The Collected Short Stories
Date: 1897-12-31T22:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Fiction; Social Life and Customs; Politics; Romance; Family life
Description: Presented here, fifty-one stories by Susan Glaspell. Her stories often relate deep concerns about political and ethical issues prevalent then and now, but also describe, often with wry and witty humor, the experiences of daily life. Her characters, dealing with aspirations and disappointments, conflicts and resolutions (or lack of them), still resonate today.
Publisher: MobileRead
Rights: Public domain in countries where the copyright term is “Life+70” or less.

The Collected
Short Stories

OF
SUSAN GLASPELL

CONTENTS:

The Stories:

“One of Those Impossible Americans”
The Plea
For Love of the Hills
Freckles M’Grath
From A to Z
The Man of Flesh and Blood
How the Prince Saw America
The Last Sixty Minutes
“Out There”
The Preposterous Motive
His America
The Anarchist: His Dog
At Twilight
The Tragedy of a Mind
An Unprofessional Crime
At the Turn of the Road
From the Pen of Failure
The Girl from Downtown
Contrary to Precedent
The Intrusion of the Personal
The Work of the Unloved Libby
An Approximation
For Tomorrow
The Hired Man’s Point of View
The Lie God Forgave
Bound
At the Source
A Boarder of Art
The Resurrection and the Life
Whom Mince Pie Hath Joined Together
The Rules of the Institution
Looking After Clara
The Manager of Crystal Sulphur Springs
Agnes of Cape’s End
Unveiling Brenda
“Finality” in Freeport
Miss Jessie’s Trip Abroad
The Hearing Ear
A Jury of Her Peers
Everything You Want to Plant
A Matter of Gesture
“Poor Ed”
“Beloved Husband”
Good Luck
The Busy Duck
Pollen
“Government Goat”
The Escape
The Nervous Pig
His Smile
Cherished and Shared of Old

Appendix:

Trifles (play)

Index of Titles

About This eBook

“One of Those Impossible Americans”

“N’avez-vous pas—” she was bravely demanding of the clerk when she observed that the bulky American who was standing there helplessly dangling a pair of red silk stockings which a copiously coiffured young woman was assuring him were bien chic was edging nearer her. She was never so conscious of the truly American quality of her French as when a fellow country-man was at hand. The French themselves had an air of “How marvelously you speak!” but fellow Americans listened superciliously in an “I can do better than that myself” manner which quite untied the Gallic twist in one’s tongue. And so, feeling her French was being compared, not with mere French itself, but with an arrogant new American brand thereof, she moved a little around the corner of the counter and began again in lower voice: “Mais, n’avez—”

“Say, Young Lady,” a voice which adequately represented the figure broke in, “you aren’t French, are you?”

She looked up with what was designed for a haughty stare. But what is a haughty stare to do in the face of a broad grin? And because it was such a long time since a grin like that had been grinned at her it happened that the stare gave way to a dimple, and the dimple to a laughing: “Is it so bad as that?”

“Oh, not your French,” he assured her. “You talk it just like the rest of them. In fact, I should say, if anything—a little more so. But do you know,”—confidentially—“I can just spot an American girl every time!”

“How?” she could not resist asking, and the modest black hose she was thinking of purchasing dangled against his gorgeous red ones in friendliest fashion.

“Well, sir—I don’t know. I don’t think it can be the clothes,”—judicially surveying her.

“The clothes,” murmured Virginia, “were bought in Paris.”

“Well, you’ve got me. Maybe it’s the way you wear ’em. Maybe it’s ’cause you look as if you used to play tag with your brother. Something—anyhow—gives a fellow that ‘By jove there’s an American girl!’ feeling when he sees you coming round the corner.”

“But why?”

“Lord—don’t begin on why. You can say why to anything. Why don’t the French talk English? Why didn’t they lay Paris out at right angles? Now look here, Young Lady, for that matter why can’t you help me buy some presents for my wife? There’d be nothing wrong about it,” he hastened to assure her, “because my wife’s a mighty fine woman.”

The very small American looked at the very large one. Now Virginia was a well-brought-up young woman. Her conversations with strange men had been confined to such things as, “Will you please tell me the nearest way to—?” but preposterously enough—she could not for the life of her have told why—frowning upon this huge American—fat was the literal word—who stood there with puckered-up face swinging the flaming hose would seem in the same shameful class with snubbing the little boy who confidingly asked her what kind of ribbon to buy for his mother.

“Was it for your wife you were thinking of buying these red stockings?” she ventured.

“Sure. What do you think of ’em? Look as if they came from Paris all right, don’t they?”

“Oh, they look as though they came from Paris all right,” Virginia repeated, a bit grimly. “But do you know”—this quite as to that little boy who might be buying the ribbon—“American women don’t always care for all the things that look as if they came from Paris. Is your wife—does she care especially for red stockings?”

“Don’t believe she ever had a pair in her life. That’s why I thought it might please her.”

Virginia looked down, and away. There were times when dimples made things hard for one.

Then she said, with gentle gravity: “There are quite a number of women in America who don’t care much for red stockings. It would seem too bad, wouldn’t it, if after you got these clear home your wife should turn out to be one of those people? Now, I think these gray stockings are lovely. I’m sure any woman would love them. She could wear them with gray suede slippers and they would be so soft and pretty.”

“Um—not very lively looking, are they? You see, I want something to cheer her up. She—well, she’s not been very well lately and I thought something—oh something with a lot of dash in it, you know, would just fill the bill. But look here. We’ll take both. Sure—that’s the way out of it. If she don’t like the red she’ll like the gray, and if she don’t like the—You like the gray ones, don’t you? Then here”—picking up two pairs of the handsomely embroidered gray stockings and handing them to the clerk—“One”—holding up his thumb to denote one—“me,”—a vigorous pounding of the chest signifying me. “One”—holding up his forefinger and pointing to the girl—“mademoiselle.”

“Oh no—no—no!” cried Virginia, her face instantly the color of the condemned stockings. Then, standing straight: “Certainly not.”

“No? Just as you say,” he replied good-humoredly. “Like to have you have ’em. Seems as if strangers in a strange land oughtn’t to stand on ceremony.”

The clerk was bending forward holding up the stockings alluringly. “Pour mademoiselle, n’est-ce-pas?”

“Mais—non!” pronounced Virginia, with emphasis.

There followed an untranslatable gesture. “How droll!”—shoulder and outstretched hands were saying. “If the kind gentleman wishes to give mademoiselle the joli bas—!”

His face had puckered up again. Then suddenly it unpuckered, “Tell you what you might do,” he solved it. “Just take ’em along and send ’em to your mother. Now your mother might be real glad to have ’em.”

