and for a mighty kindliness. He is an ideal comrade, a loyal friend, and a sort of patron saint or father confessor of young or struggling writers who have “the root of the matter” in them. For instance, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, having fallen under the spell of Dostoyevsky, was so oppressed by the pessimism of the great Russian that he was made nearly ill and was tempted to renounce all endeavor. Rolland, by tactful and tender encouragement, rescued him from this slough of despond, restoring to him his lost interest in life and art. The result was the beautiful sylvan novel, “Monsieur des Lourdines,” one of the sweetest and purest works of the last few years, which, without this intervention, probably never would have been written.

Rolland’s father was a notary, descended from notaries, and his mother was the daughter of a magistrate, descended from magistrates, who were related to Guillaume and Guillaume-Henri de Lamoignon, first President of the Parliament of Paris (seventeenth century) and Chancellor of France (eighteenth century), respectively. At a very early age the boy studied music with his mother, who was an accomplished musician, and as soon as he dreamed of the future at all, he dreamed of a musical future. When he had exhausted the educational possibilities of Clamecy, whose communal college corresponds roughly with the average American high school, his parents, fearing to allow him to shift for himself, probably because of his delicate constitution, broke up their Nivernais establishment, and went with him to Paris, the father, with a self-sacrifice verging on heroism, exchanging the prestige of being one of the first citizens of a town to which he was devotedly attached for the effacement of a modest clerkship in the capital. In Paris, Romain entered, first, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and, later, at twenty, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, matriculating at the latter not in the department of letters, to which his tastes inclined him, but in that of history and geography, a concession, no doubt, to the father, who would have liked to see his son in the Ecole Polytechnique.

The choice was fortunate, since it put him under the tutelage of the historian Gabriel Monod, who possessed a fine personality and was a stimulating teacher, exerting a salutary moral as well as intellectual influence upon his pupils, in whom he inspired a sort of filial affection.

While at the Ecole Normale, Rolland was profoundly impressed by Wagner and by Tolstoy. In October, 1887, he was the happy and proud recipient of a letter from Tolstoy, saluting him as “Dear Brother,” which he published later, preceded by a fervid introduction, in “Les cahiers de la quinzaine.” “I loved Tolstoy profoundly,” he says in this introduction, “and I have never ceased to love him. For two or three years I lived enveloped in the atmosphere of his thought. I was certainly more familiar with his creations, with ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Anna Karénina,’ and ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,’ than with the works of any of the great French writers. The goodness, the intelligence, the absolute truthfulness, of this great man, were for me the surest of guides in the midst of the moral anarchy of the time.”

Shortly after being graduated from the Ecole Normale, Rolland was admitted to the French School of Archæology and History at Rome. Although prejudiced against Italy from his boyhood, he surrendered promptly and unconditionally not only to the splendor of the art enshrined in its monuments and museums, but to the ineffable charm of its landscape and its sky. “He took his revenge for the asceticism of the gray visions to which he had hitherto been condemned.... He was as a new man beginning life over.”

During his stay in Rome, he became a great favorite of the aged Fräulein Malwida von Meysenbug, an extraordinary woman, who had known intimately and shared the hopes of all the European revolutionary movements from 1848 to 1870. Fräulein von Meysenbug’s “Memoirs,” wherein she gives her impressions of her[Pg 516] illustrious friends, Kossuth, Mazzini, Hertzen, Ogareff, Garibaldi, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, Wagner, Lenbach, Liszt, Nietzsche, and Ibsen, contains this reference to the protégé of her declining years: “I find in this young Frenchman Rolland the same idealism, the same lofty aspiration, the same profound understanding of all the great intellectual issues that I have found in the superior men of other nationalities.”

To this period of Rolland’s life belong a number of historical plays,—“Les Baglioni,” “Le siège de Mantoue,” “Niobé,” “Caligula,” “Jeanne de Piennes,” “Orsino,”—which Fräulein von Meysenbug, not an entirely impartial judge, pronounced admirable, but which thus far their author has not seen fit to give to the world. They were inspired in a certain degree by Shakspere. “Despite Tolstoy, Wagner, etc.,” Rolland wrote to a friend, “Shakspere is the one artist I have most constantly preferred from my childhood. And if the Shakspere of the historical dramas is not the only Shakspere I love, he is at least the Shakspere who has influenced me most directly by opening up to me the horizons of this new artistic world and providing me with incomparable models.”

When Rolland returned to France, he had become not only an archæological and historical pundit, but under the influence of the ardent humanitarian Von Meysenbug and of the advanced artists, agitators, and reformers who gravitated about her, an insurgent and just a bit of a fanatic. He was consumed with generous ardor to edify and elevate his compatriots, who seemed to him crushed and degraded by subserviency to convention and tradition.

Thenceforth his every act was to be combative, was to possess an unequivocal social significance, was to count, if not for revolution, at least for radical reform. His thesis for the doctorate, “The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama,” sustained before the faculty of the Sorbonne, June 19, 1895, was the first dissertation on music ever presented to that conservative body. It was intended as a protest against the disdain with which music, in contradistinction to painting, sculpture, and architecture, had always been treated by the university, and was a move to secure for music the consideration it deserves.

Rolland’s next moves were the organization (1898) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales of a department of music, in opening which he delivered a pithy and brilliant address on the place of music in general history; the unobtrusive but bold transformation (1903) of the course on the history of art, with which he had been intrusted by the Ecole Normale (in 1897), into a course on the history of music; and the stubborn maintenance of this iconoclastic orientation after the absorption of the Ecole Normale by the Sorbonne.

Rolland was also the leading spirit of a movement, so impassioned that it amounted to a veritable crusade, for the democratization of the drama, “for the creation,” to employ his rather ambitious phraseology, “of a new art for a new world.” He aspired to replace the contemporaneous stage by a stage more human and fraternal, that should edify and improve the masses on one hand, and emancipate and develop art on the other, and to found “a theater of, by, and for the people,” that should “share the bread of the people, their restlessness and anxieties, their battles and their hopes,” and that should be for them “a fountain-head of joy and of life.” In March, 1899, he signed, with Lucien Besnard, Maurice Pottecher, Louis Lumet, and Gabriel Trarieux, a somewhat turgid manifesto which ended thus: “Make no mistake. It is no mere literary experiment we are proposing. It is a question of life or death for art and for the people. For, if art is not opened to the people, it is doomed to disappear; and if the people do not discover the pathway of art, humanity abdicates its destinies.” To this propaganda, Rolland contributed a volume entitled “Le théâtre du peuple,” which contained both eloquent and grandiloquent passages, and a virile and highly colored, if slightly declamatory, tetralogy of the Revolution,—“Le quatorze juillet,” “Danton,” “Les loups,” “Le triomphe de la raison,”—designed to “resuscitate the forces of the past, reanimate its capacities for action, and rekindle the national faith and heroism with the flames of the republican epoch, in order that the work interrupted in 1794 may be resumed and completed by a people more mature and more fully aware of its destiny.”[Pg 517] “Danton,” “Les loups,” and “Le triomphe de la raison” were given two or three performances each by dramatic societies of one sort or another; and “Le quatorze juillet” was finally produced by a regular theater (La Renaissance), but its run was short.

Rolland was a vehement Dreyfusard, with a special enthusiasm for Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart. “He who can see injustice without trying to combat it is neither entirely an artist,” he observed, in this connection, “nor entirely a man”; and he protested vigorously against the British invasion of the Transvaal with a play, dedicated to “Civilization” and entitled “Le temps viendra,” in which he makes one of the characters say: “Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”

Sadly disillusioned by the triumph of might over right in South Africa, by the altogether shameless manner in which the righteous indignation of the sincere Dreyfusards was exploited by the professional politicians, and by the failure of his efforts to regenerate the stage, Rolland found fresh force and new courage in a study of the lives of heroes, the men who were great of heart in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, the noble souls who suffered for the sake of right; and always a propagandist, he straightway endeavored to found a cult of heroism, to persuade his fellows “to read in the eyes” of those sanctified by suffering, and in the histories of their careers, that “life is never greater, more fruitful, and more blessed than in affliction.” To this end he wrote a series of biographies of heroes (“Beethoven,” “Michelangelo,” “Tolstoy,” “Millet,” “Handel,” “Hugo Wolf,” etc.), which he presented to the French public and to the rest of the world with these ringing words: “The air is heavy about us. Old Europe is waxing torpid in an oppressive and vitiated atmosphere. A materialism devoid of grandeur cumbers thought and fetters the action of governments and of individuals. The world is dying of asphyxia in its prudent and vile egoism. The world is stifling. Fling the windows wide open! Let the free air rush in! Let us inhale the vivifying breath of the heroes!”

“Jean-Christophe,” which is a ten-volume biography of an imaginary hero, synthesizes and supplements the “Théâtre du peuple” and the heroic biographies. It is, like them, an act of propaganda, conceived in a similar spirit of revolt, and animated by a similar desire to help people “to live, to correct their errors, to conquer their prejudices, and to enlarge from day to day their thoughts and their hearts.” “I was isolated,” writes Rolland, regarding the origin of this now famous work; “I was stifling, like so many others in France, in a hostile moral atmosphere; I wanted to breathe, I wanted to react against a sickly civilization, against a thought corrupted by a false élite.

“I wanted to say to this élite: ‘You are liars! You do not represent France!’ And for that I needed a hero of pure eyes and of pure heart, with a soul sufficiently unblemished to have the right to speak, and with a voice strong enough to make itself heard.”

The veritable drubbing the fourth volume of “Jean-Christophe” gives Germany was inspired by sympathy, not by antipathy; it was the rod, so to speak, indispensable to the salvation of the child. “I am not in the least an enemy of Germany,” Rolland wrote in a personal letter bearing the date of September 12, 1907, “and the best proof is that I have chosen a German for my hero. The absolute sincerity, the creative energy, and the moral rigidity of Christophe offset his rather severe criticisms of his countrymen. No German can love more than I the Germany of Goethe and of Beethoven. But I believe that the Germany of to-day is sick; and, in her interest, some one must have the courage to say so. You may be sure that Christophe, at present in Paris, will be as hard upon my compatriots as he has been upon his own.”

This prediction was amply verified, as we know, by Volume V, “La foire sur la place,” which, in its turn, proceeded not from malevolence, but from a deep-rooted determination to “battle for the life and the honor of the race”; not from anti-patriotism, but from the high and pure form of patriotism that wishes its country to be blameless.[Pg 518] “Whosoever has divined the soul that animates the body of this people, which does not want to perish, can and must boldly lay bare its vices and its follies, in order to combat them—in order to combat especially those who exploit them and who live off them. To struggle is even to inflict pain that good may come.”

The entire ten volumes preach that all things work together for good to the persons or the peoples who hitch their wagons to the stars.

Incidentally, Rolland seems also to teach in “Jean-Christophe” that the Gallic ideal and the Germanic ideal, “the vast culture and the combative reason of France” and “the inner music and the feeling for nature of Germany,” have everything to gain by joining forces.

Romain Rolland has not solved the riddle of existence. His works are less a revelation than an inspiration; he is a well-nigh peerless kindler of ambition of the higher order. He has not done much toward making life comprehensible, but he has done a good deal, and possibly this is better, toward making it livable, at least for those who have renounced trying to comprehend it. He aids and encourages the downcast or despairing not with tenets of philosophy or religion,—dogmas are his bête noire,—but with stories of heroic souls whose example arouses them to a consciousness of their own capacity for virtue, inspires them with faith in themselves and in the future, and shows them how blessedness may be wrought out of wretchedness. It is the old, old, but always new, message of joy through sanctified suffering.

“Seek not happiness, seek blessedness. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein whoso walks and works it is well with him!” thundered the British worshiper and biographer of heroes, Carlyle.

The French biographer and worshiper of heroes expresses essentially the same thought in slightly different terms:

Romain Rolland, at forty-seven, has proved himself a man of great heart and of pure conscience, one of the heroic beings “forged upon the anvil of physical and moral suffering,” who dares “to look anguish in the face and venerate it”; one of the choice spirits who, seeing the world as it is, still loves it. Intoxicated with proselyting zeal, he has not thus far deigned—more’s the pity!—to become the supreme literary artist such a well-nigh flawless gem as his “Beethoven,” the best pages of “Jean-Christophe,” and his less known works, show that he can be if he will. But signs are not wanting of a growing sympathy with the sanity, the symmetry, and the harmony of classic art. His latest volume, “La nouvelle journée,” is instinct with a yearning for serenity that may lift him ultimately to a place beside the undisputed masters. It does not yet appear what he will be. He himself affirms that his work has only just begun. The time may not be far distant when, like Christophe toward the end of his career, he will blush at his former lack of orderliness and measure; when, imposing upon himself a rigid discipline, he will resolve “to be the king” of his tumultuous temperament; when his literary creations will take on, as did the mature musical creations of his hero, calmer, cooler, purer, serener forms. The torrent gradually loses its boisterousness as it approaches the sea.

In any event, Rolland’s splendid sincerity guarantees that he will not be the slave of his record. “As for me,” he declares in the farewell to Christophe with which he prefaces “La nouvelle journée,” “I bid adieu to my past soul; I cast it away like an empty husk. Life is a succession of deaths and resurrections. Let us die, Christophe, to be born again!”

STAMBOUL is wonderfully various. Compressed between two seas, it contains sharp, even brutal, contrasts of beauty and ugliness, grandeur and squalor, purity and filth, silence and uproar, the most delicate fascination and a fierceness that is barbaric. It can give you peace or a sword. The sword is sharp and cruel; the peace is profound and exquisite.

Every day early I escaped from the uproar of Pera and sought in Stamboul a place of forgetfulness. There are many such places in the city and on its outskirts: the mosques, the little courts and gardens of historic tombs; the strange and forgotten Byzantine churches, lost in the maze of wooden houses; the cemeteries, vast and melancholy, where the dead sleep in the midst of dust and confusion, guarded by giant cypresses; the lonely and shadowed ways by the walls and the towers; the poetic glades and the sun-kissed terraces of Seraglio Point.

Santa Sophia stands apart from all other buildings, unique in beauty, with the faint face of the Christ still visible on its wall, Christian in soul, though now for long dedicated to the glory of Allah and of his prophet. I shall not easily forget my disappointment when I stood for the first time in its shadow. I had been on Seraglio Point, and, strolling by the famous royal gate to look at the lovely fountain of Sultan Achmet, I saw an enormous and ugly building, decorated with huge stripes of red paint, towering above me as if fain to obscure the sun. The immensity of it was startling. I asked its name.

I looked away to the fountain, letting my eyes dwell on its projecting roof and its fretwork of gold, its lustrous blue and green tiles, splendid ironwork, and plaques of gray and brown marble.

It was delicate and enticing. Its mighty neighbor was almost repellent. But at length—not without reluctance, for I feared perhaps a deeper disappointment—I went into the mosque by the Porta Basilica, and found myself in the midst of a vast harmony, so wonderful, so penetrating, so calm, that I was aware at once of a perfect satisfaction.

At first this happy sense of being completely satisfied seemed shed upon me by shaped space. In no other building have I had this exact feeling, that space had surely taken an inevitable form and was announcing itself to me. I stood beneath the great dome, one hundred and seventy-nine feet in height, and as I gazed upward I felt both possessed and released.

For a long time I was fully aware of nothing but the vast harmony of Santa Sophia, descending upon me, wrapping me round. I saw moving figures, tiny, yet full of meaning, passing in luminous distances, pausing, bending, kneeling; a ray of light falling upon a white turban; an Arab in a long pink robe leaning against a column of dusky-red porphyry; a dove circling under the dome as though under the sky. But I could not be strongly aware of any detail, or be enchanted by any separate beauty. I was in the grasp of the perfect whole.

Somewhere far off in the mosque a child began to sing a great tune, powerfully, fervently, but boyishly. The voice was not a treble voice; it was deeper, yet unmistakably the voice of a boy. And the melody sung was bold, indeed, almost angry, and yet definitely religious. It echoed along the walls of marble, which seemed to multiply it mysteriously, adding to it wide murmurs which were carried through all the building into the dimmest, remot[Pg 520]est recesses. It became in my ears as the deep-toned and fanatical thunder of Islam, proclaiming possession of the church of Divine Wisdom which had been dedicated to Christ. It put me for a time definitely outside of the vast harmony. I was able at last to notice details both architectural and human.

Santa Sophia has nine gates leading to it from a great corridor or outer hall, lined with marble and roofed with old-gold mosaic. As you enter from the Porta Basilica, you have an impression of pale yellow, gold, and gray; of a pervading silvery glimmer; of a pervading gleam of delicate primrose, brightly pure and warm. You hear a sound of the falling of water from the two fountains of ablution, great vases of gray marble which are just within the mosque.

Gray and gold prevail in the color scheme, a beautiful combination of which the eyes are never tired. But many hues are mingled with them: yellow and black, deep plum-color and red, green, brown, and very dark blue. The windows, which are heavily grated, have no painted glass, so the mosque is not dark. It has a sort of lovely and delicate dimness, as touching as the dimness of twilight. It is divinely calm, almost as nature can be when she would bring her healing to the unquiet human spirit. We know that during the recent war Santa Sophia was crowded with suffering fugitives, with dying soldiers and cholera patients. I feel that even upon them in their agony it must have shed rays of comfort, into their hearts a belief in a far-off compassion waiting the appointed time to make itself fully manifest.

The great dome is of gold and of either black or very deep blue. Myriads of chandeliers, holding tiny glass cups, hang from the roof. Pale-yellow matting covers the plain of the floor. The silvery glimmer comes from the thousands of cups, the primrose gleam from the matting. The walls are lined with slabs of exquisite marble of many patterns and colors. Gold mosaic decorates the roof and the domes. Galleries, supported by marble arcades, and leaning on roofs of dim gold, run round a great part of the mosque, which is subtly broken up and made mysterious, enticing, and various by curved recesses of marble, by innumerable arches, some large and heavy, some fragile and delicate, by screens, and by forests of columns. Two-storied aisles flank the vast nave, through which men wander, looking almost like little dolls. So huge is the mosque that the eyes are deceived within it, and can no longer measure heights or breadths with accuracy. When I first stood in the nave I thought the chandeliers were hanging so near to the ground that it must be dangerous for a tall man to try to pass underneath them. They are, of course, really far higher than the head of a giant.

In Santa Sophia intricacy, by some magical process of genius, results in simplicity. Everything seems gently but irresistibly compelled to become a minister to the beauty and the calmness of the whole: the arcades of gray marble and gold; the sacred mosaics of holy Mary and the six-winged seraphim, which still testify to another age and another religion; the red columns of porphyry from Baalbec’s Temple of the Sun; the Ephesus columns of verd-antique; the carved capitals and the bases of shining brass; the gold and gray pulpit, with its long staircase of marble closed by a gold and green curtain, and its two miraculously beautiful flags of pearly green and faint gold, by age made more wonderful than when they first flew on the battle-field or were carried in sacred processions; the ancient prayer-rugs fixed to the walls; the sultan’s box, a sort of long gallery ending in a kiosk with a gilded grille, and raised upon marble pillars; the great doors and the curtains of dull-red wool; the piled carpets, which are ready against the winter, when the cool yellow matting is covered up; the great green shields in the pendentives, bearing their golden names of God and His prophet, of Ali, Osman, Omar, and Abu-Bekr. Everything slips into the heart of the great harmony, however precious, however simple, even however crude. There are a few ugly things in Santa Sophia—whitewash covering mosaics, stains of fierce yellow, blotches of plaster—which should be removed. They do not really matter; one cannot heed them when one is immersed in such almost mysterious beauty.

Men and birds are at ease in Santa Sophia. Doves have made their home in the holy place. They fly under the long[Pg 523] arcades, they circle above the galleries, they rest against blocks of cool marble the color of which their plumage resembles. And all day long men pass in through the gateways, and become at once little, yet strangely significant in the vastness which incloses and liberates them. They take off their shoes and carry them, or lay them down in the wooden trays at the edges of those wide, railed-in platforms covered with matting, called masbata, which are characteristic of mosques, and which are supposed to be for the use of readers of the Koran, and then they are free of the mosque. Some of them wander from place to place, silently gazing; others kneel and pray in some quiet corner; others study or sing or gossip or sink into reverie or slumber. Many go up to the masbata, take off their outer garments, and hang them over the rails, hang their handkerchiefs beside them, tuck their legs under their bodies, and remain thus for hours, staring straight before them with solemn eyes, as if hypnotized. Children, too, go to the masbata, settle cozily down, and read the Koran aloud, interspersing their study with gay conversation. On one of them I found my singing boy. Small, fanatical, with head thrown back and the fez upon it, he defiantly poured forth his tune, while an older companion, opposite to him and looking not unlike an idol in its shrine, stared impassively, as if at the voice.

Santa Sophia is mystical in its twilight beauty. Its vastness, its shape, its arrangement, its beautifully blended colors, the effects of light and of sound within it, unite in creating an atmosphere that disposes the mind to reverie and inclines the soul to prayer. Along the exquisite marble walls, in the mellow dimness, while Stamboul just outside is buying and selling, is giving itself to love and to crime, the murmur of Islam’s devotion steals almost perpetually, as mysterious as some faint and wide-spread sound of nature. The great mosque seems to be breathing out its message to the Almighty, and another message to man. The echoes are not clear, but as dim as the twilight under the arches of marble and beneath the ceilings of gold. They mingle without confusion in a touching harmony, as all things mingle in this mosque of the great repose.

One day I saw standing alone in the emperor’s doorway a child in blood-colored rags. The muezzin had called from the minaret the summons to the midday prayer, and far off before the mihrab, and the sacred carpet on which the prophet is said to have knelt, the faithful were ranged in long lines: pilgrims on the way to Mecca; Turks in quilted coats and in European dress; two dervishes with small, supple limbs and pale faces smoldering with reverie; and some hard-bitten, sun-scorched soldiers, perhaps bound for the battle-fields of the Balkan War. Moving almost as one man, they bent, they kneeled, they touched the floor with their foreheads, leaned back, and again bowed down. Their deep and monotonous voices were very persistent in prayer. And the echoes, like secret messengers, bore the sound along the arcades, carried it up into the vast space of the dome, under the transverse arches and the vaulted openings of the aisles, past the faint Christ on the wall, and the “Hand of the Conqueror,” with horrible outspread fingers, the Sweating Column, and the Cradle of Jesus, to the child in the blood-red rags. He stood there where Theophilus entered, under the hidden words, “I am the Light of the World,” gazing, listening, unaware of the marvelous effect his little figure was making, the one absolutely detached thing in the mosque. The doves flew over his head, vanishing down the marble vistas, becoming black against golden distances. The murmur of worship increased in power, as more and more of the faithful stole in, shoeless, to join the ranks before the mihrab. Like incense from a thurible, mysticism floated through every part of the mosque, seeming to make the vast harmony softer, to involve in it all that was motionless there and all that was moving except the child in the emperor’s doorway, who was unconsciously defiant, like a patch of fresh blood on a pure-white garment. The prayers at last died away, the echoes withdrew into silence; but the child remained where he was, crude, almost sinister in his wonderful colored rags.

Close to Santa Sophia in the Seraglio grounds is the old Byzantine church of Saint Irene, now painted an ugly pink, and used by the Turks as an armory and museum. It contains many spoils taken[Pg 524] by the Turks in battle, which are carefully arranged upon tables and walls. Nothing is disdained, nothing is considered too paltry for exhibition. I saw there flags riddled with bullets, but I saw also odd boots taken from Italian soldiers in Tripoli, caps, belts, water-bottles, blood-stained tunics and cloaks, saddles, weapons, and buttons. Among relics from Yildiz Kiosk was a set of furniture which once belonged to Abdul-Hamid, and which he is said to have set much store by. It shows a very distinctive, indeed, a somewhat original taste, being made of red plush and weapons. The legs of the tables and chairs are guns and revolvers. As I looked at the chairs, I could not help wondering whether ambassadors were invited to sit in them, after they had been loaded to their muzzles or whether they were reserved for subjects whom the ex-sultan suspected of treachery. Near them were several of Abdul-Hamid’s favorite walking-sticks containing revolvers, a cane with an electric light let into the knob, his inkstand, the mother-of-pearl revolver which was found in his pocket, and the handkerchief which fell from his hand when he was taken prisoner by the Young Turks, who have since brought their country to ruin.

In a series of galleries, under arches and ceilings of yellow and white, stands, sits, reclines, and squats, in Eastern fashion, a strange population of puppets, dressed in the costumes of the bygone centuries during which Turkey has ruled in Europe. Those fearful ex-Christians, the Janizaries, who were scourges of Christianity, look very mild now as they stand fatuously together, no longer either Christian or Mussulman but fatally Madame Tussaud. Once they tucked up their coats to fight for the “Father” who had ravished them away from their fathers in blood. Now, even the wicked man, who flees when no one pursueth, could scarcely fear them. Near them the chief eunuch, a plump and piteous gentleman, reclines absurdly upon his divan, holding his large black pipe, and obsequiously attended by a bearded dwarf in red and by a thin aide-de-camp in green. The Sheik ul Islam bends beneath the coiled dignity of his monstrous turban; a really lifelike old man, with a curved gray beard and a green-and-white turban, reads the Koran perpetually; and soldiers with faces made of some substance that looks like plaster return blankly the gaze of the many real soldiers who visit this curious show.

One day, when I was strolling among the puppets of Saint Irene, some soldiers followed me round. They were deeply interested in all that they saw, and at last became interested in me. Two or three of them addressed me in Turkish, which, alas! I could not understand. I gathered, however, that they were seriously explaining the puppets to me, and were giving me information about the Janizaries, and Orkhan, who was the founder of that famous corps. I responded as well as I could with gestures, which seemed to satisfy them, for they kept close beside me, and one, a gigantic fellow with pugnacious mustaches, frequently touched my arm, and once even took me by the hand to draw my attention to a group which he specially admired. All this was done with gravity and dignity, and with a childlike lack of self-consciousness. We parted excellent friends. I distributed cigarettes, which were received with smiling gratitude, and went on my way to Seraglio Point, realizing that there is truth in the saying that every Turk is a gentleman.

Upon Seraglio Point I found many more soldiers resting in groups by the edge of the sea, upon the waste ground that lies at the foot of the walls, beyond the delightful abandoned glades that are left to run wild and to shelter the birds. If you wish to understand something of the curious indifference that hangs, like moss, about the Turk, visit Seraglio Point. There, virtually in Stamboul, is one of the most beautifully situated bits of land in the world. Though really part of a great city, much of it has not been built upon. Among the trees on the ridge, looking to Marmora and Asia, to the Bosporus and the palaces, to the Golden Horn, Galata, and Pera, lie the many buildings and courts of the Old Seraglio, fairy-like in their wood. The snowy cupolas, the minaret, and towers look ideally Eastern. They suggest romantic and careless lives, cradled in luxury and ease. In that white vision one might dream away the days, watching from afar the pageant of the city and the seas, hearing from afar the faint voices of the nations, listening to strange and monotonous music, toying[Pg 527] with coffee and rose-leaf jam in the jewel-like kiosk of Bagdad, and dreaming, always dreaming. There once the sultan dwelt in the Eski-Serai, which exists no longer, and, there was built the great Summer Palace, which was inhabited by Suleiman I and by his successors. Hidden in the Old Seraglio there are many treasures, among them the magnificent Persian throne, which is covered with gold and jewels. Beyond this neglected wonder-world the woods extend toward the waters—hanging woods by the sea; and the Turks care nothing about them. One may not wander through them; one may not sit in them; one may only look at them, and long to lose oneself in their darkness and silence, to vanish in their secret recesses. The Turk leaves them alone, to rot or to flourish, as Allah and nature will it.

On the third of Stamboul’s seven hills stands the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, all glorious without, as Santa Sophia is not, but disappointing within, despite its beautiful windows of jeweled glass from Persia, and the plaques of wonderful tiles which cover the wall on each side of the mihrab. Somber and dark, earth-colored and gray, dark green and gold, it has a poorly painted cupola and much plastered stone, which is ugly; but there is fascination in its old dimness, in its silence and desertion. More than once I was quite alone with it, and was able, undisturbed, to notice its chief internal beauty—the exquisite proportions which trick you at first into believing it to be much smaller than it is.

When seen from without, it looks colossal. It is splendid and imposing, but it is much more, for it has a curiously fantastic and, indeed, almost whimsical charm, as if its builder, Sinan, had been a playful genius, full of gaiety and exuberance of spirit, who made this great mosque with joy and with lightness of heart, but who never forgot for a moment his science, and who could not be vulgar even in his most animated moments of invention. Massiveness and grace are blended together in this beautiful exterior. Round the central dome multitudes of small domes—airy bubbles thrown up on the surface of the mosque—are grouped with delightful fantasy. Four minarets, the two farthest from the mosque smaller than their brethren, soar above the trees. They are gray, and the walls of the mosque are gray and white. In the forecourt there is a fine fountain covered with a cupola; the roof of the cloisters which surround it is broken up into twenty-four little domes. A garden lies behind the mosque, and the great outer court is planted with trees.

In the garden are the turbehs, or tombs, of Suleiman the Magnificent and of Roxalana, “the joyous one,” that strange captive from Russia, who by her charm and the power of her temperament subdued a nation’s ruler, who shared the throne of the sultan, who guided his feet in the ways of crime, and who to the day of her death was adored by him. For Roxalana’s sake, Suleiman murdered his eldest son by another wife, and crept out from behind a curtain to look upon him dead; and for Roxalana’s sake that son’s son was stabbed to death in his mother’s arms. Now the fatal woman sleeps in a great octagonal marble tomb near the tomb of her lord and slave.

An atmosphere of peace and of hoary age broods over these tombs and the humble graves that crowd close about them. Mulberry-trees, fig-trees, and cypresses throw patches of shade on the rough gray pavement, in which is a small oval pool, full of water lest the little birds should go thirsty. A vine straggles over a wall near by; weeds and masses of bright yellow flowers combine their humble efforts to be decorative; and the call to prayer drops down from the mighty minarets to this strange garden of stones, yellow flowers, and weeds, where the lovers rest in the midst of Stamboul, which once feared and adored them. They were two criminals, but there was strength in their wickedness, strength in their pride and their passion. Romance attended their footsteps, and romance still lingers near them.

One morning, as I sat beneath the noble fig-tree which guards Roxalana’s tomb, and listened to the voice of the muezzin floating over old Stamboul, and watched the birds happily drinking at the edge of their little basin in the pavement, I thought of the influence of cities. Does not Stamboul forever incite to intrigue, to lawlessness, to bloodshed? The muezzin calls to prayer, but from old Stamboul arises another voice, sending forth an opposing summons. Suleiman heard it[Pg 528] echoed by Roxalana and slew his son; Roxalana heard and obeyed it; and how many others have listened and been fatally moved by it! It has sounded even across the waters of the sea and over the forests of Yildiz, and Armenians have been slain by thousands while Europe looked on. And perhaps in our day, and after we are gone, old Stamboul will command from its seven hills, and will be horribly obeyed.

I shall always remember, among many less famous buildings, the small mosque of Rustem Pasha near the Egyptian bazaar, with its beautiful arcade and its strangely confused interior, full of loveliness and bad taste, of atrocious modern painting and oleographic horrors, mingled with exquisite marble and perfect tiles. The wall of the arcade gleams with lustrous faience, purple and red, azure and milk-white, and with patterns of great flowers with green centers and turquoise leaves. I recall, too, the Mosaic Mosque, once the church of the monastery of the Chora, which stands on a hill from which Stamboul looks like a beautiful village embowered in green, cheerful and gaily fascinating. The church is ugly outside, yellow and lead-colored, with a white plaster minaret, and it is surrounded by wooden shanties like booths; but its mosaics are very interesting and beautiful, and its chief muezzin, Mustafa Effendi, is a delight in his long golden robe and his yellow turban.

Mustafa Effendi was born near Brusa in Asia Minor, but for forty-two years he has held the office of chief muezzin at the Mosaic Mosque, on which all his thoughts seem centered. He speaks English a little, and has an almost inordinate sense of humor. As he pointed out the mosaics to me with his wrinkled hand, he abounded in comment, and more than once his thin voice was almost overwhelmed by ill-suppressed laughter. He seemed specially entertained as he drew my attention to two birds on the wall—“Monsieur Peacock and Madame Peahen,” and he was obliged to abandon all dignity and to laugh outright when we came to a company of saints and angels.

The most sacred mosque in Turkey lies outside of Stamboul, at Eyub, far up the Golden Horn and not very distant from the “sweet waters of Europe.” In it, on their accession, the sultans are solemnly girded with Osman’s sword instead of being crowned. Eyub is a place of tombs. Chief eunuchs and grand vizirs sleep near the sea in great mausoleums inclosed within gilded railings, and some of them surrounded by gardens; on the hillside above them thousands of the faithful rest under cypresses in graves marked by dusty headstones leaning awry.

The center, or heart, of Eyub is a pleasant village, which gathers closely about the mosque, and is full of a quietly cheerful life. Just beyond the court of the mosque is a Turkish bath, where masseurs, with shaven heads and the usual tuft, lounge in the sunshine while waiting for customers. Near by are many small shops and cafés. In one of the latter I ate an excellent meal of rice and fat mutton, cooked on a spit which revolved in the street. If you stray from the center of the village toward the outskirts, you find yourself in a deserted rummage of tombs, of white columns, white cupolas, cloisters, rooms for theological students, mausoleums of white and pink marble. No footsteps resound on the pavement of the road, no voices are heard in the little gardens, no eyes look out through the railings. As I wandered through the sunshine to the small stone platform where the sultan descends from his horse when he comes to be girded with the sword, I saw no sign of life; and the only noise that I heard was the persistent tap of a hammer near the sea, where his Majesty is building an imperial mosque of white stone from Trebizond.

Presently, growing weary of the white and silent streets of the tombs, I turned into a narrow alley that ran by a grated wall, above which great trees towered, climbing toward heaven with the minaret of the Mosque of Eyub, but failing in their journey a little below the muezzin’s balcony. They were cypresses, and creepers climbed affectionately with them. Just beyond them I came into the court of the mosque, and found myself in the midst of a crowd of pilgrims before the tomb of Abu Eyub, which is covered with gilding and faience. Near it is a fountain protected by magnificent plane-trees which are surrounded by iron railings decorated with dervish caps.

I had been told more than once that the Christian dog is unwelcome in Eyub, and I was soon made aware of it. In the fa[Pg 531]çade of the tomb there is a hole through which one can look into the interior. Taking my turn among the pilgrims, I presently stood in front of this aperture, and was about to peep in discreetly when a curtain was sharply drawn across it by some one inside. I waited for a moment, but in vain; the curtain was not drawn back, so at last I meekly went on my way, feeling rather humiliated. A Greek friend afterward told me that an imam was stationed within the tomb, and that no doubt he had drawn the curtain against me because I was an unbeliever.

Duly chastened by this rebuff, I nevertheless went on to the mosque, and was allowed to go in for a moment on making a payment. The attendant was very rough and suspicious in manner, and watched me as if I were a criminal; and the pilgrims who thronged the interior stared at me with open hostility. I thought it wiser, therefore, to make only a cursory examination of the handsome marble interior, with its domes and semi-domes, and afterward, with a sense of relief, took my way up the hillside, to spend an hour among the leaning gravestones in the shade of the cypresses. Each stone above the grave of a man was carved with a fez, each woman’s stone with a flower; and tiny holes formed receptacles to collect the rainwater, so that the birds might refresh themselves above the dust of the departed.

The great field of the dead was very tranquil that day. I saw only two closely veiled women moving slowly in the distance and an old Turk sitting with a child, at the edge of the hill before a café.

On the bare hill to my left I saw the white gleam of the stones in a Jewish cemetery; and, beneath, the pale curve of the Golden Horn, ending in the peace of the desolate country. Red-roofed Eyub, shredding out into blanched edges of cupolas and tombs by the sultan’s landing-place, marked the base of the bill; and, beyond, in the distance, mighty Stamboul, brown, with red lights here and there where the sun struck a roof, streamed away to Seraglio Point. The great prospect was closed by the shadowy mountains of Asia, among which I divined, rather than actually saw, the crest of Olympus.

In these Turkish cemeteries there is a romantic and poignant melancholy such as I have found in no other places of tombs. They breathe out an atmosphere of fatalism, of bloodless resignation to the inevitable. Their dilapidation suggests rather than mere indifference a sense of the uselessness of care. Dust unto dust, and there an end. But far off in Stamboul the minarets contradict the voices that whisper over the fields of the dead; for the land of the Turk is the home of contradictions, and among them there are some that are welcome.

To rid myself of the clinging impression of sadness that stole over me among the cypresses of Eyub, later in the day I took a boat to the shore of Asia, and visited the English graveyard at Haidar Pasha, where long ago Florence Nightingale established her hospital for soldiers wounded in the Crimean War, and where now Germans have built an elaborate station from which some day we shall be able to set out for Bagdad. Already smart corridor cars, with white roofs and spotlessly clean curtains, and with “Bagdad” printed in large letters upon them, are running from the coast to mysterious places in the interior of Asia. In the excellent restaurant beer flows freely. If the mystic word “Verboten” were not absent from the walls, one might fancy himself in Munich on entering the station at Haidar Pasha. On the hill just above the station lies the English cemetery, a delightful garden of rest, full of hope and peace. It is beautifully kept, and contains the home of the guardian, a British soldier, who lives with his wife and daughters in a cozy stone bungalow fronted by flower-beds and trees. Close to his house is a grave with a broken column, raised on a platform which is approached by three steps and surrounded by a circular grass-plot. Here I found a serious Montenegrin, one of the workers in the cemetery, busily employed. He had spread sheets of paper all over the grass-plot, and up the steps of the grave, and had scattered above them a great mass of wool which suggested a recent sheep-shearing. When I came up he was adding more wool to the mass with a sort of grave ardor. I asked him what the wool was for and why he was spreading it out. He glanced up solemnly and replied:

“It is for my bed. I live in that shed over there, and am preparing my mattress for the winter.”

The cemetery, which looks out over the sea and the beautiful shores of Europe, is full of the graves of soldiers who died of wounds received in the Crimean War, or of maladies caught in camp and in the trenches. Among them lie the bodies of many devoted women who worked to allay their sufferings.

Bent perpetually on escape from the uproar of Pera, in which at night I was forced to dwell, I made more than one excursion to the walls and the seven towers of Stamboul. There are three sets of walls, the land, the sea, and the harbor walls. The Seven Towers, Yedi Kuleh, are very near to the Sea of Marmora, and are now unused and deserted, the home no longer of imprisoned ambassadors, of sultans, and vizirs, but of winds from the islands and from Asia, of grass, yellow wild-flowers, and the fallen leaves of the autumn. When I went there I was alone save for one very old man, the peaceful successor of the Janizaries who long ago garrisoned this marvelous place of terror and crime. With him at my heels I wandered among the trees of the deserted inclosure, surrounded by gray and crenelated walls, above which the towers rose up grimly toward the windy sky; I penetrated through narrow corridors of stone; I crawled through gaps and clambered over masses of rubble and fallen masonry; I visited tiny and sinister chambers inclosed in the thickness of the walls; peered through small openings; came out unexpectedly on terraces. And the old man muttered and mumbled in my ears, monotonously and without emotion, the history of crime connected with the place. Here some one was starved to death; here another was strangled by night; in this chamber a French ambassador was held captive; the blood of a sultan dyed these stones red; at the foot of this bit of wall there was a massacre; just there some great person was blinded. And, with the voice in my ears, I looked and I saw white butterflies flitting, with their frivolous purity, among the leaves of acacia-trees, and snails crawling lethargically over rough gray stones. Near the Golden Gate, where an earthquake has shaken down much of the wall, and the Byzantine dove of carved stone still remains—ironically?—as an emblem of peace, was a fig-tree giving green figs; Marmora shone from afar; in the waterless moat that stretches at the feet of the walls the grasses were waving, the ivy grew thick, here and there big patches of vegetables gave token of the forethought and industry of men. And beyond, stretching away as far as eye could see, the cemeteries without the city disappeared into distances, everywhere shadowed by those tremendous, almost terrible, cypresses that watch over the dead in the land of the Turk.