Then an awful thing happened. What she was thinking about was the letter she could send with the stockings. “Mother dear,” she would write, “as I stood at a counter buying myself some stockings today along came a nice man—a stranger to me, but very kind and jolly—and gave me—”

And there it was that the awful thing happened. Her dimple was showing! She could feel it showing—and at thought of it showing she could not keep it from showing! And how could she explain why it was showing with out its going on showing—and how—?

But at that moment her gaze fell upon the clerk, who had taken the dimple as signal to begin putting the stockings in a box. The Frenchwoman’s eyebrows soon put that dimple in its proper place. “And so the petite Americaine was not too—oh not too—” those French eyebrows were saying.

All in an instant Virginia was something quite different from a little girl with a dimple. “You are very kind,” she was saying, and her mother herself could have done it no better, “but I am sure our little joke has gone quite far enough. I bid you good morning.” And with that she walked regally over to the glove counter, leaving red and gray and black hosiery to their own destinies.

“I loathe them when their eyebrows go up,” she fumed. “Now his weren’t going up—not even in his mind.”

She could not keep from worrying about him. “They’ll just do him,” she was sure. “And then laugh at him in the bargain. A man like that has no business to be let loose in a store all by himself.”

And sure enough, a half hour later she came upon him up in the dress department. Three of them had gathered round to “do” him. They were making rapid headway, their smiling deference scantily concealing their amused contempt. The spectacle infuriated Virginia. “They just think they can work us!” she stormed. “They think we’re easy. I suppose they think he’s a fool. I just wish they could get him in a business deal! I just wish—”

“I can assure you, sir,” the English-speaking manager of the department was saying, “that this garment is a wonderful value. We are able to let you have it at so absurdly low a figure because—”

Virginia did not catch why it was they were able to let him have it at so absurdly low a figure, but she did see him wipe his brow and look helplessly around. “Poor thing,” she murmured, almost tenderly, “he doesn’t know what to do. He just does need somebody to look after him.” She stood there looking at his back. He had a back a good deal like the back of her chum’s father at home. Indeed, there were various things about him suggested “home.” Did one want one’s own jeered at? One might see crudities and undesirable things oneself, but was one going to have supercilious outsiders coughing those sham coughs behind their hypocritical hands?

“For seven hundred francs,” she heard the suave voice saying.

Seven hundred francs! Virginia’s national pride, or, more accurately, her national rage, was lashed into action. It was with very red cheeks that the small American stepped stormily to the rescue of her countryman.

“Seven hundred francs for that?” she jeered, right in the face of the enraged manager and stiffening clerks. “Seven hundred francs! Last year’s model—a hideous color, and”—picking it up, running it through her fingers and tossing it contemptuously aside—“abominable stuff!”

“Gee, but I’m grateful to you!” he breathed, again wiping his brow. “You know, I was a little leery of it myself.”

The manager, quivering with rage and glaring uglily, stepped up to Virginia. “May I ask—?”

But the fat man stepped in between—he was well qualified for that position. “Cut it out, partner. The young lady’s a friend of mine—see? She’s looking out for me—not you. I don’t want your stuff anyway.” And taking Virginia serenely by the arm he walked away.

“This was no place to buy dresses,” said she crossly.

“Well, I wish I knew where the places were to buy things,” he replied, humbly, forlornly.

“Well, what do you want to buy?” demanded she, still crossly.

“Why, I want to buy some nice things for my wife. Something the real thing from Paris, you know. I came over from London on purpose. But, Lord”—again wiping his brow—“a fellow doesn’t know where to go.”

“Oh, well,” sighed Virginia, long-sufferingly, “I see I’ll just have to take you. There doesn’t seem any way out of it. It’s evident you can’t go alone. Seven hundred francs!”

“I suppose it was too much,” he conceded meekly. “I tell you I will be grateful if you’ll just stay by me a little while. I never felt so up against it in all my life.”

“Now, a very nice thing to take one’s wife from Paris,” said Virginia didactically, when they reached the sidewalk, “is lace.”

“L—ace? Um! Y—es, I suppose lace is all right. Still it never struck me there was anything so very lively looking about lace.”

“‘Lively looking’ is not the final word in wearing apparel,” pronounced Virginia in teacher-to-pupil manner. “Lace is always in good taste, never goes out of style, and all women care for it. I will take you to one of the lace shops.”

“Very well,” acquiesced he, truly chastened. “Here, let’s get in this cab.”

Virginia rode across the Seine looking like one pondering the destinies of nations. Her companion turned several times to address her, but it would have been as easy for a soldier to slap a general on the back. But at last she turned to him.

“Now when we get there,” she instructed, “don’t seem at all interested in things. Act—oh, bored, you know, and seeming to want to get me away. And when they tell the price, no matter what they say, just—well sort of groan and hold your head and act as though you are absolutely overcome at the thought of such an outrage.”

“U—m. You have to do that here to get—lace?”

“You have to do that here to get anything—at the price you should get it. You, and people who go shopping the way you do, bring discredit upon the entire American nation.”

“That so? Sorry. Never meant to do that. All right, Young Lady, I’ll do the best I can. Never did act that way, but suppose I can, if the rest of them do.”

“Groan and hold my head,” she heard him murmuring as they entered the shop.

He proved an apt pupil. It may indeed be set down that his aptitude was their undoing. They had no sooner entered the shop than he pulled out his watch and uttered an exclamation of horror at the sight of the time. Virginia could scarcely look at the lace, so insistently did he keep weaving the watch before her. His contempt for everything shown was open and emphatic. It was also articulate. Virginia grew nervous, seeing the real red showing through in the Frenchwoman’s cheeks. And when the price was at last named—a price which made Virginia jubilant—there burst upon her outraged ears something between a jeer and a howl of rage, the whole of it terrifyingly done in the form of a groan; she looked at her companion to see him holding up his hands and wobbling his head as though it had been suddenly loosened from his spine, cast one look at the Frenchwoman—then fled, followed by her still groaning compatriot.

“I didn’t mean you to act like that!” she stormed.

“Why, I did just what you told me to! Seemed to me I was following directions to the letter. Don’t think for a minute I’m going to bring discredit on the American nation! Not a bad scheme—taking out my watch that way, was it?”

“Oh, beautiful scheme. I presume you notice, however, that we have no lace.”

They walked half a block in silence. “Now I’ll take you to another shop,” she then volunteered, in a turning the other cheek fashion, “and here please do nothing at all. Please just—sit.”

“Sort of as if I was feeble-minded, eh?”

“Oh, don’t try to look feeble-minded,” she begged, alarmed at seeming to suggest any more parts; “but just—just sit there—as if you were thinking of something very far away.”

“Say, Young Lady, look here; this is very nice, being put on to the tricks of the trade, but the money end of it isn’t cutting much ice, and isn’t there any way you can just buy things—the way you do in Cincinnati? Can’t you get their stuff without making kind of a comic opera out of it?”

“No, you can’t,” spoke relentless Virginia; “not unless you want them to laugh and say ‘Aren’t Americans fools?’ the minute the door is shut.”

“Fools—eh? I’ll show them a thing or two!”

“Oh, please show them nothing here. Please just—sit.”

While employing her wiles to get for three hundred and fifty francs a yoke and scarf aggregating four hundred, she chanced to look at her American friend. Then she walked rapidly to the rear of the shop, buried her face in her handkerchief and seemed making heroic efforts to sneeze. Once more he was following directions to the letter. Chin resting on hands, hands resting on stick, the huge American had taken on the beatific expression of a seventeen-year-old girl thinking of something “very far away.” Virginia was long in mastering the sneeze.

On the sidewalk she presented him with the package of lace and also with what she regarded the proper thing in the way of farewell speech. She supposed it was hard for a man to go shopping alone; she could see how difficult it would be for her own father; indeed it was seeing how difficult it would be for her father had impelled her to go with him, a stranger. She trusted his wife would like the lace; she thought it very nice, and a bargain. She was glad to have been of service to a fellow countryman who seemed in so difficult a position.

But he did not look as impressed as one to whom a farewell speech was being made should look. At first he had not lost the far away look—a more genuine faraway look this than that of the shop. Then all at once it went, and it was in anything but faraway voice he began, briskly: “Now look here, Young Lady, I don’t doubt that this lace is great stuff. You say so, and I haven’t seen man, woman or child on this side of the Atlantic knows as much as you do. I’m mighty grateful for the lace—don’t you forget that, but just the same—well, now I’ll tell you. I have a very special reason for wanting something a little livelier than lace. Something that seems to have Paris written on it in red letters—see? Now, where do you get the kind of hats you see some folks wearing, and where do you get the dresses—well, it’s hard to describe ’em, but the kind they have in pictures marked ‘Breezes from Paris’? You see—S—ay!—what do you think of that?”

“That” was in a window across the street. It was an opera cloak. He walked toward it, Virginia following. “Now there”—turning to her his large round face all aglow—“is what I want.”

It was yellow; it was long; it was billowy; it was insistently and recklessly regal.

“That’s the ticket,” he gloated.

“Of course,” began Virginia, “I don’t know anything about it. I am in a very strange position, not knowing what your wife likes or—or has. This is the kind of thing everything has to go with or one wouldn’t — one couldn’t—”

“Sure! Good idea. We’ll just get everything to go with it.”

“It’s the sort of thing one doesn’t see worn much outside of Paris—or New York. If one is—now my mother wouldn’t care for that coat at all.” Virginia took no little pride in that tactful finish.

“Can’t sidetrack me!” he beamed. “I want it. Very thing I’m after, Young Lady.”

“Well, of course you will have no difficulty in buying the coat without me,” said she, as a dignified version of “I wash my hands of you.” “You can do here as you said you wished to do, simply go in and pay what they ask. There would be no use trying to get it cheap. They would know that anyone who wanted it would”—she wanted to say “Have more money than they knew what to do with,” but contented herself with, “Be able to pay for it.”

But when she had finished she looked at him; at first she thought she wanted to laugh, and then it seemed that wasn’t just what she wanted to do after all. It was like saying to a small boy who was a-beam over finding a tin horn: “Oh well, take the horn if you want to, but you can’t haul your little red wagon while you’re blowing the horn.” There seemed something peculiarly inhuman about taking the wagon just when he had found the horn. Now if the wagon were broken, then to take away the horn would leave the luxury of grief. But let not shadows fall upon joyful moments.

With the full ardor of her femininity she entered into the purchasing of the yellow opera cloak. They paid for that decorative garment the sum of two thousand five hundred francs. It seemed it was embroidered, and the lining was—anyway, they paid it.

And they took it with them. He was going to “take no chances on losing it.” He was leaving Paris that night and held that during his stay he had been none too impressed with either Parisian speed or Parisian veracity.

Then they bought some “Breezes from Paris,” a dress that would “go with” the coat. It was violet velvet, and contributed to the sense of doing one’s uttermost. And hats—“the kind you see some folks wearing.” One was the rainbow done into flowers, and the other the kind of black hat to out-rainbow any rainbow. “If you could just give me some idea what type your wife is,” Virginia was saying, from beneath the willow plumes. “Now you see this hat quite overpowers me. Do you think it will overpower her?”

“Guess not. Anyway, if it don’t look right on her head she may enjoy having it around to look at.”

Virginia stared out at him. The oddest man! As if a hat were any good at all if it didn’t look right on one’s head!

Upon investigation—though yielding to his taste she was still vigilant as to his interests—Virginia discovered a flaw in one of the plumes. The sylph in the trailing gown held volubly that it did not fait rien; the man with the open purse said he couldn’t see that it figured much, but the small American held firm. That must be replaced by a perfect plume or they would not take the hat. And when she saw who was in command, the sylph as volubly acquiesced that naturellement it must be tout au fait perfect. She would send out and get one that would be oh! so, so, so perfect. It would take half an hour.

“Tell you what we’ll do,” Virginia’s friend proposed, opera cloak tight under one arm, velvet gown as tight under the other, “I’m tired—hungry—thirsty; feel like a ham sandwich—and something. I’m playing you out, too. Let’s go out and get a bite and come back for the so, so, so perfect hat.”

She hesitated. But he had the door open, and if he stood holding it that way much longer he was bound to drop the violet velvet gown. She did not want him to drop the velvet gown and furthermore, she would like a cup of tea. There came into her mind a fortifying thought about the relative deaths of sheep and lambs. If to be killed for the sheep were indeed no worse than being killed for the lamb, and if a cup of tea went with the sheep and nothing at all with the lamb—?

So she agreed. “There’s a nice little tea-shop right round the corner. We girls often go there.”

“Tea? Like tea? All right then”—starting manfully on.

But as she entered the tea-shop she was filled with keen sense of the desirableness of being slain for the lesser animal. For, cozily installed in their favorite corner, were “the girls.”

Virginia had explained to these friends some three hours before that she could not go with them that afternoon as she must attend a musicale some friends of her mother’s were giving. Being friends of her mother’s, she expatiated, she would have to go.

Recollecting this, also for the first time recollecting the musicale, she bowed with the hauteur of self-consciousness.