Beauty and sadness, crime and terror, wonderful romance, and a ghastly desolation, seemed brooding over this strange region beyond the reach of the voices of the city. Even the ancient man was silent at last. He had recited all the horrors his old memory contained, and at my side he stood gazing with bleary eyes across the moat and the massy cypresses, and with me, he turned to capture the shining of Marmora.

On the farther verge of the moat three dogs, which had somehow escaped the far-flung nets, wandered slowly seeking for offal; some women hovered darkly among the graves; a thin, piercing cry, that was not without a wild sweetness, rose to me from somewhere below. I looked down, and there, among the rankly growing grasses of the moat, I saw a young girl, very thin, her black hair hanging, and bound with bright handkerchiefs, sketching vaguely a danse du ventre. As I looked she became more precise in her movements, and her cries grew more fierce and imperative. From some hovel, hidden among the walls, other children streamed out, with cries and contortions, to join her. For here among the ruins the Turkish Gipsies have made their home. I threw down some coins and turned away. And as I went, returning through the old places of assassination, I was pursued by a whining of pipes and a thrumming of distant guitars. The Gipsies of old Stamboul were trying to lure me down from my fastness to make merry with them among the tombs.

IN the year 1899 a Canadian election agent, who had long been identified with the fortunes of the Liberal party, was a visitor in Washington. He expressed a wish to meet the late President McKinley, whose pleasing personality then pervaded the White House. “Nothing easier,” said his American friend, and an appointment was made forthwith. The President greeted the Canadian visitor with that charming air of particular interest and personal pleasure for which he was famed, and the conversation quite naturally drifted into political channels. The Canadian was soon put at ease, and in the course of the interview said: “This is a very great occasion for me, Mr. President. I had looked forward to it as a remote possibility, but one which would mark a red-letter day in my life. I have felt that I wanted above all things during my visit here to shake hands with a man in whom the American people had so much trust that they placed fifty million dollars in his hands, and told him to go ahead and spend it as he thought would best serve the country in the controversy with Spain. It was a wonderful evidence of trust and confidence, Mr. President; and I am proud to meet the man who was deemed worthy of it by a great, intelligent, and modern nation.”

The President’s face glowed with pleasure as the compliment passed, and he made modest and fitting reply. The Canadian then added:[Pg 535] “But I want to say, Mr. President, that I consider it a most terrible waste of money. What do you get for it? Porto Rico, the Philippines, and a few other odds and ends, to say nothing of the loss to the American nation of many lives, the disturbance to business, and a thousand other evils that follow a war. I can tell you of a much better plan for increasing the wealth, size, population, and strength of this country. Give me two million dollars to spend in the next Canadian election, and I will guarantee the peaceful annexation of Canada to the United States. And look what you get!”

President McKinley was apparently much amused, and accepted the statement in the spirit in which it was made; that is to say, the suggestion was so far removed from the domain of the real as to prevent it from being seriously discussed. If it is possible in these days, however, for influences of various kinds emanating from the United States to turn the scale in a Canadian election against freer commercial relations between Canada and the United States, it is not impossible that this practical Canadian politician spoke with greater knowledge and greater seriousness than he received credit for. It must be remembered that at that time there were avowed “annexationists” in Canada, and a party in favor of closer commercial relations with the United States was strongly intrenched in power with the Canadian voters.

When the Canadian Parliament, representing as it does, in the degree in which such bodies do represent, the Canadian people, votes $35,000,000 as a contribution to England’s navy, the consideration of Canada as a nation is forced upon the world. It is not that Canada has need of the British navy any more than she needs a chain of forts along her southern border. It is because of the spirit of independence of natural laws of transportation, economics, and all other things that flow along the line of least resistance, shown by this act of fealty to an idea which might naturally have lost its vividness in crossing three thousand miles of water. England never did much to strengthen the tie between herself and Canada, and even now does little but talk. This talk is inspired by an awakening sense of the absolute necessity of oversea dominions to maintain the greatness of “little England” in the face of rivals becoming more formidable at an amazing rate. There is more human nature in the revival of Canadian loyalty to England, England’s greater appreciation of Canada, and a joint cold shoulder to the United States, than there is statesmanship or economic wisdom. The natural routes of trade and commerce in Canada lead to the south; the character and social conditions of the people are North American, not English. The temperate zone of the North American continent, along the northern fringe of which lies Canada, is all one country in its aspirations and material progress.

I remember sitting in a London club one day at the time of the jubilee of the late Queen Victoria. Near me sat two Canadian army officers who were with the contingent of troops sent to the celebration in England. They were tall, raw-boned, leathery-skinned youths of the type now known to Europe as American. Seated in the club window, quietly and observantly watching the passing crowd, one of them suddenly blurted out to the other, “Well, there’s one thing I’ve learned on this trip, if nothing else.”

“Well I’ve learned that I am not an Englishman, as I’ve always supposed myself to be. I’m a Canadian. We don’t know them, and they don’t know us; and what is more, while we are interested enough to try to know them, they just don’t care one way or another. Our point of view is different; and I’m going back home more of a Canadian than I ever was.”

When the Hon. William S. Fielding, formerly Canadian Minister of Finance, introduced his now famous budget to the Canadian Parliament several years ago, in which Canada virtually declared a tariff war upon Germany, he said quite frankly that the important feature of this action was not the apparent hostility to Germany, but that such hostility might serve as a warning to the United States and to England. In brief, it was notice to the mother country that Canada was quite able and ready to act for what she might consider her best interests in fiscal matters, regardless of the wishes, feelings, or dictation of her august parent.

Canada has given to English goods preferential duties a third less than those assessed against the goods of other countries; in times of recent trouble she has given men and money; and now comes a contribution to the expense of British armament amounting to nearly five dollars per capita for every man, woman, and child in the dominion. In return, England has talked of preferential customs duties, but cannot give them; she has talked of changing the law under which a Canadian citizen is not necessarily a citizen of England, but has not done so; she has[Pg 537] talked of an armed defense, which is not needed and never will be, for, unlike Australia, the Canadians are protected from all possible enemies by the mere facts of geographical isolation and the presence to the south of a great and powerful nation which would in her own interest, if for no other reason (and there are others), permit no foreigner to alienate a square yard of Canadian soil. England must have the products of Canadian soil, and English emigrants would go to Canada in no greater or lesser numbers if the political tie between the two countries were sundered. As a matter of fact, English immigrants are accorded the same treatment by Canada as those from other lands, and are not as welcome, because of the kind that England has sent.

The ties between five sevenths of the people of Canada and the people of England are those of tradition, sentiment, and blood, while the like ties of the other two sevenths are to France and the United States. It may be true that such ties constitute a tangible force, but that is a matter open to debate, and not to be settled until it comes to a question of international disputes. The ties between Canada and the United States are those compelling bonds of geographical and economic likeness, reciprocity of needs and markets, natural routes for trade and transportation, sympathetic financial exchanges, individual investments one within the confines of the other, to say nothing of the fact that more than a million Canadian-born—a number equaling one seventh of the present population of Canada—have found homes and profitable occupation in the United States, within easy hailing distance of their native land; and in that land are perhaps half a million or more people who were born in the United States.

At the general election in 1912, nearly half of the Canadian people voted in favor of closer trade relations with the United States. A newly elected Democratic Congress in the United States has signified its intention of not repealing the Canadian Reciprocity Act, and there are Canadians who believe the day will come, and at no very distant date, when Canada will yet enter the door thus left ajar, and absorb to herself a share of the forces for expansion and growth of industry which are urging her neighbor to the tremendous pace of the present day.

Notwithstanding the inability of Eng[Pg 538]land to give, and her readiness to take, the people of Canada have heroically set themselves to the task of directing their national growth along the lines of strongest resistance. They will not succeed in the end; but this conclusion does not detract from world-wide interest in the struggle, or from the significance and interest of the results of this Canadian policy, which, as stated, originates more in the qualities of human nature than from the observance of economic laws and an attempt to take advantage thereof. The logical course of events, following the coöperation of human endeavor and natural laws, would be the unification of the North American continent, politically, industrially, commercially, and financially. That this will come sooner or later is inevitable. In the meantime, to maintain a political sympathy with an Old World and a more or less indifferent parent community, to confine transportation, industry, and social existence to lines laid east and west, and at the same time to maintain the somewhat strained pose of an independent nation, is the task the majority of the Canadian people have set for themselves.

This self-styled nation is making a brave show at an ambitious task. A splendid national and independent spirit has arisen, and natural resources are being developed and farmed to the utmost. It has probably surprised the Canadians themselves to realize the present power of their word in affairs of the British Empire, a result not due so much to the weight of Canadian counsels as to the development of international affairs in Europe, but none the less gratifying to Canadian pride. For the first time in history the Canadian Government now finds itself in a position where its demands upon the mother country are not only listened to with respectful consideration, but are granted without much ado. Had it not been for Canadian insistence, backed up by the coöperation of other British possessions, the protest of the British Government over the action of Congress in the matter of the Panama Canal tolls would not have been so insistent; notwithstanding the alarm[Pg 539] felt in England over the proposed reciprocity between Canada and the United States, the British Government was forced to leave the matter entirely in the hands of Canada, breathing a sigh of intense relief when it was found that the event was at least postponed. In many other cases where a few years ago all negotiations concerning Canadian affairs would have been conducted as between the United States and England, the latter country more recently has remained a passive and subservient listener, standing ready to carry out the wishes of Canada when the negotiations came to an end.

Politically, therefore, Canada has finally won for herself the position of a virtually independent nation, self-governed and self-contained except for the form of obtaining the now ever-ready acquiescence of the mother country in her final dealings with foreign nations.

This was made possible by the very reasons which will forever bar Canada from a like industrial, commercial, financial, or social independence. The geographical and economic dependence of Canada upon the United States forced England to proceed carefully in dealing with Canadian affairs, to prevent aliena[Pg 540]tion and possible final separation by the wish and necessities of the Canadian people. This attitude is an acknowledgment in itself of the independence of Canada from Great Britain and her tendencies in other directions. However, to say that Canada never can achieve the full measure of her material greatness as an independent nation takes nothing from her present power or her splendid progress. In fact, the greater the latter, the more evident will be the need to extend her southern boundaries.

If the position were reversed from what it is to-day, and the proposition were to be submitted to the Canadian people whether or not they would annex the United States, the vote would be virtually unanimous in favor of such annexation. The economic results would be the same as if the United States annexed Canada; the people of the whole continent would move forward at the same pace now observed in the expanding industry and internal power of the United States.

The reasons of Canada’s handicap lie in a lack of geographical and economic balance. From a material point of view, the country is not self-contained. An artificial barrier extends across its southern boundary, forcing transportation to follow unnatural lines and rolling back the tide of Canadian productive industry upon itself. Rivers, lakes, and valleys flow north and south. Eastern and western Canada are separated by twelve hundred miles, more or less, of almost totally infertile country. The snow and ice of winter point to the southern route as the natural outlet for traffic during certain seasons of the year. The population is not sufficient to absorb the products of huge mills, big enough to manufacture at a price which makes possible competition with Europe and countries elsewhere. The greatest and highest-priced marts of the world are across that theoretical line drawn upon the map and existing only as an idea in the minds of the people, a stimulus to local patriotism, and a hindrance to development in most directions. Her people are barred from the best in material prosperity, the best in the arts, in music, and literature, because these things come only where human beings congregate in sufficient numbers to make it possible to support them; and the cities of Canada never can reach that point of development where such will be possible so long as the pass to the south is blocked by even an idea.

With the aid of foreign capital, seven eighths of which, by the way, is Scottish, not English, Canada has built her railways, her mills, and established her banks; with the aid of subsidies she has made possible her manufactures and even her news agencies. Her per capita national debt is the largest in the world, a token in this case of amazing energy, courage, and enterprise, and not of fruitless wars or unproductive extravagance. The units of Canadian population are highly prosperous and intelligent, and possess a purchasing power superior to nearly every other community in the world. The profit of to-day, however, has come, first, from the rapidly increasing land values, and, second, from the fatness of virgin lands. There will be an end to this in its earliest and simplest forms. The profits upon the land have been largely taken; and while the virgin land is still yielding to the plow and numberless thousands of acres are still untouched, the nuggets lying on the ground have been closely gleaned, and more scientific, systematic, and expensive effort is necessary to reap the harvest yet available.

Land values in the Canadian towns and cities have reached the danger-point, and in some cases have exceeded it. There is an old and long-established law that land is worth only what it will produce, be it cash or produce for cash, and that in the end all values flow to this level. The material development of Canada will proceed upon sure lines, for it is based upon that measure of all values, the products of the earth; but the rate of development cannot be hurried beyond a certain point, and this, while satisfactory enough in itself, will not be at the pace the enthusiasts would have us believe. The same story has been written of the western United States, and as the conditions are virtually the same, history will repeat itself. Canada has this advantage, and that is the increasing population of the world and its increasing need or absorptive power, which is far greater to-day than in the decades when the western frontier of America was being pushed toward the Pacific coast.

With all this, the record of Canadian[Pg 541] accomplishments is an amazing tale of wondrous energy and gigantic results. Put the figures of Canadian population, immigration, enterprise, and production side by side with those of the greater nations, and they are not large in comparison; but take them by themselves, as they stand, and they are pregnant with promise for the future of this land which stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is only estopped on the south by an imaginary line drawn just where a greater prosperity should begin, and limited at the north solely by the degree of cold and the length of winter that may control human endeavor in its strivings for material advance.

In some directions the science of government is more highly developed in Canada than in any other country in the world. A notable instance of this is in the administration and disposal of public land. Notwithstanding the vast area to be given away to settlers, there has been no prodigality or waste. The home-builder is the man that is wanted, and he is the only one who can secure title to arable land. The banking system is held to be superior to that of the United States; tenure in administrative and judicial office is based largely upon good behavior; immigration is restricted along protective lines; and the customs are administered with the least possible inconvenience to the importer or the traveler. In the endeavor to overcome the natural tendency of trade to flow north and south, and the limitations of her industrial present, Canada has been led into the doubtful byways of subsidy; but as the years progress and the country adjusts itself, there is a notable tendency to be more chary in creating industries that must be kept alive by direct gift; and those already enjoying these special privileges have been warned to prepare for the day when public opinion will demand that they stand or fall upon their own merits.

The figures of Canadian progress tell a story of wonderful energy, and in one particular they are especially interesting and significant. The population of Canada has not increased as might be expected, in view of her great industrial expansion. In fact, it has barely doubled in forty years. In the last four decades the population of the United States has grown about twenty-five per cent. in each succeeding ten years, while that of Canada has increased by thirty, eleven, twelve, and seventeen per cent. in the same periods. That is to say, while the population of Canada was doubling itself, that of the United States increased to two and a half times the number in 1871. In that same forty years, however, the productive and absorptive energies of the Canadian unit have increased enormously, until in these respects a point has been reached without parallel in any other country.

While, as stated, the population has about doubled in forty years, deposits in the post-office savings-banks have risen from $2,500,000 to $43,000,000; total bank deposits from $67,000,000 to $1,000,000,000; the national revenue from $20,000,000 to $118,000,000; expenditure for life-insurance from $1,800,000 to $20,000,000; the amount paid for mail and steamship subventions from $286,000 to nearly $2,000,000; the number of letters and post-cards handled by the post-office from 27,000,000 to 550,000,000; passengers on railways from 5,000,000 to 37,000,000; tons of freight hauled on railways from 5,000,000 to 80,000,000, and on canals from 3,000,000 to 43,000,000.

In that same time the national debt has increased from $77,000,000 to $508,338,592. The total mineral production has grown in value from the figure of 1886, when it was $10,000,000, to $107,000,000 in 1911. Coal production has increased in value from $3,000,000 to $30,000,000, and total foreign trade from $162,000,000 to $771,000,000.

There are in Canada to-day about 1,500,000 families, and only about 75,000 of these are without a dwelling to themselves—a great record of a home-building nation. There is now nearly a billion dollars invested in Canadian manufactures. Nearly 400,000 wage-earners have a payroll of about $150,000,000, and the product of their labor brings nearly the same amount of revenue to the nation as is invested in the productive plants. These figures are all the more extraordinary in that the figures of increase of population bear little relation thereto. It is the story of a great industrial awakening, following the discovery of latent natural resources which applied industry and intelligence have transmuted into wealth and profitable occupation for labor.

In the last ten years the population of Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon, has decreased by 9, 14, and 69 per cent., respectively. Some of this decrease has been caused by changes of political boundary-lines. Of the total increase in population nearly sixty per cent. has taken place in the four western provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba, the relative expansion of these provinces in number of inhabitants being 439 per cent., 413 per cent., 119 per cent., and 73 per cent., respectively. The total increase of population in the last decade was 1,834,000, and it was distributed as follows: 1,117,000 in the four western or agricultural provinces; 354,000 in Quebec; 340,000 in Ontario; and 54,000 in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. To the western provinces have gone the people seeking homes on the new lands, and to the lively towns and cities, which have become the centers of these great productive areas, have thronged laborers, purveyors to the wants of the settlers, those who offer facilities for the exchange of commodities, and the usual large percentage who, in a new country, live off the industry of others by taking advantage of the eagerness of would-be buyers and sellers to make quick bargains.

As in the history of every newly opened reserve of the world, fortunes have been made from a shoe-string by those shrewd enough to step in between the seller and the buyer in time to take a part of the profit to themselves. The man who buys acreage and sells town lots is the speculator who has made money the world over. The purchaser of the latter may in turn make profit for himself, but the cream has been taken by the prophet who can materialize the vision of the paved street across the plowed field or the prairie sod. All new or rapidly developing countries pass through this stage of swift encroachment of town upon country, and up to a certain point it remains legitimate and normal—that is to say, so long as it fills the measure of need. The momentum thus gained, however, has seldom failed to carry the movement beyond the legitimate, and numberless acres have been in turn sold for taxes, and the farmer’s plow has turned up the stakes which were to mark the lines of pretentious boulevards.

The time of reaction is one of danger and often of disaster. Western Canada has already passed through several periods of stress and trial of this character, and the early story of the now thriving city of Winnipeg is full of tragedy to those who were caught in the reactionary period of many years ago. After a certain time, however, these places find themselves, possibilities and impossibilities are recognized, and values assume true levels, which in many cases constantly but sanely keep pace in their rise with the development of tributary territory. It seems to be a truism that the prices of Broadway or the Strand could not be legitimately duplicated in Prairieville or Rocky Pass, but men surely sane and successful elsewhere apparently become intoxicated as they breathe the stimulating air of the Northwest, and blinded by the vision of the future, they buy or loan in haste not only their own money, but that of others, only to lose, and curse their temporary aberration in the calmness of second thought or the depressing incident of a “busted boom.” Optimism is the key-note of life in a new community, and the true story of the poor man who stumbled over a wheelbarrow-load of gold nuggets is the constant incentive to the weary prospector who is measuring his daily dole from his last sack of flour. It is a thankless task to measure real values in the Northwest at the moment, for no matter how high they may be placed, such measure meets with the approval of no one, neither of the man who has something to sell, nor of the man inclined to buy. The spirit of the gambler is in all human nature, and in none more than the frontiersman; and there is no check to its development in the high-strung, optimistic, and get-rich-quick communities living in the electric atmosphere of our far-flung Northwestern horizons.

Genuine opportunity abounds, and the keen, restless minds of those who blaze the way for the more conservative are impatient of suggested limitations. Perhaps it is just as well it is so, for in the end, while some are trampled under the car, the final adjustment yields no higher death-rate in hopes than in older communities, and in the younger aspirant for civic greatness there is real opportunity for all; whereas in the older settlements there is often opportunity for those alone who already[Pg 543] have the power and the means to create it.

An increase of 354,000 in the population of Quebec during the last ten years means a large natural increase characteristic of the French-Canadian inhabitants, and a development of lumbering, mining, and fishing industries natural to any section of the world so easy of access and so rich in such resources. The population of Ontario, that stronghold of the British in Canada, has increased by 340,000. This is due to the development of manufacturing. Cheap power, raw material, and favorable natural location, with protection and bounty advantages, are being made use of by foreign capital. The recent decision of the United States Steel Corporation to build a $20,000,000 plant in Canada is no part of a boom; it is only the maturing of plans made long ago in view of future possibilities, and a realization that the time was now ripe to move. The building of this plant bears no relation to the bounty now given on Canadian manufactured iron, for that is too uncertain, too political, too subject to the popular whim, to base a great and permanent industrial enterprise upon. It is based entirely upon an economic situation deemed favorable to the establishment of an extensive and profitable industry.

The rush to the wheat-fields of the Canadian Northwest is easily understood. For twenty years Europe poured a great stream of intelligent, industrious farmers into the United States to take advantage of the free and arable lands. Not a few from eastern and central Canada crossed the line to the south for the same purpose. With the exhaustion of the more easily acquired lands, the tide turned more northward, and while the movement has not yet attained, and probably never will reach, the flood-tide witnessed in the agricultural immigration into the United States, the same forces are at work, and the same results will be achieved.

In the days when the grain area of the United States filled up with people, wheat was fifty cents a bushel or less, and “dollar wheat” was the dream of the grain-farmer. The dream has come true, and this increase in value has given the movement strength enough to overcome serious climatic differences and remoteness from markets; or, in brief, it has equalized the line of greater resistance. In the last ten years perhaps 750,000 people from the United States have gone to Canada, most of them seeking homes. On the whole, this immigration has been of a very desirable class, and it is estimated that these people have taken with them to their new homes an average of about a thousand dollars in money or property for every man, woman, and child, or total assets of about $750,000,000. Many a prosperous farmer, with perhaps a hundred and forty acres of land in Iowa, Illinois, or other good farming States, has thought about his family, and realized that at his death his property would have to be sold in order that each might get his share. He has found that by selling his valuable but comparatively small farm at a good figure he would have enough to improve and stock at least six hundred and forty acres of the Canadian Northwest, thus giving him ample land at some time in the future to divide among his children and leave each one with a workable portion. Canada has welcomed these settlers, as well she might. They have willingly become Canadians and are good citizens. Their influence will in time add insensibly to the force at work for the economic unification of the North American continent, though in the meantime they are as good Canadians as immigrants in the United States are good Americans, even in the first generation.

There is possibly about $2,000,000,000 of British and other European capital invested in Canada, but it takes little active part in influencing the country politically or otherwise in the direction of its progress. As a rule, the English send out their money in hopes of larger earnings than would be had at home—and to escape the income tax; France, for the income received therefrom; both people investing in listed securities rather than industrial adventures. It is not quite the same with $350,000,000 of American money that has found its way into Canadian investment. Much of this money is engaged in enterprises based upon Canadian trade, protected by Canadian tariff, benefited by Canadian bounties, and competitive with American capital at home. The force of this influence, taken with antagonisms of similar character originating south of the Canadian boundary, and the active aid of certain high-tariff enthusiasts in the[Pg 544] United States, enabled the anti-reciprocity party in Canada to score over those in favor of closer commercial union between the two countries. It might not be comforting to the pride of Canadians to know or to have it said just how far these influences went in deciding the political fate of the dominion at the moment, and it might detract from the quality of the self-gratification of the English to know how this so-called manifestation of Canadian loyalty was really brought about. It is equally true that those in the United States who worked so long and so ardently for greater freedom of trade with Canada, believing it would result in great good for their own country as well as for Canada, are not inclined to cheerfulness when they realize just how much of their defeat they owe to the antagonistic influence of their own fellow-countrymen, directors of American industries which have grown into perhaps too great power in the nation through the willingness on the part of the American consumer to contribute liberally, so that all branches of human endeavor might prosper together in the general advance of the nation. Just how far the reaction in favor of reciprocity has gone in both countries since the last Canadian election, it is impossible to say. It is reasonable to assume that none who voted in favor of it has changed his opinion, and it is a matter of public and private record that a goodly number of those who voted against it in Canada have changed their opinion since the smoke of battle cleared away and it has been possible to put a true value on the injudicious or untrue statements of politicians, be these of an allegedly humorous character or not. This question of the economic unification of North America is a living issue which will disappear from the national life of the two English-speaking countries only with a fulfilment of a commercial union virtually complete. When President Taft authorized his secretary of state to offer complete free trade to the Canadian Reciprocity Commissioners as a basis for negotiation, he was not suggesting the impossible; he was merely ahead of the times, for some day one of his successors in the White House will have the honor of carrying the suggestion into practical effect.

The period of great development in Canada began in the decade from 1891 to 1901, when the foreign trade of the country increased by about $170,000,000, or, in other words, doubled itself. In the following decade it increased by nearly $384,000,000, or nearly doubled itself again. A few figures show most strikingly how during the last twenty years the new Canada was begun and came into her own, for her foreign trade progressed as follows:

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1871

$74,173,618

$96,092,971

$170,266,589

1881

98,299,823

105,380,840

203,621,663

1891

98,417,296

119,967,638

218,384,934

1901

196,487,632

190,415,525

386,903,157

1911

297,196,365

472,247,540

769,443,905

In the last forty years Canada increased the export of the products of her mines from $3,700,000 to $43,000,000; fisheries from $4,000,000 to $16,000,000; forests from $23,000,000 to $46,000,000; animal products from $13,000,000 to $53,000,000; agricultural products from $10,000,000 to $90,000,000, and manufactures from $2,500,000 to $44,000,000. Her greatest gain in the export of any one item has been in wheat and wheat flour, for in 1871 the exports were valued at $3,560,000, while in 1911 the value reached about $60,000,000. The wheat production of the United States is about 620,000,000 bushels, valued at about $555,000,000. That of Canada is about 216,000,000 bushels, valued at about $140,000,000. The average yield an acre in Canada is more than twenty-one bushels to the acre, or more than seven bushels an acre greater than the yield to the south. In 1912, Canada had 32,500,000 acres planted in field crops, 10,000,000 of which were in wheat, and nearly 10,000,000 in oats.

For the last forty years the foreign trade of Canada has been distributed among the four principal nations as follows:

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1873

$68,522,776

$38,743,848

$107,266,624

1883

52,052,465

47,145,217

99,197,682

1893

43,148,413

64,080,493

107,228,906

1903

58,896,901

131,202,321

190,099,222

1911

109,936,462

136,965,111

246,901,573

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1873

$47,735,678

$42,072,526

$89,808,204

1883

56,032,333

41,668,723

97,701,056

1893

58,221,976

43,923,010

102,144,986

1903

137,605,195

71,783,924

209,389,119

1911

284,934,739

119,396,801

404,331,540

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1873

$1,099,935

$76,553

$1,176,488

1883

1,809,154

133,697

1,942,851

1893

3,825,763

750,461

4,576,224

1903

8,175,604

1,819,223

9,994,827

1911

10,047,340

2,663,017

12,710,357

Years

Exports

Imports

Total

1873

$2,023,288

$31,907

$2,055,195

1883

2,316,480

617,730

2,934,210

1893

2,832,117

264,047

3,096,164

1903

6,580,029

1,341,618

7,921,647

1911

11,563,773

2,782,092

14,345,865

The two great traders with Canada are the United States and Great Britain. More than ten years ago Canada gave to certain classes of imports from England a special reduction of duties amounting on an average to about 30 per cent. These special favors are doubtless responsible for a part of the large and sudden increase of imports from England in the last decade. What would have happened to British trade in Canada without these tariff concessions is not a cheerful subject for discussion among British manufacturers, for even with it the Canadian exports to England form the large part of such increase of trade, as has been noted. Trade between England and Canada has increased as a whole by about 140 per cent.; but while imports from England have risen in forty years from less than $70,000,000 to about $110,000,000, exports to England have risen from less than $40,000,000 to about $140,000,000. In the same forty years exports from the United States to Canada have increased from about $48,000,000 to about $285,000,000, while imports from Canada have gone from $42,000,000 to about $120,000,000, or a total gain of about 350 per cent. This has been accomplished without tariff concessions on either side, in fact in the face of considerable antagonism.

The reasons for American success in the sale of manufactured goods in Canada in competition with other nations favored, as in the case of England, with lower customs duties, are not entirely geographical. Not only are many of the largest Canadian industrial plants of American origin, or even branches of American institutions, but American capital is interested in the success of many others. In a report to his Government the British trade commissioner for Canada says: “The geographical advantage of our American rivals is fully realized, but the lesson pressed home is that they are more aggressive in trade methods, spend more money in selling their goods, are quicker to make any suggested change in patterns, smarter in business methods and in design of goods, and quicker in delivering.”

England’s trade with Canada is based upon the necessities of the mother country in the matter of food supply and raw materials; hence the increasing Canadian export of the products of the farm and forest. In supplying the needs of Canada, the British manufacturer meets in competition the best equipped of all American industries—those which deal in building supplies of all descriptions, machinery, and railway equipment. English trade in Canada will continue to increase, but any hope on the part of Europe to oust the United States from the lines chosen is doomed to disappointment. Even with free trade within the British Empire, the situation might not change materially, though it might lead to a greater investment of American industrial capital in Canada, a course of events that would in time militate even more strongly against British trade supremacy than does the present situation, for competition would then come from within instead of from without. The development of Canada is the only measure of the future of American trade in Canada in nearly every direction, and the only way in which Canada can share fully in this rising tide of industrial activity is to make a flank attack upon the “friendly enemy” by permitting a freer exchange of commodities than is now allowed, to which the United States stands already committed. This would mean an increase in[Pg 546] Canadian production and population such as has never been recorded.

From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood

THE ST. LAWRENCE AS SEEN FROM THE CITADEL IN QUEBEC

It is not within the scope of this article to treat of other than the material side of Canadian development, and yet such treatment leaves much unsaid that has a direct bearing upon the present and future of this old-new country, which is rapidly coming into its own. Commercial and industrial development have been rapid, and yet there is another Canada including within itself all the activities of human thought. Literature, art, and science are making amazing strides, stimulated by the optimism that pervades the life of this Northern land. Long before preferential tariffs or reciprocity treaties with Canada were seriously discussed by foreign nations as being of real advantage to them, Canada had made her impress upon the life of the world through the genius of her sons and daughters. In fact, the bygone days of calm contentment with things as they were, acceptance of a position in the world’s affairs as that merely of a colony of a far-distant country, gave time for introspection and the cultivation of the graces of the mind. In those days were laid the foundations of Canada’s great institutions, her schools, her libraries, her universities, and her laboratories. Still further back in history were enacted the heroic deeds of her soldiers and her pioneers, which have yielded to the Canadian people a pride of race all their own, and made easy the adoption at a later date of the so-called new national policy to which the people now pin their faith.

There is no rivalry between the United States and Canada. The interests of the two peoples are identical; the needs of both countries can be filled one by the other. No thought of conquest originates south of the Canadian boundary, and no thought of surrender from within. The resources of Canada, developed to their utmost, are only supplementary to the needs of the people of the whole continent; and to the south lie the great masses of population which are increasing in density at such a rate as to invite the prediction that before many years have elapsed it will require the highest potential energy of both peoples to supply their actual wants. The extension of American trade in Canada cannot be checked by laws or restrictions; the expansion of American markets for Canadian produce will be measured only by the ability to supply.

[Pg 547]

A MESSAGE FROM ITALY

BY MARGARET WIDDEMER

THERE was a white bird lighted on the sill

That sang of Italy.

All day the great bands whirled along the mill

And pale girls languidly

Wound the long skeins that do not ever end,

And nothing saw or heard,

Only one heart flew back to sun and friend

And freedom with the bird.

Doves by the broken fountain in the square

Cooed at her small brown feet.

There was wide sky and love and laughter there,

And the soft wind was sweet;

The long days ran, like little children, free

In that blue, sunny air,

Life did not labor hushed and measuredly,

There was not gold or care.

The close heat pulsed, unsweetened by the sun,

And the blind walls again

Penned her to tasks unending, unbegun,

Monotony and pain;

But all that day her feet paced with gay will,

Her child-heart circled free.

There was a white dove lighted on the sill

That cooed of Italy.

Plates in tint, engraved for THE CENTURY by C. W. Chadwick and H. Davidson

DRAWN BY W. T. BENDA

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 549]

THE IMPRACTICAL MAN

BY ELLIOTT FLOWER

Author of “Policeman Flynn,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY F. R. GRUGER

“I AM sorry to inform you,” said Shackelford, the lawyer, “that you have been to some trouble and expense to secure a bit of worthless paper. This—” and he held up the document he had been examining—“is about as valuable as a copy of a last week’s newspaper.”

It is possible that Shackelford really regretted the necessity of conveying this unpleasant information to Peter J. Connorton, Cyrus Talbot, and Samuel D. Peyton; but, if so, his looks belied him, for he smiled very much as if he found something gratifying in the situation.

Connorton was the first to recover from the shock.

“Then it’s a swindle!” he declared hotly. “We’ll get that fellow Hartley! He’s a crook! We’ll make him—”

“Oh, no,” interrupted Shackelford, quietly, “it’s no swindle. According to your own story, you prepared the paper yourself and paid him for his signature to it.”

“We paid him twenty-five thousand dollars for his patent,” asserted Connorton.

“But you didn’t get the patent,” returned Shackelford. “He has assigned to you, for a consideration of twenty-five thousand dollars, all his rights, title, and interest in something or other; but the assignment doesn’t clearly show what. There are a thousand things that it might be, but nothing that it definitely and positively is. Very likely he doesn’t know this, but very likely somebody will tell him. Anyhow, you’ve got to get clear and unquestioned title before you can do anything with the patent without danger of unpleasant consequences.”

Deeper gloom settled upon the faces of the three, and especially upon the face of Connorton, who was primarily responsible for their present predicament.

“What would you advise?” asked Connorton at last.

“Well,” returned the lawyer, after a moment of thought, “you’d better find him. As near as I can make out, he had no thought of tricking you.”

“Oh, no, I don’t believe he had,” confessed Connorton. “I spoke hastily when I charged that. He’s too impractical for anything of the sort.”

“Much too impractical, I should say,” added Talbot, and Peyton nodded approval.

“In that case,” pursued the lawyer, “you can still clinch the deal easily and quickly—if you get to him first. I see nothing particularly disturbing in the situation, except the possibility that somebody who is practical may get hold of him before you do, or that he may learn in some other way of the value of his invention. Do you know where he is?”

“No,” answered Connorton. “That’s the trouble.”

“Not so troublesome as it might be,” returned the lawyer. “He is not trying to hide, if we are correct in our surmise, and his eccentricities of dress and deportment would attract attention to him anywhere. I have a young man here in the office who will get track of him in no time, if you have nothing better to suggest.”

They had nothing better to suggest, so Myron Paulson was called in, given a description of Ira Hartley, together with such information as to his associates and haunts as it was possible to give, and sent in quest of news of him.

“Meanwhile,” observed the lawyer, “I’ll prepare something for his signature, when we find him, that will have no loopholes in it.”

IRA HARTLEY, as the lawyer had said, was not a hard man to trace. He was tall and slim, wore a flaring bow tie, a wide-brimmed slouch hat, clothes that hung loosely upon his spare frame, and smoked cigarettes in a long reed holder. Add to that some eccentricities of speech and man[Pg 550]ner, and it will be readily apparent that he was not likely to be forgotten by those he encountered.

Paulson learned in brief time that he had gone to Detroit. No one knew for what purpose, whether he intended to remain there or go elsewhere, or, in fact, anything about it, except the bare fact that he had left for Detroit. Certain of his acquaintances understood that it was in connection with some great and long-cherished plan that was suddenly made financially possible; but they had no idea of the nature of the plan.

Paulson, of course, would follow at once, and Connorton regretfully decided to go with him. Connorton, being large and slow, fond of ease and of good things to eat, disliked to have the routine of his life disturbed; but he blamed himself for their very unpleasant predicament, and, aside from his own financial interest in the affair, he was desirous to do everything possible to protect his associates and secure to them the promised profit. Besides, he knew Hartley, and Paulson did not; so it might easily happen that his presence would be helpful, if not absolutely necessary, when the inventor should be overtaken.

The lawyer prepared the necessary papers, as far as he could with the information at hand; but he was not altogether satisfied. The inventor alone could supply some minor points that he would like to incorporate in them; so he suggested that they bring Hartley back, if possible.

“If you can’t do that,” he instructed, “get his signature, properly witnessed and acknowledged, to the assignment of patent, and let it go at that. I could clinch it a little tighter if I could have a talk with him, but it isn’t really necessary.”

“Suppose something should happen to him before we get it?” suggested Connorton.

“You’d lose the patent,” returned the lawyer, calmly. “Title to that still rests in him, and it would naturally go to his heirs if anything should happen to him before it is legally transferred to you.”

“Guardian to a lost lunatic!” grumbled Connorton. “A nice job!”

Still grumbling, he left with Paulson for Detroit. He had no idea of acting in any other than an advisory capacity during the search, of course. He was on hand to take charge of the negotiations at the proper time; but until that time should arrive he purposed remaining in some convenient hotel while Paulson did the scouting. Fortunately, owing to the inventor’s striking personality, Paulson’s task was not difficult.

“Gone to Toronto,” was the report he made to Connorton, a few hours after their arrival in Detroit. “Stopped at the Cadillac, but left there yesterday.”

“Sure it was Hartley?” queried Connorton.

“No doubt about it,” replied Paulson. “Everybody remembers him, for he hired a cab, put the cabby inside, and did the driving himself—said he wanted to see something of the town.”

“That was Hartley, all right,” Connorton admitted, dislodging himself regretfully from the comfortable lobby chair he was occupying, “and I suppose we’ll have to hustle along after him. I don’t see why he has to be so infernally restless, though.”

Again, at Toronto, Connorton had reason to complain of Hartley’s restlessness. His name was on the register of the King Edward Hotel when they arrived there; but he had lingered no longer than in Detroit, and they were still a day behind him.

“Sure it was our Hartley?” asked Connorton.

“No doubt about it,” Paulson replied. “He showed up here with a dunnage bag instead of a trunk, and they took him for an immigrant and were going to throw him out.”

“Must be our man,” agreed Connorton. “That’s just the kind of fool thing he’d do.”

“Made some trouble at the bar,” added Paulson, “by insisting that they should put the seltzer and lemon-peel in his highball glass first and add the whisky afterward—said it improved the flavor to have a highball made that way.”

“That’s Hartley,” asserted Connorton, positively. “Where did he go from here?”

“North Bay.”

“Where’s that?”

“About two hundred and fifty miles due north.”

Connorton became suddenly perturbed, not to say excited. “Great Scott!” he exclaimed,[Pg 551] “he’s heading for the wilderness!”