Right there her friend contributed to the tragedy of a sheep’s death by dropping the yellow opera coat. While he was stooping to pick it up the violet velvet gown slid backward and Virginia had to steady it until he could regain position. The staring in the corner gave way to tittering—and no dying sheep had ever held its head more haughtily.

The death of this particular sheep proved long and painful. The legs of Virginia’s friend and the legs of the tea-table did not seem well adapted to each other. He towered like a human mountain over the dainty thing, twisting now this way and now that. It seemed Providence—or at least so much of it as was represented by the management of that shop—had never meant fat people to drink tea. The table was rendered further out of proportion by having a large box piled on either side of it.

Expansively, and not softly, he discoursed of these things. What did they think a fellow was to do with his knees? Didn’t they sell tea enough to afford any decent chairs? Did all these women pretend to really like tea?

Virginia’s sense of humor rallied somewhat as she viewed him eating the sandwiches. Once she had called them doll-baby sandwiches; now that seemed literal: teacups, petit gâteau, the whole service gave the fancy of his sitting down to a tea-party given by a little girl for her dollies.

But after a time he fell silent, looking around the room. And when he broke that pause, his voice was different.

“These women here, all dressed so fine, nothing to do but sit round and eat this folderol, they have it easy—don’t they?”

The bitterness in it, and a faint note of wistfulness, puzzled her. Certainly he had money.

“And the husbands of these women,” he went on; “lots of ’em, I suppose, didn’t always have so much. Maybe some of these women helped out in the early days when things weren’t so easy. Wonder if the men ever think how lucky they are to be able to get it back at ’em?”

She grew more bewildered. Wasn’t he “getting it back”? The money he had spent that day!

“Young Lady,” he said abruptly, “you must think I’m a queer one.”

She murmured feeble protest.

“Yes, you must. Must wonder what I want with all this stuff,’ don’t you? ”

“Why, it’s for your wife, isn’t it?” she asked, startled.

“Oh yes, but you must wonder. You’re a shrewd one, Young Lady: judging the thing by me, you must wonder.”

Virginia was glad she was not compelled to state her theory. Loud and common and impossible were terms which had presented themselves, terms which she had fought with kind and good-natured and generous. Their purchases she had decided were to be used, not for a knock, but for a crashing pound at the door of the society of his town. For her part, Virginia hoped the door would come down.

“And if you knew that probably this stuff would never be worn at all, that ten to one it would never do anything more than lie round on chairs—then you would think I was queer, wouldn’t you?”

She was forced to admit that that would seem rather strange.

“Young Lady, I believe I’ll tell you about it. Never do talk about it to hardly anybody, but I feel as if you and I were pretty well acquainted—we’ve been through so much together.”

She smiled at him warmly; there was something so real about him when he talked that way.

But his look then frightened her. It seemed for an instant as though he would brush the tiny table aside and seize some invisible thing by the throat. Then he said, cutting off each word short: “Young Lady, what do you think of this? I’m worth more ’an a million dollars—and my wife gets up at five o’clock every morning to do washing and scrubbing.”

“Oh, it’s not that she has to,” answering her expression, “but she thinks she has to. See? Once we were poor. For twenty years we were poor as dirt. Then she did have to do things like that. Then I struck it. Or rather, it struck me. Oil. Oil on a bit of land I had. I had just sense enough to make the most of it; one thing led to another—well, you’re not interested in that end of it. But the fact is now we’re rich. Now she could have all the things that these women have—Lord A’mighty, she could lay abed every day ’til noon if she wanted to! But—you see?—it got her—those hard, lonely, grinding years took her—She’s”—he shrank from the terrible word and faltered out—“her mind’s not—”

There was a sobbing little flutter in Virginia’s throat. In a dim way she was glad to see that the girls were going. She could not have them laughing at him—now.

“Well, you can about figure out how it makes me feel,” he continued, and looking into his face now it was as though the spirit redeemed the flesh. “You’re smart. You can see it without my callin’ your attention to it. Last time I went to see her, I had just made a hundred thousand dollars on a deal. And I found her down on her knees thinking she was scrubbing the floor!”

Unconsciously Virginia’s hand went out, following the rush of her sympathy and under standing. “But can’t they—restrain her?” she murmured.

“Makes her worse. Says she’s got it to do—frets her to think she’s not getting it done.”

“But isn’t there some way?” she whispered. “Some way to make her know?”

He pointed to the large boxes. “That,” he said simply, “is the meaning of those. It’s been seven years—but I keep on trying.”

She was silent, the tears too close for words. And she had thought it cheap ambition!—vulgar aspiration—silly show—vanity!

“Suppose you thought I was a queer one, talking about lively looking things. But you see now? Though it might attract her attention, though something real gorgeous like this might impress money on her. Though I don’t know,”—he seemed to grow weary as he told it; “I got her a lot of diamonds, thinking they might interest her, and she thought she had stolen ’em, and they had to take them away.”

Still the girl did not speak. Her hand was shading her eyes.

“But there’s nothing like trying. Nothing like keeping right on trying. And anyhow—a fellow likes to think he’s taking his wife something from Paris.”

There passed before her in their heartbreaking folly, their tragic uselessness, their lovable absurdity and stinging irony—those things they had bought that afternoon: an opera cloak—a velvet dress—those hats—red silk stockings—

The mockery of them wrung her heart. Right there in the tea-shop Virginia was softly crying.

“Oh, now that’s too bad,” he expostulated clumsily. “Why look here, Young Lady, I didn’t mean you to take it so hard.”

When she had recovered herself he told her much of the story. And the thing which revealed him—and glorified him—was less the grief he gave to it than the way he saw it. “It’s the cursed unfairness of it,” he concluded. “When you consider it’s all because she did those things—when you think of her bein’ bound to ’em for life just because she was too faithful doin’ ’em—when you think that now—when I could give her everything these women have got!—she’s got to go right on worrying about baking the bread and washing the dishes—when you consider that she did it for me when I was poor—and that now with me rich she can’t get out from it—and I can’t reach her—oh it’s rotten! I tell you it’s—rotten! Sometimes I can just hear my money laugh at me! Sometimes I get to going round and round in a circle about it till it seems I’m going crazy myself!”

“I think you are a—a noble man,” choked Virginia.

That disconcerted him. “Oh Lord—don’t think that. No, Young Lady, don’t try to make any plaster saint out of me. My life goes on. I’ve got to eat, drink and be merry. I’m built that way. But just the same, my heart on the inside’s pretty sore, Young Lady. I want to tell you that the whole inside of my heart is sore as a boil!”

They were returning for the hats. Suddenly Virginia stopped, and it was a soft-eyed and gentle Virginia who turned to him after the pause. “There are lovely things to be bought in Paris for women who aren’t well,” she said. “Such soft lovely things to wear in your room. Not but what I think these other things are all right. As you say they may—interest her. But they aren’t things she can use just now, and wouldn’t you like her to have some of those soft lovely things she could actually wear? They might help most of all. To wake in the morning and find herself in something so beautiful—”

“Where do you get ’em?” he demanded promptly.

And so they went to one of those shops which have, more than all the others, enshrined Paris in feminine hearts. And never was lingerie selected with more loving care than that which Virginia picked out that afternoon. A tear fell on one particularly lovely robe de nuit—so soothingly soft, so caressingly luxurious, it seemed that surely it might help bring release from the bondage of those crushing years.

As they were leaving they were given two packages. “Just the kimono thing you liked,” he said, “and a trinket or two. Now that we’re such good friends, you won’t feel like you did this morning.”

“And if I don’t want them myself I might send them to my mother,” Virginia replied, a quiver in her laugh at her own little joke.

He had put her in her cab; he had tried to tell her how much he thanked her; they had said goodbye and the cocher had cracked his whip when he came running after her.

“Why, Young Lady,” he called out, “we don’t know each other’s names.”

She laughed, and gave hers. “Mine’s William P. Johnson,” he said. “Part French and part Italian. But now look here, Young Lady—or I mean, Miss Clayton. A fellow at the hotel was telling me something last night that made me sick. He said American girls sometimes got awfully up against it here. He said one actually starved last year. Now I don’t like that kind of business. Look here, Young Lady, I want you to promise that if you—you or any of your gang—get up against it, you’ll cable William P. Johnson, of Cincinnati, Ohio.”

The twilight gray had fallen upon Paris. And there was a mist which the street lights only penetrated a little way—as sometimes one’s knowledge of life may only penetrate life a very little way. Her cab stopped by a blockade, she watched the burly back of William P. Johnson disappearing into the mist. The red box which held the yellow opera cloak she could see longer than all else.

“You never can tell,” murmured Virginia. “It just goes to show that you never can tell.”

And whatever it was you never could tell had brought to Virginia’s girlish face the tender knowingness of the face of a woman.

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
The American Magazine, Jun 1911
as “According to His Lights”

The Plea

Senator Harrison concluded his argument and sat down. There was no applause, but he had expected none. Senator Dorman was already saying “Mr. President?” and there was a stir in the crowded galleries, and an anticipatory moving of chairs among the Senators. In the press gallery the reporters bunched together their scattered papers and inspected their pencil-points with earnestness. Dorman was the last speaker of the Senate, and he was on the popular side of it. It would be the great speech of the session, and the prospect was cheering after a deluge of railroad and insurance bills.

“I want to tell you,” he began, “why I have worked for this resolution recommending the pardon of Alfred Williams. It is one of the great laws of the universe that every living thing be given a chance. In the case before us that law has been violated. This does not resolve itself into a question of second chances. The boy of whom we are speaking has never had his first.”

Senator Harrison swung his chair halfway around and looked out at the green things which were again coming into their own on the State-house grounds. He knew—in substance—what Senator Dorman would say without hearing it, and he was a little tired of the whole affair. He hoped that one way or other they would finish it up that night, and go ahead with something else. He had done what he could, and now the responsibility was with the rest of them. He thought they were shouldering a great deal to advocate the pardon in the face of the united opposition of Johnson County, where the crime had been committed. It seemed a community should be the best judge of its own crimes, and that was what he, as the Senator from Johnson, had tried to impress upon them.

He knew that his argument against the boy had been a strong one. He rather liked the attitude in which he stood. It seemed as if he were the incarnation of outraged justice attempting to hold its own at the floodgates of emotion. He liked to think he was looking far beyond the present and the specific and acting as guardian of the future—and the whole. In summing it up that night, the reporters would tell in highly wrought fashion of the moving appeal made by Senator Dorman, and then they would speak dispassionately of the logical argument of the leader of the opposition. There was more satisfaction to self in logic than in mere eloquence. He was even a little proud of his unpopularity. It seemed sacrificial.

He wondered why it was Senator Dorman had thrown himself into it so whole-heartedly. All during the session the Senator from Maxwell had neglected personal interests in behalf of this boy, who was nothing to him in the world. He supposed it was as a sociological and psychological experiment. Senator Dorman had promised the Governor to assume guardianship of the boy if he was let out. The Senator from Johnson inferred that as a student of social science his eloquent colleague wanted to see what he could make of him. To suppose the interest merely personal and sympathetic would seem discreditable.

“I need not dwell upon the story,” the Senator from Maxwell was saying, “for you are all familiar with it already. It is said to have been the most awful crime ever committed in the State. I grant you that it was, and then I ask you to look for a minute into the conditions leading up to it.

“When the boy was born, his mother was instituting divorce proceedings against his father. She obtained the divorce, and remarried when Alfred was three months old. From the time he was a mere baby she taught him to hate his father. Everything that went wrong with him she told him was his father’s fault. His first vivid impression was that his father was responsible for all the wrong of the universe.

“For seven years that went on, and then his mother died. His stepfather did not want him. He was going to Missouri, and the boy would be a useless expense and a bother. He made no attempt to find a home for him; he did not even explain—he merely went away and left him. At the age of seven the boy was turned out on the world, after having been taught one thing—to hate his father. He stayed a few days in the barren house, and then new tenants came and closed the doors against him. It may have occurred to him as a little strange that he had been sent into a world where there was no place for him.

“When he asked the neighbors for shelter, they told him to go to his own father and not bother strangers. He said he did not know where his father was. They told him, and he started to walk—a distance of fifty miles. I ask you to bear in mind, gentlemen, that he was only seven years of age. It is the age when the average boy is beginning the third reader, and when he is shooting marbles and spinning tops.

“When he reached his father’s house he was told at once that he was not wanted there. The man had remarried, there were other children, and he had no place for Alfred. He turned him away; but the neighbors protested, and he was compelled to take him back. For four years he lived in this home, to which he had come unbidden, and where he was never made welcome.

“The whole family rebelled against him. The father satisfied his resentment against the boy’s dead mother by beating her son, by encouraging his wife to abuse him, and inspiring the other children to despise him. It seems impossible such conditions should exist. The only proof of their possibility lies in the fact of their existence.

“I need not go into the details of the crime. He had been beaten by his father that evening after a quarrel with his stepmother about spilling the milk. He went, as usual, to his bed in the barn; but the hay was suffocating, his head ached, and he could not sleep. He arose in the middle of the night, went to the house, and killed both his father and stepmother.