Connorton was sufficiently troubled now to forget temporarily his love of ease. He could imagine nothing that would take Hartley to that region except some crazy hunting or mining scheme, both of which had elements of danger. Wherefore they must follow quickly, no matter how unpleasant the outlook.

But Hartley was not at North Bay, and had not stopped there. That was easily settled, for it was not so large a place that a man of his personality could possibly escape observation.

“More uncertain than a flea!” grumbled Connorton. “Probably dropped off somewhere down the line.”

“Or went on up the line,” suggested Paulson. “Perhaps the ticket-man will know.”

The ticket-man did. They would have saved time if they had asked him in the first place instead of making their inquiries at the hotel.

“Sure I saw that sombrero-covered toothpick,” said the ticket-man. “He asked me if this was the open season for Indians and moose.”

“That’s Hartley,” sighed Connorton. “He’s as likely to shoot one as the other. What did he do then?”

“Bought a mackinaw that would dazzle your eyes and a ticket to Temagami and went on with the train—said the Indians were too tame for real sport here. I couldn’t see what he wanted of a mackinaw in summer, but he said he liked the color scheme.”

“What’s Temagami?” asked Connorton.

“Temagami Forest Reserve.”

“I knew it,” groaned Connorton. “Headed for the wilderness!”

IRA HARTLEY lay stretched in front of a camp-fire on the shore of Lake Wausauksinagami. It had been necessary to cover two portages and three lakes to reach this spot; but it certainly gave him the seclusion that he sought. No human habitation marred the shore-line of the lake, although another camp-fire, seen faintly between two of the many islands, showed that he was not in sole possession. The other camp, however, was several miles away, so he was quite alone, except for Joe Lightfoot, his Indian guide; and supreme content was reflected in face and pose.

True, he had not caught many fish, owing to his own inexpertness with rod and line rather than to any lack of fish to be caught; but this was a matter of indifference to him. He had promised himself this outing long before. He had no particular reason for wanting it, except that he had heard so much of the joys of life in the open that he had resolved to try it as soon as opportunity offered; but that was enough for one of his whimsically impulsive nature, and an increasing desire to try it had influenced him to some extent in closing with Connorton in the matter of his invention. He liked to be alone; and surely one could ask for nothing better in such circumstances than an Indian guide who spoke tersely when he spoke at all.

The Indian, having cleaned up after supper, squatted with his pipe a little distance from the fire. Back of him was the shelter-tent under which Hartley slept, and back of that lay the forest. On the other side of the fire, the lake shimmered in the moonlight and the water rippled soothingly on the shore. So restfully beautiful was the scene that it affected the spirits of both white man and red, and they smoked in silence for some time.

“Joe,” remarked Hartley at last, “this fosters a tranquillity that makes me think I’d like to live here all the time. I’ve never seen or felt anything just like it.”

A part of this comment was beyond Joe, but he caught the main idea. “Spoil quick,” he suggested.

“Yes, that’s true, too,” admitted Hartley. “The white man certainly does spoil nature wherever he settles. I suppose I’d build a cabin first, which wouldn’t be so bad; then I’d think I had to have a bungalow, which would be crowding things a little; next I’d want a two-story house and a steam-launch, and after that I’d put in a telephone and move back to the city. Yes, you’re right, Joe: no white man could settle here without spoiling it. But it just suits my humor now. If anybody comes to disturb us, Joe, do me the favor of throwing him into the lake.”

Joe, being a man of few words, merely grinned, but a moment later he held up his hand for silence.

“Canoe coming,” he announced.

[Pg 552]

“Nonsense!” returned Hartley, after vainly trying to catch some sound other than that of the rippling water and the rustling leaves.

“Canoe coming,” repeated Joe, positively.

A few minutes later even Hartley’s ears caught the swish of a paddle; and far out on the lake a black spot could be seen in the silvery path of the moonlight on the water.

“You’re right, Joe, as usual,” he conceded; “but,” he added whimsically, “don’t forget your duty—into the water he goes! I will not be disturbed!”

In brief time a canoe, containing three men and a larger stock of supplies than Connorton had thought it possible to get into so small a space, shot plainly into view. Connorton himself, anxious and uncomfortable, occupied a position on some boxes and bags amidships; Paulson was in the bow, and the guide, Jim Redfeather, was in the stern.

A shelving rock, which ended abruptly in deep water a few feet from shore, offered the best landing-place for a heavily laden canoe, and the Indian brought it alongside that point.

Hartley sauntered wearily down to meet his unexpected and unwelcome guests.

“My goodness, Hartley!” exclaimed Connorton, the moment he saw the inventor, “I’m glad we’ve found you at last! We’ve had a devil of a time doing it.”

“If it was so difficult,” murmured Hartley, “why didn’t you give it up?”

“Too important,” replied Connorton. “Help me out, and I’ll tell you about it. I’m pretty near done up.”

With some difficulty, the large man was transferred from the canoe to the rock, and, to one who knew him in the city, he was certainly an extraordinary spectacle. He was dirty, disheveled, and badly sunburned, having acquired dirt on the portages and blisters on the water. Moreover, the khaki suit that he wore was too small, the derby hat seemed sadly out of place, and his position in the canoe had so cramped him that he walked like a cripple.

“Had to sleep under the stars last night,” he complained, after introducing Paulson. “Thought we’d locate you the first day, but you’d gone farther than we expected. Never had such an experience! But that fire looks good to me,” he added. “Let’s get next to it and come down to business.”

Hartley laid a detaining hand on his arm. “I’m not in the humor for business to-night,” he objected. “Let us look out over the moonlit lake—”

“Damn the lake!” exploded Connorton. “I’ve had enough of it. Let’s get down to business. It will take but a few minutes to explain—”

“To-morrow,” insisted Hartley. “I may be in the humor for business to-morrow; but to-night I must insist—”

Now, whether Joe had taken Hartley’s whimsical instructions to “throw him into the lake” seriously or not never will be known, for the Indian is not loquacious; but it is a fact that, assisting in unloading the canoe, he bumped into Connorton at this moment, and Connorton, being close to the outer edge of the shelving rock, went backward into the water with a loud splash.

He came up spluttering and floundering like an animated bag of meal, and Hartley and Paulson quickly pulled him back on the rock. Then they rushed him to the fire.

“Got a change of clothing, Mr. Connorton?” asked Hartley, solicitously.

“Change of clothing!” sputtered Connorton. “Change of clothing here! Why don’t you ask me if I’ve got a dress suit?”

“Too bad!” commented Hartley. “I haven’t anything extra either, and it wouldn’t fit you if I had. But you’ll be all right in a blanket, I guess. Just get those wet clothes off now.”

Connorton objected. His undraped figure was something to cause laughter rather than command respect, and he had no desire to make any more of a spectacle of himself than he was already. But Hartley was insistent, Paulson urged, and the combination of wet clothing and chill night air made him shiver. So he presently found himself posing under protest as a large and rather flabby cherub.

It was not dignified. Even when Hartley draped a blanket over him, it was not dignified. He was quite sure the apparently stolid Indians were chuckling inwardly, and he distinctly heard Joe refer to him as Big Splash. If he had only[Pg 553] known it, Joe had thus christened him and always thereafter thus referred to him. He did not know it, but, even so, it would have delighted his soul to take an ax to Joe. Never before had he had so murderous an impulse.

There could now be no serious discussion of business before morning, of course. A large, fleshy man, attired in nothing but a blanket, is not exactly in a situation to talk business to advantage. He is too much of a joke. Hartley frankly treated him as a joke, although Paulson was respectful and sympathetic.

“I am sure,” said Hartley, “that you will feel better to-morrow for your bath to-night. Just stick your little pink tootsies up to the fire—”

“Shut up!” exploded Connorton.

“Oh, that’s no way to talk to your host,” complained Hartley. “It has a tendency to make a man peevish; and you don’t want me to be peevish, do you?”

Connorton did not; and he realized that it would be the part of wisdom to hold his temper in check. “I beg your pardon, Hartley,” he said. “It’s not your fault, of course, but I’ve endured such unspeakable horrors during the last few days that my nerves are all on edge.”

“That’s better,” commended Hartley. “You shall have a nice highball for that; and then we’ll tuck you in your little bed and sing you to sleep.”

BIG SPLASH, as Joe called him, was awakened in the morning by the sound of a big splash, and he shuddered. It made him think of the great splash of the night before. Looking out from under the canvas, however, he discovered that this splash was made by Hartley, who was enjoying an early swim.

Connorton’s clothes, still damp, hung from the branch of a tree near at hand, but he did not wait to put them on. He recalled the fact that he had a very deep and special interest in the life of Hartley, and Hartley was recklessly splashing about beyond the end of the shelving rock, where the water was deep. Wherefore, wrapping his blanket about him, Connorton hurried down to the rock and pleaded with the inventor to come out.

“What for?” asked Hartley.

“You might drown,” replied Connorton. “I can’t swim, so I couldn’t help you.”

“Bosh!” returned Hartley. “This is fine! Better come in yourself and get freshened up for the day.”

But Connorton would not, and neither would he abandon his station on the rock, even to dress, until Hartley came out. He could at least summon the guides to the rescue if the foolhardy man should be in danger. So he stood there, looking more like a distressed Indian squaw than a white man, until Hartley left the water.

“He needs me,” reflected Hartley; “he needs me very, very much! Else why this anxiety for my safety? And,” he added whimsically, “I can see much sport ahead, whatever his purpose may be.”

Connorton did not lose much time in throwing light—at least some light—upon this purpose.

“I want you to go back with me at once—to-day,” he said, when they were at breakfast.

“Oh, you want me to go back with you,” repeated Hartley. “Why?”

“Well, there’s a little something wrong with the assignment of patent,” explained Connorton, “and I want to get it fixed up.”

“Couldn’t that wait until I returned?” asked Hartley.

“Why, yes, it could,” admitted Connorton, “but there was a risk. If anything happened to you, you know, it might be serious.”

“Yes,” agreed Hartley, “it would be serious.”

“To us, I mean,” explained Connorton.

“Oh, to you!” commented Hartley. “Why not to me?”

“Why, it would naturally be serious to you, of course,” returned Connorton; “but that’s your own lookout.”

“True, quite true,” rejoined Hartley. “But this is business, you know,” he added, “and I never discuss business in the morning. It makes me nervous.”

“Oh, thunder!” expostulated Connorton.

“Really quite nervous, I assure you,” insisted Hartley. “I’m hardly responsible for what I do when I’m annoyed that way.”

“Now, look here,” urged Connorton in desperation,[Pg 554] “I want to go back now—just as soon as we can get ready—and I’ll give you five hundred to go with me.”

“But this is morning,” objected Hartley, “and I never discuss business in the morning.”

“A thousand,” added Connorton.

“Makes me nervous—quite irresponsible,” murmured Hartley, rising.

Very deliberately he walked down to the shelving rock, across it, and stepped, clothes and all, into ten feet of water.

“Help! Help!” screamed Connorton, rushing to the rock. “Save him!”

The two guides and Paulson came down and tried to pull the inventor out, but he objected.

“Take him away!” he gurgled, as his head bobbed up out of the water and almost immediately disappeared again.

“Save him! Save him!” cried Connorton, frantically jumping up and down on the rock.

“Big Splash make crazy man!” commented Joe.

“Better this than him!” gurgled Hartley, again coming up. “Take him away!”

Joe unemotionally prodded Connorton in the stomach, whereupon that gentleman grunted, doubled over, and backed away. Joe prodded him again and again, thus driving him back to the tent. Then Hartley permitted himself to be pulled out of the water; but it was some time before he would let Connorton come near him.

“You see what you’ve done!” he said reproachfully, when he finally did consent to resume intercourse with his visitor. “I warned you, too. Now we can’t talk business before to-morrow.”

“Oh, come!” expostulated Connorton.

“Not until to-morrow,” insisted Hartley. “You’ve got me all upset for to-day.”

Connorton hesitated; but he was desperate now, so at last he drew from his pocket the assignment of patent, somewhat blurred by contact with the water. Even if the notarial seal were lacking, it would make things a little safer if he could get that signed.

“Just put your name to that,” he urged, “and I won’t say another word about business until to-morrow.”

Hartley’s only reply was to start again for the lake.

“Come back! Come back!” cried Connorton. “I won’t mention business again to-day.”

Hartley returned and stretched himself out in the sun to let his clothes dry.

“We’ll stay in camp to-day?” suggested Connorton, hopefully.

“Wouldn’t do at all!” replied Hartley. “We must fish, if only as an excuse for coming.”

Pursuant to this idea, Hartley presently set out with Joe. Connorton, after a little hesitation, followed with the other guide, leaving Paulson in camp. Connorton felt that he could not rest easy unless he had this reckless man directly under his observation all the time; and the reckless man was not unmindful of this espionage.

“Joe,” said the reckless man, when he saw that Connorton was following, “we won’t do much fishing to-day, but we’ll have some sport, just the same. The fish are here all the time, but Connorton isn’t. And Connorton, Joe, is afraid something is going to happen to me. That being the case, let us enjoy ourselves! Let us lead him afar on land and sea, and tramp him over portages, and make him miss his dinner, and give him a real good time generally. Of course, Joe, it is downright cruel to make a man like Connorton miss a meal, but let us be downright cruel! Proceed, Joe!”

Joe proceeded, and that he acted up to his instructions was proved by the many and bitter things that Connorton said about “that crazy inventor” in the course of the day—the hardest day of his life, he afterward asserted.

But Hartley was not satisfied. “I think, Joe,” he complained, as they were returning to camp in the late afternoon, “that this is beginning to pall a little on Big Splash. Too much work and too little excitement. He needs a thrill, Joe, to revive his interest in the proceedings. Let us give him the thrill. Let us alarm him. Let us make him think that he is going to lose little Willie, the human prize! I have several thrills in mind, Joe, but let us begin mildly. Will you oblige me by rocking the boat, so to speak. Not too much, you know, for I have no wish to go into the drink again, and that’s what would probably happen if I tried to do it myself.”

Joe replied with a grunt, as usual; but presently the canoe began to take a most erratic course and to betray alarming[Pg 555] symptoms of crankiness. The Indian seemed to be doing his utmost to steady it, and several times prevented an upset by throwing his weight in just the right direction; but the more he strove the worse it rocked.

Connorton was frantic. He lost his head completely as he saw the apparent danger of Hartley, and screamed and shouted and swore as his own guide paddled up, to be on hand in case they capsized.

“Make him go splash once more?” suggested Joe, as the other canoe came near.

“No,” returned Hartley, magnanimously. “He has had his bath, and we will not be so cruel as to insist upon another just now.”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” screamed Connorton. He had already suffered so much that he felt that he could watch Hartley drown with actual joy; but he could not lose half a million dollars in that spirit.

“Yes, stop it, Joe,” instructed Hartley. “It is time to give him another diversion. Don’t you suppose we could get lost, Joe? He is a rather stout person, and he impresses me as a man who needs exercise. I think he rides in an automobile too much when at home. A nice, long walk through the forest, where it is not too easy going, would do him a world of good; and it might take his mind off business matters if we happened to get lost. Try it, Joe. He’ll follow, for he’s fearful that something may happen to little Willie.”

The Indian made for a portage, and, arriving there, left the canoe on the shore and plunged into the forest.

Connorton and his guide followed, of course. Connorton had great difficulty in following, for a stout man with flabby muscles is at a disadvantage in the forest; but he followed. A man will follow half a million dollars a long, long way and over all sorts of obstructions. And there was plenty to tax temper, muscle, and wind. Joe saw to that. Joe was glad to see to it; he would willingly have seen to it without pay, and might even have paid for the privilege of seeing to it, if that were necessary.

“Better get lost now, Joe,” Hartley finally suggested.

Joe immediately began to show signs of bewilderment. He stopped and looked about him anxiously. He started in one direction, retraced his steps, and tried another. He came back a second time and made another new start.

Connorton’s guide, Jim, interpreted this correctly without half trying. He knew that he was not lost, that he could not possibly be lost in that locality, but that he was going through all the motions of being lost. There was, therefore, some reason for it. Jim may or may not have guessed the reason, but he played up to Joe’s lead.

“What’s the matter?” asked Connorton, anxiously, as he noticed these strange actions.

“Him lost,” replied Jim.

“Lost!” exclaimed Connorton. “A guide lost! Well, that’s a good joke! How about you?”

“Me lost too,” replied the Indian, imperturbably. “Sit down and let Joe find way out.” And he seated himself placidly on a log.

“You lost, too!” cried Connorton in consternation. “Good Lord! Lost in an impenetrable forest, with two fool Indians and a crazy man! Oh, if I ever get out of here alive there isn’t money enough in the world to bring me back! Here!” he thundered at the placid Jim, “what you loafing there for? Get up and help Joe find a way out! Hustle, too! I’ll bet we starve to death,” he added gloomily to himself. “I’m starving already.”

Late that evening two stolid Indian guides and two very weary white men got back to the camp, where Paulson was anxiously waiting for them. One of the white men, although weary, seemed to be quite happy, even going so far as to release an occasional chuckle. The other was exhausted almost to the point of collapse, and nothing but groans were heard from him.

“Do you know, Connorton,” remarked the first white man, as they left their respective canoes and walked slowly toward the camp-fire, “I don’t believe you think any more of money than I do of my life—really, I don’t.”

Connorton had not the spirit to reply.

SUPPER, although lacking the viands that would have appealed to Connorton in more favorable circumstances, tasted un[Pg 556]usually good to him that evening; and he was disposed to give thanks that he was still alive rather than complain of what he had suffered. But he had acquired a great fear of Hartley’s impulsive vagaries.

“May I speak briefly of business?” he asked, as they sat by the fire.

“To-morrow,” returned Hartley.

“If you would permit me,” urged Connorton, “I think I could make the matter clear to you in a very few minutes.”

“It is really quite important, Mr. Hartley,” put in Paulson, “and I would suggest that you let Mr. Connorton explain.”

The inventor frowned, and looked down at the shelving rock.

“No, no,” expostulated Connorton, hastily; “don’t do that again, Hartley! Keep away from the lake! I won’t say a word without your permission.”

“Oh, very well,” agreed Hartley. “I’ve been pretty badly upset to-day. You have annoyed me persistently—ruffled my artistic temperament. Indeed, I have been strongly tempted, Mr. Connorton, to let Joe take you out and drown you, as he wished to do. Joe doesn’t like to be disturbed any more than I do; and it is so easy for a man to be accidentally drowned up here, especially a man who can’t swim.”

Connorton’s eyes reflected a sudden great fear, and his face became white.

“However,” pursued Hartley, calmly, “you don’t know any better, so I shall try to forgive you. I shall even permit you to speak briefly—very briefly—of business, for we might as well get that out of the way, I suppose. But don’t let Joe hear you.”

Connorton assured himself that Joe was beyond earshot, and then produced the assignment of patent. “It’s a trifle,” he explained, “a mere formality.”

“Ah, yes,” returned Hartley; “you followed me into the wilderness for a trifle.”

“Well, it’s rather important, of course,” admitted Connorton.

“An important trifle!” commented Hartley, whereat Connorton became somewhat flustered.

“If you will permit me,” put in Paulson, coming to his principal’s relief, “I think I can make the whole thing clear in a few words.”

“Go ahead!” said Hartley; “but be careful. Joe has his eye on you, too.”

Paulson was not so disturbed as Connorton had been; but his smile was not that of a man who was wholly at his ease.

“The assignment that you gave Mr. Connorton,” he explained, “is not valid; that is, it does not clearly and certainly transfer the rights that both you and he thought it did. Now, all he wants is to have those rights definitely and surely transferred to him, and he has brought along a paper for you to sign that will make the purpose clear. It should be acknowledged before a notary, but it will put the matter in a little better shape if you sign it anyhow. Then we can have an entirely new assignment properly executed when we get back.”

“That’s the whole story, is it?” queried Hartley, reaching for the paper.

“Yes.”

“It merely clinches a sale already made,” urged Paulson.

Hartley took a fountain-pen from his pocket, uncapped it, shook it to get it flowing freely, and then laid it down.

“Isn’t that moonlight beautiful?” he asked.

“Yes, yes,” returned Connorton, impatiently, “it’s fine, very fine, indeed.” He waited then for Hartley’s wandering attention to return to the pen and paper; but Hartley continued to gaze dreamily over the lake until Connorton, in desperation, finally reminded him that they were neglecting the business in hand.

“Of course,” admitted Hartley. “Business and moonlight don’t mix, and the moonlight effect, Connorton, is never twice alike. I suppose you never noticed that, but it’s so. A moonlight effect once gone is lost forever, whereas it’s my experience that you can’t lose business at all. It is for us, therefore, to make the most of moonlight.”

“Look here!” exclaimed the exasperated Connorton. “Cut out this foolishness, and I’ll make the bonus two thousand.”

“Foolishness?” repeated Hartley.

“Yes, foolishness,” insisted Connorton.

“How absurd and unreasonable you are!” complained Hartley.[Pg 557] “Why, you’re the one that’s foolish—bringing business up here into the woods where a man ought never even to think of it. I’m strictly in harmony with the surroundings—dreamy, impractical, erratic—but you are not. You’re a prosaic mortal, Connorton, and you’re very, very foolish to be here.”

Connorton was surprised and troubled.

“However,” resumed Hartley, again picking up the pen, “I believe you said two thousand.”

“I did,” returned Connorton, encouraged. “I’ll add two thousand to what I’ve already paid you for your patent if you’ll sign that paper now, and go back with me to-morrow and put the whole matter in legal and binding shape.”

“Two thousand!” mused Hartley, idly toying with the pen. “That’s a good deal of money, Connorton.”

“It is,” agreed Connorton, hopeful but anxious.

“It is so much,” said Hartley, capping the pen and putting it away, “that I don’t believe I’ll sign.”

“What!” cried Connorton, in dismay.

“Let’s enjoy the moonlight!” suggested Hartley.

“But—but—”

“If you exasperate me, Connorton,” threatened Hartley, “I shall do something desperate!”

Connorton, discouraged, decided to let him alone until morning, when he would make one last attempt to induce him to listen to reason. He turned in with that idea in mind, dreamed of it, and had it still in mind when he was roughly awakened at daylight.

“Get up!” ordered Hartley. “We’ll be starting in half an hour.”

“Starting!” exclaimed Connorton. “Where to?”

“Temagami—Toronto—home. Hustle, now!”

CONNORTON found the situation extremely bewildering. So did Paulson. They had understood Hartley to have rejected emphatically their proposition the night before; and now that incomprehensible person was doing precisely what they most wanted him to do.

For some time neither dared ask any questions, lest the least suggestion of surprise should lead him to change his mind: but curiosity finally overcame Connorton’s caution.

“What’s the reason for this?” he queried.

“For what?” returned Hartley.

“This change of plan.”

“There’s been no change of plan,” asserted Hartley. “I refused to sign the paper you showed me, but I didn’t say I wouldn’t go back with you. Might as well go back as to have you bothering around up here anyway. You’re too great a responsibility, Connorton; I feel that I must get you out of Joe’s reach. Any other proposition to make this morning?”

“No-o,” replied Connorton, doubtfully, “I think not.”

“Oh, very well,” acquiesced Hartley, cheerfully. “I guess I’ll let you go with Joe to-day.”

“No, no, no!” objected Connorton, in alarm; “I won’t go with that bloodthirsty savage.”

“Oh, he won’t hurt you,” urged Hartley, reassuringly; “I’ve told him he mustn’t.”

“I won’t go with him,” insisted Connorton. “He tried to murder me the first night I was here.”

“Oh, very well,” agreed Hartley, resignedly. “I’ll take Joe’s canoe and paddle you myself.”

Let me draw a veil over the return trip to Temagami Inn, lifting the edge of it slightly to give a general idea of what happened.

Connorton, with many misgivings, set out in Joe’s canoe with Hartley, simply because he was afraid to raise a second objection to any arrangement that whimsical gentleman might make.

Hartley knew no more about managing a canoe than he did about managing an aëroplane, and the best that he could do was to propel it in erratic circles, occasionally placing himself, his freight, and his passenger in jeopardy when he shifted his paddle from one side to the other. Connorton was helpless because he was compelled to assume a reclining position on top of the camp equipment, and he was angered because the Indians so far departed from their usual imperturbability as to respond to his screams for help with grins and grunts that plainly indicated amusement. Afraid to sit up, and expecting every minute to be rolled into the water, he could only plead with Hartley to return to shore, which Hartley was quite unable to do, and with the Indians to come and get them, which the Indians finally did.

[Pg 558]

A fresh start was then made, Paulson being put in the canoe with Joe, and Hartley and Connorton going with Jim, the other guide. Paulson was not altogether pleased with this arrangement; but he presently discovered that he was far better off than Connorton. For Hartley developed the most astonishing vagaries and a clumsiness that was equal to that of a bear cub. Three times during that memorable trip he tipped Connorton into the water. That he also went in did not help matters in any particular, so far as Connorton was concerned, for that close-figuring business man had but slightly less interest in the inventor’s life than he had in his own.

Moreover, on the portages Hartley loaded Connorton up with pots and pans until he resembled an itinerant tinsmith, and on one occasion he tripped him up—quite accidentally, of course—at the highest point of the divide between two lakes, and then added insult to injury by apologizing profusely as he jangled down the incline. He wandered away at noon, when they stopped for lunch, and it was only after an hour’s search that he was found in deep thought in a deep thicket. He was devising a harness, he said, that would enable a man to carry a larger camp equipment than was now possible; and he insisted upon harnessing Connorton up with a rope by way of experiment.

But Temagami Inn was reached at last. Connorton never was so utterly weary in his life. The physical strain of that day had been considerable, but the mental strain had been far greater. He had several times thought his chance of life slim and his chance for that half-million even slimmer. But Temagami Inn revived his hopes. Much of the camp impedimenta with which they had set out had been lost during the thrilling adventures of that day, but their “civilized clothes,” as Hartley designated them, had been left at Temagami Inn. So Connorton, feeling properly dressed once more, regained much of his confidence and composure.

Hartley, too, was more quiescent now. In fact, he seemed rather depressed by the return to conventional surroundings, and answered only in monosyllables when any one spoke to him. Just before retiring, however, he drew Connorton to one side.

“Any new proposition to make this evening, Connorton?” he asked.

“No-o, I think not,” replied Connorton, feeling that the game was more nearly in his own hands now than at any time since he had set forth in pursuit of the inventor.

“Oh, very well,” returned Hartley, who then went immediately to his room.

Connorton was a bit uneasy, fearing that some new vagary might send Hartley away in the night; but he joined them at breakfast in the morning. Moreover, he still seemed unaccountably depressed and spiritless. He was as tractable now as he had been intractable before, acquiescing indifferently in all suggestions made. On the steamer he sat gloomily apart from the others; at Temagami Station he let Paulson make all the arrangements.

“Tamed at last,” reflected Connorton; “but he’ll bear watching, just the same.”

Still, only twice on the way to Toronto did he occasion his companions any uneasiness. Once was at North Bay, where he betrayed a desire to take the through train west—said he would rather like to see what Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver looked like. However, Connorton and Paulson, each clinging affectionately to an arm, managed to get him back into the car.

The other time was when, just as they were leaving a station, they suddenly discovered that he was missing. Connorton was for pulling the bell-cord and stopping the train; but Paulson feared that might get them into trouble and advised an appeal to the conductor first.

“That elongated bottle of gloom!” exclaimed the conductor. “Why, he swung upon the engine just as we were leaving the last station. I’m thinking of having him arrested at the next stop.”

That would not do, of course. They did not want him on the engine, which they regarded as a dangerous place, but neither did they want him arrested. Connorton squared it with the conductor, explaining that the man was slightly demented, and promising to get him back in the coach and tie him down at the first opportunity. Then, at the next stop, he argued and pleaded with Hartley, but only when the conductor and engineer both ordered him back into the coach did that erratic gentleman consent to return to it.[Pg 559] He was resentful then, said everybody was in a conspiracy to make his life miserable, and it was some time before he would even speak to Connorton. But he caused them no further trouble during the trip.

Drawn by F. R. Gruger

“A MAN WILL FOLLOW HALF A MILLION DOLLARS A LONG, LONG WAY, AND OVER ALL SORTS OF OBSTRUCTIONS”

At Toronto, however, he began again to take some interest in life and insisted upon staying there a day, saying that he couldn’t stand so much continuous traveling. On their first morning there, he again asked Connorton whether he had any new proposition to make.

“No-o, I think not,” replied Connorton; “but, as you have brought up the subject, I would suggest that we might go ahead along the line already proposed. We can get a notary here, and if you will execute the assignment of patent, just as a precaution—”

Hartley, saying nothing, got up and in a very businesslike way walked out of the lobby, where this conversation had taken place.

“Follow him!” urged Connorton, turning to Paulson. “You’re more active than I am. Follow the fool, and see what he does.”

Paulson followed, and Connorton spent an unhappy two hours awaiting his return. The vagaries of the inventor, apparently, were again dominating his actions, and no one could tell what crazy thing he might do.

He was the more troubled when Paulson returned alone. His report was at first mystifying, then startling, and finally perplexing.

“He hunted up a cooper and bought a barrel,” said Paulson.

“A barrel!” repeated Connorton.

“A large barrel,” asserted Paulson.

“Crazy as a loon!” declared Connorton.

“I should think so!” returned Paulson. “He ordered the barrel shipped to Niagara Falls.”

Connorton, large and lethargic as he was, almost jumped out of his chair.[Pg 560] “Head him off! Head him off!” he cried. “Stop him! He’s going over the falls in a barrel. I knew he’d be up to some crazy thing.”

“Oh, he’s safe enough just now,” said Paulson.

“Where?” asked Connorton.

“At police headquarters.”

Connorton breathed more freely.

“He talked so wildly about what he was going to do,” pursued Paulson, “that the cooper notified the police.”

“Good thing!” commented Connorton.

“He’s to be examined as to his sanity,” added Paulson.

“He ought to be,” asserted Connorton.

“But if he is pronounced insane,” said Paulson, significantly, “he can’t transfer any property rights.”

“Great Scott!” exclaimed Connorton, again almost jumping out of his chair; “we’ve got to get him out, haven’t we?”

“We have,” replied Paulson.

“And if we get him out,” complained Connorton, dismally, “he’ll go over the falls in a barrel.”

CONNORTON and Paulson had no difficulty in securing permission to talk with Hartley, and they approached with considerable confidence the cell in which he was detained. It had occurred to them, upon reflection, that they were now in a most advantageous position in the matter of their business relations with the inventor. He was friendless in a strange city. He was believed to be of unsound mind, and his actions had been erratic enough to give color to that belief. He could hardly hope to secure his release without their help, and, if so, they could impose their own terms before extending that help.

To their surprise, they found him quite cheerful and apparently indifferent or blind to the seriousness of his predicament.

Drawn by F. R. Gruger

“HE COULD ONLY PLEAD WITH HARTLEY TO RETURN TO SHORE”

“Hullo, Connorton!” he cried, when he saw them approaching. “Any other proposition to make now?”

“Why, no, certainly not,” replied Connorton. “We came to see about you.”

“Awfully good of you,” laughed Hartley. “How you do love me, Connorton!”

Connorton’s face reddened, but he ignored the thrust. “You’ve got yourself in a nice fix, Hartley,” he remarked.

“Oh, it’s of no consequence,” returned Hartley.

“Of no consequence!” exclaimed Connorton.

“Not to me,” asserted Hartley. “It may be to you, of course.”

The impractical man appeared to be[Pg 561] able to take a very practical view of some matters, and Connorton was the more perturbed and uneasy in consequence.

“They say you’re crazy,” suggested Connorton.

“And I guess they can prove it, too,” rejoined Hartley, cheerfully.[Pg 562] “You’ve said the same thing yourself, and I know you wouldn’t lie about a mere trifle like that. Then the conductor, the engineer, and the fireman of the train we came down on will swear to it, and so will the bartender I had words with over my highball on the up trip, not to mention the cooper, the hotel clerk, a few bell-boys, and the policeman who arrested me. Yes, I guess I’m crazy, Connorton. Too bad, isn’t it?”

Drawn by F. R. Gruger

“APOLOGIZING PROFUSELY AS HE JANGLED DOWN THE INCLINE”

“It’s likely to be bad for you,” said Connorton.

“Oh, no,” returned Hartley, easily. “I’m not violent, you know, just mentally defective; unable to transact business, as you might say. They’ll find that out and let me go; but there will be the taint, the suspicion, the doubt. Very likely a conservator will be appointed when I get back home—some shrewd, sharp fellow, with a practical mind.”

Such a very impractical man was the inventor, and so very troublesome in his impracticality! Connorton could only begin at the beginning again, and go slow.

“Suppose we get you out,” he ventured, “what would you be willing to do?”

“What would you be willing to do?” retorted Hartley.

“What do you mean by that?” demanded Connorton.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” replied Hartley, with an air of the utmost frankness. “I seldom mean anything, of course, and it is such a lot of trouble to find out what I do mean when I mean anything that I usually give it up. But you are so deeply interested in me—so much more interested in me than I am in myself—that I thought you might want to keep me sane; that you might not like to feel that you had driven me crazy.”

Paulson was about to interrupt, but Connorton motioned to him to be silent. Connorton was in the habit of handling his own business matters, and he wanted his lawyer to speak only when a legal proposition was put directly up to him. It may be admitted that he was sorely perplexed now; but he found nothing in the inventor’s face but a bland smile, and he did not think Paulson could help him to interpret that.

“Hartley,” he said at last, “I’ll get you out of here and add five thousand to what you’ve already had the moment that patent is properly transferred to me.”

“Connorton,” returned the inventor, “I believe I’m crazy. When I think of the events of the last few days—of your more than brotherly interest in me, which I have pleasurably exploited during our delightful association—I believe I am crazy enough to say, Come again!”

Connorton drew a long breath and conceded another point. “Hartley,” he proposed, “you may keep the money I have already given you—”

“Thank you,” said Hartley; “I shall.”

“—and you may also have a quarter interest in the patent,” concluded Connorton.

“It’s all mine now,” suggested Hartley.

“If so,” argued Connorton, who well knew that much of the money had been spent, “you owe me twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“If so,” returned Hartley, the impractical man, “I infer from your anxiety and extraordinary generosity that I can sell it for enough to pay you and make a little margin for myself. Besides, you can’t collect from a crazy man, Connorton; and I’m getting crazier every minute. Business always goes to my head, Connorton. You must have noticed that up in the woods. I’m really becoming alarmed about myself. But perhaps you’d rather do business with a conservator, Connorton.”

“A half interest,” urged Connorton, desperately, as he mentally reviewed the weakness of his own position in view of the unsuspected perspicacity of the inventor. “Consider that I have paid you twenty-five thousand dollars for a half interest, and the other half is yours. I’ll defray whatever expense is incurred in marketing the invention, too.”

Hartley reflected, seeming in doubt. “Connorton,” he said at last, “I think I am still getting the worst of it somewhere, but an impractical fellow like me deserves to get the worst of it. Go ahead! Have that agreement put in legal form, and then you may get me out while there is yet time to save my reason.”

CONNORTON had finished his appeal for the release of Hartley.

“Of course,” he was told, “if you and Mr. Paulson will assume the responsibility, and will immediately take him away, we shall be glad to let you have him; but he is undoubtedly demented.”

“Demented!” snorted Connorton. “Say! you try to do business with him, and you’ll think he’s the sanest man that ever lived!”

[Pg 563]

THE MARVELOUS MUNCHAUSEN

BY WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT

WITH PICTURES BY OLIVER HERFORD

THE snug little room with its brazier fire aglow,

And Piet and Sachs and Vroom—all in the long ago,

Oh, the very long ago!—o’er their pipes and hollands seen;

And on the wall the man-o’-war, and firelight on the screen!

Their flowered, bulging waistcoats that wrinkle when they chuckle;

The baron, much-mustachioed, and gay with star and buckle,

And bristling in a uniform as scarlet as his cheeks,

With choker lace beneath his chin, and splendid, yellow breeks!

The smoke drifts blue, and bluer through that window, all abreeze,

Are glinting sky and glistening sea beyond the Holland quays.

Blue tiles, red bricks, the bustling wharves, with color’s oriflamme;

Starched caps and rosy-posy cheeks—the girls of Amsterdam!

The snug little room with its brazier fire aglow!

Oh, listen, will he tell them, as he told them long ago,—

Oh, very long ago, a-laughing in his sleeve!—

The marvelous Munchausen, with the fables I believe?

••••••••••••

[Pg 564]

“When I had sown the Turkey beans that reachéd to the moon,

And lifted all Westminster in the sling from my balloon

(Swung over the Atlantic,

They peered from windows, frantic),

When, eagle-back, I’d scanned the pole in broad, eternal noon,

“In Queen Mab’s chariot I ventured on the sea.

’T was like a mammoth hazelnut, with matchless orrery

A-sparkle on its ceiling,

With planet systems wheeling

And giddy comets sizzling all about the head o’ me.

“The nine bulls drew it, as stout as those of Crete,

And all were shod with horrid skulls that clattered on their feet.

Rich banners waved behind ’em,

While on their backs, to mind ’em,

Postilion crickets chirruped them, all chirping loud and sweet.

“Ghost of the Cape I warn you of, for he is bottle-blue.

We split his Table Mountain. He gibbered and he flew.

The bulls straight showed disfeature

With gazing on the creature,

Stampeding in their harness when I gave the view-halloo.

[Pg 565]

“Though wrecked on Egypt’s obelisks, disaster I defied,

And harnessed Sphinx, the emperor’s gift, to tow an ark as wide

As great Westminster;

With beau and bell and spinster,

And cleric, clerk, and coronet all tête-à-tête inside.

“‘Good folk, we sail for Africa,’ said I to all my train.

‘When bold Munchausen leads you forth, what laggard dares remain

In slippered ease, uncaring

To share my deeds of daring?’

Their cheers amazed my modesty, and more had made me vain.

“‘The sultan’s bees I’ve shepherded. I’ve hornpiped at Marseilles,

Where gulped me down, well nigh to drown, the liveliest of whales.

I’m riskiest of riskers,

But, blow my grizzled whiskers!’

I cried, ‘May jackals gnaw my bones if now Munchausen fails!’

“By night the lions roared at us. By day the simoons came

And swept across our caravan in sandy clouds of flame;

But naught dismayed our temper, or

The genial Afric emperor

Had missed my handsome greeting, to his long-abiding shame.

[Pg 566]

“The people of the Mountains of the Moon I wined and dined.

I reigned at Gristariska when His Majesty declined.

Reforms I wrought untiring,

With Gog and Magog squiring,

And Frosticos, my bosom friend, who lent a legal mind.

“For last superb achievement,—bright tears may Envy shed!—

I built a bridge, from Africa to distant England spread.

No edifice of fable,

Nay, not the Tower of Babel,

Surpassed its mammoth glory in the heavens overhead.

“So back across its noble arch my retinue and I

Advanced with blaring trumpets through the regions of the sky.

Clouds lingered to enwreathe us,

Earth’s kingdoms far beneath us,

And martial music cheered our march from all the birds that fly.”

••••••••••••

The snug little room with its brazier fire aglow,

And Piet and Sachs and Vroom all sleeping long ago,—

Oh, so very long ago!—and, chuckling in his sleeve,

Still, o’er the slumbering table,

Drone-droning on his fable,

The marvelous Munchausen, with the stories I believe!

[Pg 567]

BRITISH UNCOMMUNICATIVENESS

BY A. C. BENSON

Author of “From a College Window,” “The Upton Letters,” etc.

I ATTENDED a public dinner the other day in London, and sat between two really quite eminent men. One of them, indeed, would be regarded as being in quite the front rank of eminent Englishmen. I took my place with a mixture of interest and decorous trepidation, and naturally waited for one of the two to open conversation. But neither of them showed any signs of wishing to address either myself or the adjacent guests on each side; they sipped their soup, they toyed with their sherry, they looked about them with an air of mingled curiosity and benevolence. I thereupon selected the least formidable of the two and began to talk. He listened to me indulgently, as one might listen to the prattle of a child; he answered direct questions with a half-amused air; when I had said all I could think of on the subject, the matter dropped. My neighbor made no further observations on that or any other head. He was perfectly courteous and amiable, but it did not occur to him that it was his business to talk. I thereupon conducted a boarding expedition upon the still more eminent man’s vessel, which bristled, so to speak, with guns. I met with exactly the same fate. He heard me with courtesy, and he replied without any show of animation. But I was more fortunate here; it emerged in the course of the talk that he was a collector of books, and he gave me an account of a recent purchase which he had made of a famous and rare book under rather curious circumstances. I tried to advance a little further upon this line; but he was not to be drawn, and so that conversation also dropped. I believe that both my neighbors would have sat quite contentedly in silence during the whole of dinner; but it happened that the guest who was sitting on the farther side of the great man opened fire on a political question in which our hero had taken a prominent part, accompanying his question with deferential compliments which I should have thought would have been distasteful, and which certainly seemed to me to partake of the nature of palpable flattery. To my surprise, the great man beamed all over, and rose to the fly with a swirl. Not to be outdone, I went back to the lesser notability on my right with an effusive compliment, which I can only say I myself would have found highly embarrassing. The ruse succeeded, and my neighbor began to expatiate on the point with every appearance of genuine interest.

I thought the experience rather a painful one. No doubt both my neighbors were men full to the brim of important concerns, they were possibly tired by their work; but it seemed to me to be a violation of all the elementary laws of social intercourse that they should come to a public dinner without any intention of making themselves agreeable to their humbler neighbors, and casting upon their fellow-guests the onus of entertaining and amusing them if they could. What was still worse to my mind was to find that they were accessible to patent adulation, and that their geniality could be elicited by flattery which was not even adroit.

I think there is a strong tendency among Englishmen not to realize their social duties in this respect. An Englishman is inclined to mistrust and dislike ornamental accomplishments such as conversation, and to believe that if he has nothing particular to say, he need not trouble himself to say anything. I was struck the other day by a remark made to me by an American friend of mine, who was commenting upon the social usages of England. He said to me:[Pg 568] “What is so disconcerting to many of us Americans in England is the appalling capacity for silence on social occasions which characterizes so many of your solid men. We in America think that if we are invited to a festivity of any kind, we are bound to contribute all we can in the way of geniality, to pay, so to speak, for the hospitality extended to us; but many Englishmen seem to think that they are invited to a festivity to be looked at, and that they have no sort of duty to talk unless they feel disposed.”

I think there is a good deal of truth in this. We in England do not think of talk as a kind of art which ought to be exercised; we look upon it as an optional thing. We have a feeling of caution and even of suspicion toward other people. We have a dislike of giving ourselves away; we think it safer to be supposed not to have views or ideas, and it is that which makes our official classes on the whole so dull. We rather tend to promote to honor and emolument safe men who can hold their tongues; and if a man, in the gaiety of his heart, flourishes about airy considerations and conversational friandises, we think of him as rather a light-minded person, who is likely not to be a good man of business. “A man of business”—hateful phrase! I do not mean that one undervalues the sound qualities which underlie it; but if business is a thing which is to overflow into all our waking hours, to preoccupy and comprise all our rational thoughts and aims, what is to become of us? It is this intense concentration on material interests, the dreadful supremacy of property, which hampers not only our intellectual and social life, but actually our material prospects as well. I have no sort of doubt that the rapid rise of Germany even as a commercial rival corresponds to the alertness which comes from having a strong intellectual and artistic life behind it; or, rather, that the nation which has fewer interests is simply no match for the nation with wider and more eager interests, because its national vitality is inferior.

I do not take a pessimistic view of the future of England, nor do I think that because we cannot talk lightly and brightly at dinner we are ill-equipped for national greatness; but I do think that our caution, our stolidity, our stodginess are not things to glory in, but faults to be amended. It seems to me—and I say this not fancifully, but from careful observation—that the younger generation of Englishmen have in childhood a good deal of aptitude for intellectual and artistic things. They are easily stirred and actively inquisitive. Then comes school life; and there the dreariness of much of our education, the weary athletic conventions, the so-called “sticking to business,” begin to exercise a coercive effect. Little or no attempt is made in our schools to cultivate the imagination or the emotions, or even to teach boys how to fill their leisure rationally. Then there is often an awakening at the university. Ideas are to a certain extent in the air; if life does not exactly become all fire and music, as Browning found it, at all events, there are lights on the horizon—there are:

“Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”

Even here I have noted with discontent the fact that the school conventions exercise a certain leveling power, and make themselves felt more markedly than they did in my own undergraduate days. The papers are full of sport; and a young man is considered just a little abnormal who has not a due respect for athletic renown.

Then the young men go out into the world; and there it does seem to me that the curtain of darkness does too often drop again. A man of strong individual tastes does no doubt contrive to keep up some touch with intellectual or artistic interests; but even so, that is often regarded as a hobby, a private indulgence, not a matter of perfectly healthy and natural concern. And then too often the dreary specter of business comes menacingly on the scene; after all, a good income, a definite occupation, time for golf—those are the “solid joys, and lasting pleasure” which life can yield; there is nothing vague or fantastic about them. The abusive word “esthetic” cannot be applied to life lived on these sturdy lines.

Now, I do not wish to discredit the sturdy bourgeois virtues of common sense and honesty, but I do not really believe that a nation can advance on those lines. It cannot advance because it ends by being unsympathetic. It puts personal success and personal comfort above all ideas and causes. It respects men not for their power of subordinating their own welfare to that of others, but for their capacity to secure their own position. A witty Frenchman once said that the two great vices of Englishmen were cant and bashfulness; by which he meant that the Englishman professes a standard of virtue which he does not practise, and that he cannot at the same time be both frank and amiable. When he is frank, he is censorious; when he is amiable, he is insincere.[Pg 569] And there is no doubt that though we are respected for our force, we are not a popular nation. It is easier to us to censure than to praise, however genuinely we admire. Our bashfulness does not arise from modesty, but from vanity. We are so much concerned with what other people think of us, so anxious to make an impression of dignity, that we are hypocritical about our standards, and glum when we might be frank. We are deeply conventional, and most of us arrange our lives not on our own lines, but on the lines which we believe are expected of us. Thus I find it impossible to believe that our common sense is based upon simplicity. It is really an elaborate ideal, painfully adapted from what we believe to be the ideals of other people. Our fault is really an inverted sensitiveness. We are sensitive to what is thought of us and said of us, and our repression of emotion and extravagance is dictated not by our sentiment, which is a strong characteristic of Englishmen, but by our terror of public opinion. This keeps us perhaps from making fools of ourselves, but it also keeps us from generous and ardent enterprise. I do believe that we Englishmen shut out from our perception a great part of life, and perhaps the best part of life. We limit our experience, we dissemble our emotions. Yet when we get a great poet, like Shakspere or Browning or Shelley, who said flowingly what they felt, who were inspired by the vividness, the variety, the emotion of life, and who cared very little about its standards and conventions, we are immensely vain of the product, and pigeon-hole it faithfully among our national assets.

Of course these generalizations are wide and necessarily insecure; but I do feel that a great treasure of fine feeling, of a noble curiosity about life and its issues, of great and generous emotion, is somehow put away under lock and key in the English warehouse. One desires more frankness, more independence, more freshness to prevail. It would even have its material consequences.

There is an interesting story of Wordsworth, who went to call on Miss Harriet Martineau at Ambleside, in the house which she had built and laid out. There was a gathering of neighbors present, and Wordsworth stood for a long time at the window contemplating the beautiful landscape outside. Then he turned to the party and said, “Miss Martineau, I congratulate you on your beautiful little domain. The views are wonderful, and it will turn out to be the wisest thing you ever did in your life.” He paused for a moment, and the guests expected some comment on the uplifting effect of communion with nature; but Wordsworth, with a fine gesture, continued, “Your property will certainly be trebled in value within the next ten years!”

[Pg 570]

THE GUTTER-NICKEL

BY ESTELLE LOOMIS

Author of “Out of Bondage”

WITH A PICTURE BY J. MONTGOMERY FLAGG

I

SUCCESS seldom comes as in a lottery—one big prize, and it’s all over, the winner satisfied.

No; Destiny, like a demonstrator at a pure-food exhibition, stands back of her counter in the world, and to those who happen to pass the booth of success she hands a sample. Sometimes the samples are small, sometimes large; but, whatever the size, let him who receives one never mistake his sample for a complete package of success.

It was strange that Jean Caspian made this blunder. Surely four years of theatrical experience were enough to have proved to her that, for an actor, there is only one real success—a hit in New York. How could she have forgotten that theatrical judgment-seat, where the sheep are separated from the goats?

But here, in Milwaukee, with applause still ringing in her ears, with the local papers full of her praise, her head was fairly turned with her triumph. Guy Norman’s leading lady! As she had won her way up step by step in his company, how she had longed for this final moment to come! Intoxicated with the realization of her ambition, she had already begun to live in a glorious future.

On the morning of the third day in Milwaukee, as Jean sat on her bed, reading a joyous letter from her mother, a high-spirited rap sounded on the door.

“Are you in, old pal?” Clara Coolwood, just from an understudy rehearsal, entered excitedly.

“Jean, what d’ you think! Company’s going to close! Norman’s ill!”

Jean heard the words, but, instead of seeing Clara’s agitated face, a vision loomed before her: she had forgotten New York. Broadway was still unattained.

Clara caught her look of despair, and continued:

“Oh, it may not be for long, Jean. Anyway, you needn’t worry, with the big start you’ve made.”

“A big start! Yes, two nights as leading woman—in Milwaukee!”

“But with Guy Norman,” Clara insisted.

“Guy Norman,” said Jean deliberately, “is under his own management. If he doesn’t play again this year, where shall I be? Have any of the big New York managers ever heard of me—B. B. Littleton, for instance? If he should happen to hear of my brief career as leading lady, has he ever seen me act? No. Therefore Jean Caspian does not exist. Why, you know very well, Clara Coolwood, that until the curtain goes up on you on Broadway, and they see you in the actual flesh, you might just as well have been playing on Mars.”

Jean was mechanically pulling on her coat.

Clara nodded thoughtfully.

“I’m afraid you’re right, Jean. Yes, remember poor Julia Wilcox, drawing crowds every day to that Baltimore stock theater for eight years? And when she opened in New York the critics said, ‘Unknown actress makes a sensation.’ Where are you going, Jean?”

“Why, I’m going to find Davey. Stage-managers usually know the truth, if they’ll only tell.”

Jean put on her hat and set out for the theater. In the stage entrance she met Guy Norman, calm, smiling, the picture of health. As he lifted his hat with his customary air of distinction, Jean inquired timidly for news.

[Pg 571]

“Why, yes; we’re going to close Saturday night. It’s all so silly, in a way, but my physician and manager were so importunate about my having a rest that I decided to humor them. I thought it might be wise to recuperate for the New York engagement.”

Jean smiled her relief, and was about to leave when he called her back.

“Oh, Miss Caspian, just a minute. I’m going to send a manuscript over to you to-day; it’s a play we’re expecting to put on in New York. And, oh—I may want to do some Shakspere, too. You’d better be up on Juliet.” He looked at her piercingly. “I’m not so sure that you re not the very person I’ve been waiting for.”

Jean flew back delightedly to the hotel, and two days later the still grumbling theatrical party left for New York in Guy Norman’s private cars.

In Mrs. Bunting’s boarding-house, where “the meals made up for the rooms,” Jean Caspian wrote to her chum, “back home” in Wisconsin:

Dear Clara:

Spent my first day in New York traveling the streets, trying to get some of “the road” worn off. You can’t imagine what a hole it made in my salary before I became a real New Yorker again. How I laughed at those hats we bought in Davenport when I caught a glimpse of myself on Broadway!

I dropped in to see Dell yesterday. She’s still haunting the agencies. Poor Dell! Went with her to Smiley’s, and it certainly seemed like old times. I even heard some one ask Smiley, “How’s the baby?” Remember how you used to make those tender inquiries in vain for six months?

Oh, those pathetic whipped-cur faces! Two thousand actors out of work this season, they say! We are lucky, aren’t we?

Yours gleefully,
JEAN C.

P.S. Hear we’re to open in Pittsburgh, the fifteenth. Come on soon and take in a few plays. J. C.

P.P.S. Wait till you see my white satin “Countess” costume! You’ll see where four hundred of my good dollars have gone. I’m certainly all ready for my new salary. J. C.

Early Saturday morning Jean Caspian sat in her room darning a long “run” in a silk stocking, to the mental accompaniment of her Juliet cues. Suddenly she dropped her work to listen. Some one was running up-stairs at a breakneck speed. Then, simultaneously with a loud bang, her door opened. Clara Coolwood pale and excited, stood panting before her.

“Oh, Jean, isn’t it terrible! I heard it just as soon as I got off the train! It makes me perfectly sick!”

“What?”

“Why—why, Jean—didn’t you know that Guy Norman is dead?”

Jean Caspian jumped to her feet and stared blankly.

“Why, the papers are full of it; he died in Florida yesterday!”

Jean did not answer; she was trembling violently. Gradually her face grew inexplicably empty, as if her stricken soul were receding into some secret refuge, leaving her body to act mechanically. Suddenly she burst into a paroxysm of laughter, loud and strident, void of mirth.

“Well, it’s back to Grandpa Smiley’s, Clara dear,” she chanted hysterically, and with a flippant gesture she chucked Clara under the chin. “Don’t be blue, little girl! Don’t you know that your old friend Smiley is waiting to hear you ask about the baby? Back to the agencies, darling; back ‘from ten till four!’ Four chairs for eighty: six hours to wait. Six hours? Six weeks, six months, six years!”

Her voice ended in a moan, and she fell headlong upon the bed, where she lay, face down, in crumpled folds of lace and velvet and white satin, unconscious.

Clara Coolwood had been schooled and poised by her theatrical experience; she knew every heartbreaking phase of the cruel competition of her profession; she had seen its inevitable disappointments and failures. So up to this moment she had thought she felt the full force of this day’s shock; but it was not until she had drawn the costly white satin ball-gown from under Jean that she began to lose her self-control.

It was the first time she had seen the wonderful “Countess” costume. She held it up and looked at it sadly, almost with reverence; new and unworn, it was already a relic. Slowly, thoughtfully, ca[Pg 572]ressingly, she smoothed out the creases; then, sobbing, she hung it in the closet.

An hour later, Jean, left alone, still sat staring, still idly tracing with her finger the scrollwork pattern on an exquisite silver slipper. The prolonged ringing of the bell for luncheon aroused her from her lethargy. She rose mechanically, and walked over to the window. How foreign everything looked outside in the sunlight! The passers-by, how queer and busy!

“Dead!” she whispered to herself. Then, drawing a deep breath, she opened the new, unopened chapter of her life. Jean Caspian had awakened to the realization that Destiny had handed her only a sample of success, not a complete package.

II

“OUT,” “Gone to Chicago,” “Busy,” “At rehearsal,” “Won’t be back till next Thursday,” “Got a card?” “Don’t know.” These melancholy refrains, sing-songed by officious, gum-chewing office-boys in the stuffy theatrical agencies, soon became as familiar to Jean Caspian as “Annie Laurie” or “Home, Sweet Home.”

“Mornin’ ’s the best time to catch him,” “He ain’t seein’ any one to-day,” “Ain’t puttin’ on any shows this spring,” “Gone to lunch. No, I couldn’t say.”

Sometimes, in desperation, Jean would approach the sleepy, red-headed type-writer with a brave smile. To all inquiries this remote, supercilious personage always replied, “Cast is filled.”—Click-click-clickety, click, click, click.

During the first week after Norman’s death, Jean gained a momentary interview with B. B. Littleton’s representative. When she mentioned that she had been leading lady for Guy Norman, he smiled incredulously.

“Lord!” he said, “I have a dozen a day in here claiming they were with Norman. It’s a joke, here.”

Jean produced a Milwaukee program bearing her name. The representative, after inspecting it, somewhat reluctantly consented to take her name and address.

“I’ll bear you in mind,” he said. “You might drop in in a month or so.” But never again did Jean succeed in finding him “in.”

Day after day; hot after cold, optimistic mornings and discouraged afternoons; weary, irritable, hungry; now happy, now sad; standing, leaning, gossiping, hoping, always hoping, Jean Caspian, her ambition priming her with bravery to keep up the ordeal, “went the rounds” from managers to agents, from agents to managers. As regularly as the doors opened every morning, she blossomed in a theatrical office, as fresh, lovely, vigorous as a newly opened lily. Yesterday’s weariness was forgotten in to-day’s enthusiasm.

Two months went by. No engagement. Two months more went by. No prospect of an engagement. Another month, then the inevitable—clothes!

How surely her clothes betrayed her! From boarding-house to Broadway they blabbed the tale of her futile peregrinations. Worn-out clothes, shabby-shiny clothes, spots-that-won’t-come-off clothes. Worse than these, stagy-old “stock” clothes; but, worst of all, out-of-date clothes. The time came when Jean, gazing lugubriously at her last three gowns, now dubbed severally “Wreck,” “Goner,” and “Mess,” saw that further wear was impossible. At last she broke down.

But out of despairing tears came inspiration. It was one of the articles of Jean’s esthetic creed that the test of genius is versatility. She should be able to be carpenter, dish-washer, or to model in wax, as necessity dictated. If she were to portray life, all aspects of life, this adaptability alone would justify her calling herself an artist. Now fortune had put her to the test. She must prove herself adequate to the emergency. With a grim smile of determination, Jean jerked the three gowns down from their hooks.

Two days later “Pa” Smiley gave her an encouraging smile. “Pretty dress you got on, little one! Noo, ain’t it? That what they call a ‘pannier’?”

“Oh, no,” said Jean, “this is newer than that. The name of this little frock is the ‘Three-in-one,’ successor to ‘Wreck,’ ‘Goner,’ and ‘Mess.’ Got anything for me to-day, Mr. Smiley?”

It was nearly noon when Della Prance and Clara Coolwood collided with her on the corner of Forty-second Street.

“Oh, I love your hat, Jean! Where? How much?”

Della Prance added:

[Pg 573]

“Turn round. It’s awfully Frenchy, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Jean; “it’s lucky for me the imported creations are always shy on trimming. Just one wonderful bow or something,—” she chucked Clara under the chin,—“if you only know just how to place it.”

The girls took another stare. “You don’t mean to say you made it yourself?”

At a quarter to five a dapper “juvenile” gentleman lifted his hat airily in the offices of B. B. Littleton. “Beg pardon,” he said, “but haven’t you stepped on something?”

Jean crossed her feet hastily, blushing. Through the generous aperture in her left sole she knew he must have read the engraved words, “Mr. and Mrs. U. R. Sweet announce the marriage,” etc. Experience had taught her that, of all cardboards, that used for wedding-invitations is the most durable.

Now, any woman who after dire straits has had her wardrobe unexpectedly replenished, is apt in her delight to consider her new-found costume indestructible. So Jean Caspian relied implicitly on good old “Three-in-one.”

But, alas! three months later what a change had been wrought! Silk and wool could barely hold together any longer. Her mind, like her costume, had also become frayed, worn, and out of date. “Chasing” for an engagement had by this time become a mere habit; and continual contact with weary, discouraged seekers for work had gradually accomplished its demoralizing effect.

As Jean sat one morning in the crowded office of B. B. Littleton, her two-hours’ wait dreamed itself away in the hypnotic fascination of watching person after person, rouged and powdered, with heroically assumed expressions of prosperity and cheerfulness, squeeze into the little room, only to have the dry, suffocating “waiting” atmosphere gradually desiccate them till, benumbed by discouragement, they seemed like mummies, swathed in despairing introspection, the juices of their ambitions long since dried up.

A vivid, fresh young miss entered. Her enthusiastic appearance in that chamber of dead hopes woke the inert groups to laughter. Her face was radiant with “dramatic-school” promises, her confidence obviously reinforced with a “personal” letter.

Blithely she spoke: “Is Mr. Littleton in? His representative! No, I must see Mr. Littleton, himself. Oh, no, I can’t wait; I must see him at once. Oh, dear!”

Jean smiled at her as at a vision of her own first hopeful credulity. Yet, after all, she thought, wasn’t this ingenuous faith as good a passport as any to carry one across the frontier of that door marked “Private”? What did these stage-worn veterans possess that could compete with this splendid, potent ignorance? Nothing. To-day, at least, that girl was a leader. She was still uncontaminated with discouraged, diseased thoughts. How long before some one would tell her, or she would decide for herself simply to follow the crowd? Jean’s thoughts drifted to herself. Oh, the “Personal” letters she, too, had blithely borne to stolid, unsympathetic readers! What was the matter? She was only a follower. That was it: she was wearily tagging along the beaten path. Had any one ever accomplished anything really great in this world by following others along the same old groove? Oh, to get out of it!

The thought disturbed her. She grew restless; and as she pondered, instinct seemed to warn her: “Get out of the rut!” “But how?” she asked herself, with increasing anxiety. An excited hesitancy, shot with fear and doubt, possessed her. It held her like a prisoner who lacks the courage to escape.

Suddenly her thoughts were dissipated by the opening of the private door. “There’s no need of any one waiting; I have nothing to say to any one to-day.” The private door closed.

To have a three-hours’ wait terminated only by a few casual words from Littleton’s representative usually left a drowning expression on every face. A few of the determined-to-survive actors, however, fighting their way through grumblers, swearers, fighters-for-the-elevator, snatched desperately at the one last straw—the stenographer. “When is the best time to catch Mr. Littleton?” “Did you deliver the letter I left yesterday for Mr. Littleton?” “Will you kindly tell Mr. Littleton that Miss Fuller—”

Jean listened to this fusillade of questions being answered with a volley of type-writer clicks that made an occasional interpolated “He’s uncertain,” and[Pg 574] “Don’t know,” scarcely audible. She smiled grimly, deciding that she would have to use her full third-balcony voice if she was to impress this cold-blooded, businesslike Annie at the keys. As Jean looked forward to speak, she accidentally caught sight of herself in that young lady’s private mirror. She gave a quick second look, and the sickening revelation held her gaze fixedly. She grew weak, numb.

She did not realize that the clicks had stopped. She was oblivious of the stenographer’s hand pressing her own. “What’s the matter, honey? What you crying about? Blue this morning? Want to leave some message for Mr. Littleton?”

Jean Caspian’s face showed not the faintest knowledge of the stenographer’s sudden interest in her. But, subconsciously, she had reached for a bejeweled hand and pressed it into pain with her gratitude. Her voice came weakly: “I don’t think—thank you so much, but—well—” She shook her head dully. “I don’t think I’ll have any more messages for Mr. Littleton.” With a quick release of her hand, Jean Caspian escaped from the office, moaning to herself: “So I’ve got the look at last! It’s come!”

How jocosely she had once written to Clara Coolwood about those theatrical-agency faces—those “pathetic, whipped-cur” faces! How she had mimicked them! Guy Norman’s voice came back: “Give us another one of those agency faces, Miss Caspian! Do ‘Agony Jane’!” How Guy Norman’s laughter had delighted her! Now it seemed to slap back at her, torturing her horribly. She was only one of the rabble now. She, too, was a mummy. Agony Jane!

The poignancy of the thought sent her wandering on and on till at last she wearily climbed the steps to her boarding-house. Mechanically she took out her key, turned the latch, and entered the dimness of the hallway.

As she started up the stairs, a small boy shot past her. “Mama! mama!” he called excitedly, “come quick! Open the door! Mama, look! See what I found in the gutter—five cents! Mama, it was right down there in the gutter!”

The boy’s outcry caused several doors to open before his mother had time to appear; but as Jean reached the second flight she heard: “That’s very nice, dear; but don’t make such a noise. Come in, and we’ll put it in your bank.”

A chunky, ringleted lady was smiling benevolently upon the scene. “Well, now,” she said, “Owen has been such a nice boy that I’m going to give him something else for his bank. Look, Owen, here’s a nice big quarter for you.”

The little boy was too much absorbed to answer. He was rubbing the nickel energetically on his trousers.

“Can’t you thank the lady?” exclaimed the embarrassed mother.

“Got a pin, anybody? I want to clean these stars and get the dirt out of this face.” He bent over the nickel with delighted concentration.

His mother interposed petulantly: “But look at this nice new quarter, Owen.”

“Don’t bother me with that old quarter!” Instinctively feeling Jean’s sympathy, he looked up at her and smiled. “Say, won’t the fellows be s’prised, though, when they know I found this nickel right down in the gutter?”

Jean, amused, started up the next flight of stairs. At the top she turned and looked back. Then, hardly knowing why, she sat down. Some powerful suggestion was working in her, subconsciously. Her eyes were fixed on the little boy, fascinated.

“That old nickel!” she said to herself. “Why in the world does he prefer that to the quarter, I’d like to know!”

Then something in his absorption threw her into a reverie of her own. A little later she found herself in her room. She was sitting by the window in a far-away mood of exaltation, floating, her intellect freed in some strange fashion from her environment.

If any one had told Jean Caspian that she would end that day in a beatified frame of mind, she would have thought it madness. Had she not given up all hope? But now, suddenly, she found herself asking: “Why am I so happy? Why does everything seem changed?” Strange! In the wretchedest hour of her life a mysterious, inspiring power had risen to support her. It stood beside her now like an invisible husband. What was it? Perhaps it was what people had called the “genius” in her. She was aware only of[Pg 575] a swift, potent reaction, which made her body quiver with a new vitality.

“That nickel!” she repeated. Still uncomprehending, she was already sure. Then, wonderfully, the vague radiance within her soul blazed up into an idea, clear, compelling, prophetic. She rose with a serene, confident smile, and pulled down the shade.

“The gutter-nickel!” In her face glowed a secret illumination.

On the next Monday morning, when Clara Coolwood, enthusiastic over a stock company vacancy in Lowell, Massachusetts, rang the doorbell of Mrs. Bunting’s boarding-house, she was answered with the curt statement that Miss Caspian was no longer there. She had gone, and had left no address.

III

“OVER in Dell’s room.” How often every day that little phrase answered, “Where’ve you been?” “Where are you going?” “Where’d you hear that?” “Over in Dell’s room.”

Della Prance’s room was No. 381, third floor, in a little ramshackle hotel on upper Broadway. Della Prance and her elder, divorced, “not-feeling-very-well” sister had grumbled daily at the old peacock-blue and garnet plush furniture, with its nibbled corners and threadbare polka dots; at the dilapidated cretonne-covered divan, with “that caster out again”; and at the dirty, torn, faded old-rose wall-paper, only to have Della conclude, sighing: “Oh, well, what’s the use of tearing up and moving? After all, Sis, the old place has got atmosphere.”

Evidently there were others who shared her opinion. For never was there such a popular rendezvous as “over in Dell’s room.” And never was there a girl so popular as Della Prance.

“Over in Dell’s room” they laughed; “over in Dell’s room” they wept. From the unknown aspirant of Smiley’s to the “featured” celebrity who could not understand why she got those awful notices on her opening night, one and all received genuine sympathy “over in Dell’s room.”

“Over in Dell’s room” they damned, “over in Dell’s room” they praised. “What d’ you think, Dell! Lazette is stranded out in Omaha, and is working her way back to Smiley’s. Playing a real chambermaid now, for a change, in the Grand Hotel! It looks like a good, long engagement, too.” “She got the lead in that play, really? Flora Gordo! That’s bully! She deserves it. Say, I want to get up and yell when a girl wins out honestly in this business. It’s impossible, but it can be done.”

Toward five o’clock the room fairly clattered. Dell was like the leader of an orchestra; she struck high C. And while the sharps and flats of those excited voices ran upward, through arpeggios of laughter, to mingle with the chords and discords of the clamorous piano, where the latest song “hits” were banged and yelled, Dell would feel her liveliest notes of merriment suddenly change to a nervous tremolo. The elevator door had banged! Was this grand concerted movement to culminate in a series of staccato door-whacks by that irate hotel proprietor?

Not this time. To-day, the grand finale was more musical, with the long, persistent tinkling of the telephone-bell.

“Let her ring!” “Tell ’em to come over, Dell.” “The more the merrier—what?”

As Della Prance sent one of her high-spirited, whimsically affected “hello’s!” over the wire, a fresh explosion of laughter rattled along with it. An instant later, something ominous in Dell’s voice wrought a sudden transition in those mirthful faces. While the company wondered, the receiver clicked, and from the pale, bewildered Dell their answer came.

“Say, you all—or I guess the most of you, anyway—have heard of Jean Caspian? Well, that was Clara—Clara Coolwood—on the ’phone. What d’you think? She’s just run into Jean, down and out, in a little cheap-joint place. Oh, girls, think of it! Jean Caspian is manicuring nails down in Fourteenth Street!”

A faint gasp was audible, though no one uttered a word. But their unspoken thoughts seemed to cry out the inevitable reflex of egoism: “Oh, the stage! The life of the stage! I wonder where I’ll end up.”

“Poor Clara!” Dell continued.[Pg 576] “It’s been about two months now. Jean just suddenly disappeared out of her life. Clara wrote to Jean’s mother—to every one who knew her, but she never got an answer. And here to-day in Smiley’s office some girl Clara got into conversation with told her about this little place where you get your nails done for twenty cents. Jean Caspian! Think of it!” Dell shook her head incredulously. “I tell you, when a genius like that—”

“Good Lord!” From the corner of the room a raucous voice rattled in. “Genius!” she gibed. “Well, I never saw a so-called genius yet that didn’t end at the bottom of the ladder. These actresses with a future! Say, take it from me, you can usually find them—well, like your wonderful Jean Caspian, in the manicure parlors. But, say, whenever you hear it whispered, ‘Oh, she’ll never act!’ believe me, you can just watch for Somebody’s Favorite to give you the wink in electric lights.”

With a fling, she donned her hat and coat, and moved toward the door. “Say, don’t you mind anything I say, Dell. I’m madder than a wet hen to-day. This hard-luck atmosphere has got on my nerves. Good-by, everybody! See you at Smiley’s in the morning.”

When the other guests had taken their leave, and Dell was at last alone, she slipped into a kimono and rang the call-bell. A few minutes later she heard the sound of footsteps in the hall.

“Ice-water boy!” she muttered thirstily, and flung open the door. “Oh,” she cried, “it’s Clara!”

Clara burst forth without a preface.

“I never should have known her, Dell! Why, she’s so thin, haggard, sort of, but that isn’t it. Jean was so different, somehow. Wait till I get these hat-pins out.”

After she had seated herself she was silent for a moment. Then she seized Dell’s hand.

“Dell, it’s funny, but really it seemed to me as if Jean were—why, she was even greater than she was that wonderful night in Milwaukee with Norman.”

Dell brought her back to realities. “But what did she say?”

“Why, I only had time for a word. I said, ‘Why, Jean!’ She had a little bowl of water, and she said, ‘Oh, Clara, please don’t talk to me now! I’m awfully busy. Come in some other time, won’t you?’ And before I knew it, she was gone.”

For another hour the two girls discussed Jean Caspian and a way to help her. The result of their planning was that the next morning Dell appeared at Clara’s room with a triumphantly extended hand.

“Eighty-eight dollars! Well, they can say what they choose about actors, but when it comes to practical generosity, they’re there, right down to the last little girl in the chorus. Look here! Forty dollars from English Toppling! And we used to call him a tight-wad.”

An hour later Clara and Dell, half hoping, half fearing to find Jean in such a place, walked into a little shop bearing the sign: “Lizzie Lord. Manicuring.” But as Clara was about to reply to the question, “Nails done, lady?” she suddenly stepped back and whispered to Dell:

“I’ll bet Jean’s here under an assumed name. That’s why she asked me not to call her name out.” She turned to the desk again. “Is that—that young lady with the light hair here?”

“Miss Miller, you mean?”

Clara hesitated. Some one, evidently Lizzie Lord, called from behind a screen: “No, that girl ain’t here no more; she quit us last night.”

At this the two girls started reluctantly to leave, when the proprietress, a terrible blonde, emerged to add tartly: “Hold on. We got plenty o’ girls can beat Miss Miller manicuring—she wa’n’t only a beginner, anyways. Set down; you won’t have to wait but a minute.”

Clara timidly explained that she wanted only her friend’s address. But “Maggie Miller” had left no address in the shop. The proprietress didn’t know it. Never had known it. She waddled back behind the screen.

“Maggie Miller!” exclaimed Clara, as the girls left. “Oh, I can’t bear to think what that must mean! It makes me perfectly sick. How in the world are we ever going to find her now?”

Days passed, weeks went by, and still no trace of Jean Caspian. It seemed almost incredible that no one could obtain any news of her even “over in Dell’s room.”

Over in Dell’s room they said, “What a shame that such a talented girl should end so disastrously!” Over in Dell’s room they told interesting anecdotes about her. Ambitious girls, who had hitherto withheld their secret opinions, at last felt[Pg 577] that there was no longer danger of her rivalry, and came boldly out of the woods. “Yes, Jean Caspian certainly was a genius.” Time passed, and over in Dell’s room Jean Caspian was now usually referred to in the past tense. Clara Coolwood began to lose hope. She read the papers constantly, fearing each morning to hear of the suicide of Maggie Miller. So the winter drifted by. Newer, more interesting topics were discussed over in Dell’s room.

“They say the marcel is coming back again,” said Dell, one snowy afternoon, as she was entertaining the wife of an actor friend. “Your hair is wonderful, Mrs. Wade. Have you been reckless enough to indulge in the fifty-dollar permanent wave, or is that the transient curl of a day?”

Pretty Mrs. Wade laughed.

“I got it this morning, thank you—only thirty-five cents—at Rosenburg’s, a little place on Thirty-eighth Street. But if you girls ever go there be sure to ask for that pretty blonde girl they have. By the way, do you know, she’s the very image of that leading woman Guy Norman had when I went on to see Harry once. In fact, I told her she ought to go on the stage. Say, that girl’s got the touch all right; she gives a grand shampoo.”

“What’s her name?” Clara asked excitedly. “Miller?”

“Oh, no. Now, let me see—seems to me some one did call her—what was it, now? Hobbs, I think; or was it Cobb?”

Clara Coolwood was already on her feet, and Dell, too. In fifteen minutes they were out of the house. They would lose no time this time. They reached the place breathless; and, not seeing Jean, asked at once for “Miss ’Obb.”

The proprietress gazed at them with a cold professional eye, noting their straying tresses. “Miss Robb, you mean? Why, she left last Thursday. No, I don’t expect to get her back; she said she was sick. But we got other girls just as good; better, in fact. Miss Robb was smart enough; she took hold pretty well, but she lacked experience. Oh, Miss Lipstein! Here, please!”

“Oh,” said Clara, “I don’t wish my hair done to-day, thank you. I wanted to see Miss Casp—Cobb—personally. Could you give me her address?”

The woman immediately lost interest, shook her head, and turned away.

Clara’s and Dell’s hands met and telegraphed a wordless message they could not speak. This second futile effort to solve Jean’s mystery left them too heart-broken for words.

It was late in the spring when Della Prance came upon another clue. This was at Floy Tulliver’s.

“Say, Dell, whatever became of Jean Caspian?” Floy asked. “We all expected so much of her after the hit she made with Norman. Too bad she didn’t strike New York, where some of the big managers like Littleton could have seen her! Oh, that reminds me—funny thing, too. Say, Dell, you remember Betty, that blonde maid I had? Well, I had a picture of Jean on my dresser, right here, and, well—why, Betty used to tell me about a girl that used to work where she worked. Said it was one of those gown places, where they sew on bindings and things,—sort of a sweat-shop, I s’pose,—and Betty always used to say that girl looked so much like Jean’s picture. Yes, really. She was quite positive of it. Only this girl wasn’t so pretty, she said, and was thinner, and—oh, I don’t know. But, anyway, she said the eyes were perfect of her. Yes, it was queer. Oh, I have no idea where the place was, Dell. Why, let’s see—Betty left me about two months ago.”

After thinking all this over seriously, and not without tears, Dell decided not to mention it to Clara Coolwood. It would only break open the wound that was slowly healing in Clara’s heart.

For Clara was full of excitement now over her new stock engagement as leading lady in Lowell. Her talk was all of hats and gowns, salaries and parts and matinées. She smiled now at every one’s jokes and her whole manner was scented with success.

So, as the weeks lapsed into months, over in Dell’s room the name of Jean Caspian gradually faded into a memory.

IV

THE Herrick theater, Buffalo. A profoundly bored stage-hand was hammering away on a back-drop, regardless of the rehearsing of the orchestra.

Prancing along the footlights, up and[Pg 578] down, notes in hand, the stage-manager, intoxicated with his own temporary importance, was grimacing and gesticulating his injunctions to play the music, oh, so much softer! Miss Dover’s great love-scene had been ruined by their confounded fiddling at the matinée this afternoon. Now, where was that character-man? “Motzart”—not “Mozart!”—he was profanely cautioned. Two supers were discharged; no use discussing it, gentlemen; they’d walked on the ladies’ trains just once too often. “Be sure to watch those amber lights now, and for Heaven’s sake keep the entrances clear!”

Sarah Dover opened the stage-door, and with her gracious “good evening” stilled the bustle. Through a sudden, flattering silence she passed to her dressing-room.

Here a slight, serious-looking young woman, with light hair braided into a sedate knot, was spreading a silver-and-chiffon gown over a chair. She looked up.

“Well, Vinnie,” Sarah Dover asked anxiously, as she emerged from her sable coat, “what luck did you have with my pet gown?”

The maid modestly displayed her skill on a long mended tear in the lace of the star’s second-act costume.

“Vinnie!” exclaimed Miss Dover, ecstatically. “Why, it’s wonderful! I can scarcely find the place! Where did you ever learn to sew like that?” She smiled gratefully, and sank down before her triple mirrors.

“Why, I could always sew fairly well, Miss Dover,” answered Vinnie. She began deftly to take down her mistress’s hair. “But just before I came to you, I did work a while in a kind of gown shop, and they had all kinds of fine mending to do.”

Sarah Dover mumbled as she plastered her face vigorously with rose-scented cold-cream. “Oh, Vinnie, don’t forget about those two new switches. I want to lengthen my braids. Some friends of mine have a box to-night, and I want to look particularly well.”

Vinnie, after attaching the switches, gave one shrewd look, then carelessly flung a braid round Miss Dover’s head.

“Fine, Vinnie! Leave it that way; it’s just too catchy for anything. Stick in this rose here. Why, Vinnie, I knew you could do nails beautifully, but I had no idea you could dress hair like that. You’re as good as a professional. Lovely!”

Sarah Dover inspected her make-up with smiling satisfaction; then automatically giving the final dusting with her powder-puff, she rose. Vinnie hurried her into her costume gown.