“I shall not pretend to say what thoughts surged through the boy’s brain as he lay there in the stifling hay with the hot blood pounding against his temples. I shall not pretend to say whether he was sane or insane as he walked to the house for the perpetration of the awful crime. I do not even affirm it would not have happened if there had been some human being there to lay a cooling hand on his hot forehead, and say a few soothing, loving words to take the sting from the loneliness, and ease the suffering. I ask you to consider only one thing: he was eleven years old at the time, and he had no friend in all the world. He knew nothing of sympathy; he knew only injustice.”

Senator Harrison was still looking out at the budding things on the State-house grounds, but in a vague way he was following the story. He knew when the Senator from Maxwell completed the recital of facts and entered upon his plea. He was conscious that it was stronger than he had anticipated—more logic and less empty exhortation. He was telling of the boy’s life in the penitentiary and in the reformatory since the commission of the crime, of how he had expanded under kindness, of his wonderful mental attainments, the letters he could write, the books he had read, the hopes he had cherished. In the twelve years he had spent there he had been known to do no unkind or mean thing; he responded to affection—craved it even. It was not the record of a degenerate, the Senator from Maxwell was saying.

A great many things were passing through the mind of the Senator from Johnson. He was trying to think who it was that wrote that book Put Yourself in his Place. He had read it once, and it bothered him to forget names. Then he was wondering why it was the philosophers had not more to say about the incongruity of people, who had never had any trouble of their own, sitting in judgment upon people who had known nothing but trouble. He was thinking also that abstract rules did not always fit smoothly over concrete cases, and that it was hard to make life a matter of rules, anyway.

Next he was wondering how it would have been with the boy Alfred Williams if he had been born in Charles Harrison’s place; and then he was working it out the other way, and wondering how it would have been with Charles Harrison if he had been born in Alfred Williams’s place. He wondered whether the idea of murder would have grown in Alfred Williams’s heart had he been born to the things to which Charles Harrison was born, and whether it would have come within the range of possibility for Charles Harrison to murder his father had he been born to Alfred Williams’s lot. Putting it that way, it was hard to estimate how much of it was the boy himself, and how much the place the world had prepared for him. And if it was the place prepared for him more than the boy, why was the fault not more with the preparers of the place than with the occupant of it? The whole thing was very confusing.

“This page,” the Senator from Maxwell was saying, lifting the little fellow to the desk, “is just eleven years of age, and he is within three pounds of Alfred Williams’s size when he committed the murder. I ask you, gentlemen, if this little fellow should be guilty of a like crime tonight, to what extent would you, in reading of it in the morning, charge him with the moral discernment which is the first condition of moral responsibility? If Alfred Williams’s story were this boy’s story, would you deplore that there had been no one to check the childish passion, or would you say it was the in-born instinct of the murderer? And suppose again this were Alfred Williams at the age of eleven, would you not be willing to look into the future and say if he spent twelve years in both penitentiary and reformatory, in which time he developed the qualities of useful and honorable citizenship, that the ends of justice would then have been met, and the time at hand for the world to begin the payment of her debt?”

Senator Harrison’s eyes were fixed upon the page standing on the opposite desk. Eleven was a younger age than he had supposed. As he looked back upon it and recalled himself when eleven years of age—his irresponsibility, his dependence—he was unwilling to say what would have happened if the world had turned upon him as it had upon Alfred Williams. At eleven his greatest grievance was that the boys at school called him “yellow-top.” He remembered throwing a rock at one of them for doing it. He wondered if it was criminal instinct prompted the throwing of the rock. He wondered how high the percentage of children’s crimes would go were it not for countermanding influences. It seemed the great difference between Alfred Williams and a number of other children of eleven had been the absence of the countermanding influence.

There came to him of a sudden a new and moving thought. Alfred Williams had been cheated of his boyhood. The chances were he had never gone swimming, nor to a ball game, or maybe never to a circus. He might never have owned a dog. The Senator from Maxwell was right when he said the boy had never been given his chance, had been defrauded of that which has been a boy’s heritage since the world itself was young.

And the later years—how were they making it up to him? He recalled the reformatory—and also what to him was the most awful thing he had ever heard about the State penitentiary—they never saw the sun rise down there, and they never saw it set. They saw it at its meridian, when it climbed above the stockade, but as it rose into the day, and as it sank into the night, it was denied them. And there, at the penitentiary, they could not even look up at the stars. It had been years since Alfred Williams raised his face to God’s heaven and knew he was part of it all. The voices of the night could not penetrate the little cell in the heart of the mammoth stone building where he spent his evenings over those masterpieces with which, they said, he was more familiar than the average member of the Senate. When he read those things Victor Hugo said of the vastness of the night, he could only look around at the walls that enclosed him and try to think back over the twelve years for some satisfying conception of what night really was.

The Senator from Johnson shuddered: they had taken from one of God’s creatures the things that were God-given, and all because in the crucial hour there had been no one to say a staying word. The world had cheated him of the things that were the world’s, and now it was trying to cheat him of the things that were God’s. They had made for him a life barren of compensations.

There swept over the Senator a great feeling of self-pity. As representative of Johnson County, it was he who must deny this boy the whole great world without, the people who wanted to help him, and what the Senator from Maxwell called “his chance.” If Johnson County carried the day, there would be something unpleasant for him to consider all the remainder of his life. As he grew to be an older man he would think of it more and more—what the boy would have done for himself in the world if the Senator from Johnson had not been more logical and more powerful than the Senator from Maxwell.

Senator Dorman was nearing the close of his argument. “In spite of the undying prejudice of the people of Johnson County,” he was saying, “I can stand before you today and say that after an unsparing investigation of this case I do not believe I am asking you to do anything in violation of justice when I beg of you to give this boy his chance.”

It was going to a vote at once, and the Senator from Johnson County looked out at the budding things, and wondered whether the boy down at the penitentiary knew the Senate was considering his case that afternoon. It was without vanity he wondered whether an all-wise providence would not have preferred that Johnson County be represented that session by a less able man.

A great hush fell over the Chamber, for ayes and noes followed almost in alternation. After a long minute of waiting the secretary called, in a hollow voice,

“Ayes, 30; Noes, 32.”

The Senator from Johnson had proven too faithful a servant of his constituents. The boy in the penitentiary was denied his chance.

The usual things happened: some women in the galleries who had boys at home cried aloud; the reporters were fighting for occupancy of the telephone booths, and most of the Senators began the perusal of the previous day’s Journal with elaborate interest. Senator Dorman indulged in none of these feints. A full look at his face just then told how much of his soul had gone into the fight for the boy’s chance, and the look about his eyes was a little hard on the theory of psychological experiment.