As the star held out her hand for Vinnie to button the glove, a sudden recollection made her say abstractedly:

“I wonder who that was I heard reading those lines last night. Must have been studying some part. Didn’t sound like any voice in the company, though. Here, Vinnie, you’re buttoning that glove all wrong! Don’t be so nervous, my dear; there’s plenty of time. What’s the matter with you to-night?”

Several days later Miss Dover entered the dressing-room with a puzzled smile on her face.

“Funny!” she exclaimed. “Vinnie, I declare if I didn’t hear that strange voice again just now reciting something. It stopped just before I opened the door. Who in the world—no, not those shoes, Vinnie. I’m going to wear the gray ones to-night.” She dropped into her chair with a sigh. “My, but I’m tired! I got so nervous in that cab—oh, that’s nice, Vinnie! Thank you. It is a treat to have some one who knows what to do without being told.”

As Vinnie the maid flitted here and there in the dressing-room, handing Miss Dover this and taking off that, busying herself with hat, gown, kimono, shoes, and and hunting for the inevitably lost nail-file, there was a sparkle in her eyes that never had been there before. She trembled, but evidently not from fear. A pink flush was mounting in her cheeks.

Miss Dover caught her reflection in the glass. “What in the world are you thinking of, Vinnie?” She studied her maid in the glass as she went on rouging her lips.

Pink deepened to red on Vinnie’s face. “Oh, I don’t know that I quite dare to tell you, Miss Dover.”

Miss Dover turned squarely round and looked at her.

“Why, it was only—” Vinnie was apparently much embarrassed. “Oh, you do look so lovely, Miss Dover! I couldn’t help thinking—oh, I’d just love to be an actress!”

Sarah Dover turned back to the rouge-[Pg 579]pot to conceal her amusement, but her shoulders were shaking. In another minute she held up an admonitory finger.

“Vinnie,” she said, “I did think that you were the one girl who would never be stage-struck. Oh, dear, nobody’s safe, then!”

“Oh, it is sort of foolish. I know, but—well, sometimes I feel kind of ambitious.”

“Ambitious! Vinnie, for Heaven’s sake, be contented! You’re an admirable maid now. Don’t spoil that with ambition. Why, Vinnie, you’re as much an artist in your line as I am in mine. I give you my word, I’ve envied you more than once!”

Vinnie’s face was the perfection of blank ignorance; her voice was a triumph of stupidity as she exclaimed, “Why, Miss Dover, I always thought actresses had such an awfully good time!”

Miss Dover smiled.

“My poor girl, you have no idea what this theatrical life is. Let me tell you something, Vinnie: you have to pay for your applause on the stage—yes, and a hundred times over. Why, you don’t know when you’re well off. How would you like to stand and wait all day long, month in and month out, for years, in packed, stuffy agencies?” The star shook her head reminiscently. “Wait till you’ve starved and nearly frozen to death in cheap lodging-houses, Miss Vinnie Smith! When I think of the visits to pawnshops! Heavens, I’ve worn clothes like those on a scarecrow! You wouldn’t believe Sarah Dover has patched and borrowed and scrubbed, would you? But, oh, the worst of all was the smiling and smiling, and trying to look prosperous and happy through everything!” She turned and patted Vinnie on the hand. “Just you be thankful, Vinnie Smith, that you’re where you are, and get that stage-struck idea right out of your head.”

Miss Dover leaned forward to the mirror and daintily adjusted a piece of court-plaster. At the sound of sobbing, she turned. Vinnie’s face was hidden in her hands.

“Why, Vinnie!” cried Sarah Dover. “What’s the matter? Vinnie!” She laid her hand tenderly on her maid’s shoulder.

“Oh, I couldn’t bear to think, Miss Dover, that you’d ever had to suffer like that!” Vinnie began to laugh hysterically through her sobs. “It was something in your voice; I kind of forgot where I was, Miss Dover, for a minute, I guess. You made me imagine it all so plain.”

What conversation there was after that dwindled down to cold-cream, cosmetic-sticks, and pins, until Sarah Dover was about to leave her dressing-room. “Strange about that voice I heard,” she muttered thoughtfully. “Vinnie, who has this next room right there? D’you know?”

Vinnie, queerly enough, didn’t know; so there, for a second time, the subject dropped.

During the third week of the popular star’s New York engagement, she arrived at the theater one evening earlier than usual in order to experiment with a new wig. As she stopped to speak to one of the electricians about the spot-light, a voice was heard coming from the direction of her dressing-room. Stealthily, Sarah Dover tiptoed to the door and stopped. For several minutes she leaned against the wall in a spellbound concentration.

When the voice ceased, Miss Dover’s eyes were damp, her hands were cold. She was trembling with puzzled excitement.

Suddenly she flung open the dressing-room door.

Her look searched the room as with a hundred eyes, but no one was there. Only her maid, who, perched on a trunk, smiled as usual and went on flitting the comb through a long-haired golden wig.

“Vinnie!” came the amazed exclamation. “You! Why, that wasn’t you? It couldn’t have—Vinnie!” The excited actress held the maid at arm’s-length and scrutinized her as if she never had seen her before.

Vinnie’s expression was a mask of naïve perplexity. But, as she stared, a nervous, sheepish grin crept into her face. “Oh,” she suddenly recollected, with an artfully timorous voice, “I guess I know what you mean, Miss Dover. You heard me talking to myself just now.” Guiltily, she shied away from the star, and flouncing down on the trunk eyed her skittishly, while the apologetic strain ran on:[Pg 580] “Why, I was only fooling, Miss Dover. You know you didn’t come as early as you said you would; so I was just trying to see what it would seem like to be a great actress.”

Sarah Dover did not appear to be listening. As she moved abstractedly about the room for a few minutes in silence, she scowled faintly and frequently bit her lip. Several times she gave Vinnie a quick, sharp glance. Then, turning abruptly, she pressed a lever on the wall and sat down at her escritoire, where she began to write hurriedly.

About fifteen minutes later, while Vinnie was telling her mistress how lovely she looked in the new wig, a series of “beg-pardon” raps came on the door, to the accompaniment of an obsequious voice. “Messenger, Miss Dover,” said the stage-manager. “Did you ring?”

Miss Dover hastened to the door and stepped outside. When she returned to the dressing-room to complete her toilet the atmosphere was subtly changed. The former freedom with which she had glibly called for this and that had diminished. The two were outwardly mistress and maid as much as ever; but the whole relation had subconsciously altered.

It came to a focus when, just before the star left the dressing-room, Vinnie sprang to brush off a splotch of powder from the black velvet gown. As Miss Dover thanked her, Vinnie restrained a smile. Something in the gracious tone seemed different from that which the mistress had heretofore used to the maid.

After the performance that night, as Vinnie was hanging up clothes, awaiting Miss Dover’s unusually delayed return, the assistant stage-manager appeared at the door.

“Miss Dover wants you to come out on the stage right away,” he announced.

The star was seated by the footlights; her eyes were on a short, stout, authoritative stranger who was haranguing the stage director about a door somewhere, damn it! that had banged all through every act. He turned to Miss Dover with a shaking head and smiled wearily.

“Well, where is the little lady?”

Miss Dover rose and drew Vinnie forward. “I imagine you’ve seen my maid before,” she said; “but I suppose you’ve never met.” She laughed at the jest. “Vinnie, this is Mr. Littleton; Mr. B. B. Littleton, one of the biggest managers in this country.” She smiled at the magnate. “And this is Miss Vinnie Smith, Mr. Littleton.”

Littleton’s shrewd, critical eyes swept Vinnie from top to toe.

“Well, Miss Vinnie Smith, what can you do?” His voice was gruffly jocose. “Can you act?”

The two successful personages on the bare stage did not realize that at that very moment they were watching what Vinnie Smith could really do—act. They did not dream that the name of B. B. Littleton had swept through her brain and whirled a past before her—a past that a histrionic instinct stronger than her will itself was forcing back to its old place.

They did not notice that she had stiffened defiantly. All they saw was a singularly good-looking, phlegmatic maid-servant, coolly unafraid, who seemed quite unimpressed with the possibilities of the situation.

“You’d better go over some of those speeches I heard you doing, Vinnie. Mr. Littleton will only want—”

“Yes, anything’ll do,” broke in the manager. “Fire away!” He pulled out his watch impatiently. “By George! it’s quarter-past eleven now, and I’m due uptown at twelve. Got to meet that Madame—what the devil’s her name, now?—you know, Sarah, that big French comedienne, Madame—Madame—” Each “Madame” grew more and more remote as he stalked up and down the stage, fumbling in his pockets, chewing a cigar, flipping out letter after letter, grumbling, jamming them back. “Confound it, if there isn’t that door banging again! Wilson!”

As the feet of Wilson’s assistant pattered obediently up the iron steps, Vinnie was explaining. “Oh, Miss Dover, I only made those scenes up. I was only—”

“Give her some of those lines in the mob scenes,” thundered Littleton. “What are some of them, Wilson?”

Wilson repeated a few of the speeches with characteristic stage-manager delivery, while Littleton’s eyes hurried down the page of a letter. After a short silence, he looked up to demand, “Well, what are you waiting for?”

“I’m not going to say those lines, Mr. Littleton.” Vinnie was standing erect, with a nonchalantly determined smile on her face.

Nonplussed, Littleton glared at her almost as if he were trying to misunderstand[Pg 581] her. The star, already on her feet, tactfully intervened.

“Oh, Vinnie, you don’t realize what a wonderful opportunity this is, my dear! Why, Mr.—”

“It’s just because I do realize it, Miss Dover, that I’m not—”

“What’s the matter with those lines?” Littleton barked it out.

Vinnie regarded the manager listlessly. Slowly an ironic smile crept over her face. “Oh, they’re fine,” she finally said, “if all you want is to show intelligence and a good loud voice. But I happen to want to show more. And if this is such a wonderful opportunity, as Miss Dover says, then why should I waste it on such lines as ‘The ropes! Hand me the ropes!’ and ‘Oh, look at the pretty fool!’ I’m sorry, Mr. Littleton, but—” Vinnie stopped abruptly. Her face changed to a delightfully whimsical, far-away expression. “Those lines are too skimpy. There’s not nearly enough room in them for what I’ve got in me to show you, Mr. Littleton.”

Fear, eagerness, and anxiety had vanished in this expression of herself. Littleton! Why, he might have been a scene-shifter, for all she cared, despite the puzzled wonder and growing interest that now lurked behind his cold managerial veil. The amazed, questioning face of Sarah Dover—“Can this be Vinnie?”—caused only a secret smile. Vinnie Smith boldly flung reason to the winds, and, calling up every hidden charm she possessed, intuitively scented her way to success.

A grunt and a few curt words from the manager urged her on.

“That’s very true, Mr. Littleton, but you must remember I did n’t ask you to come and hear me. It was Miss Dover who sent for you, and asked me to come out here on the stage. I’m perfectly satisfied with my position, and I guess I can make good as a maid until—well, some day, somewhere, somebody is going to hear me, Mr. Littleton; but I can tell one thing: I’m not going to ‘fire away’ until I shoot to kill. And when that time comes”—she smiled dreamily—“there won’t be any reading letters or bothering about a banging door somewhere!”

Suddenly Vinnie burst into a victorious laugh. “There!” she cried. “That’s the look I want on your face when I act! See? My own words were better than the ones you gave me. I’ve had time to create the ‘spell’; and that’s what tells whether you can act or not.”

Littleton was staring at her like a child listening to a fairy-tale. But what was the subtle influence that began to threaten to mar his perfect concentration, neutralizing the attractive magnetism between the sexes? The woman’s atmosphere! For the first time, Vinnie felt a pang of anxiety for her success. What should she do? lightened through her brain. An answer flashed back: Sarah Dover’s mind must be charged somehow to an equal concentration with his. The same intensity of attention must be compelled. How? Through anger, jealousy, ridicule? Ah! With a triumphant smile of satisfaction, Vinnie, tingling, ran to the center of the stage.

“I’m going to do the big speech in Miss Dover’s own love-scene!” she exclaimed; and she jumped audaciously into the part.

Shooting a wink at the now intensely interested Sarah, Littleton straddled a chair and, chuckling, rested his arms on the back. The smile gradually faded from his face. He began to scowl, chewing a cigar viciously. He muttered gently under his breath, nervously tapping his foot till the climax came.

Then, jumping up with a dash that sent his chair into the footlights, he caught the glowing Vinnie by both hands, and shook them mercilessly.

“Sarah Dover,” he shouted, shaking his fist crazily, “this is the discovery of my life! You’re right, by Jupiter! The girl’s got it! Think of finding a talent like that in the gutter!”

“That’s right; she certainly surprised me!” So spoke the artist in Sarah Dover. But the woman in her added quickly: “But, Mr. Littleton, you mustn’t forget Madame—that French comedienne, you know. It’s almost twelve o’clock.”

“Right out of the gutter! Think of it!” Littleton was repeating. “By Jove, I believe she’d make a perfect—”

“But, Mr. Littleton,”—Miss Dover’s voice had risen harshly,—“really, you must n’t miss that appointment! Madame—”

[Pg 582]

“Madame be damned! Let her wait! Why, confound it, Sarah, you don’t realize what this thing means! I’ve been waiting for just something like this. Wait till I tell you something.”

In the excited talk that followed, all Vinnie Smith was really aware of was the iteration of that magic word “gutter.” She stood in a kind of trance, clairvoyante, a delicate smile illuminating her.

Before her was a little boy. He was polishing a nickel on his trousers. How his eyes were dancing with pride in his discovery! Then he vanished. When she turned to Littleton, there was a look of victory on her face.

She left the theater that night, feeling as if, after crawling through a dark, mile-long tunnel, she had miraculously come out into the sunshine, to greet suddenly the half-forgotten figure of—Jean Caspian!

HOW familiar, yet how strange, the office seemed! She felt like a grandmother revisiting the scenes of her youth. Annie, the red-headed typist, had gone, yet the keys of her machine were still playing the same old tune. A new office-boy, but the same old song: “Mr. Littleton’s not seeing any folks to-day.”

How natural it sounded! But Vinnie Smith’s card worked a charm. Two mummies came to life and gaped as she calmly opened the magic door marked “Private.”

“Good afternoon. Just be seated, please,” said Littleton. He went on giving orders right and left. A messenger-boy was hurried off. A dozen letters were glanced at and rubber-stamped. Then he swung round in his chair.

“Can you keep a secret, young lady?”

Vinnie blushed. “That’s what I’ve been doing for the last eight months.”

“Good! I guess that’s the record for a woman. Well, then, see here. I’ve had a ‘lemon’ wished on me in this new production of mine. She’s a great friend of the author; acts like a—well, she’s impossible. The show’s going to the devil. Now, I’ve always said I’d rather have the worst professional than the cleverest amateur in any show of mine. You’ve got to have experience; you simply must know how to handle the stage. But I’m so sick of author’s friends and influence and all those gold bricks I’ve stood for, that for just once I’m going to break all my rules and take a chance on you, young lady!

“Now, see here; Monday morning you take the train for New Bedford, and travel with the company for two weeks. Rehearse, and watch it from the front every night. Then we’ll see what you can do. Now, young lady, you may not know it, but there’s a chance that doesn’t come once in a stage-lifetime. Excuse me for a moment, please.”

As she waited for him to finish a heated telephone conversation, her voyaging eyes stopped suddenly at a large framed photograph on the wall. It was a picture of Guy Norman, and there she herself was, in the very scene she last played with him in Milwaukee! There she was, too, in this very office she had so many months tried in vain to enter! Guy Norman! A choking came in her throat. His cuffs,—the way he jerked them back; that overcoat, flung over a chair at rehearsal; that fresh, folded handkerchief, never opened. “Très bien, Ma’m’selle.” Tears were gathering in her eyes.

Littleton whirled round to her.

“Now, about your name. You know, this ‘Vinnie Smith’ sounds to me like a country dressmaker.” He stopped, stared at a tear trickling down her cheek, and added kindly: “Oh, don’t feel hurt, my dear; they all take stage names, you know. Why, Sarah Dover’s real name is McGillicuddy. Now, I’ve been thinking over some names. I’ll tell you—what was that, now? Sher—”

“My mother’s name was Caspian.”

“Caspian? Bully!”

“Oh, I wish I could take my favorite name. It’s Jean.”

Littleton poked her with his pencil. “Say, you can kiss Vinnie Smith good-by right now. Jean Caspian, I wish you luck!”

IN three weeks Littleton received the following telegram from Springfield:

Where did you catch her? Great! You would n’t know the show. Come on immediately.

GERRISH.

The result of this telegram, and the hurried trip of Littleton’s that followed, was that the production was rushed into New York ahead of the schedule, with the[Pg 585] name of Jean Caspian “featured” on the bills.

“THE SMILE GRADUALLY FADED FROM HIS FACE”

DRAWN BY JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG

❏
LARGER IMAGE

On the opening night, after the second-act drop fell for the last time, Littleton, grinning at the curtain-calls, and with a keen, twinkling eye on the cabal of critics heading for the bar, was suddenly whacked on the back.

“Great girl!” a tall man behind him exclaimed cordially. He was beaming as if his own daughter had won.

“Hello, Davey! It’s a knock-out, isn’t it? Isn’t she a wonder?”

“Well, I guess yes. I came all the way over from Elizabeth to see her.”

“And what d’you think, Davey, I picked that girl almost out of the gutter. Never acted before last month.”

Davey stared. “Say, how many cocktails have you had to-night, old man?”

“Why, that girl was Sarah Dover’s maid!”

“Who? Jean Caspian? Haw-haw-haw!” Davey threw back his head and roared. “Good God! Wasn’t I stage-manager for Guy Norman? I always said she’d go to the top. Say, Littleton, you ought to keep track of these outside winners.”

Littleton was transfixed. His eyes grew small. “How many cocktails have you had, Davey?”

For a moment the two glared at each other in silence. Then Littleton jerked his thumb toward the stage. “Say, come on behind with me.”

Jean opened her dressing-room door in answer to the emphatic knock.

“Well, Miss Caspian,” said Littleton, “you certainly put it over.” He wrung her hand enthusiastically. “But what’s all this about your being with Norman?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered demurely, “I believe I was his leading lady. Oh, how d’you do, Mr. Davey?” She extended her hand, and the two exploded in laughter.

Littleton, baffled, bewildered, watched them, utterly at a loss, pulling his beard savagely.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” he said. Then slowly his face lightened to an indulgent smile. “See here, Miss Caspian, I always thought you were a genius, but now I’m sure of it. Yes, you certainly put it over! Haw-haw-haw!”

SOON after the performance was over that night, Jean and two excited, happy girls hastened from the theater and jumped into a taxicab. Over in Dell’s room they laughed; over in Dell’s room they wept.

“Oh, Jean, it’s awful!” said Clara. “I can’t bear to hear it.”

“Go on! Go on!” said Della Prance. “I want to hear it all.”

“It’s not what she’s telling that affects me. It’s awfully funny, some of it; but it’s something—” Clara slipped down on the floor beside Jean and took her hand. “It’s your voice, Jean—that’s it! It’s something it’s done to it.” She gripped Jean hard. “Jean, you’ve won something more than they ever saw to-night. It’s something that you’ll always have now. It’s been worth the whole game!”

The clock struck three. The parable of the little boy and the gutter-nickel was finished. Silence fell in the room; the girls communed without words. Then Clara rose, yawned, and gave a broken laugh.

“Think of Smiley’s in the morning, Dell!”

[Pg 586]

THE FIRST VOYAGE OVER

OBSERVATIONS AND IMPRESSIONS OF A NAÏVELY SOPHISTICATED TRAVELER AT FORTY

BY THEODORE DREISER

Author of “Sister Carrie,” “Jennie Gerhardt,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY W. J. GLACKENS

I HAVE just turned forty. I have seen a little something of life. I have been a newspaper man, editor, magazine contributor, author, and, in earlier days, several odd kinds of clerk before I found out what I could do.

Eleven years ago I wrote my first novel, which was issued by New York publishers, and suppressed by them. Heaven knows why, for the same autumn they suppressed my book because of its alleged immoral tendencies they published Zola’s “Fecundity” and “An Englishwoman’s Love-Letters.” I fancy now, after eleven years of wonder, that it was not so much the supposed immorality as the book’s straightforward, plain-spoken discussion of American life in general. We were not used then in America to calling a spade a spade, particularly in books. We had great admiration for Tolstoy and Flaubert and Balzac and De Maupassant at a distance,—some of us,—and it was an honor to have handsome sets of these men on our shelves; but mostly we had been schooled in the literature of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Charles Lamb, and that refined company of English sentimental realists who told us something about life, but not everything. I am quite sure that it never occurred to many of us that there was something really improving in a plain, straightforward understanding of life. For myself, I now accept no creeds. I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely and I do not doubt any one absolutely. I think people have both evil and good intentions.

While I was opening my mail one morning I encountered a note, now memorable, which was addressed to me at my apartment. It was from an old literary friend of mine in England, who expressed himself as anxious to see me immediately. I have always liked him. I like him because he strikes me as amusingly English, decidedly literary and artistic in his point of view, a man with wide wisdom, discriminating taste, rare selection. He wears a monocle in his right eye, à la Chamberlain, and I like him for that. I like people who take themselves with a grand air, whether they like me or not, particularly if the grand air is backed up by a real personality. In this case it is.

Next morning G. took breakfast with me; it was a most interesting affair. He was late—very. He stalked in, his spats shining, his monocle glowing with a shrewd, inquisitive eye behind it, his whole manner genial, self-sufficient, almost dictatorial, and always final. He takes charge easily, rules sufficiently, does essentially well in all circumstances where he is interested so to do.

“I have decided,” he observed with that managerial air which always delights me because my soul is not in the least managerial, “that you will come back to England with me. I have my passage arranged for the twenty-second. You will come to my house in England; you will stay there a few days; then I shall take you to London and put you up at a very good hotel. You will stay there until January first and then we shall go to the Continent. Sometime in the spring or summer, when you have all your notes, you will return to London or New York and write your impressions, and I will see that they are published.”

“If it can be arranged,” I interpolated.

“It can be arranged,” he replied emphatically. “I will attend to the financial part, and arrange affairs with both an American and an English publisher.”

Sometimes life is very generous. It walks in and says,[Pg 587] “Here, I want you to do a certain thing,” and it proceeds to arrange all your affairs for you. I felt curiously at this time as though I was on the edge of a great change. When one turns forty and faces one’s first transatlantic voyage, it is a more portentous event than when it comes at twenty.

I shall not soon forget reading in a morning paper, on the early ride downtown the day we sailed, of the suicide of a friend of mine, a brilliant man. He had fallen on hard lines, his wife had decided to desert him, he was badly in debt. I knew him well, I had known his erratic history. Here on this morning when I was sailing for Europe in the flush of a momentary literary victory, he was lying in death. It gave me pause. It brought to my mind the Latin phrase, “Memento mori.” I saw again, right in the heart of this hour of brightness, how grim life really is. Fate is kind or it is not. It puts you ahead or it does not. If it does not, nothing can save you. I acknowledge the Furies. I believe in them. I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.

When I reached the ship, it was already a perfect morning in full glow. The sun was up, a host of gulls were on the wing, an air of delicious adventure enveloped the great liner’s dock at the foot of Thirteenth Street. Did ever a boy thrill over a ship as I over this monster of the seas?

In the first place, even at this early hour it was crowded with people. From the moment I came on board I was delighted by the eager, restless movement of the throng. The main deck was like the lobby of one of the great New York hotels at dinner-time. There was much call on the part of a company of dragooned ship-stewards to “keep moving, please,” and the enthusiasm of farewells and the inquiries after this person and that were delightful to hear. I encountered G. finally and exchanged greetings, and then perforce soon found myself taken in tow by him, for he obviously wanted to instruct me in all the details of this new world upon which I was now entering.

Shortly before sailing I had my first glimpse of a Miss B., as discreet and charming a bit of English femininity as one would care to set eyes upon. She was an English actress in whose comfortable transit G. was apparently seriously interested. Shortly afterward a Miss X. was introduced to him and to Miss B. by a third acquaintance of Miss B.’s, a Mr. K. I noticed Mr. K. strolling about the deck some time before I saw him conversing with Miss B., and later, for a moment, with G., K. interested me as a direct, self-satisfied, and aggressive type of the Hebrew race. I saw these women only for a moment at first, but they impressed me at once as rather attractive examples of the stage world.

It was nine o’clock, the hour of the ship’s sailing. I went forward to the prow. All the morning I had been particularly impressed with the cloud of gulls fluttering about the ship, but now the harbor, the magnificent wall of lower New York, set like a jewel in a green ring of sea-water, took my eye. When should I see it again? How soon should I be back? I stood there till the Mauretania fronted her prow outward to the broad Atlantic. Then I started to go below, but G. overtook me.

“Come up here,” he said.

We went to the boat-deck, where the towering red smoke-stacks were belching forth trailing clouds of smoke. I am quite sure that G., when he originally made his authoritative command that I come to England with him, was in no way satisfied that I would. It was a somewhat light venture on his part; but here I was. And now, having “let himself in” for this, as he would have phrased it, I could see that he was intensely interested in what Europe would do to me—and possibly in what I would do to Europe. Nevertheless, he had very little to say except to speak of the receding beauty of New York, to speculate as to my probable impressions of England and France, to congratulate himself that we were really under way. It was delightful.

Absolutely ignorant of this world of the sea, a great ship like this interested me from the start. It impressed me no little that all the servants were English and that they were, shall I say, polite? Well, if not that, non-aggressive.

Another thing that impressed and irritated me a little was the stolidity of the English countenance as I encountered it here on this ship. I didn’t know then whether it was accidental in this case or national. There is a certain type of Englishman—the robust, rosy-checked, blue-[Pg 588]eyed Saxon—whom I cordially dislike, I think, speaking temperamentally and artistically. They are too solid, too rosy, too immobile as to their faces, and altogether too assured and stary. I don’t like them. They offend me. They thrust a silly race pride into my face, which isn’t necessary at all, and which I always resent with a race pride of my own. It has even occurred to me at times that these temperamental race differences could be quickly adjusted only by an appeal to arms, which is sillier yet. But so goes life. It’s foolish on both sides, but I mention it for what it is worth.

I went to my room and began unpacking, but was not there long before I was called out by G. to meet Miss B. and Miss X.

“Get your cap and coat,” he said in his authoritative way, “and come out on deck. Miss B. is there. She’s reading your last novel. She likes it.”

I went out, interested to meet these two, for the actress, the talented, good-looking representative of that peculiarly feminine world of art, appeals to me very much. I have always thought, since I have been able to reason about it, that the stage is almost the only ideal outlet for the artistic temperament of a talented and beautiful woman. Men? Well, I don’t care so much for the men of the stage. I acknowledge the distinction of such a temperament as that of David Garrick or Edwin Booth. These were great actors, and, by the same token, they were great artists, wonderful artists; but in the main the men of the stage are frail shadows of a much more real thing—the active, constructive man in other lines.

I found that this very able patron of mine was doing everything that could be done to make the trip comfortable without show or fuss. Many have this executive or managerial gift. Sometimes I think it is a natural trait of the English—of their superior classes, anyhow. They go about colonizing efficiently, industriously. They make fine governors and patrons.

Not only were all our chairs on deck here in a row, but our chairs at table had already been arranged for—four seats at the captain’s table. It seems that from previous voyages on this ship G. knew the captain. He also knew the chairman of the company in England. No doubt he knew the chief steward. Anyhow, he knew the man who sold us our tickets. Wherever he went, I found he was always finding somebody whom he knew. I like to get in tow of such a man as G. and see him plow the seas.

I covertly observed the personality of Miss X. Here was some one who, on sight, at a glance, attracted me far more significantly than ever Miss B. could. I cannot tell you why, exactly. In a way, Miss B. appeared, at moments and from certain points of view, with her delicacy, refinement, sweetness of mood, the more attractive of the two. But Miss X., with her chic face, her dainty little chin, her narrow, lavender-lidded eyes, drew me quite like a magnet. I liked a certain snap and vigor which shot from her eyes, and which, I could feel, represented our raw American force. A foreigner will not, I am afraid, understand exactly what I mean; but there is something about the American climate, its soil, rain, winds, race spirit, which produces a raw, direct incisiveness of soul in its children. They are strong, erect, elated, enthusiastic. They look you in the eye, cut you with a glance, say what they mean in ten thousand ways without really saying anything at all. They come upon you fresh like cold water, and they have the luster of a hard, bright jewel and the fragrance of a rich, red, full-blown rose. Americans are wonderful to me—American men and American women. They are rarely polished or refined. They know little of the subtleties of life, its order and procedures. But oh, the glory of their spirit, the hope of them, the dreams of them, the desires and enthusiasm of them! That is what wins me. They give me the sense of being intensely, enthusiastically, humanly alive.

After dinner we adjourned to the ship’s drawing-room, and there Miss X. fell to playing cards with G. at first, afterward with Mr. K., who came up and found us, thrusting his company upon us perforce. The man amused me, so typically aggressive, money-centered was he. However, not he so much as Miss X. and her mental and social attitude commanded my attention. Her card-playing and her boastful accounts of adventures at Ostend, Trouville, Nice, Monte Carlo, and Aix-les-Bains indicated plainly the trend of her[Pg 589] interests. She was all for the showy life that was to be found in these places, burning with a desire to glitter, not shine, in that half-world of which she was a smart atom. Her conversation was at once showy, naïve, sophisticated, and yet unschooled. I could see by G.’s attentions to her, that, aside from her crude Americanisms, which ordinarily would have alienated him, he was interested in her beauty, her taste in dress, her love of a certain continental café life which encompassed a portion of his own interests. Both were looking forward to a fresh season of it, G. with me, Miss X. with some one who was waiting for her in London.

After dinner there was a concert. It was a dreary affair. When it was over, I started to go to bed, but, it being warm and fresh, I stopped outside. The night was beautiful. There were no fellow-passengers on the promenade. All had retired. The sky was magnificent for stars—Orion, the Pleiades, the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper. I saw one star, off to my right, as I stood at the prow, under the bridge, which, owing the soft, velvety darkness, cast a faint, silvery glow on the water—just a trace. Think of it! One lone, silvery star over the great dark sea doing this. I stood at the prow and watched the boat speed on. I threw back my head and drank in the salt wind. I looked and listened. England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany—all these were coming to me mile by mile. As I stood there, a bell over me struck eight times. Another, farther off, sounded the same number. Then a voice at the prow called, “All’s well,” and another aloft, in the crow’s-nest, echoed, “All’s well.” The second voice was weak and quavering.

Something came up in my throat—a quick, unbidden lump of emotion. Was it an echo of old journeys and old seas when life was not safe? What about Columbus and Raleigh and the Norsemen? What about the Phoenicians and the Egyptians and the Greeks? St. Paul writes, “And we being exceedingly tossed with a tempest.” Quite so—fears and pains and terrors. And now this vast ship, eight hundred and eighty-two feet long, eighty-eight feet beam, with huge pits of engines and furnaces and polite, veneered first-cabin decks and passengers! I love life. It is strange, dangerous, beautiful, cruel. I love forms and variations, but I mistrust them utterly. I do not know who I am, or whence I am, or why I am. Only I am here, and would that I were happy and could live so always!

The close of the next day occurred in the lounging-or reception-room, where, after dinner, we all retired to listen to the music, and then began one of those really interesting conversations between G. and Miss X. that sometimes illuminate life and make one see things forever afterward.

It is going to be very hard for me to define just how this could be, for I might say that I had at the moment considerable intellectual contempt for the point of view which the conversation represented. Consider first the American attitude. With us the business of life is not living, but achieving. Roughly speaking, we are willing to go hungry, dirty, to wait in the cold, and to fight gamely, if in the end we can achieve one or more of the seven stars in the human crown of life. Several of the forms of supremacy may seem the same, but they are not. Examine them closely. The average American is not born to place. He does not know what the English sense of order is. We have not that national esprit de corps which characterizes the English and the French, perhaps, certainly the Germans. We are loose, uncouth, but, in our way, wonderful. The spirit of God has once more breathed upon the waters.

Well, the gentleman who was doing the talking in this instance and the lady who was coinciding, inciting, aiding, abetting, approving, and at times leading and demonstrating, represented two different and yet allied points of view. G. is distinctly a product of the English conservative school of thought, a gentleman who wishes sincerely he was not so conservative. His house is in order. You can feel it. His standards and ideals are fixed. He knows what life ought to be, how it ought to be lived. You would never catch him associating with the rag-tag and bobtail of humanity with any keen sense of human brotherhood or emotional tenderness of feeling. One cannot be considering the state of the under dog at any particular time. Government is established to do this sort of thing. The masses! Let[Pg 590] them behave. And let us, above all things, have order and peace. This is a section of G. Not all, mind you, but a section. I have described Miss X.

“And oh, the life!” she said at one point. “Americans don’t know how to live. They are all engaged in doing something. They are such beginners. They are only interested in money. I see them in Paris now and then.” She lifted her hand. “Here in Europe people understand life better. They know how to live. They know before they begin how much it will take to do the things that they want to do, and they start out to make that much; not a fortune—just enough to do the things that they want to do. When they get that, they retire and live.”

“And what do they do when they live?” I asked. “What do they call living?”

“Oh, having a nice country house within a short traveling distance of London or Paris; and being able to dine at the best restaurants and visit the best theaters once or twice a week; to go to Paris or Monte Carlo or Scheveningen or Ostend two or three or four, or as many times a year as they please; to wear good clothes; and to be thoroughly comfortable.”

“That is not a bad standard,” I said, and then I added, “And what else do they do?”

“And what else should they do? Isn’t that enough?”

And there you have the European standard according to Miss X. as contrasted with the American standard which is, or has been up to this time, something decidedly different. I am sure. We have not been so eager to live. Our idea has been to work. No American that I have ever known has had the idea of laying up just so much, a moderate amount, and then retiring and living. He has had quite another thought in his mind. The American, the average American, I am sure loves power, the ability to do something, far more earnestly than he loves mere living. He wants to be an officer or a director of something, a poet, anything you please for the sake of being it, not for the sake of living.

While I was lying in my berth the fifth morning, I heard the room steward outside my door tell some one that he thought we reached Fishguard at one-thirty.

I packed my trunks, thinking of this big ship and the fact that my trip was over and that never again could I cross the Atlantic for the first time. A queer world this. We can only do any one thing significantly once. I remember when I first went to Chicago, I remember when I first went to St. Louis, I remember when I first went to New York. Other trips there were, but they are lost in vagueness. But the first time of any important thing sticks and lasts; it comes back at times, and haunts you with its beauty and its sadness. You know well you cannot do that any more; and, like a clock, it ticks and tells you that life is moving on. I shall never come to England any more for the first time. That is gone and done for, worse luck.

So I packed—will you believe it?—a little sadly. I think most of us are a little silly at times, only we are cautious enough to conceal it. There is in me the spirit of a wistful child somewhere, and it clings pitifully to the hand of its big mama, Life, and cries when it is frightened. It longs for love and sympathy, and aches, oh, pathetically; and then there is a coarse, vulgar exterior which fronts the world defiantly and bids all and sundry to go to the devil. It sneers and barks and jeers bitterly at times, and guffaws and cackles and has a joyous time laughing at the follies of others.

Then I went to hunt G. to find out what I should do. How much was I to give the deck steward, how much to the bath steward, how much to the room steward, how much to the dining-room steward, how much to “boots,” and so on.

“Look here,” observed that most efficient of all managerial souls that I have ever known, “I’ll tell you what you do. No, I’ll write it.” And he drew forth an ever-ready envelope.

I went forthwith and paid them, relieving my soul of a great weight. Then I came on deck, and found that I had forgotten to pack my ship blanket and a steamer rug, which I forthwith went and packed. Then I discovered that I had no place for my derby hat save on my head, so I went back and packed my cap. Then I thought I had lost one of my brushes, which I hadn’t, though I did lose one of my stylo-pencils. Finally I came on deck and sang coon-songs with Miss X., sitting[Pg 591] in our steamer-chairs. The low shore of Ireland had come into view, with two faint hills in the distance, and these fascinated me. I thought I should have some slight emotion on seeing land again, but I didn’t. It was gray and misty at first, but presently the sun came out beautifully clear, and the day was as warm as May in New York. I felt a sudden elation of spirits with the coming of the sun, and I began to think what a lovely time I was going to have in Europe.

Miss X. was a little more friendly this morning than heretofore. She is a tricky creature, coy, uncertain, and hard to please. She liked me intellectually and thought I was able, but her physical and emotional predilections, as far as men are concerned, did not include me.

We rejoiced together singing coon-songs, and then we fought. There is a directness between experienced intellects which waves aside all formalities. She had seen a lot of life; so had I. She said she thought she would like to walk a little.

We strolled back along the heaving deck to the end of the first-cabin section and then to the stern. When we reached there the sky was overcast again, for it was one of those changeable mornings which is now gray, now bright, now misty. Just now the heavens were black and lowering with soft, rain-charged clouds, like the wool of a smudgy sheep. The sea was a rich green in consequence; not a deal green, but a dark, muddy, oil-green. It rose and sank in its endless unrest, and one or two boats appeared—a light-ship, anchored out all alone against the lowering waste, and a small, black, passenger-steamer going somewhere.

“I wish my path in life were as white as that and as straight,” observed Miss X., pointing to our white, propeller-churned wake, which extended back for half a mile or more.

“Yes,” I observed, “you do and you don’t. You do, if it wouldn’t cost you trouble in the future—impose the straight and narrow, as it were.”

“Oh, you don’t know,” she exclaimed irritably, that ugly fighting light coming into her eyes which I had seen there several times before. “You don’t know what my life has been. I haven’t been so bad. We all of us do the best we can. I have done the best I could, considering.”

“Yes, yes,” I observed; “you’re ambitious and alive and you’re seeking—Heaven knows what. You would be fine with your pretty face and body if you were not so—so sophisticated. The trouble with you is—”

“Oh, look at that cute little boat out there!” She was talking of the light-ship. “I always feel sorry for a poor little thing like that, set aside from the main tide of life and left lonely, with no one to care for it.”

“The trouble with you is,” I went on, seizing this new remark as an additional pretext for analysis, “you’re romantic, not sympathetic. You’re interested in that poor little lonely boat because its state is romantic, not pathetic. It may be pathetic, but that isn’t the point with you.”

“Well,” she said, “if you had had all the hard knocks I have had, you wouldn’t be sympathetic either. I’ve suffered, I have. My illusions have been killed dead.”

“Yes, love is over with you. You can’t love any more. You can like to be loved, that’s all. If it were the other way about—”

I paused to think how really lovely she would be with her narrow, lavender eyelids; her delicate, almost retroussé, little nose; her red cupid’s-bow mouth.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, with a gesture of almost religious adoration, “I cannot love any one person any more; but I can love love, and I do—all the delicate things it stands for.”

“Flowers,” I observed, “jewels, automobiles, hotel bills, fine dresses.”

“Oh, you’re brutal. I hate you. You’ve said the cruelest, meanest things that have ever been said to me.”

“But they’re so.”

“I don’t care. Why shouldn’t I be hard? Why shouldn’t I love to live and be loved? Look at my life. See what I’ve had.”

“You like me, in a way.”

“I admire your intellect.”

“Quite so; and others receive the gifts of your personality.”

“I can’t help it. I can’t be mean to the man I’m with. He’s good to me. I won’t. I’d be sinning against the only conscience I have.”

They were blowing a bugle for lunch[Pg 592] when we came back, and down we went. G. was already at table. The orchestra was playing “Auld Lang Syne,” “Home, Sweet Home,” “Dixie,” and the “Suwanee River.” It even played one of those delicious American rags which I love so much—the “Oceana Roll.” I felt a little lump in my throat at “Auld Lang Syne” and “Dixie,” and together Miss X. and I hummed the “Oceana Roll” as it was played. One of the girl passengers came about with a plate to obtain money for the members of the orchestra, and half-crowns were generally deposited. Then I started to eat my dessert; but G., who had hurried off, came back to interfere.

“Come, come,”—he is always most emphatic—“you’re missing it all. We’re landing.”

I thought we were leaving at once. The eye behind the monocle was premonitory of some great loss to me. I hurried on deck, to thank his artistic and managerial instinct instantly I arrived there. Before me was Fishguard and the Welsh coast, and to my dying day I shall never forget it. Imagine, if you please, a land-locked harbor, as green as grass in this semi-cloudy, semi-gold-bathed afternoon, with a half-moon of granite scarp rising sheer and clear from the green waters to the low gray clouds overhead. On its top I could see fields laid out in pretty squares or oblongs, and at the bottom of what to me appeared to be the east end of the semicircle was a bit of gray scruff, which was the village, no doubt. On the green water were several other boats—steamers, much smaller, with red stacks, black sides, white rails and funnels, bearing a family resemblance to the one we were on. There was a long pier extending out into the water from what I took to be the village, and something farther inland that looked like a low shed.

This black hotel of a ship, so vast, so graceful, now rocking gently in the enameled bay, was surrounded this hour by wheeling, squeaking gulls. I always like the squeak of a gull; it reminds me of a rusty car-wheel, and somehow it accords with a lone, rocky coast. Here they were, their little feet coral red, their beaks jade gray, their bodies snowy white or sober gray, wheeling and crying, “My heart remembers how.” I looked at them, and that old intense sensation of joy came back—the wish to fly, the wish to be young, the wish to be happy, the wish to be loved. I think my lips framed verses, and I thought that if nature, in her vast, sightless chemistry, would only give me something to feed this intense emotion to the full, I should welcome eternal sleep.

But my scene, beautiful as it was, was slipping away. One of the pretty steamers I had noted lying on the water some distance away was drawing alongside—to get mails, they said. There were hurrying and shuffling people on all the first-cabin decks.

Then the mail and trunks being off, and that boat having veered away, another and somewhat smaller one came alongside, and we first- and then the second-class passengers went aboard, and I watched the great ship growing less and less as we pulled away from it. It was immense from alongside, a vast skyscraper of a ship. At a hundred feet it seemed not so large, but exceedingly more graceful; at a thousand feet all its exquisite lines were perfect, its bulk not so great, but the pathos of its departing beauty wonderful; at two thousand feet it was still beautiful and large against the granite ring of the harbor; but, alas! it was moving. The captain was an almost indistinguishable spot upon the bridge. The stacks, in their way gorgeous, took on beautiful proportions. I thought, as we veered in near the pier and the ship turned within her length or thereabouts and steamed out, I had never seen a more beautiful sight. Her convoy of gulls was still about her. Her smoke-stacks flung back their graceful streamers. The propeller left a white trail of foam.

Just then the lighter bumped against the dock. I walked under a long, low train-shed covering four tracks, and then I saw my first English passenger-train. I didn’t like the looks of the cars. I can prove in a moment by any traveler that our trains are vastly more luxurious. I can see where there isn’t heat enough, and where one lavatory for men and women on any train, let alone a first-class one, is an abomination; but, still, and notwithstanding, I say the English railway service is better. Why? Because it’s more human; it’s more considerate. You aren’t driven and urged to step lively and called at in loud, harsh voices, and made to feel[Pg 593] that you are being tolerated aboard something that was never made for you at all, but for the employees of the company.

Drawn by W. J. Glackens

“THE MAGNIFICENT WALL OF LOWER NEW YORK, SET LIKE A JEWEL IN A GREEN RING OF SEA-WATER”

But finally the train was started, and we were off. The track was not so wide as ours, if I am not mistaken, and the little freight-cars were positively ridiculous, mere wheelbarrows by comparison with the American type. As for the passenger-cars, when I came to examine them, they reminded me of some of our fine street-cars that run from, say, Schenectady to Gloversville. They were the first-class cars, too—the English Pullmans. The train started out briskly and you could feel that it did not have the powerful weight to it which the American train has. An American Pullman creaks significantly, just as a great ship does when it begins to move. An American engine begins to pull slowly because it has something to pull—like a team with a heavy load. I didn’t feel that I was in a train half so much as I did that I was in a string of baby-carriages.

As I think of it now, I can never be sufficiently grateful to G. for a certain affectionate, thoughtful, sympathetic regard for my every possible mood on this occasion. This was my first trip to this England of which of course he was intensely proud. He was so humanly anxious that I should not miss any of its charms or, if need be, defects. He wanted me to be able to judge it fairly and humanly and to see, as he phrased it, “the eventual result sieved through your temperament.” The soul of attention, the soul of courtesy, patient, long-suffering, humane, gentle, how I have tried the patience of that man at times! An iron mood he has on occasion; a stoic one always. Gentle, even, smiling, living a rule and a standard, every thought of him produces a grateful smile.

It was three-thirty when the train began to move, and from the lovely, misty sunshine of the morning the sky had become overcast with low, gray, almost black, rain-clouds. I looked at the hills and valleys. They told me we were in Wales. Curiously, as we sped along, first came Wordsworth into my mind, and then Thomas Hardy. I thought of[Pg 594] Wordsworth first because these smooth, kempt hills, wet with the rain and static with deep, gray shadows, suggested him. England owes much to William Wordsworth, I think. So far as I can see, he epitomized in his verses this sweet, simple hominess that tugs at the heart-strings like some old call that one has heard before. My father was a German, my mother of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, and yet there is a pull here in this Shaksperian-Wordsworthian-Hardyesque world which is precisely like the call of a tender mother to a child. I can’t resist it. I love it. I love it so much that it even hurts me; and I am not English, but radically American.

Drawn by W. J. Glackens

“I SAW K. CONVERSING WITH MISS B.”

I understand that Hardy is not so well thought of in England as he might be; that, somehow, some large conservative class thinks that his books are immoral or destructive. I should say the English would better make much of Thomas Hardy while he is alive. He is one of its great traditions. His works are beautiful. The spirit of all the things he has done or attempted is lovely. He is a master mind, simple, noble, dignified, serene. He is as fine as any of the English cathedrals. St. Paul’s or Canterbury has no more significance to me than Thomas Hardy. I shall see St. Paul’s. I wish I could see the spirit of Thomas Hardy indicated in some such definite way. And yet I do not. Monuments do not indicate great men, but the fields and valleys of a country suggest them.

At twenty or thirty miles from Fishguard we came to the Bay of Bristol. Then came more open country, and then the lovely, alternating hues of this rain-washed world. The water under these dark clouds took on a peculiar luster. It looked at times like burnished steel, at times like muddy lead. I thought of our own George Inness and what he would have done with these scenes and what the English Turner has done, though he preferred, as a rule, another key.

At four-thirty one of the charming English trainmen came and asked if we would have tea in the dining-car. We would. We arose and in a few moments were entering one of those dainty little basket cars. The tables were covered with white linen and simple, pretty china and a silver tea-service. It wasn’t as though you were traveling at all. I felt as though I were stopping at the house of a friend, or as though I were in the cozy corner of some well-known and friendly inn. Tea was served. We ate toast and talked cheerfully. G. was most anxious that I should not miss any of the significance of the landscape, and insisted that I keep my nose to the window.

Having started so late, it grew nearly dark after tea, and the distant landscapes[Pg 595] were not so easy to descry. We came presently, in the mist, to a place called Carmarthen, I think, where were great black stacks and flaming forges and lights burning wistfully in the dark; and then to another similar place, Swansea; and finally to a third, Cardiff, great centers of manufacture, for there were flaming lights from forges; great, golden gleams from open furnaces; and dark blue smoke, visible even at this hour, from tall stacks overhead; and gleaming electric lights, like bright, lucent diamonds.

Drawn by W. J. Glackens

“ONE OF THOSE REALLY INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN G. AND MISS X.”

It has always seemed a great, sad, heroic thing,—plain day labor. Those common, ignorant men, working before flaming forges, stripped to the waist in some instances, fascinated my imagination. I have always marveled at the inequalities of nature—the way it will give one man a low brow and a narrow mind, a narrow round of thought, and make a slave or horse of him, and another a light, nimble mind, a quick wit, and air, and make a gentleman of him. No human being can solve either the question of ability or utility. Is your gentleman useful? Yes and no, perhaps. Is your laborer useful? Yes and no, perhaps. I should say obviously yes. But see the differences in the reward of labor, physical labor. One eats his hard-earned crust in the sweat of his face; the other picks at his surfeit of courses, and wonders why this or that doesn’t taste better. I did not make my mind. I did not make my art. I cannot choose my taste except by predestined instinct, and yet here I am sitting in a comfortable English home as I write, commiserating the poor working-man. I indict nature here and now, as I always do and always shall do, as being aimless, pointless, unfair, unjust. I see in the whole thing no scheme but an accidental one, no justice save accidental justice. Now and then, in a way, some justice is done, but it is accidental; no individual man seems to will it. He can’t. He doesn’t know how. He can’t think how. And there’s an end of it.

[Pg 596]

WINGÈD VICTORY

BY VICTOR WHITLOCK

O PATIENT, wounded warrior of the range,

Braving the might of all the storms that blow,

Breasting the bandit winds that never change,

Fighting forever with an unseen foe.

How your brave spirit breathes of sturdy cheer—

You that the ranger deems a worthless tree.

Triumphant Nature, sculptor without peer,

Has moulded you her Wingèd Victory.

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 597]

AMERICAN MAKERS OF THE NEW JAPAN

BY WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS

Author of “The Religions of Japan,” “The Japanese Nation in Evolution,” etc.

ALL the world knows that Commodore Matthew C. Perry “opened Japan,” very much as one opens an exposition. He touched the button that set in operation the waiting wheels of a century or more of interior, intellectual preparation. It is not so well known that to President Millard Fillmore belongs the credit of organizing the expedition sent out in 1852, although it was William Alexander Graham, Secretary of the Navy, who brought up the subject in cabinet meeting.

Other American makers of Japan lived before Perry. Our flag, covering Dutch ships, was mirrored in Nagasaki Bay in 1798. In 1837, S. Wells Williams, printer and diplomatist, who, in the American ship Morrison, fitted out by Mr. Charles W. King, sailed from Hong-Kong to return shipwrecked Japanese, was driven away from Uraga with cannon-fire and balls. From these waifs, by word of mouth, he learned the spoken language; he then translated the gospels into Japanese, and in 1852 acted as Perry’s interpreter and proposed “the favored nation” clause in the treaty.

Mastery of the language was the key with which to open Thornrose Castle. The futile visits in 1845 and 1846 of Commodores James Biddle and James Glynn, with battle-ships and brigs, appear smaller in perspective than the work of Ranald MacDonald, first teacher of English in Japan. In 1848, this educational zealot had himself put ashore from an American ship. In shutting out undesirable aliens the bigoted hermit Japanese of the nineteenth century were quite equal to the glorious Americans of the twentieth. Though MacDonald was promptly imprisoned and sent to Nagasaki, about his cage cell eager young men gathered in classes to learn English and become interpreters. The Yedo Government, thus enabled to meet Perry openly, had also, concealed in the after pavilion, Manjiro (“John Munn”), who had been educated at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and who likewise had been voluntarily put ashore from an American vessel which had carried him to Japan. “John,” though young, was white-haired, the capillary bleaching having resulted from translating into Japanese, by command of his Yedo superiors, Bowditch’s “The New American Practical Navigator,” when dictionaries were unknown.

In Perry’s fleet, a marine named Jonathan Goble had enlisted, hoping to Christianize the natives. Goble began with a waif picked up at sea, whose Japanese name emerged from the alembic of sailor lingo as “Sam Patch.” Later, in a land where horse traction was unknown, Goble, in order to give his sick wife outdoor air, invented the man-power carriage. By his drawing of a rough design, and showing a native mechanic the picture of a baby-carriage in Godey’s “Lady’s Book,” the result in 1871 was the jinrikisha, the wheel that rolled round the world.

Before 1860, Japanese time was valueless, a drug in the market. There was no word in common use for anything less than an hour. Railways, introduced in 1872, made minutes and seconds intelligible quantities. For the first train scheduled, the prime minister of the empire was late and was left behind. The simultaneous advent of the cheap American watch and the Yankee’s jinrikisha made ordinary people realize that an hour had sixty minutes. Some Japanese have since learned to split seconds.

FIRST CLASS IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKIO, 1872, TAUGHT BY DR. GRIFFIS FOR TWO YEARS. MANY OF THESE ARE NOW LEADING MEN IN JAPAN

In 1850 no English-speaking person could read correctly a Japanese book. Eugene Van Reed, an American, made a phrase-book in the katakana script, beginning the work which was continued by John Liggins, the two Browns, Samuel and Nathan, and William Imbrie—all Americans. James Curtis Hepburn, linguistic pioneer and translator of the Bible, made the initial dictionary, on which all[Pg 598] subsequent lexicons are based. The first series of American books done into Japanese was Peter Parley’s histories, the style of which for a whole generation flavored “English as she was written” in Japan. It showed the Japanese islanders that they were as “frogs in a well, that know not the great ocean.” More than anything else, the reading of English turned Japan’s head away from China’s world of thought to that of the Occident. Not a few masterpieces of American literature done into Japanese have passed through many editions. The answer of one of our sailors, in 1847, to the question, “Who is the ruler of America?” “The people,” was then unfathomable. It is now quite plain. Prince Ito, who knew the Constitution of the United States almost by heart, read “The Federalist,” finding it more fascinating than a novel. Thus it was by Alexander Hamilton, quite as much as by Bismarck, that he was confirmed in his unionist and centralizing theories. On the other hand, none so well as Americans has mastered the psychology of the Japanese, opened their hearts, and read their souls. Despite its limitations, Percival Lowell’s work, “Occult Japan” (1894), is a masterpiece, Sidney L. Gulick’s “Evolution of the Japanese” (1903) is excellent, and Alice Bacon’s writings on Japan are superb.

TOWNSEND HARRIS, THE FIRST UNITED STATES MINISTER TO JAPAN AND FOUNDER OF THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

Except that by Perry’s treaty two doors were set ajar for doling out food, fuel, and water to sailors, Japan through this alone might still be a hermit nation. Yet in 1913 we see a world power,[Pg 599] wherein trade and labor are honored, population is doubled, wealth octupled, fifty millions of people are physically made over, and are actually taller by a half-inch than their ancestors, armed with the external forces of civilization, with social life and education, including music and law, changed and with ideals vastly modified. How did it come about?

WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS

Our first consul-general was Townsend Harris, merchant, and President of the Board of Education in New York City. In accepting President Pierce’s nomination, he changed his skies, but not his constant mind, and hardly his chair of instruction. This founder of the institution that became the College of the City of New York, during twenty-two months at Shimoda and in Yedo, taught Japan’s leading men the practical details of modern civilized intercourse. The hermits yielded, and opened five seaports and two cities to trade, residence, and the work of teachers, missionaries, and experts who made labor honorable. It was Harris who lifted the flood-gates of modernism, set the precedents, and fixed the limits of the later treaties with twenty nations. Even more, despite diplomatic limits, he discerned in the Japanese character a frankness and honesty that some of our newspapers have not yet discovered. Hence in Yedo, with a courage born of faith that fails not the true discerner, Harris, without a soldier, marine, or sailor, kept the stars and stripes flying over the American legation—the only one left in Yedo—when all the foreign envoys, de[Pg 600]spite big battalions and artillery, had struck their flags and fled to Yokohama, thus insulting a proud nation by their absence from its capital for nearly a decade. The popular Japanese title of Townsend Harris is “the nation’s friend.”

CELEBRATION IN HONOR OF THE OPENING OF THE FIRST PUBLIC SCHOOL IN JAPAN

Having committed herself by treaty, Japan then had to make trade and toil honorable and develop the resources of the country, or else go the way of India, be prostrate like China, or fall into the maw of Russia.

Where look for wealth? The soil was already worked to its full capacity as then known. Despite artificial checks to population, which had stood stationary for a century, the land seemed to cast out its human occupants. Famines, often carrying off two millions of people a year, desolated the land with appalling regularity. They were obliged to look to the mines and the precious metals, despite the double danger of a social revolution sure to be wrought from honoring men of pick and tools rather than of swords, and of the wrath of the gods and dragons that guarded jealously the treasures of the underworld.

It was as Nicodemus by night that high-bred men, shuddering at the necessity of it, came to Mr. Harris to ask for American mining engineers to prospect for gold. In 1861, with appalling promptness, arrived Messrs. William Phipps Blake and Raphael Pumpelly. Then the frightful problem of etiquette at once upreared itself. Should they be received as mechanics in overalls or as subalterns in an embassy? The answer to the question referred to Mr. Harris was startling: “In America the President of the United States would receive them as his equals.”

That settled it. The monetary equilibrium of the world was not disturbed then or since by Japan’s output of gold. Social and economic conditions, as well as lack of lodes prevented, but Pumpelly taught blasting, and incidentally lighted the fuse that blew up feudalism. Later, Professor Benjamin Lyman, with Harry Smith Monroe and others from America, explored, surveyed, and mapped Japan’s treasure-lands, saving the waste of millions in wild delusions.

Pumpelly builded better than he knew, healing an age-long breach between honor and toil. Without knowing it, he ushered in a new industrial era. Townsend Harris was the glad sponsor of the missionaries, who for ten years were in effect the sole teachers of the nation in science, history, medicine, and statesmanship; for of Christianity, until 1872, the Japanese, knowing only the Portuguese and Spanish type, and refusing to jest at their scars, would have none.

[Pg 601]

A TYPICAL STREET CONVEYANCE IN JAPAN BEFORE THE INTRODUCTION OF JINRIKISHAS

Some unseen power must have presided over the choice of the four American pioneer missionaries—Channing Moore Williams, Samuel Robbins Brown, James Curtis Hepburn, and Guido Fridolin Verbeck—who arrived on the soil in 1859, each one to live through forty years of altruistic toil. They seeded Japan with new thoughts and raised a regiment of trained men, with faces set toward the Occident. These serve, or have served, as van-leaders of reform and progress, not a few being in the high councils of the nation. Of the four pioneers, three, having been in China, soon got a grip on the native script and literature, which, like most things Japanese, is based on the Chinese. Dr. Guido Fridolin Verbeck, master of seven languages, became later chief government translator, adviser of the emperor, and the star preacher in Japanese. This “Americanized Dutchman,” educated in technical science at Delft, had at once the mind of an engineer and of a statesman. At Nagasaki he took hold of the boys, taught them the New Testament and the Constitution of the United States, and, to feudal and divided Japan, Christopher Martin Wieland’s poem, “Where is the German Fatherland?” Verbeck dictated what should be the languages for medicine (German), law (French), and education (English). He hewed out the channels of progress by urging that while students should be sent abroad in large numbers, foreign experts in all departments should be brought to Japan; by proposing an imperial embassy to go around the world, and by elaborating a scheme of national elementary education. Dr. Samuel Robbins Brown, the schoolmaster, intellectual father of the first American woman’s college chartered as such, at Elmira, New York, who had in 1847 brought the first Chinese students to America, introduced photography and raised a body of intellectuals. To-day a hundred Japanese lawyers, doctors, editors, ministers, and public men revere his name.

In December, 1867, the older native statesmen, with long preparation, and the younger ones, with the new mind “brought from over the sea,” got possession of the imperial palace and person in Kioto, and began, in the boy mikado’s name, that series of far-reaching reforms that have made a new nation. In the new Government possibly half were pupils of Verbeck. His heart beat faster when in one of the five articles of the charter oath of the emperor in Kioto, the basis of the Constitution of 1889, it was sworn that[Pg 602] “intellect and learning should be sought for throughout the world in order to restore the foundations of the empire.” Leaving Nagasaki and going at once to headquarters, Verbeck secured the turning of the stream of students to America, where soon hundreds, mostly at New Brunswick, New Jersey, were, from 1866 onward, pounding at the gates of knowledge. Verbeck was then called to Tokio to be president of the Imperial University of Tokio and incidentally to be factotum of a government then in novelty and isolation. When the embassy set out to go around the world in 1872, Verbeck, who had suggested the idea, found that more than one half of its personnel had been his pupils.

WILLIAM ALEXANDER GRAHAM, SECRETARY OF THE NAVY IN 1831

From 1868 to 1900, in response to the Mikado’s invitation, about five thousand experts or assistants in every line of human achievement went to Japan, from master or ordinary mechanics, boatswains, and corporals to superintendents and professors. Their salaries ranged from day’s wages to a salary then exceeding that of the President of the United States. Of these, about twelve hundred were American teachers. Of all these foreign helpers (yatoi), called out under the charter oath, I had the honor to be the first appointed and on the ground.

It was my good fortune to arrive in Fukui, Echizen, in 1871. I enjoyed the unique advantage of living in the far interior, in a daimio’s castle, of seeing feudalism in operation, and of being present. October 1871, at the solemn and impressive ceremonies at its fall and the transference of sovereignty to the emperor.

There was as yet no national department of education. Perhaps it is no accident that, out of the province of Echizen, where public schools were first organized, was raised the Ninth Division of the army that took Port Arthur. The chemical laboratory, training-class of teachers, lecture-and recitation-rooms, equipped with blackboards and modern furniture, were in the actual “palace” occupied for two centuries by the Baron of Echizen, one of the seventeen great feudatories of the empire. As I had been a soldier in the Civil War, I was asked my opinions as to the value of forts in miniature then being built with trowel and clay. Almost the first call to apply my knowledge of chemistry and physics was to show the Japanese how, by the use of electric wires and fulminates, to blow up ships by submarine wires and torpedoes. The introduction at that time of chairs in the schools, and changes in method and habits of sitting, have during a generation elongated the legs of a nation, adding half an inch to the Japanese stature.

Seeing the danger in a scheme of education of exclusive devotion to book-learning, and knowing the value of manual and technical training, I elaborated the plan of a technological school. The letter reached Tokio almost on the day that the first minister of education, Oki Takato, was appointed and the department was organized. Summoned by return messen[Pg 603]ger to the capital, I was about to begin with four professional chairs, but happily, with enlarged ideas, the Government organized a few months later on a larger scale the superb College of Engineering, in which such men as Dyer, Milne, Divers, and Ayrton taught, and such pupils as Takaminé, Shimosé, and Oda were graduated. Transferred to the Imperial University, I had the honor to serve during three years. I taught science by contract; but also ethics, philosophy, and literature voluntarily, in order to know the Japanese mind. Of my pupils, some entered the cabinet; others to-day occupy places among the highest in education, diplomacy, or the enterprises of the Government. One of these was the Marquis Komura, who, after winning laurels in London, Washington, and Peking, sat opposite Serjius De Witte, the Russian, at the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. Remembering his daily work in the classroom, I was not unprepared for his brilliant success. Against the Russian, he scored all points on the Manchurian question, which to-day is the pivot of politics in the Far East. Komura and Takahira, both ambassadors, the latter to Washington in 1905, had been my pupils, Komura during nearly three years.

The missionaries were the pioneers of every good feature of civilization. In 1859, Hepburn opened the first dispensary in a land where there was no public hospital, or chimney, or newspaper, or milk-wagon, or stationary wash-stand, or any other than medieval devices of comfort. Public hygiene was scarcely known. The highways were full of sights of horror: a million outcasts, swarms of beggars, gamblers, lepers, smallpox patients moving freely abroad; eye-disorders, blindness, unmentionable diseases, and their victims; phallic shrines on the road, and phallic emblems freely exposed in the shops and at temple festivals; pilloried heads, gory execution-grounds, and blackened remains of judicial incineration. In the prisons, the apparatus of torture was elaborate and of infernal variety. Rotten humanity crowded the seats in Hepburn’s chapel, while about him were a dozen or so of the future physicians and surgeons now famous. To-day Japan has a thousand hospitals and a faculty of world-wide fame, while no nation excels her in public hygiene.

WILLIAM H. JAQUES, WHO INTRODUCED STEEL-MAKING PROCESSES INTO JAPANESE WAR-SHIPS

Long before the government hospitals or officially trained nurses were heard of, Dr. John Berry, a medical missionary, now of Worcester, Massachusetts, the father also of prison reform in Japan, had taught women nurses and begun the development of a noble army of white-robed ministering angels. Indeed, the first message of Christendom has been to womanhood, and gratefully have the Japanese made acknowledgment. As early as 1861, Mrs. James Curtis Hepburn opened at Yokohama a school for girls; she was followed by Miss Mary Kidder of Brooklyn. In 1871 was founded the Woman’s Union American Home, “on the Bluff,” in which hundreds of girls received the education that has made a multitude of homes in which the social equality of husband and wife is a reality. This home has now a hundred missionary duplicates. In 1872 Miss Margaret Clark Griffis began the[Pg 604] first government school for girls, out of which have developed the Peeresses’ School and the Tokio Normal School, which have educated thousands of female teachers. It was an American woman missionary, Mrs. James Ballagh, who in 1863 first demonstrated, with two boys, the capacity of the Japanese voice to sing our scale. Since that time, besides Mr. Mason’s training of pupils in the public schools, pianos and brass bands have become common. Mr. Edward House, with a native orchestra in Tokio, gave an oratorio beautifully, and now in New York Mrs. Takaori is singing our airs.

A GROUP OF STUDENTS TAUGHT BY DR. GRIFFIS IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKIO

How, in a brief article, can one recite what American women have done in education, from peasant hut to emperor’s palace, or tell of statesmen and diplomatists like E. Pershine Smith, John W. Foster, Henry Willard Denison, Durham White Stevens, John Hyde de Forest, the Rt. Rev. Merriman C. Harris; of Charles P. Bryan, who organized the national postal system; of men of finance, like George Burchell Williams; of art experts, like Ernest F. Fenollosa; of archæologists, like Edward S. Morse; of engineers, like William H. Jaques; of surgeons, like Duane B. Simmons and Albert Sydney Ashmead; of translators, like Daniel Crosby Greene or Nathan Brown, the latter by himself alone, after seven years’ study, making a superb version of the New Testament, and of a host of others of whose work it shames the writer not to speak? Lack of space forbids even mention in detail of the great missionary enterprise, with its university, colleges, schools, hospitals, dispensaries, and an army of high-souled and cultivated men and women. It has been possible to name scarcely any others than the pioneers. Yet without the direct influence of their foreign Christian teachers, and their practical training received in the sessions, debates, committee and public meetings of the church-congregations, the large measure of representative and self-government, already reached in constitutional Japan, would have been impossible. Only in this way can we explain the large proportion of active members of the Christian Church in the Imperial Diet and local assemblies.

MISS MARGARET GRIFFIS AND HER PUPILS

Miss Griffis was the first American woman teacher in the government school for Samurai girls in Japan

It was ours to be servants only, and joyful was the service. After forty-seven years’ close acquaintance with these people, I am unable to trace any inferiority in intellect, or any fundamental difference in human nature, character, or brain[Pg 605] power in the Japanese, as compared with Occidentals. Being a student of history and nations, I believe in their honesty and morality. All that we did was to show the way. The capacity was already theirs. Nevertheless, as Verbeck said, “New Japan came from beyond the sea.” To an Englishman we leave the final verdict.—“New Japan is the creation of the foreign employé.” Japan’s true line of advance has really been less in exterior brilliancy than in interior reconstruction, in coöperation with her foreign helpers; and these, in overwhelming preponderance, whether of numbers or personality, have been Americans.

RESIDENCE OF TOWNSEND HARRIS AT SHIMODA (1835–1838)

[Pg 606]

MIND VERSUS MUSCLE IN GOLF

BY MARSHALL WHITLATCH

MR. WHITLATCH was a national figure in golf two or three years ago. Now he plays only once or twice a week. But his recent scores in the Knickerbocker Cup contest at the Oakland course show the results of applying his newly developed theory of play to his own game. His gross scores for the four rounds, played a week apart, were 75, 72, 77, and 73, a triumph, he considers, for his new ideas. His 72, done with a ball out of bounds, establishes the new competitive record for the course.—THE EDITOR.

GOLF and brains do not seem to assimilate. That the brains of the country are at work on this problem is amply proved by the membership-lists of the various country clubs. The handicap-lists and scores turned in by these brainy men are further evidence that golf and brains do not assimilate. The scores seem to indicate that there is a direct relation between the amount of brains used and the amount of strokes used in making a round of the course. The more brains, the more strokes.

When I try to find the cause of this state of affairs, these intellectual giants with whom I talk modestly inform me that “Golf is mental,” and they admit that the subtle mystery has thus far eluded them; but I can tell from what they leave unsaid rather than from what they voice just how determined they are to master this wonderful mentality which permeates the game of golf, and I can almost imagine their speech of dedication as they consecrate themselves to this great end.

In my own case, I have recently made a very curious discovery and have imparted the secret to a number of my friends, who have urged me to pass the word along.

It is that good golf is played through the lower nerve-centers and motor channels, while poor golf is due to the direct interference of the brain, or consciousness.

In other words, the more I succeed in eliminating the mental or thinking part of golf, and the more I depend upon the muscular sense, the better my golf has become.

Shortly after the account of Maria Montessori’s work in the “children’s houses” in Rome was published, I obtained a copy of the book, and from it received a suggestion that led me to apply the idea to golf, with the result that my game has been revolutionized, and I have tried the idea upon others with considerable success.

To explain my application of the principle, I must call attention to the Montessori method of teaching handwriting. The usual method of schools has been to place before a child a written letter, give the child a pen, and tell him to copy the letter. Unaccustomed to holding a pen, and totally unfamiliar with the outlines of the letter he is directed to copy, the child holds the pen in a vise-like grip, and with unnecessary muscular exertion moves slowly through a series of mechanical strokes until at last he has produced a crude representation of the original. The Montessori method, on the other hand, is to give to the child a fairly large model of the letter cut out of sandpaper and pasted on a smooth surface. Over these outlines the child is made to pass his finger, at first slowly, but gradually with more lightness and speed until he has become thoroughly familiar with the movements necessary to reproduce the letter. With a pencil-like stick he is then taught to touch the outlines in the same manner, until his sense of touch has become so thoroughly educated to the “feel” of the letter that spontaneously he discovers that he can reproduce it without the model.

“Tracing the letter,” explains Dr. Montessori,[Pg 607] “in the fashion of writing begins the muscular education which prepares for writing.... The child who looks, recognizes, and touches the letter in the manner of writing, prepares himself simultaneously for reading and writing. Touching the letters, and looking at them at the same time, fixes the image more quickly through the coöperation of the senses. Later, the two facts separate; looking becomes reading, and touching becomes writing.”

This suggested to me that the method most used for playing golf followed the method of the old-fashioned system of writing, wherein the child, seeing the letter A, for instance, has a preconceived idea of the motions necessary to make it, and his mind forces his muscles step by step in a cramped and painstaking way to go through certain predetermined movements. This was exactly my scheme in playing golf, and I know from observation that it is the scheme of many other golfers. There is neither freedom nor spontaneity, because the mind controls and dominates each muscular movement necessary in making the swing.

If I were to describe the reason why the majority of players do this, I should say that it is due to their placing more reliance in their sense of vision than on their sense of feeling. One cannot see the correct timing of a stroke, but he can feel it.

My former method was to figure out how everything should “look” when I addressed the ball, and my present method is absolutely to ignore what it looks like, and depend entirely upon what it “feels” like.

If I depend upon what things look like in the address, I “set” some of my muscles in such and such a way to accommodate this preconceived notion. If I depend upon how it feels, I have to relax more and more of my muscles, or I am aware of the resistance one set offers to another.

In the light of my new method, the matter of true balance and poise will assume the importance it deserves because in the preliminary “waggle” of the club, which is generally done with the hands and arms alone, the body being held rigid, the muscles of the body will have to be relaxed in order that one may feel out the correct positions. This has been my own experience, and I think that if consideration be given the fact that the actual stroke is delivered with all the muscles in action, the nearer the player reproduces the actual conditions in his preliminary waggle, the better chance he will have to bring off the shot. If the muscles are “set,” with the idea of “aiming,” so to speak, with everything in repose in the address, it can hardly be called a good preliminary of the actual effort.

In order to focus the attention on this phase, I should like to describe the two different plans used by the professional golfer and the amateur.

The professional represents good golf, and his scheme of play is to feel out the correct position in action, while the average amateur represents poor golf, and his scheme is to reason out, in a preconceived way, the correct position, with most of his muscles in repose, or set.

To put it more plainly, I should say that the professional, through his sense of feeling, allows his muscles to talk to his mind; while the amateur, through his reason, makes his mind talk to his muscles, or control them. The sense of feeling being the medium the professional uses to arrive at the correct position to make the stroke, he develops free and spontaneous muscular reaction, while the amateur makes a mental plan or picture of what position he should assume for a correct address, and therefore is without freedom or spontaneity. It is death to any free and natural movement.

In addressing his ball the amateur stands rigidly facing it with muscles set, and with careful attention and painstaking deliberation shown in his entire attitude, concentration written on every feature. Gradually he begins a carefully guarded movement of his club away from his ball. Up to the top of his swing he makes this careful, deliberate movement, consciously controlling every change in position, and then when he reaches the top of his swing, he makes a wild, vicious attempt to whack that ball to “kingdom come.” There has not been a single spontaneous muscular act performed. Every movement or muscular reaction has been under his conscious control.

Compare this elaborate, complex scheme with the professional method. He walks up to the ball, and never for an instant is in repose. He takes a glance at the point where he intends to send the ball; then back goes his glance to the ball, and away it goes. There is smooth, easy grace in every movement.

Because the professional has succeeded better is no evidence that he has a superior mind. If it were mind, or golf were a mental game, the amateur should succeed better because he has given more thought to his work.

There is really no mystery in the pro[Pg 608]fessional’s success: it is because he has hit his ball truer with no lost motion.

Now, if those golfers who have trouble will stop and consider for a moment the number of things they are thinking of in preparing to strike the ball, they will realize that their effort is decidedly mental; that is, they run over in their minds the things they deem necessary and the positions to be assumed in order to make a successful stroke, while the making of a successful stroke depends upon something they cannot think out at all. It is something they must feel out, and that is the delicate balance and timing of the turn of the wrists, etc. It is in the feel of the correct poise of the body and the correct balance of the club while in motion that they should look for guidance.

When a player has the feel of the balance, he makes the stroke with confidence. When he has lost the touch or feel, all the will power in the world will not give him confidence. His next shot is bound to be an experiment. He is then likely to shift his grip, change his stance, alter his club, or make some other kind of experiment. This is going to focus his attention upon the detail he is trying out, and while he may and generally does make a very intelligent effort to accomplish what he at that moment considers the thing of paramount importance, the ball nevertheless fails to go oft as he desires.

Good golf comes from educating the muscles to the correct feel of the balance of the body and club while in motion. This is essentially physical because it is developed while the muscles are in free and spontaneous action. The average amateur spends most of his time educating himself to a stance with the muscles in repose and the mind in action. His swing is then made without his getting the preliminary feel cultivated by the professional. This scheme is therefore decidedly mental.

In devoting the attention first to this detail and then to that, it is evident that the mind is giving an amount of conscious attention to the details out of all proportion to their importance, and a player is thus very apt to neglect the most vital point of all—the feel of the correct balance in the preliminary waggle.

The professional really generalizes, and leaves all the finer details of the swing to his subconsciousness to interpret correctly. The young lad just taking up the game does the same.

It has come home to me that many of the things in golf that I have been in the habit of accepting as gospel are in reality pure nonsense. From careful analysis of my own game and by observing other players, I know that more shots are missed from “stiffening up” than from “looking up.” Also, those players cannot help looking up who stiffen up, as the saying is. The stiffening up is an inhibition or restraint by the sense of feeling. The reason that this inhibition occurs is due to the fact that the player becomes aware through the sense of feeling, without reasoning it out, that he is not going to hit his ball. If it were not so, there would never be any slicing, because players would not pull in their hands in order to connect with the ball. This is a sense reaction pure and simple, and although I may not be able to show this clearly to all at the start, one may be sure that players can plan and calculate all they desire and stand rigidly facing the ball in their own way, yet when they get in action and are in the act of delivering the blow, the sense of feeling, hitherto neglected, is going to reign supreme and govern the accuracy of the effort.

William James says: “Habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed.... Habit simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate, and diminishes fatigue.” In another work he says, “The more we exercise ourselves at anything, the fewer muscles we employ.”

The habits which are formed in golf, as in everything else in life in which either the mind or muscles are exercised, tend to become fixed, and therefore are difficult to change. Dr. Carpenter very aptly says, “We find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been accustomed to think, feel, or do under like circumstances without any consciously formed purpose or anticipation of results.” The rigid, fixed address of the average amateur is the hardest thing to change but it is no benefit, indeed is a decided hindrance, because it results in the player setting his muscles to accommodate his position in the address to a preconceived attitude.

[Pg 609]

In working out this idea on a number of my friends, I have found that waggling the club and twisting the body in the address are of great help, because they accomplish one thing of vital importance, and that is the relaxing of the various muscles of the body, which all golfers admit is wise. This is one thing, then, which we can readily see is progress. This, as a habit, is a very desirable one to acquire. The next thing it accomplishes is to educate a greater number of the muscles to the feel of the balance and poise of the body while in motion, instead of in repose. This is one step in sense education. The next is that, as the player is bringing more and more of his muscles into play, he learns to use some of these muscles which have never before entered properly into the delivery of the blow. The point where I find those players upon whom I have tried out the idea drift away from the benefit derived from an address in motion instead of an address in repose is that they will drift back to setting themselves when they put the club down behind the ball. It looks to them like a careless way of playing. It would be a careless way if it were done without an object. The object is to get the feel. The feel is no mysterious force or formula which will put a great strain upon the intellect, and, as a matter of fact, the attention need not be focused upon it at all. It takes care of itself, without one’s giving thought to it. It is a simple thing to learn to keep one’s balance while in motion, with the club making any sort of pendulum motion. The only thing about it is to do it, and the only thing to think about is to keep the head still while doing it. The ability to keep the head still at such times will gradually improve, because the player is acquiring the habit while in motion. The hardest part of it all is to eradicate from one’s mind all preconceived ideas of what he has been in the habit of believing is necessary to bring off the stroke. In my own case, I think of nothing. I ignore all my former idea of angles, etc., and how everything should look, and just waggle my club to get things loosened up. I do not think of the line, I do not think of the distance, but just look at the ball in an easy, superficial way, and as soon as I feel all my muscles are free and working, I make the stroke. If I feel any muscles setting, I make another waggle to “loosen,” and then swing at the ball.