Senator Harrison was looking out at the budding trees, but his face too had grown strange, and he seemed to be looking miles beyond and years ahead. It seemed that he himself was surrendering the voices of the night, and the comings and the goings of the sun. He would never look at them—feel them—again without remembering he was keeping one of God’s creatures away from them. He wondered at his own presumption in denying any living thing participation in the universe. He wondered what the great God behind it all must think of him. And all the while there were before him visions of the boy who sat in the cramped cell with the volume of a favorite poet before him, trying to think how it would seem to be out under the stars.

The stillness in the Senate Chamber was breaking; they were going ahead with something else. It seemed to the Senator from Johnson that sun, moon, and stars were wailing out protest for the boy who wanted to know them better. And yet it was not sun, moon, and stars so much as the unused swimming-hole, and the uncaught fish, the unattended ball game, the never-seen circus, and, above all, the unowned dog, that brought Senator Harrison to his feet.

They looked at him in astonishment, their faces saying plainly it would have been better taste for him to remain seated just then.

“Mr. President,” he said, pulling at his collar and looking straight ahead, “I rise to move a reconsideration.”

There was a gasp, a deathlike moment of quiet, and then a mighty burst of applause. To men of all parties and factions there came a single thought. Johnson was the leading county of its Congressional district. There was an election that fall, and Harrison was in the race. Those eight words meant to a surety he would not go to Washington, for the Senator from Maxwell had chosen his word with nicety when he referred to the prejudice of Johnson County on the Williams case as “undying.” The world throbs with such things at the moment of their doing—even though condemning them later—and the part of the world then packed within the Senate-Chamber shared the universal disposition.

The noise astonished Senator Harrison, and he looked around with something like resentment. When the tumult at last subsided, and he saw that he was expected to make a speech, he grew very red, and grasped his chair desperately.

The reporters were back in their places, leaning nervously forward. This was Senator Harrison’s chance to say something worth putting into a panel by itself with black lines around it—and they were sure he would do it.

But he did not. He stood there like a schoolboy who had forgotten his piece—growing more and more red. “I—I think,” he finally jerked out, “that some of us have been mistaken. I’m in favor now of—of giving him his chance.”

They waited for him to proceed, but after a helpless look around the Chamber he sat down. The president of the Senate waited several minutes for him to rise again, but he at last turned his chair around and looked out at the green things on the State-house grounds, and there was nothing to do but go ahead with the second calling of the roll. This time it stood 50 to 12 in favor of the boy.

A motion to adjourn immediately followed—it seemed no one wanted to do anything more that afternoon. They all wanted to say things to the Senator from Johnson; but his face had grown cold and unsympathetic, and as they were usually afraid of him, anyway, they kept away. All but Senator Dorman—it meant too much with him. “Do you mind my telling you,” he said, tensely, “that it was as great a thing as I have ever known a man to do?”

The Senator from Johnson looked distinctly bored—he was so very tired of the whole affair. “You think it great,” he asked, “to be a coward?”

“Coward!” cried Senator Dorman—“coward! That’s hardly the word. It’s heroic.”

“Oh no,” said Senator Harrison, with weary finality; “it was a clear case of cowardice. You see, I was afraid it might haunt me when I am seventy.”

Senator Dorman started eagerly to speak, but the other man stopped him and passed on. He was seeing it as his constituency would see it, and it humiliated him. They would say he had not the courage of his convictions, that he was afraid of the unpopularity, that his judgment had fallen victim to the eloquence of the Senator from Maxwell.

But when he left the building and came out into the softness of the April afternoon, it was not he alone who leaned to the softer side. There were the trees—they were permitted another chance to bud; there were the birds—they were allowed another chance to sing; there was the earth—to it was given another chance to yield. There came to him then the calming consciousness that beyond the constituents was God.

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Oct 1903
as “In the Face of His Constituents”

For Love of the Hills

“Sure you’re done with it?”

“Oh, yes,” said the girl, the suggestion of a smile on her face, and in her voice the suggestion of a tear. “Yes; I was just going.”

But she did not go. She turned instead to the end of the alcove and sat down before a table placed by the window. Leaning her elbows upon it she looked about her through a blur of tears.

Seen through her own eyes of longing it seemed to the girl that almost all of the people whom she could see standing before the files of the daily papers were enlisted in Chicago’s great army of the homesick. The reading-room had been a strange study to her during those three weeks spent in fruitless search for the work she wanted to do, and it had likewise proved a strange comfort. When tired and disconsolate and utterly sick at heart there was always one thing she could do—she could go down to the library and look at the paper from home. It was not that she wanted the actual news of Denver. She did not care in any vital way what the city officials were doing, what buildings were going up, or who was leaving town. She was only indifferently interested in the fires and the murders. She wanted only the comforting companionship of that paper from home.

It seemed there were many to whom the papers offered that same sympathy, companionship, whatever it might be. More than anything else it perhaps gave to them—the searchers, the drifters—a sense of anchorage. She would not soon forget the first day she herself had stumbled in there and found the home paper. The city had given her nothing but rebuffs that day, and in a sort of desperation, just because she must go somewhere, and did not want to go back to her boarding-place, she had hunted out the city library. It was when walking listlessly about in the big reading-room that there had come to her the illumining thought that perhaps she could find the paper from home; and after that when things were their worst, when her throat grew tight and her eyes dim, she could always comfort herself by saying: “After a while I’ll run down and look at the paper.”

But tonight it had failed her. It was not the paper from home tonight; it was just a newspaper. It did not inspire the belief that things would be better tomorrow, that it would all come right soon. It left her as she had come—heavy with the consciousness that in her purse was eleven dollars, and that that was every cent she had in the whole world.

It was hard to hold back the tears as she dwelt upon the fact that it was very little she had asked of Chicago. She had asked only a chance to do the work for which she was trained, in order that she might go to the art classes at night. She had read in the papers of that mighty young city of the Middle West—the heart of the continent—of its brawn and its brain and its grit. She had supposed that Chicago, of all places, would appreciate what she wanted to do. The day she drew her hard-earned one hundred dollars from the bank in Denver—how the sun had shone that day in Denver, how clear the sky had been, and how bracing the air!—she had quite taken it for granted that her future was assured. And now, after tasting for three weeks the cruelty of indifference, she looked back to those visions with a hard little smile.

She rose to go, and in so doing her eye fell upon the queer little woman to whom she had yielded her place before the Denver paper. Submerged as she had been in her own heartache, she had given no heed to the small figure which came slipping along beside her, beyond the bare thought that she was queer-looking. But as her eyes rested upon her now there was something about the woman which held her.