I have noticed in trying out this idea upon my friends that they learn to waggle fairly well, but do not seem to grasp the importance of getting the gentle play of the body into the preliminary waggle. Through habit they feel they must do the waggling with the club while the secret of the greatest benefit is to get the preliminary feel as well distributed over all the muscles of the body as possible. If this is done successfully, the player will use those muscles which he has just exercised, and will not have to make so great a conscious effort with one set of muscles which he has been keeping in action to overcome another set which he has been keeping in repose.

The point to remember is that skill is acquired gradually by any method, and the player can confidently hope to make progress every month through sense education. The majority of players fail to become as skilful as it is well within their ability to become because they kill off any chance of learning or make it extremely difficult to learn by making a mental process of golf instead of a physical exercise. The brains should be in the finger-tips and muscles.

CHAPTER XXI

LADY MALLOWE and her daughter did not pay their visit to Asshawe Holt, the absolute, though not openly referred to, fact being that they had not been invited.

The visit in question had merely floated in the air as a delicate suggestion made by her ladyship in her letter to Mrs. Asshe Shawe, to the effect that as she and Joan were going to stay at Temple Barholm, the visit to Asshawe they had partly arranged might now be fitted in.

The partial arrangement itself, Mrs. Asshe Shawe remarked when she received the note, was so partial as to require slight consideration, since it had been made by a woman who would push herself into any house if a back door were left open. In the civilly phrased letter she received in answer to her own, Lady Mallowe read between the lines and writhed secretly, as she had been made to writhe scores of times in the course of her career. It had happened so often, indeed, that she should have been used to it; but the woman who acted as maid to herself and Joan always knew when “she had tried to get in somewhere” and failed.

The note of explanation sent immediately to Miss Alicia was at once adroit and amiable. They had unfortunately been detained in London a day or two past the date fixed for their visit to Asshawe, and Lady Mallowe would not allow Mrs. Asshe Shawe, who had so many guests, to be inconvenienced by their arriving late and perhaps disarranging her plans. So if it was quite convenient, they would come to Temple Barholm a week earlier; but not, of course, if that would be the least upsetting.

When they arrived, Tembarom himself was in London. He had suddenly found he was obliged to go. The business which called him was something which could not be put off. He expected to return at once.[Pg 611] It was made very easy for him when he made his excuses to Palliser, who suggested that he might even find himself returning by the same train with his guests, which would give him opportunities. If he was detained, Miss Alicia could take charge of the situation. They would quite understand when she explained. Captain Palliser foresaw for himself some quiet entertainment in his own meeting with the visitors. Lady Mallowe always provided a certain order of amusement for him, and no man alive objected to finding interest and even a certain excitement in the society of Lady Joan. It was her chief characteristic that she inspired in a man a vague, even if slightly irritated, desire to please her in some degree. To lead her on to talk in her sometimes brilliant, always heartlessly unsparing, fashion, perhaps to smile her shade of a bitter smile, gave a man something to do, especially if he was bored. The following would have been Palliser’s trenchant summing up of her: “Flaringly handsome girl, brought up by her mother to one end. Bad temper to begin with. Girl who might, if she lost her head, get into some frightful mess. Meets a fascinating devil in her first season. A regular Romeo and Juliet passion blazes up—all for love and the world well lost. All London looking on. Lady Mallowe frantic and furious. Suddenly the fascinating devil ruined for life. Done for. Bolts. Gets killed. Lady Mallowe triumphant. Girl dragged about afterward like a beautiful young demon in chains. Refuses all sorts of things. Behaves infernally. Nobody knows anything else.”

Nobody did know; Lady Mallowe herself did not. From the first year in which Joan had looked at her with child consciousness she had felt that there was antagonism in the deeps of her eyes. No mother likes to recognize such a thing, and Lady Mallowe was a particularly vain woman. The child was going to be an undeniable beauty, and she ought to adore the mother who was to arrange her future. Instead of which, she plainly disliked her.

When the years had become three, the evident antagonism had become defiance and rebellion. Lady Mallowe could not even indulge herself in the satisfaction of showing her embryo beauty off, and thus preparing a reputation for her. She was not cross or tearful, but she had the temper of a little devil. She would not be shown off. She hated it, and her bearing dangerously suggested that she hated her handsome young mother. No effect could be produced with her.

Before she was six, the antagonism was mutual, and it increased with years. The child was of a passionate nature, and had been born intensely all her mother was not, and intensely not all her mother was. A throw-back to some high-spirited and fiercely honest ancestor created in her a fury at the sight of falsities and dishonors. As she grew older, she had to admit that nothing palliative could be said about her temper. It had been violent from the first, and she had lived in an atmosphere which infuriated it. She once prayed for a week that she might be made better tempered,—not that she believed in prayer,—but nothing came of it.

Every year she lived she raged more furiously at the tricks she saw played by her mother, who would carry off slights and snubs as though they were actual tributes, if she could gain her end. Since she definitely disliked her daughter, Lady Mallowe did not mince matters when they were alone. What her future would be was made unsparingly clear to the girl. She had no money, she was extremely good-looking, she had a certain number of years in which to fight for her own hand among the new debutantes who were presented every season. Beggary stared them both in the face if she did not make the most of her looks and waste no time. And Joan knew it was all true, and that worse, far worse things were true also. She would be obliged to spend a long life with her mother in cheap lodgings, a faded, penniless, unmarried woman, railed at, taunted, sneered at, forced to be part of humiliating tricks played to enable them to get into debt and then to avoid paying what they owed.

Then that first season! Dear, dear God! that first season when she met Jem! She was not nineteen, and the facile world pretended to be at her feet, and the sun shone as though London were in Italy, and the park was marvelous with flowers, and there were such dances and such laughter!

And it was all so young—and she met[Pg 612] Jem! It was at a garden-party at a lovely old house on the river, a place with celebrated gardens which would always come back to her memory as a riot of roses. The frocks of the people on the lawn looked as though they were made of the petals of flowers, and a mad little haunting waltz was being played by the band, and there under a great copper birch on the green velvet turf near her stood Jem, looking at her with dark, liquid, slanting eyes. They were only a few feet from each other, and he looked, and she looked, and the haunting, mad little waltz played on, and it was as though they had been standing there since the world began, and nothing else was true.

Afterward nothing mattered to either of them. Lady Mallowe herself ceased to count. Now and then the world stops for two people in this unearthly fashion. At such times, as far as such a pair are concerned, causes and effects cease. Her bad temper fled, and she believed she would never feel its furious lash again.

With Jem looking at her with his glowing, drooping eyes, there would be no reason for rage and shame. She confessed the temper to him and told of her terror of it; he confessed to her his fondness for high play, and they held each other’s hands, not with sentimental, youthful lightness, but with the strong clasp of sworn comrades, and promised on honor that they would stand by each other every hour of their lives against their worst selves.

They would have kept the pact. Neither was a slight or dishonest creature. The phase of life through which they passed is not a new one, but it is not often so nearly an omnipotent power as was their three-months’ dream.

It lasted only that length of time; then came the end of the world. Joan did not look fresh in her second season, and before it was over, men were rather afraid of her. Because she was so young, the freshness returned to her cheek, but it never came back to her eyes.

What exactly had happened, or what she thought of it, was impossible to know. She had delicate, black brows, and between them appeared two delicate, fierce lines. Her eyes were of a purplish-gray, “the color of thunder,” a snubbed admirer had once said. Between their black lashes they were more deeply thunder-colored. Her life with her mother was a thing not to be spoken of. To the desperate girl’s agony of rebellion against the horror of fate, Lady Mallowe’s taunts and beratings were devilish. There was a certain boudoir in the house in Hill Street where the two went through scenes which in their cruelty would have done credit to the Middle Ages.

“We fight,” Joan said with a short, horrible laugh one morning—“we fight like cats and dogs. No, like two cats. A cat-and-dog fight is more quickly over.”

The evening after she met Jem, when she went to her room in Hill Street for the night, she prayed because she suddenly did believe. Since there was Jem in the world, there must be the Other somewhere.

“I want to be made good,” she said. “I have been bad all my life. I was a bad child, I have been a bad girl; but now I must be good.”

On the night after the tragic card-party she went to her room and kneeled down in a new spirit. She knelt with throat strained and her fierce young face thrown back and upward.

Her hands were clenched to fists, and flung out and shaken at the ceiling. She said things so awful that her own blood shuddered as she uttered them. But she could not, in her mad helplessness, make them awful enough. She flung herself on the carpet at last, her arms outstretched like a creature crucified face downward.

Several years had passed since that night, and no living being knew what she carried in her soul. If she had a soul, she said to herself, it was black—black. But she had none. Neither had Jem had one; when the earth and stones had fallen upon him it had been the end, as it would have been if he had been a beetle.

This was the guest who was coming to the house where Miles Hugo smiled from his frame in the picture-gallery—the house which would to-day have been Jem’s if T. Tembarom had not inherited it.

TEMBAROM returned some twenty-four hours after Miss Alicia had received his visitors for him. He had been “going into” absorbing things in London. His thoughts during his northward journey were puzzled and discouraged ones.

The price he would have given for a talk with Ann would not have been easy to compute. Her head, her level little head and her way of seeing into things and picking out facts without being rattled by what didn’t really count, would have been worth anything. The day itself was a discouraging one, with heavy threatenings of rain which did not fall.

He went to his room at once when he reached home. He was late, and Pearson told him that the ladies were dressing for dinner. Pearson was in waiting with everything in readiness for the rapid performance of his duties. Tembarom had learned to allow himself to be waited upon. He had, in fact, done this for the satisfying of Pearson, whose respectful unhappiness would otherwise have been manifest despite his efforts to conceal it. He dressed quickly and asked some questions about Strangeways. Otherwise Pearson thought he seemed preoccupied.

On his way to the drawing-room he deflected from the direct path, turning aside for a moment to the picture-gallery because for a reason of his own he wanted to take a look at Miles Hugo.

The gallery was dim and gloomy enough in the purple-gray twilight. He walked through it without glancing at the pictures until he came to the portrait, and looked hard at the handsome face.

Then he turned suddenly round toward one of the big windows. He turned because he had been startled by a sound, a movement. Some one was standing before the window. For a second’s space the figure seemed as though it were almost one with the purple-gray clouds that were its background. It was a tall young woman, and her dress was of a thin material of exactly their color—dark-gray and purple at once. The wearer held her head high and haughtily. She had a beautiful, stormy face, and the slender, black brows were drawn together in a frown. Tembarom had never seen a girl so handsome and disdainful. He had, indeed, never been looked at as she looked at him when she moved slightly forward.

He knew who it was. It was the Lady Joan girl, and the sudden sight of her momentarily “rattled” him.

“You quite gave me a jolt,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t know any one was in the gallery.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked. She spoke to him as though she were addressing, an intruding servant. There was emphasis on the word “you.”

Her intention was so evident that it increased his feeling of being “rattled.” To find himself confronting deliberate ill nature of a superior and finished kind was like being spoken to in a foreign language.

“I—I’m T. Tembarom,” he answered, not able to keep himself from staring because she was such a “winner” as to looks.

“T. Tembarom?” she repeated slowly, and her tone made him at once see what a fool he had been to say it.

“I forgot,” he half laughed. “I ought to have said I’m Temple Barholm.”

“Oh!” was her sole comment. She actually stood still and looked him up and down.

She knew perfectly well who he was, and she knew perfectly well that no palliative view could possibly be taken by any well-bred person of her bearing toward him. He was her host. She had come, a guest, to his house to eat his bread and salt, and the commonest decency demanded that she should conduct herself with civility. But she cared nothing for the commonest, or the most uncommon, decency. She was thinking of other things. As she had stood before the window she had felt that her soul had never been so black as it was when she turned away from Miles Hugo’s portrait—never, never. She wanted to hurt people. Perhaps Nero had felt as she did and was not so hideous as he seemed.

The man’s tailor had put him into proper clothes, and his features were respectable enough, but nothing on earth could make him anything but what he so palpably was. She had seen that much across the gallery as she had watched him staring at Miles Hugo.

“I should think,” she said, dropping the words slowly again, “that you would often forget that you are Temple Barholm.”

“You’re right there,” he answered. “I can’t nail myself down to it. It seems like a sort of joke.”

It was as though she had slapped him in the face, though she said it so quietly. He knew he had received the slap, and that, as it was a woman, he could not slap back. It was a sort of surprise to her that he did not giggle nervously and turn red and shuffle his feet in impotent misery. He kept quite still a moment or so and looked at her, though not as she had looked at him. She wondered if he was so thick-skinned that he did not feel anything at all.

“That’s so,” he admitted. “That’s so.” Then he actually smiled at her. “I don’t know how to behave myself, you see,” he said. “You’re Lady Joan Fayre, ain’t you? I’m mighty glad to see you. Happy to make your acquaintance, Lady Joan.”

He took her hand and shook it with friendly vigor before she knew what he was going to do.

“I’ll bet a dollar dinner’s ready,” he added, “and Burrill’s waiting. It scares me to death to keep Burrill waiting. He’s got no use for me, anyhow. Let’s go and pacify him.”

He did not lead the way or drag her by the arm, as it seemed to her quite probable that he might, as costermongers do on Hampstead Heath. He knew enough to let her pass first through the door; and when Lady Mallowe looked up to see her enter the drawing-room, he was behind her. To her ladyship’s amazement and relief, they came in, so to speak, together. She had been spared the trying moment of assisting at the ceremony of their presentation to each other.

IN a certain sense Joan had been dragged to the place by her mother. But though she had been dragged, she had come with an intention. She knew what she would find herself being forced to submit to if the intruder were not disposed of at the outset. Lady Mallowe’s stakes at this special juncture were seriously high. Joan knew what they were, and that she was in a mood touched with desperation. The defenselessly new and ignorant Temple Barholm was to her mother’s mind a direct intervention of Providence, and it was only Joan herself who could rob her of the benefits and reliefs he could provide. So she was capable to-day of inflicting upon her latest victim any hurt which might sweep him out of her way. She had not been a tender-hearted girl, and in these years she was absolutely callous.

But though her deliberate intention had been so to conduct herself that he would be put to absolute flight, she had also come for another reason. She had never seen Temple Barholm, and she knew that Jem had loved it with a slighted and lonely child’s romantic longing; he had dreamed of it as boy and man, knowing that it must[Pg 615] some time be his own, his home, and yet prevented by his uncle’s attitude toward him from daring to act as though he remembered the fact. Old Mr. Temple Barholm’s special humor had been that of a man guarding against presumption.

Jem had not intended to presume, but he had been snubbed with relentless cruelty even for boyish expressions of admiration. And he had hid his feeling in his heart until he poured it out to Joan. To-day it would have been his. Together, together, they would have lived in it and loved every stone of it, every leaf on every great tree, every wild daffodil nodding in the green grass. Her brief dream of young joy had been the one reality in her life.

And the man who stood in the place Jem had longed for, the man who sat at the head of his table, was this “thing!” That was what she felt him to be, and every hurt she could do him, every humiliation which should write large before him his presumption and grotesque unfitness, would be a blow struck for Jem, who could never strike a blow for himself again.

He had not wriggled or shuffled when she spoke to him in the gallery; he did neither now. She addressed no remarks to him herself, and answered with chill indifference such things as he said to her. If conversation had flagged between him and Mr. Palford because the solicitor did not know how to talk to him, it did not even reach the point of flagging with her, because she would not talk and did not allow it to begin. Lady Mallowe, sick with annoyance, was quite brilliant. She drew out Miss Alicia by detailed reminiscences of a visit paid to Rowcroft Hall years before. The vicar had dined at the hall while she had been there. She remembered perfectly his “charm of manner and powerful originality of mind. A really remarkable personality.”

“His sermons,” faltered Miss Alicia, as a refuge, “were indeed remarkable. I am sure he must greatly have enjoyed his conversations with you. I am afraid there were very few clever women in the neighborhood of Rowcroft.”

Casting a bitter side glance on her silent daughter, Lady Mallowe lightly seized upon New York as a subject. She knew so much of it from delightful New Yorkers. London was full of delightful New Yorkers. She would like beyond everything to spend a winter in New York. She understood that the season there was in the winter and that it was most brilliant. Mr. Temple Barholm must tell them about it.

“Yes,” said Lady Joan, looking at him through narrowed lids, “Mr. Temple Barholm ought to tell us about it.”

She wanted to hear what he would say, to see how he would try to get out of the difficulty or flounder staggeringly through it. Her mother knew in an instant that her own speech had been a stupid blunder. She had put the man into exactly the position Joan would enjoy seeing him in. But he wasn’t in a position, it appeared.

“What is the season, anyhow?” he said. “You’ve got one on me when you talk about seasons.”

“In London,” Miss Alicia explained courageously, “it is the time when her Majesty is at Buckingham Palace, and when the drawing-rooms are held, and Parliament sits, and people come up to town and give balls.”

“I guess they have it in the winter in New York, then, if that’s it,” he said. “There’s no Buckingham Palace there, and no drawing-rooms, and Congress sits in Washington. But New York takes it out in suppers at Sherry’s and Delmonico’s and theaters and receptions. Miss Alicia knows how I used to go to them when I was a little fellow, don’t you, Miss Alicia?” he added, smiling at her across the table.

“I used to stand outside in the snow and look in through the windows at the people having a good time,” he said. “Us kids that were selling newspapers used to try to fill ourselves up with choosing whose plate we’d take if we could get at them. We were so all-fired hungry!”

“How pathetic!” exclaimed Lady Mallowe. “And how interesting, now that it is all over!”

She knew that her manner was gushing, and Joan’s side glance of subtle appreciation of the fact exasperated her almost beyond endurance. But she had been forced to hold her ground before in places she detested or where she was not wanted,[Pg 616] and she must hold it again until she had found out the worst or the best. And, great Heaven! how Joan was conducting herself, with that slow, quiet insultingness of tone and look, the wicked, silent insolence of bearing which no man was able to stand, however admiringly he began! The Duke of Merthshire had turned his back upon it even after all the world had known his intentions, and she herself had been convinced that he could not possibly retreat. She had worked desperately that season. And never had Joan been so superb; her beauty at its most brilliant height. The match would have been magnificent; but he could not stand her, and would not. Why, indeed, should any man?

And there were no dukes on the horizon. Merthshire had married almost at once, and all the others were too young or had wives already. If this man would take her, she might feel herself lucky. Temple Barholm and seventy thousand a year were not to be trifled with by a girl who had made herself unpopular and who was twenty-six. And for her own luck the moment had come just before it was too late—a second marriage, wealth, the end of the hideous struggle. Joan was the obstacle in her path, and she must be forced out of it. She glanced quickly at Tembarom. He was trying to talk to Joan now. He was trying to please her. She evidently had a fascination for him. It struck her that he could not take his eyes away. That was because he had never before been on speaking terms with a woman of beauty and rank.

Joan herself knew that he was trying to please her, and she was asking herself how long he would have the courage and presumption to keep it up. He could scarcely be enjoying it.

He was not enjoying it, but he kept it up. He wanted to be friends with her for more reasons than one. No one had ever remained long at enmity with him. He had “got over” a good many people in the course of his career. This had always been accomplished because he presented no surface at which arrows could be thrown. She was the hardest proposition he had ever come up against, he was thinking; but if he didn’t let himself be fool enough to break loose and get mad, she’d not hate him so much after a while. She would begin to understand that it wasn’t his fault; then perhaps he could get her to make friends. In fact, if she had been able to read his thoughts, there is no certainty as to how far her temper might have carried her. But she could see him only as a sharp-faced, common American of the shop-boy class, sitting at the head of Jem Temple Barholm’s table, in his chair.

As they passed through the hall to go to the drawing-room after the meal was over, she saw a neat, pale young man speaking to Burrill and heard a few of his rather anxiously uttered words.

“The orders were that he was always to be told when Mr. Strangeways was like this, under all circumstances. I can’t quiet him, Mr. Burrill. He says he must see him at once.”

When the message was delivered to him, Tembarom excused himself with simple lack of ceremony. “I’ll be back directly,” he said to Palliser. “Those are good cigars.” He left the room at once.

Palliser took one of the good cigars, and in taking it exchanged a glance with Burrill which distantly conveyed the meaning that perhaps he had better remain for a moment or so. Captain Palliser’s knowledge of interesting detail was obtained “by chance here and there,” but always with a light and casual air.

“I am not sure,” he remarked as he took the light Burrill held for him and touched the end of his cigar—“I am not quite sure that I know exactly who Mr. Strangeways is.”

“He’s the gentleman, sir, that Mr. Temple Barholm brought over from New York,” replied Burrill with a stolidity clearly expressive of distaste.

“He’s not in a condition to see people, sir,” said Burrill, and Palliser’s slightly lifted eyebrow seeming to express a good deal, he added a sentence, “He’s not all there, sir.”

“From New York, and not all there. What seems to be the matter?” Palliser asked quietly. “Odd idea to bring a lunatic all the way from America. There must be asylums there.”

“Us servants have orders to keep out of the way,” Burrill said with sterner stolidity.[Pg 617] “He’s so nervous that the sight of strangers does him harm. I may say that questions are not encouraged.”

“Then I must not ask any more,” said Captain Palliser. “I did not know I was edging on to a mystery.”

“I wasn’t aware that I was myself, sir,” Burrill remarked, “until I asked something quite ordinary of Pearson, who is Mr. Temple Barholm’s valet, and it was not what he said, but what he didn’t, that showed me where I stood.”

“A mystery is an interesting thing to have in a house,” said Captain Palliser without enthusiasm. He smoked his cigar as though he was enjoying its aroma, and even from his first remark he had managed not to seem to be really quite addressing himself to Burrill. He was certainly not talking to him in the ordinary way; his air was rather that of a gentleman overhearing casual remarks in which he was only vaguely interested. Before Burrill left the room, however, and he left it under the impression that he had said no more than civility demanded, Captain Palliser had reached the point of being able to deduce a number of things from what he, like Pearson, had not said.

THE man who in all England was most deeply submerged in deadly boredom was, the old Duke of Stone said with wearied finality, himself. He had been a sinful young man of finished taste in the earlier part of the century; he had cultivated these tastes, which were for literature and art and divers other things, in the most richly alluring foreign capitals until finding himself becoming an equally sinful and finished elderly man, he had decided to marry. After the birth of her four daughters, his wife had died and left them on his hands. Developing at that time a tendency to rheumatic gout and a daily increasing realization of the fact that the resources of a poor dukedom may be hopelessly depleted by an expensive youth passed brilliantly in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, when it was endurable, he found it expedient to give up what he considered the necessities of life and to face existence in the country in England. It is not imperative that one should enter into detail. There was much, and it covered years during which his four daughters grew up and he “grew down,” as he called it. If his temper had originally been a bad one, it would doubtless have become unbearable; as he had been born an amiable person, he merely sank into the boredom which threatens extinction. His girls bored him, his neighbors bored him, Stone Hover bored him, Lancashire bored him, England had always bored him except at abnormal moments.

“I read a great deal, I walk when I can,” this he wrote once to a friend in Rome. “When I am too stiff with rheumatic gout, I drive myself about in a pony-chaise and feel like an aunt in a Bath chair. I have so far escaped the actual chair itself. It perpetually rains here, I may mention, so I don’t get out often. You who gallop on white roads in the sunshine and hear Italian voices and vowels, figure to yourself your friend trundling through damp, lead-colored Lancashire lanes and being addressed in the Lancashire dialect. But so am I driven by necessity that I listen to it gratefully. I want to hear village news from villagers. I have become a gossip. It is a wonderful thing to be a gossip. It assists one to get through one’s declining years. Do not wait so long as I did before becoming one. Begin in your roseate middle age.”

An attack of gout more severe than usual had confined him to his room for some time after the arrival of the new owner of Temple Barholm. He had, in fact, been so far indisposed that a week or two had passed before he had heard of him. His favorite nurse had been chosen by him because she was a comfortable village woman whom he had taught to lay aside her proper awe and talk to him about her own affairs and her neighbors when he was in the mood to listen. She spoke the broadest possible dialect,—he liked dialect, having learned much in his youth from mellow-eyed Neapolitan and Tuscan girls,—and she had never been near a hospital, but had been trained by the bedsides of her children and neighbors.

She had tucked him in luxuriously in[Pg 618] his arm-chair by the fire on the first day of his convalescence, and as she gave him his tray, with his beef-tea and toast, he saw that she contained anecdotal information of interest which tactful encouragement would cause to flow.

“Now that I am well enough to be entertained, Braddle,” he said, “tell me what has been happening.”

“A graidely lot, yore Grace,” she answered; “but not so much i’ Stone Hover as i’ Temple Barholm. He’s coom!”

Then the duke vaguely recalled rumors he had heard sometime before his indisposition.

“The new Mr. Temple Barholm? He’s an American, isn’t he? The lost heir who had to be sought for high and low—principally low, I understand.”

The beef-tea was excellently savory, the fire was warm, and relief from two weeks of pain left a sort of Nirvana of peace. Rarely had the duke passed a more delightfully entertaining morning. There was a richness in the Temple Barholm situation, as described in detail by Mrs. Braddle, which filled him with delight.

That the story should be related by Mrs. Braddle gave it extraordinary flavor. No man or woman of his own class could have given such a recounting, or revealed so many facets of this jewel of entertainment. He and those like him could have seen the thing only from their own amused, outraged, bewildered, or cynically disgusted point of view. Mrs. Braddle saw it as the villagers saw it—excited, curious, secretly hopeful of undue lavishness from “a chap as had nivver had brass before an’ wants to chuck it away for brag’s sake.” She saw it as the servants saw it—secretly disdainful, outwardly respectful, waiting to discover whether the sacrifice of professional distinction would be balanced by liberties permitted and lavishness of remuneration and largess. She saw it also from her own point of view—that of a respectable cottage dweller whose great-great-grandfather had been born in a black-and-white timbered house in a green lane, and who knew what were “gentry ways” and what nature of being could never even remotely approach the assumption of them. She had seen Tembarom more than once, and summed him up by no means ill-naturedly.

“He’s not such a bad-lookin’ chap. He is na short-legged or turn-up-nosed, an’ that’s summat. He con stride along, an’ he looks healthy enow for aw he’s thin.”

“I think, perhaps,” amiably remarked the duke, sipping his beef-tea, “that you had better not call him a ‘chap,’ Braddle. The late Mr. Temple Barholm was never referred to as a ‘chap’ exactly, was he?”

Mrs. Braddle gave vent to a sort of internal-sounding chuckle. She had not meant to be impertinent, and she knew her charge was aware that she had not, and that he was neither being lofty nor severe with her.

“Eh, I’d ’a’ loiked to ha’ heared somebody do it when he was nigh,” she said.[Pg 619] “Happen I’d better be moindin’ ma P’s an’ Q’s a bit more. But that’s what this un is, yore Grace. He’s a ‘chap’ out an’ out. An’ theer’s some as is sayin’ he’s not a bad sort of a chap either. There’s lots o’ funny stories about him i’ Temple Barholm village. He goes into the cottages now an’ then, an’ though a fool could see he does na know his place, nor other people’s, he’s downreet open-handed. An’ he maks foak laugh. He took a lot o’ New York papers wi’ big pictures in ’em to little Tummas Hibblethwaite. An’ wot does tha think he did one rainy day? He walks into the owd Dibdens’ cottage, an’ sits down betwixt ’em as they sit one each side o’ the foire, an’ he tells ’em they’ve got to cheer him up a bit becos he’s got naught to do. An’ he shows ’em the picter-papers, too, an’ tells ’em about New York, an’ he ends up wi’ singin’ ’em a comic song. They was frightened out o’ their wits at first, but somehow he got over ’em, an’ made ’em laugh their owd heads nigh off.”

Her charge laid his spoon down, and his shrewd, lined face assumed a new expression of interest.

“Did he! Did he, indeed!” he exclaimed. “Good Lord! what an exhilarating person! I must go and see him. Perhaps he’d make me laugh my ‘owd head nigh off.’ What a sensation!”

There was really immense color in the anecdotes and in the side views accompanying them: the routing out of her obscurity of the isolated, dependent spinster relative, for instance. Delicious! The man was either desperate with loneliness or he was one of the rough-diamond benefactors favored by novelists, in which latter case he would not be so entertaining. The only man he had ever encountered who had become a sort of millionaire between one day and another had been an appalling Yorkshire man, who had had some extraordinary luck with diamond-mines in South Africa, and he had been simply drunk with exhilaration and the delight of spending money with both hands, while he figuratively slapped on the back persons who six weeks before would have kicked him for doing it.

This man did not appear to be excited. The duke mentally rocked with gleeful appreciation of certain things Mrs. Braddle detailed. She gave, of course, Burrill’s version of the brief interview outside the dining-room door when Miss Alicia’s status in the household had been made clear to him. But the duke, being a man endowed with a subtle sense of shades, was wholly enlightened as to the inner meaning of Burrill’s master.

“Now, that was good,” he said to himself, almost chuckling. “By the Lord! the man might have been a gentleman.”

When to all this was added the story of the friend or poor relative, or whatnot, who was supposed to be “not quoite reet i’ the yed,” and was taken care of like a prince, in complete isolation, attended by a valet, visited and cheered up by his benefactor, he felt that a boon had indeed been bestowed upon him. It was a nineteenth-century “Mysteries of Udolpho” in embryo, though too greatly diluted by the fact that though the stranger was seen by no one, the new Temple Barholm made no secret of him.

If he had only made a secret of him, the whole thing would have been complete. There was of course in the situation a discouraging suggestion that Temple Barholm might turn out to be merely the ordinary noble character bestowing boons.

“I will burn a little candle to the Virgin and offer up prayers that he may not. That sort of thing would have no cachet whatever, and would only depress me,” thought his still sufficiently sinful grace.

“When, Braddle, do you think I shall be able to take a drive again?” he asked his nurse.

Braddle was not prepared to say upon her own responsibility, but the doctor would tell him when he came in that afternoon.

“I feel astonishingly well, considering the sharpness of the attack,” her patient said. “Our little talk has quite stimulated me. When I go out,”—there was a gleam in the eye he raised to hers,—“I am going to call at Temple Barholm.”

“I knew tha would,” she commented with maternal familiarity. “I dunnot believe tha could keep away.”

A few weeks later there were some warm days, and his grace chose to go out in his pony-carriage. If he was not in some way amused, he found himself whirling, with rheumatic gout and seventy years, among recollections of vivid pictures better hung in galleries with closed doors. It was always possible to stop the pony-chaise by roadsides where solitary men sat by piles of stone, which they broke at leisure with hammers as though they were cracking nuts. He had spent many an agreeable half-hour in talk with a road-mender who could be led into conversation and was left elated by an extra shilling. As in years long past he had sat under chestnut-trees in the Apennines and shared the black bread and sour wine of a peasant, so in these days he frequently would have been glad to sit under a hedge and eat bread and cheese with a[Pg 620] good fellow who did not know him and whose summing up of the domestic habits and needs of “the workin’-mon” or the amiabilities or degeneracies of the gentry would be expressed, figuratively speaking, in thoughts and words of one syllable. He did not, it might be told, desire to enter into conversation with his humble fellow-man from altruistic motives. He did it because there was always a chance more or less that he would be amused. He might hear of little tragedies or comedies; he much preferred the comedies. Blest with a neatly cynical sense of humor, he knew he had always been an entirely selfish man and that he was entirely selfish still, and was not revoltingly fretful and domineering only because he was constitutionally unirritable.

He was, however, amiably obstinate, and was accustomed to getting his own way in most things. On this day of his outing he insisted on driving himself in the face of arguments to the contrary. He was so fixed in his intention that his daughters and Mrs. Braddle were obliged to admit themselves overpowered.

“Nonsense! Nonsense!” he protested when they besought him to allow himself to be driven by a groom. “The pony does not need driving. He doesn’t go when he is driven. He frequently lies down and puts his cheek on his hand and goes to sleep, and I am obliged to wait until he wakes up.”

“But, Papa dear,” Lady Edith said, “your poor hands are not very strong. And he might run away and kill you. Please do be reasonable!”

“My dear girl,” he answered, “if he runs, I shall run after him and kill him when I catch him. George,” he called to the groom holding the plump pony’s head, “tell her ladyship what this little beast’s name is.”

“The Indolent Apprentice, your Grace,” the groom answered, touching his hat and suppressing a grin.

“I called him that a month ago,” said the duke. “Hogarth would have depicted all sorts of evil ends for him. Three weeks since, I could have outrun him myself. Let George follow me on a horse if you like, but he must keep out of my sight. Half a mile behind will do.”

He got into the phaëton, concealing his twinges with determination, and drove down the avenue with a fine air, sitting very erect and smiling. Indoor existence had become unendurable, and the spring was filling the woods.

“I love the spring,” he murmured to himself. “I am sentimental about it. I love sentimentality—in myself, when I am quite alone. If I had been a writing person, I should have made verses every year in April and sent them to magazines—and they would have been returned to me.”

The Indolent Apprentice was, it is true, fat, though comely, and he was also entirely deserving of his name. Like his grace of Stone, however, he had seen other and livelier days, and now and then he was beset by recollections. He had once stepped fast, as well as with a spirited gait. During his master’s indisposition he had stood in his loose box and professed such harmlessness that he had not been annoyed by being taken out for exercise as regularly as he might have been. He did not intend, when he was taken out, to emulate the Industrious Apprentice by hastening his pace unduly and raising false hopes for the future, but he sniffed in the air the moist green of leafage and damp moss, massed with yellow primroses cuddling in it as though for warmth, and he liked the feel of the road under a pony’s feet.

Therefore, when he found himself out in the world again, he shook his head now and then and even tossed it.

“You feel it, too, do you?” said the duke. “I won’t remind you of your years.”

The drive from Stone Hover to the village of Temple Barholm was an easy one, of many charms of leaf-arched lanes and grass-edged road. The duke had always had a partiality for it, and he took it this morning.

The groom was a young man of three and twenty, and he felt the spring also. The horse he rode was a handsome animal, and he himself was not devoid of a healthy young man’s good looks. He knew his belted livery was becoming to him, and when on horseback he prided himself on what he considered an almost military bearing. Sarah Hibson, Farmer Hibson’s dimple-chinned and saucy-eyed daughter, had been “carryin’ on a good bit” with a soldier who was a smart, well-[Pg 621]set-up, impudent fellow, and it was the manifest duty of any other young fellow who had considered himself to be “walking out with her” to look after his charge. His grace had been most particular about George’s keeping far enough behind him; and as half a mile had been mentioned as near enough, certainly one was absolved from the necessity of keeping in sight. Why should not one turn into the lane which ended at Hibson’s farm-yard, drop into the dairy, and “have it out wi’ Sarah”?

Dimpled chins and saucy eyes, and bare, dimpled arms, and hands patting butter while heads are tossed in coquettishly alluring defiance, made even “having it out” an attractive and memory-obscuring process. Sarah was a plump and sparkling imp of prettiness, and knew the power of every sly glance and every dimple and every golden freckle she possessed. George did not know it so well, and in ten minutes had lost his head and entirely forgotten even the half-mile behind.

He was lover-like, he was masterful, he brought the spring with him; he “carried on,” as Sarah put it, until he had actually outdistanced the soldier, and had her in his arms, kissing her as she laughed and prettily struggled.

“Shame o’ tha face! Shame o’ tha face, George!” she scolded and dimpled and blushed. “Wilt tha be done now? Wilt tha be done? I’ll call mother.”

And at that very moment mother came without being called, running, red of face, heavy-footed, and panting, with her cap all on one side.

“The duke’s run away! The duke’s run away!” she shouted. “Jo seed him. Pony got freetened at summat—what art doin’ here, George Bind? Get o’ thy horse an’ gallop! If he’s killed, tha ’rt a ruined man.”

THERE was an odd turn of chance in it, the duke thought afterward. Though friskier than usual, the Indolent Apprentice had behaved perfectly well until they neared the gates of Temple Barholm, which chanced to be open because a cart had just passed through. And it was not the cart’s fault, for the Indolent Apprentice regarded it with friendly interest. It happened, however, that, perhaps being absorbed in the cart, which might have been drawn by a friend or even a distant relative, the Indolent Apprentice was horribly startled by a large rabbit which leaped out of the hedge almost under his nose, and, worse still, was followed the next instant by another rabbit even larger and more sudden and unexpected in its movements. The Indolent Apprentice snorted, pawed, whirled, dashed through the open gateway,—the duke’s hands were even less strong than his daughter had thought,—and galloped, head in air, and bit between teeth, up the avenue, the low carriage rocking from side to side.

“Damn! Damn!” cried the duke, rocking also. “Oh, damn! I shall be killed in a runaway perambulator!”

And ridiculous as it was, things surged through his brain, and once, though he laughed at himself bitterly afterward, he gasped, “Ah, Heloïse!” as he almost whirled over a jagged tree-stump; gallop and gallop and gallop, off the road and through trees, and back again on to the sward, and gallop and gallop and jerk and jolt and jerk, and he was nearing the house, and a long-legged young man ran down the steps, pushing aside footmen, and was ahead of the drunken little beast of a pony, and caught him just as the phaëton overturned and shot his grace safely, though not comfortably, in a heap upon the grass.

It was of course no trifle of a shock, but its victim’s sensations gave him strong reason to hope, as he rolled over, that no bones were broken. The servants were on the spot almost at once, and took the pony’s head.

The young man helped the duke to his feet and dusted him with masterly dexterity. He did not know he was dusting a duke, and he would not have cared if he had.

“Hello,” he said, “you’re not hurt. I can see that. Thank the Lord! I don’t believe you’ve got a scratch.”

His grace felt a shade shaky, and he was slightly pale, but he smiled in a way which had been celebrated forty years earlier, and the charm of which had survived even rheumatic gout.

“Thank you. I’m not hurt in the least. I am the Duke of Stone. This isn’t really a call. It isn’t my custom to arrive in this way. May I address you as my preserver, Mr. Temple Barholm?”

UPON the terrace, when he was led up the steps, stood a most perfect little elderly lady in a state of agitation much greater than his own or his rescuer’s. It was an agitation as perfect in its femininity as she herself was. It expressed its kind tremors in the fashion which belongs to the puce silk dress and fine bits of collar and undersleeve the belated gracefulness of which caused her to present herself to him rather as a figure cut neatly from a book of the styles he had admired in his young manhood. It was of course Miss Alicia, who having, with Tembarom, seen the galloping pony from a window, had followed him when he darted from the room.

“I do so hope you are not hurt,” she exclaimed. “It really seemed that only divine Providence could prevent a terrible accident.”

“I am afraid that it was more grotesque than terrible,” he answered a shade breathlessly.

“Let me make you acquainted with the Duke of Stone, Miss Alicia,” Tembarom said in the formula of Mrs. Bowse’s boarders on state occasions of introduction. “Duke, let me make you acquainted, sir, with my—relation—Miss Alicia Temple Barholm.”

The duke’s bow had a remote suggestion of almost including a kissed hand in its gallant courtesy. Not, however, that early-Victorian ladies had been accustomed to the kissing of hands; but at the period when he had best known the type he had daily bent over white fingers in Continental capitals.

“A glass of wine,” Miss Alicia implored—“pray let me give you a glass of wine. I am sure you need it very much.”

He was taken into the library and made to sit in a most comfortable easy-chair. Miss Alicia fluttered about him with sympathy still delicately tinged with alarm. How long, how long, it had been since he had been fluttered over! Nearly forty years. Ladies did not flutter now, and he remembered that it was no longer the fashion to call them “ladies.” Only the lower-middle classes spoke of “ladies.” But he found himself mentally using the word again as he watched Miss Alicia.

He could scarcely remove his eyes from her as he sipped his wine. She felt his escape “providential,” and murmured such devout little phrases concerning it that he was almost consoled for the grotesque inward vision of himself as an aged peer of the realm tumbling out of a baby-carriage and rolled over on the grass at the feet of a man on whom later he had[Pg 623] meant to make, in proper state, a formal call. She put her hand to her side, smiling half apologetically.

“My heart beats quite fast yet,” she said. Whereupon a quaintly novel thing took place, at the sight of which the duke barely escaped opening his eyes very wide indeed. The American Temple Barholm placed his arm about her in the most casual and informally accustomed way, and led her to a chair, and put her in it, so to speak.

“Say,” he announced with affectionate authority, “you sit down right away. It’s you that needs a glass of wine, and I’m going to give it to you.”

The relations between the two were evidently on a basis not common in England even among people who were attached to one another. There was a spontaneous, every-day air of natural, protective petting about it, as though the fellow was fond of her in his crude fashion, and meant to take care of her. He was fond of her, and the duke perceived it with elation, and also understood. He might be the ordinary bestower of boons, but the protective curve of his arm included other things. In the blank dullness of his unaccustomed splendors he had somehow encountered this fine, delicately preserved little relic of other days, and had seized on her and made her his own.

“I have not seen anything as delightful as Miss Temple Barholm for many a year,” the duke said when Miss Alicia was called from the room and left them together.

“It’s an exquisite survival of type,” said the duke. “She belongs to my time, not yours,” he added, realizing that “survival of type” might not clearly convey itself.

“Well, she belongs to mine now,” answered Tembarom. “I wouldn’t lose her for a farm.”

“Would you mind my writing that down?” said the duke. “I have a fad for dialects and new phrases.” He hastily scribbled the words in a tablet that he took from his pocket. “Do you like living in England?” he asked in course of time.

“If it had not been for finding Miss Alicia, and that I made a promise I’d stay for a year, anyhow, I’d have broken loose at the end of the first week and worked my passage back if I hadn’t had enough in my clothes to pay for it.” He laughed, but it was not real laughter. There was a thing behind it. The situation was more edifying than one could have hoped. “I made a promise, and I’m going to stick it out,” he said.

He was going to stick it out because he had promised to endure for a year Temple Barholm and an income of seventy thousand pounds! The duke gazed at him as at a fond dream realized.

“But you’re used to it, and I’m not. I’m used to working ’steen hours a day, and dropping into bed as tired as a dog, but ready to sleep like one and get up rested.”

“I used to play twenty hours a day once,” answered the duke; “but I didn’t get up rested. That’s probably why I have gout and rheumatism combined. Tell me how you worked, and I will tell you how I played.”

It was worth while taking this tone with him. It had been worth while taking it with the chestnut-gathering peasants in the Apennines, sometimes even with a stone-breaker by an English roadside. And this one was of a type unique and more distinctive than any other—a fellow who, with the blood of Saxon kings and Norman nobles in his veins, had known nothing but the street life of the crudest city in the world, who spoke a sort of argot, who knew no parallels of the things which surrounded him in the ancient home he had inherited and in which he stood apart as a sort of semi-sophisticated savage. The duke applied himself with grace and finished ability to drawing him out. The questions he asked were all seemingly those of a man of the world charmingly interested in the superior knowledge of a foreigner of varied experience. His method was one which engaged the interest of Tembarom himself. He did not know that he was not only questioned, but, so to speak, deli[Pg 624]cately cross-examined, and that before the end of the interview the Duke of Stone knew more of him, his past existence and present sentiments, than even Miss Alicia knew after their long and intimate evening talks. The duke, however, had the advantage of being a man and of cherishing vivid recollections of the days of his youth, which, unlike as it had been to that of Tembarom, furnished a degree of solid foundation upon which to build conjecture.

“A young man of his age,” his grace reflected astutely, “has always just fallen out of love, is falling into it, or desires vaguely to do so. Ten years later there would perhaps be blank spaces, lean years during which he was not in love at all; but at his particular period there must be a young woman somewhere. I wonder if she is employed in one of the department stores he speaks of, and how soon he hopes to present her to us. His conversation has revealed so far, to use his own rich simile, ‘neither hide nor hair’ of her.”

On his own part, he was as ready to answer questions as to ask them. In fact, he led Tembarom on to asking.

“I will tell you how I played” had been meant. He made a human document of the history he enlarged, he brilliantly diverged, he included, he made pictures, and found Tembarom’s point of view or lack of it gave spice and humor to relations he had thought himself tired of. To tell familiar anecdotes of courts and kings to a man who had never quite believed that such things were realities, who almost found them humorous when they were casually spoken of, was edification indeed. The novel charm lay in the fact that his class in his country did not include them as possibilities. Peasants in other countries, plowmen, shopkeepers, laborers in England—all these at least they knew of, and counted them in as factors in the lives of the rich and great; but this dear young man!

“What’s a crown like? I’d like to see one. How much do you guess such a thing would cost—in dollars?”

“Did not Miss Temple Barholm take you to see the regalia in the Tower of London? I am quite shocked,” said the duke. He was, in fact, a trifle disappointed. With the puce dress and undersleeves and little fringes, she ought certainly to have rushed with her pupil to that seat of historical instruction on their first morning in London, immediately after breakfasting on toast and bacon and marmalade and eggs.

“She meant me to go, but somehow it was put off. She almost cried on our journey home when she suddenly remembered that we’d forgotten it, after all. She’d never been to London before, and you couldn’t make her believe she could ever get there again, and she said it was ungrateful to Providence to waste an opportunity. She’s always mighty anxious to be grateful to Providence, bless her!”

“She regards you as Providence,” remarked the duke, enraptured. With a touch here and there, the touch of a master, he had gathered the whole little story of Miss Alicia, and had found it of a whimsical exquisiteness and humor.

“She’s a lot too good to me,” answered Tembarom. “I guess women as nice as her are always a lot too good to men. She’s a kind of little old angel. What makes me mad is to think of the fellows that didn’t get busy and marry her thirty-five years ago.”

“Thousands of ’em, though most of ’em never saw her. I suppose you never saw her then. If you had, you might have done it.”

The duke, sitting with an elbow on each arm of his chair, put the tips of his fine, gouty fingers together and smiled with a far-reaching inclusion of possibilities.

“So I might,” he said; “so I might. My loss entirely—my abominable loss!”

They had reached this point of the argument when the carriage from Stone Hover arrived. The stately barouche contained Lady Edith and Lady Celia, both pale, and greatly agitated by the news which had brought them horrified from Stone Hover without a moment’s delay.

They both descended in haste and swept in such alarmed anxiety up the terrace steps and through the hall to their father’s side that they had barely a polite gasp for Miss Alicia and scarcely saw Tembarom at all.

“Dear Papa!” they cried when he revealed himself in his chair in the library intact and smiling.[Pg 625] “How you have frightened us! Where was George? You must dismiss him at once. Really—really—”

“He was half a mile away, obeying my orders,” said the duke. “A groom cannot be dismissed for obeying orders. It is the pony who must be dismissed, to my great regret; or else we must overfeed him until he is even fatter than he is and cannot run away.”

Were his arms and legs and his ribs and collar-bones and head quite right? Was he sure that he had not received any internal injury when he fell out of the pony-carriage? They could scarcely be convinced, and as they hung over and stroked and patted him, Tembarom stood aside and watched them with interest. They were the kind of girls he had to please Ann by “getting next to,” giving himself a chance to fall in love with them, so that she’d know whether they were his kind or not. They were nice-looking, and had a way of speaking that sounded rather swell, but they weren’t ace high to a little slim, red-headed thing that looked at you like a baby and pulled your heart up into your throat.

“Don’t poke me any more, dear children. I am quite, quite sound,” he heard the duke say. “In Mr. Temple Barholm you behold the preserver of your parent. Filial piety is making you behave with shocking ingratitude.”

They turned to Tembarom at once with a pretty outburst of apologies and thanks. They were very polite and made many agreeably grateful speeches, but in the eyes of both there lurked a shade anxiety which they hoped to be able to conceal. Their father watched them with a wicked pleasure. He realized clearly their well-behaved desire to do and say exactly the right thing and bear themselves in exactly the right manner, and also their awful uncertainty before an entirely unknown quantity. Really, if Willocks, the butcher’s boy, had inherited Temple Barholm, it would have been easier to know where one stood in the matter of being civil and agreeable to him. First Lady Edith, made perhaps bold by the suggestion of physical advantage bestowed by the color, talked to him to the very best of her ability; and when she felt herself fearfully flagging, Lady Celia took him up and did her very well-conducted best. Neither she nor her sister were brilliant talkers at any time, and limited by the absence of any common familiar topic, effort was necessary. The neighborhood he did not know; London he was barely aware of; social functions it would be an impertinence to bring in; games he did not play; sport he had scarcely heard of. You were confined to America, and if you knew next to nothing of American life, there you were.

Tembarom saw it all,—he was sharp enough for that,—and his habit of being jocular and wholly unashamed saved him from the misery of awkwardness that Willocks would have been sure to have writhed under. His casual frankness, however, for a moment embarrassed Lady Edith to the bitterest extremity. When you are trying your utmost to make a queer person oblivious to the fact that his world is one unknown to you, it is difficult to know where you stand when he says:

“It’s mighty hard to talk to a man who doesn’t know a thing that belongs to the kind of world you’ve spent your life in, ain’t it? But don’t you mind me a minute. I’m glad to be talked to anyhow by people like you. When I don’t catch on. I’ll just ask. No man was ever electrocuted for not knowing, and that’s just where I am. I don’t know, and I’m glad to be told. Now, there’s one thing. Burrill said ‘Your Ladyship’ to you. I heard him. Ought I to say it, or oughtn’t I?”

“Oh, no,” she answered, but somehow without distaste in the momentary stare he had startled her into; “Burrill is—”

“He’s a servant,” he aided encouragingly. “Well, I’ve never been a butler, but this is the first time I’ve been out of a job.”

What a queer, candid, unresentful creature! What a good sort of smile! And how odd that it was he who was putting her more at her ease by the mere way in which he was saying this almost alarming thing! By the time he had ended, it was not alarming at all, and she had caught her breath again.

She was actually sorry when the door opened and Lady Joan Fayre came in, followed almost immediately by Lady Mallowe and Captain Palliser, who appeared to have just returned from a walk and heard the news.

Lady Mallowe was most sympathetic. Why not, indeed? The Duke of Stone was a delightful, cynical creature, and Stone Hover was, despite its ducal poverty, a desirable place to be invited to, if you could manage it. Her ladyship’s method of fluttering was not like Miss Alicia’s, its character being wholly modern; but she fluttered, nevertheless. The duke, who knew all about her, received her amiabilities with appreciative smiles, but it was the splendidly handsome, hungry-eyed young woman with the line between her black brows who engaged his attention. On the alert, as he always was, for a situation, he detected one at once when he saw his American address her. She did not address him, and scarcely deigned a reply when he spoke to her. When he spoke to others, she conducted herself as though he were not in the room, so obviously did she choose to ignore his existence. Such a bearing toward one’s host had indeed the charm of being an interesting novelty. And what a beauty she was! Then as in a flash he recalled between one breath and another the quite fiendish episode of poor Jem Temple Barholm—and she was the girl!

Then he became almost excited in his interest. He saw it all. As he had himself argued must be the case, this poor fellow was in love. But it was not with a lady in the New York department stores; it was with a young woman who would evidently disdain to wipe her feet upon him. How thrilling! As Lady Mallowe and Palliser and the others chattered, he watched him, observing his manner. He stood the handsome creature’s steadily persistent rudeness very well; he made no effort to push into the talk when she coolly held him out of it. He waited without external uneasiness or spasmodic smiles. If he could do that despite the inevitable fact that he must feel his position uncomfortable, he was possessed of fiber. That alone would make him worth cultivating. And if there were persons who were to be made uncomfortable, why not cut in and circumvent the beauty somewhat and give her a trifle of unease. It was with the light and adroit touch of accustomedness to all orders of little situations that his grace took the matter in hand, with a shade, also, of amiable malice. He drew Tembarom adroitly into the center of things; he knew how to lead him to make easily the odd, frank remarks which were sufficiently novel to suggest that he was actually entertaining. He beautifully edged Lady Joan out of her position. She could not behave ill to him, he was far too old, he said to himself, leaving out the fact that a Duke of Stone is a too respectable personage to be quite waved aside.

Tembarom began to enjoy himself a little more. Lady Celia and Lady Edith began to enjoy themselves a little more also. Lady Mallowe was filled with admiring delight. Captain Palliser took in the situation, and asked himself questions about it. On her part, Miss Alicia was restored to the happiness any lack of appreciation of her “dear boy” touchingly disturbed. In circumstances such as these he appeared to the advantage which in a brief period would surely reveal his wonderful qualities. And how more than charmingly cordial his grace’s manner was when he left them!

“To-morrow,” he said, “if my daughters do not discover that I have injured some more than vital organ, I shall call to proffer my thanks with the most immense formality. I shall get out of the carriage in the manner customary in respectable neighborhoods, not roll out at your feet. Afterward you will, I hope, come and dine with us. I am devoured by a desire to become more familiar with the ‘New York Earth.’”

IT was Lady Mallowe who perceived the moment when he became the fashion. The Duke of Stone called with the immense formality he had described, and his visit was neither brief nor dull. A little later Tembarom with his guests dined at Stone Hover, and the dinner was further removed from dullness than any one of numerous past dinners always noted for being the[Pg 627] most agreeable the neighborhood afforded. The duke managed his guests as an impresario might have managed his tenor, though this was done with subtly concealed methods. He had indeed a novelty to offer which had been discussed with much uncertainty of point of view.

“Nobody will be likely to see him as he is unless he is pointed out to them,” was what he said to his daughters. “But being bored to death,—we are all bored,—once adroitly assisted to suspect him of being, alluring, most of them will spring upon him and clasp him to their wearied breasts. I haven’t the least idea what will happen afterward. I shall in fact await the result with interest.”

Following the dinner party at Stone Hover came many others. All the well-known carriages began to roll up the avenue to Temple Barholm. The Temple Barholm carriages also began to roll down the avenue and between the stone griffins on their way to festive gatherings of varied order. Burrill and the footmen ventured to reconsider their early plans for giving warning. It was not so bad if the country was going to take him up.

“Do you see what is happening?” Lady Mallowe said to Joan. “The man is becoming actually popular.”

“He is popular as a turn at a music-hall is,” answered Joan. “He will be dropped as he was taken up.”

“There’s something about him they like, and he represents what everybody most wants. For God’s sake, Joan, don’t behave like a fool this time! The case is more desperate. There is nothing else—nothing.”

“There never was,” said Joan, “and I know the desperateness of the case. How long are you going to stay here?”

“I am going to stay for some time. They are not conventional people. It can be managed very well. We are relatives.”

“Will you stay,” inquired Joan in a low voice, “until they ask you to remove yourself?”

Lady Mallowe smiled an agreeably subtle smile. “Not quite that,” she said. “Miss Alicia would never have the courage to suggest it. It takes courage and sophistication to do that sort of thing. Mr. Temple Barholm evidently wants us to remain. He will be willing to make as much of the relationship as we choose to let him.”

“Do you choose to let him make as much of it as will establish us here for weeks—or months?” Joan asked, her low voice shaking a little.

“That will depend entirely upon circumstances. It will, in fact, depend entirely upon you,” said Lady Mallowe, her lips setting themselves into a straight, thin line.

For an appreciable moment Joan was silent; but after it she lost her head and whirled about.

“How much money have you?” asked her mother. She knew she had none. She was always sufficiently shrewd to see that she had none.

“How much money have you?” she repeated quietly. This was the way in which their unbearable scenes began.

Joan looked at her; this time it was for about five seconds. She turned her back on her and walked out of the room. Shortly afterward Lady Mallowe saw her walking down the avenue in the rain, which was beginning to fall.

She had left the house because she dared not stay in it. Once out in the park, she folded her long purple cloak about her and pulled her soft purple felt hat down over her brows, walking swiftly under the big trees without knowing where she intended to go before she returned.

No one could know so well as herself how desperate from her own point of view the case was. She had long known that her mother would not hesitate for a moment before any chance of a second marriage which would totally exclude her daughter from her existence. Why should she, after all, Joan thought? They had always been antagonists. The moment of chance had been looming on the horizon for months. Sir Moses Monaldini had hovered about fitfully and evidently doubtfully at first, more certainly and frequently of late, but always with a clearly objecting eye cast askance upon herself. He would have no penniless daughters hanging about, scowling and sneering. None of that for him. And the ripest apple upon the topmost bough in the highest wind would not drop more readily to his feet than her mother would, Joan knew with sharp and shamed burnings.

It made her sick to think of the perpetual visits they had made where they were not wanted, of the times when they had been politely bundled out of places, of the methods which had been used to induce shopkeepers to let them run up bills. For years her mother and she had been walking advertisements of smart shops because both were handsome, wore clothes well, and carried them where they would be seen and talked about. Now this would be all over, since it had been Lady Mallowe who had managed all details. Thrown upon her own resources, Joan would have none of them, even though she must walk in rags. If she had never met Jem! But Jem had been the beginning and the end.

“And he sits in Jem’s place! And every day that common, foolish stare will follow me!” she said.

He sat, it was true, in the place Jem Temple Barholm would have occupied if he had been a living man, and he looked at her a good deal. Perhaps he sometimes unconsciously stared because she made him think of many things. But if she had been in a state of mind admitting of judicial fairness, she would have been obliged to own that it was not quite a foolish stare. Absorbed, abstracted, perhaps, but it was not foolish. Sometimes, on the contrary, it was searching and keen.

Of course he was doing his best to please her. Of all the “Ladies,” it seemed evident that he was most attracted by her. He tried to talk to her despite her unending rebuffs, he followed her about and endeavored to interest her, he presented a hide-bound unsensitiveness when she did her worst. Perhaps he did not even know that she was being icily rude. He was plainly “making up to her” after the manner of his class.

She had reached the village when the rain changed its mind, and without warning began to pour down as if the black cloud passing overhead had suddenly opened. She was wondering if she would not turn in somewhere for shelter until the worst was over, when a door opened and Tembarom ran out with an umbrella.

“Come in to the Hibblethwaites’ cottage, Lady Joan,” he said. “This will be over directly.”

He did not affectionately hustle her in by the arm as he would have hustled in Miss Alicia, but he closely guarded her with the umbrella until he guided her inside.

The first object she became aware of was a thin face with pointed chin and ferret eyes peering at her round the end of a sofa, then a sharp voice.

“Tak’ off her cloak an’ shake the rain off it in the wash’us’,” it said. “Mother an’ Aunt Susan’s out. Let him unbutton it fer thee.”

“I can unbutton it myself, thank you,” said Lady Joan. Tembarom took it when she had unbuttoned it. He took it from[Pg 629] her shoulders before she had time to stop him. Then he walked into the tiny “wash’us’” and shook it thoroughly. He came back and hung it on a chair before the fire.

“I know tha name,” he said. “He towd me,” with a jerk of the head toward Tembarom.

A flaringly illustrated New York paper was spread out upon his sofa. He pushed it aside and pulled the shabby atlas toward him. It fell open at a map of North America as if through long habit.

Tembarom had stood watching them both. “I guess you’d better not do that,” he suggested to Tummas.

“Why not?” said the boy, sharply. “It’s the same as if he’d married her. If she wur his widder, she’d want to talk about him. Widders allus wants to talk. Why shouldn’t she? Women’s women. He’d ha’ wanted to talk about her.”

“Do you come here to talk to this boy about him?” she said. “How dare you!”

“He knew next to nowt about him till I towd him,” he said. “Then he came to ax me things an’ foind out more. He knows as much as I do now. Us sits here an’ talks him over.”

“What interest can you have in the man who ought to be in your place?” she asked. “What possible interest?”

“Well,” he answered awkwardly, “because he ought to be, I suppose. Ain’t that reason enough?”

He had never had to deal with women who hated him and who were angry, and he did not know exactly what to say. He had known very few women, and he had always been good natured with them and won their liking in some measure. Also, there was in his attitude toward this particular woman a baffled feeling that he could not make her understand him. She would always think of him as an enemy and believe he meant things he did not mean. If he had been born and educated in her world, he could have used her own language; but he could use only his own, and there were so many things he must not say for a time at least.

“Do you not realize,” she said, “that—that you and this boy are taking liberties?”

“I’ve takken liberties aw my loife,” he stated; “an’ I’m goin’ to tak’ ’em till I dee. They’re the on’y things I con tak’, lyin’ here crippled, an’ I’m goin’ to tak’ ’em.”

“Stop that, Tummas!” said Tembarom, with friendly authority. “She doesn’t catch on, and you don’t catch on, either. You’re both of you ’way off. Stop it!”

“I thowt happen she could tell me things I did na know,” protested Tummas, throwing himself back on his pillows. “If she conna, she conna, an’ if she wun not, she wun not. Get out wi’ thee!” he said to Joan. “I dunnot want thee about the place.”

“I am going,” said Lady Joan, and, seizing her cloak, turned to open the door.

The rain was descending in torrents, but she passed swiftly out into its deluge, walking as rapidly as she could. She thought she cared nothing about the rain, but it dashed in her face and eyes, taking her breath away, and she had need of breath when her heart was beating with such fierceness.

Even chance could not let her alone at one of her worst moments. She walked faster and faster because she was afraid Tembarom would follow her, and in a few minutes she heard him splashing behind her, and then he was at her side, holding the umbrella over her head.

“You’re a good walker,” he said, “but I’m a sprinter. I trained running after street-cars and catching the ‘L’ in New York.”

She had so restrained her miserable hysterical impulse to break down and utterly humiliate herself under the unexpected blow of the episode in the cottage that she had had no breath to spare when she left the room, and her hurried effort[Pg 630] to escape had left her so much less that she did not speak.

“I’ll tell you something,” he went on. “He’s a little freak, but you can’t blame him much. Don’t be mad at him. He’s never moved from that corner since he was born, I guess, and he’s got nothing to do or to think of but just hearing what’s happening outside. He’s sort of crazy curious, and when he gets hold of a thing that suits him, he just holds on to it till the last bell rings.”

She said nothing whatever, and he paused a moment because he wanted to think over the best way to say the next thing.

“Mr. James Temple Barholm”—he ventured it with more delicacy of desire not to seem to “take liberties” than she would have credited him with—“saw his mother sitting with him in her arms at the cottage door a week or so after he was born. He stopped at the gate and talked to her about him, and he left him a sovereign. He’s got it now. It seems a fortune to him. He’s made a sort of idol of him. That’s why he talks like he does. I wouldn’t let it make me mad if I were you.”

He did not know that she could not have answered him if she would, that she felt that if he did not stop she might fling herself down upon the wet heather and wail aloud.

“You don’t like me,” he began after they had walked a few steps farther. “You don’t like me.”

This was actually better. It choked back the sobs rising in her throat. The stupid shock of it, his tasteless foolishness, helped her by its very folly to a sort of defense against the disastrous wave of emotion she might not have been able to control. She gathered herself together.

“Well it is—sort of,” he said, but in a manner curiously free from fatuous swagger. “I’ve had luck that way. I guess it’s been because I’d got to make friends so as I could earn a living. It seems sort of queer to know that some one got a grouch against me that—that I can’t get away with.”

She looked up the avenue to see how much farther they must walk together, since she was not “a sprinter” and could not get away from him. She thought she caught a glimpse through the trees of a dog-cart driven by a groom, and hoped she was not mistaken and that it was driving in their direction.

“It must, indeed,” she said, “though I am not sure I quite understand what a grouch is.”

“When you’ve got a grouch against a fellow,” he explained impersonally, “you want to get at him. You want to make him feel like a mutt; and a mutt’s the worst kind of a fool. You’ve got one against me.

“I knew there was a lot against me when I came here,” he persisted. “I should have been a fool if I hadn’t. I knew when you came that I was up against a pretty hard proposition; but I thought perhaps if I got busy and showed you—you’ve got to show a person—”

“Friends! You and I?” The words ought to have scorched him, pachyderm though he was.

She had not been mistaken. The dog-cart had rounded the far-off curve and was coming toward them. And the man went on talking.

“You’ve felt every minute that I was in a place that didn’t belong to me. You know that if the man that it did belong to was here, you’d be here with him. You felt as if I’d robbed him of it—and I’d robbed you. It was your home—yours. You hated me too much to think of anything else. Suppose—suppose there was a way I could give it back to you—make it your home again?”

His voice dropped and was rather unsteady. The fool, the gross, brutal, vulgar, hopeless fool! He thought this was the way to approach her, to lead her to listen to his proposal of marriage! Not[Pg 631] for a second did she guess that they were talking at cross-purposes. She did not know that as he kept himself steady under her contemptuousness he was thinking that Ann would have to own that he had been up against it hard and plenty while the thing was going on.

“I’m always up against it when I’m talking to you,” he said. “You get me rattled. There’s things I want to talk about and ask you. Suppose you give me a chance, and let us start out by being sort of friends.”

“I am staying in your house,” she answered in a deadly voice, “and I cannot go away because my mother will not let me. You can force yourself upon me, if you choose, because I cannot help it but understand once for all that I will not give you your ridiculous chance. And I will not utter one word to you when I can avoid it.”

He was silent for a moment and seemed to be thinking rather deeply. She realized now that he saw the nearing dog-cart.

“You won’t. Then it’s up to me,” he said. Then with a change of tone he added: “I’ll stop the cart and tell the man to drive you to the house. I’m not going to force myself on you, as you call it. It ’u’d be no use. Perhaps it’ll come all right in the end.”

He made a sign to the groom, who hastened his horse’s pace and drew up when he reached them. Tembarom said:

The groom, who was a new arrival, began to prepare to get down and give up his place.

And, to the groom’s amazement, they left him standing under the trees looking after them.

“It’s up to me,” he was saying. “The whole durned thing’s up to me.”

GOING UP

A PROPHET is not without honor save in his bathing-suit. Bathing-suits harmonize with the ocean, and are worn unblushingly by those who stand with one foot in sea and one on land; but it is possible for a bathing-suit to be out of place, as at a garden party or at the opera. Bathing-suits are specialized goods. If one is inclined to doubt the truth of these propositions, listen to the tale of Professor Jarvis.

The professor spent his summers on the sea-coast of Maine, where he occupied his mornings in working on a history of the diplomatic relations of Uruguay and Paraguay, or perhaps it was Costa Rica and Honduras. His afternoons were spent in golfing and bathing. His house stood about a hundred yards from the end of the sandy bathing-beach, and since he possessed no bath-house, it was his habit, at the end of his chilling swim, to pick his way gingerly home along a sandy, root-ribbed, pine-needled path, to enter his house brazenly by the front door, to flee dripping up the front stairs, and, in the privacy of his bedroom, to transform himself from Proteus to Beau Brummell.

One cool September afternoon as he was returning from his plunge, Professor Jarvis paused among the pines at a little distance from the house. A large black automobile was drawn up before the front steps. The spacious piazza, on which his wife was in the habit of serving afternoon tea—a conveniently situated piazza which gave upon the sea, and not upon Professor Jarvis—was unoccupied. The professor hesitated, his teeth clashing against one another, and the goose-flesh creeping out on his dripping arms. The conclusion was obvious: his wife was receiving guests in the living-room. She had evidently decided that the piazza would be a trifle too breezy for tea.

Now Professor Jarvis, even in a bathing-suit, was not an unbeautiful figure. He had fallen into the vale of fifty years with more grace than the average human being, thanks[Pg 633] to golf and to bathing. He did not display to any alarming extent the inevitable tendencies of age. He was, in fact, rather proud of the restraint which his waist-line had exercised. Now he did not hesitate long among the pines, but advanced daintily over some sharp twigs to the front door. The chauffeur, sprawling at ease in the black car and reading “Mutt and Jeff” in the colored comic section of a Sunday supplement, smiled out of the leeward side of his mouth. But the professor regarded him not, haughtily passed him by, and boldly entered the house. His gray hair stood on end in scant wisps, the goose-flesh adorned his limbs, the water dripped from his Roman nose and trickled from his abbreviated trousers, and he left several little wet footprints on the ivy-clad front porch.

Once inside the house, the professor paused timidly in the hallway. Before him stood two doors. One was the entrance to the dining-room; the other led into the capacious living-room. The stairs were beyond, at the extreme back of the hall. Through the open doors of the living-room issued the sound of voices. Professor Jarvis recognized his wife’s and Mrs. Heath’s and—no, he was not quite sure about the other one. The conversation within continued.

The professor realized that it would be impossible to pass the living-room door without exposing himself to the curious view of the ladies within.

He could, however, reach and enter the dining-room unobserved. He stood a while in thought.

“I find a plain brown stain gives the best wear,” said the doubtful voice in very positive tones. “I find nothing compares with it.”

The professor recognized the voice. It was Mrs. Bannerman’s. He was afraid of Mrs. Bannerman. She was a very positive person, and it was her manner to speak with such evident authority that whenever she held forth the professor began to have his doubts even on Venezuelan questions.

But his wife’s voice reassured him. “I’ve forgotten what our mixture is,” she said. “The farmer always does our shellacking. But you’ll be able to tell if you come out and look at the hall floor. It’s given us splendid wear.”

There was a rustle of dresses. The professor started. It was impossible to get up the distant stairs, with their delightful view of the hall—his own plan. Noiselessly he darted into the dining-room, leaving a tiny pool of water behind him. Mrs. Jarvis, Mrs. Heath, and the formidable Mrs. Bannerman came out into the hall, and discussed varnish, paint, and allied subjects for some minutes.

In the meantime Professor Jarvis considered methods of escape. The dining-room was a large affair. There were windows on one of the sides opposite him, but under them was a sheer drop of twelve feet to a graveled avenue. The sideboard offered no hiding-place. The center-table was not large enough for a professor of diplomacy to curl up under in any fitting way. The “mission” chimney was no place for a man in a bathing-suit. Only one avenue of escape was available, and that was an open door that led invitingly into the pantry or china-closet. Behind this door the professor stationed himself, and prayed that the ladies might depart.

For a moment he had his hopes. There was some mention of good-bys. Somebody went to get her things. The professor drew a long breath. He was very, very chilly, and another little pool was rapidly forming about his white and tender feet.

“Why should I be afraid to face these ladies?” he asked himself. “What have I to be ashamed of? Is there anything wrong in going about my own house in my own bathing-suit? I will go out and say, ‘Oh, I was looking for a towel in the china-closet. I have had such a wonderful swim.’”

Nevertheless, the professor did not move. Nor time nor place did then adhere, while his bathing-suit did. He heard the voice of the terrible Mrs. Bannerman, and remained behind the china-closet door, listening. Suddenly fear smote into his heart.

“Mr. Jarvis planned this house himself,” he heard his wife say proudly. “We had several ideas which we insisted on. For instance, the dining-room here is an arrangement of our own.”

The professor moved on, into a recess of the china-closet. The voices came nearer and uprose in voluble appreciation of the dining-room. Mrs. Jarvis was holding forth[Pg 634] with a proud delight on the architectural disposition of doors, windows, etc. What was coming next the professor guessed only too well. He looked about wildly. Cupboards, all too small. Shelves, impossible. They all had glass fronts. He could hardly expose himself under glass, like an exhibit in a museum. There was, to be sure, a dumb-waiter that descended to the kitchen below.

It was a new and wonderful dumb-waiter. Wonderfully balanced, weighted, and contrived. Professor Jarvis headed for it, and, as he heard the voices relentlessly approaching the china-closet, climbed nimbly in and, marveling at the beautiful balance of the thing, cautiously let himself down a few yards into the black abyss that yawned between him and the kitchen.

In absolute and overwhelming darkness he gathered himself about the rope that controlled his wooden cage, and held his breath. Thank heavens, it was a roomy dumb-waiter! As it was, he had to curl up like a kitten or a dog, and a very damp one at that. “I should never have supposed,” he said to himself, “that one could get into a dumb-waiter.” And he pondered on the uses of adversity, and remembered the bird in the gilded cage. Above, the voices were faintly audible; they echoed as if through caverns.

There were footsteps. The professor clutched the rope with an iron grasp, and just in time. Some one was attempting to jerk it out of his hands.

The professor’s blood froze. He curled up tighter about the rope in his damp little puddle. He feared the ladies and particularly he feared the brawny might of the fearful Mrs. Bannerman.

Dear teacher, kind schoolmates, honorable judges and chairman, seeing that I am the speaker on the affirmative side I say that Washington was a greater man than Napoleon.

Washington is the man that saved Our Country from the hands of the British. Did Napoleon, of course not, And Washington never deserted his wife and family like Napoleon did. No because Washington was more of a man than to do that.

G. Washington was a man of good sense. He never got a divorce from his wife like Napoleon did. Of course not because Washington knew better than to do that.

When the British made their second attempt to conquer New York, Washington was too sly for them, and by him the English were defeated, and we won the battle. Did Napoleon do that, of course not.

Napoleon entered Berlin in Triumph October 27, 1806 and established himself in the kings palace. He did not like the beutiful Queen Louise, because he felt that she had inspired the soldiers by her presence and urged her husband to make war. He was very unjust to her in his bulletins and Josephine reproached him of speaking ill of women. Did Washington do that of course not he knew better.

Napoleon never liked the festival of a saint, he said it was a day of idleness. Did Washington like it. Of course becaus he used it right and Napoleon didnt.

I both say and think there was never and never will be a man to take the place of Our great American George Washington.

The Rymbel is an interesting and newly discovered verse family. It consists of either ten, twenty, or thirty lines, and is sometimes spoken of, not as a rymbel, but as a “tent-twent-thirt.” The first noteworthy example of it in our literature is Mr. Herford’s interesting twent which, with its fine flux of cerebral invention, is printed below.

The Rymbel family is descended from many rhyming ancestors. Its father was a Jingle, its mother a Rondel. The result of this marriage was a feeble-minded daughter. Symbol by name, and four “wanting” sons, Ramble (the eldest), Rondeau and Rhyme (the twins), and Jumble, the baby. They only express themselves in verse, and are usually spoken of as “the eccentric Rymbels.” Deafness is a Rymbel family characteristic.

Whenever the father (who is invariably the family pioneer in matters poetical) is seized by an uncontrollable afflatus, he starts out bravely enough, but usually attenuates at the fifth line of the first stanza. Owing to the deafness of his wife and little ones he shouts this last line in a frantic crescendo, at which point his voice and his intellect give up the unequal contest, and his wife, seizing on the last word as her cue, pursues the theme spontaneously—and in her own misguided way.

The poetical relay proceeds in this manner until the tenth, twentieth, or—in very rare cases—the thirtieth line has been reached. In Mr. Herford’s splendid example of rymbelican verse, for instance, the father’s brain ceased to “mote” after the fifth line, but the crescendoed concept “fall” was bravely but disastrously propulsed into the second stanza by Mrs. Rymbel, who, in turn, gave up the struggle and abandoned the entire enterprise to the twins.

Regarding your memo. of yesterday in regard to the 1913 model story recently purchased by you from this company, would say we cannot understand why you have found so many repairs necessary.

While we only guarantee our product for one year from date of purchase, all goods are examined before shipment, and should reach you in good condition, and stand any ordinary wear and tear for twelve months. We cannot understand your complaint. Is it not possible you have allowed sand to get in the gear-box of the story?

However, we are shipping you by this same mail material to replace the unsatisfactory parts, Nos. 13 and 14, and trust that, with these in place, the purchase will give you good satisfaction. In case of any further trouble please address this department.

		PAGE
WHITE LINEN NURSE, THE	Eleanor Hallowell Abbott	483
Pictures, printed in tint, by Herman Pfeifer.
ROMAIN ROLLAND.	Alvan F. Sanborn	512
Picture from portrait of Rolland from a drawing by Granié.
BALKAN PENINSULA, SKIRTING THE	Robert Hichens
VI. Stamboul, the City of Mosques.		519
Pictures by Jules Guérin, two printed in color.
TRADE OF THE WORLD PAPERS, THE	James Davenport Whelpley
XVII. If Canada were to Annex the United States		534
Pictures from photographs.
IMPRACTICAL MAN, THE	Elliott Flower	549
Pictures by F. R. Gruger.
BRITISH UNCOMMUNICATIVENESS.	A. C. Benson	567
GUTTER-NICKEL, THE	Estelle Loomis	570
Picture by J. Montgomery Flagg.
VOYAGE OVER, THE FIRST	Theodore Dreiser	586
Pictures by W. J. Glackens.
JAPAN, THE NEW, AMERICAN MAKERS OF	William Elliot Griffis	597
Pictures from photographs.
GOLF, MIND VERSUS MUSCLE IN	Marshall Whitlatch	606
T. TEMBAROM.	Frances Hodgson Burnett	610
Drawings by Charles S. Chapman.
GOING UP.	Frederick Lewis Allen	632
Picture by Reginald Birch.
WASHINGTON, FRESH LIGHT ON		635
CARTOONS.
A Boy’s Best Friend	May Wilson Preston	634
“The Fifth Avenue Girl” and “A Bit of Gossip.” Sculpture by	Ethel Myers	635
The Child de Luxe.	Boardman Robinson	636

DOUBLE STAR, A	Leroy Titus Weeks	511
MESSAGE FROM ITALY, A	Margaret Widdemer	547
Drawing printed in tint by W. T. Benda.
MARVELOUS MUNCHAUSEN, THE	William Rose Benét	563
Pictures by Oliver Herford.
WINGÈD VICTORY.	Victor Whitlock	596
Photograph and decoration.
ROYAL MUMMY, TO A	Anna Glen Stoddard	631
TRIOLET, A	Leroy Titus Weeks	636
RYMBELS.
Pictures by Oliver Herford.
The Girl and the Raspberry Ice.	Oliver Herford	637
The Yellow Vase.	Charles Hanson Towne	637
Tragedy.	Theodosia Garrison	638
“On Revient toujours à Son Premier Amour”.	Oliver Herford	638
LIMERICKS.
Text and pictures by Oliver Herford.
XXXII. The Eternal Feminine.		639
XXXIII. Tra-la-Larceny.		640

THE CENTURY MAGAZINE

CONTENTS

THE WHITE LINEN NURSE

A DOUBLE STAR

ROMAIN ROLLAND

SKIRTING THE BALKAN PENINSULA

IF CANADA WERE TO ANNEX THE UNITED STATES

A MESSAGE FROM ITALY

THE IMPRACTICAL MAN

THE MARVELOUS MUNCHAUSEN

BRITISH UNCOMMUNICATIVENESS

THE GUTTER-NICKEL

I

II

III

IV

THE FIRST VOYAGE OVER

WINGÈD VICTORY

AMERICAN MAKERS OF THE NEW JAPAN

MIND VERSUS MUSCLE IN GOLF

T. TEMBAROM

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

TO A ROYAL MUMMY

IN LIGHTER VEIN

GOING UP

FRESH LIGHT ON WASHINGTON

A TRIOLET

WHAT IS A RYMBEL?

THE GIRL AND THE RASPBERRY ICE

THE YELLOW VASE

TRAGEDY

“ON REVIENT TOUJOURS À SON PREMIER AMOUR”

LIMERICKS

THE ETERNAL FEMININE

TRA-LA-LARCENY