She was a strange little figure. An old-fashioned shawl was pinned tightly about her shoulders, and she was wearing an odd, rusty little bonnet. Her hair was rolled up in a small knot at the back of her head. She did not look as though she belonged in Chicago. And then, as the girl stood there looking at her, she saw the thin shoulders quiver, and after a minute the head that was wearing the rusty bonnet went down into the folds of the Denver paper.

The girl’s own eyes filled, and she turned to go. It seemed she could scarcely bear her own heartache that day, without coming close to the heartache of another. But when she reached the end of the alcove she glanced backward, and the sight of that shabby, bent figure was not to be withstood.

“I am from Colorado, too,” she said, softly, putting a hand upon the bent shoulders.

The woman looked up at that, and took the girl’s hand in both of her thin, trembling ones. It was a wan face and a troubled face she lifted, and there was something about the eyes which would not seem to have been left there by the tears alone.

“And do you have a pining for the mountains?” she whispered, with a kind of timid eagerness. “Do you have a feeling that you want to see the sun go down behind them tonight, and see the darkness come stealing up to the tops?”

The girl half turned away, but she pressed the woman’s hand tightly in hers. “I know what you mean,” she murmured.

“I wanted to see it so bad,” continued the woman, tremulously, “that something just drove me here to this paper. I knowed it was here because my nephew’s wife brought me here one day and we come across it. We took this paper at home for more ’an twenty years. That’s why I come. ’Twas the closest I could get.”

“I know what you mean,” said the girl again, unsteadily.

“And it’s the closest I ever will get!” sobbed the woman.

“Oh, don’t say that,” said the girl, brushing away her own tears, and trying to smile; “you’ll go back home someday.”

The woman shook her head.

“And if I should,” she said, “even if I should, ’twill be too late.”

“But it couldn’t be too late,” insisted the girl. “The mountains, you know, will be there forever.”

“The mountains will be there forever,” repeated the woman, musingly; “yes, but not for me to see. You see,” — she said it quietly — “I’m going blind.”

The girl took a quick step backward, then stretched out two impulsive hands. “Oh, no, no, you’re not! Why — the doctors, you know; they do everything now.”

The woman shook her head. “That’s what I thought when I come here. That’s why I come. But I saw the biggest doctor of them all today—they all say he’s the best there is—and he said right out ’twas no use to do anything. He said ’twas—hopeless.”

Her voice broke on that word. “You see,” she hurried on, “I wouldn’t care so much, seems like I wouldn’t care ’t all, if I could get there first! If I could see the sun go down behind ’em just one night! If I could see the black shadows come slippin’ over ’em just once! And then, if just one morning—just once!—I could get up and see the sunlight come a streamin’—oh, you know how it looks! You know what ’tis I want to see!”

“Yes; but why can’t you? Why not? You won’t go—your eyesight will last until you get back home, won’t it?”

“But I can’t go back home, not now.”

“Why not?” demanded the girl. “Why can’t you go home?”

“Why, there ain’t no money, my dear,” she explained, patiently. “It’s a long way off—Colorado is, and there ain’t no money. Now, George—George is my brother-in-law—he got me the money to come; but you see it took it all to come here, and to pay them doctors with. And George—he ain’t rich, and it pinched him hard for me to come—he says I’ll have to wait until he gets money laid up again, and—well he can’t tell just when ’twill be. He’ll send it soon as he gets it,” she hastened to add.

“But what are you going to do in the meantime? It would cost less to get you home than to keep you here.”

“No; I stay with my nephew here. He’s willin’ I should stay with him till I get my money to go home.”

“Yes; but this nephew, can’t he get you the money? Doesn’t he know,” she insisted, heatedly, “what it means to you?”

“He’s got five children, and not much laid up. And then, he never seen the mountains. He don’t know what I mean when I try to tell him about gettin’ there in time. Why, he says there’s many a one living back in the mountains would like to be livin’ here. He don’t understand, my nephew don’t,” she added, apologetically.

“Well, someone ought to understand!” broke from the girl. “I understand! But—” she did her best to make it a laugh — “eleven dollars is every cent I’ve got in the world!”

“Don’t!” implored the woman, as the girl gave up trying to control the tears. “Now, don’t you be botherin’. I didn’t mean to make you feel so bad. My nephew says I ain’t reasonable, and maybe I ain’t.”

The girl raised her head. “But you are reasonable! I tell you, you are reasonable!”

“Maybe I ought to be going back,” said the woman, uncertainly. “I’m just making you feel bad, and it won’t do no good. And then they may be stirred up about me. Emma—Emma’s my nephew’s wife—left me at the doctor’s office ’cause she had some trading to do, and she was to come back there for me. And then, as I was sittin’ there, the pinin’ came over me so strong it seemed I just must get up and start! And”—she smiled wanly—“this was far as I got.”

“Come over and sit down by this table,” said the girl, impulsively, “and tell me a little about your home back in the mountains. Wouldn’t you like to?”

The woman nodded, gratefully. “Seems ’most like getting back to them to find someone that knows about them,” she said, after they had drawn their chairs up to the table and were sitting there side by side.

The girl put her rounded hand over on the thin, withered one. “Tell me about it,” she said again.

“Maybe it wouldn’t be much interesting to you, my dear. ’Tain’t much like a story. It’s just a common life—mine is. You see, William and I—William was my husband—we went to Georgetown before it really was any town at all. Years and years before the railroad went through we was there. Was you ever there?” she asked, wistfully.

“Oh, very often,” replied the girl. “I love every inch of that country!”

A big tear rolled down the woman’s face. “It’s ’most like being home to find someone that knows about it,” she whispered, brokenly. “Yes, William and I went there when ’twas all new country,” she went on, after a pause. “We worked hard, and we laid up a little money. Then, three years ago, William took sick. He was sick for ’most a year, and we had to live up most of what we’d saved. That’s why I ain’t got none now. It ain’t that William didn’t provide.”

The girl nodded.

“We seen some hard days. But we was always harmonious—William and I was. And William had a great fondness for the mountains. The night before he died he made them take him over by the window and he looked out and watched the darkness come stealin’ over the daylight—you know how it does in them mountains. ‘Mother,’ he says to me—his voice was that low I could no more ’an hear what he said—‘I’ll never see another sun go down, but I’m thankful to God that I seen this one.’”

She was crying outright now, and the girl did not try to stop her.

“And that’s the reason I love the mountains,” she whispered at last. “It ain’t just that they’re grand and wonderful to look at. It ain’t just the things them tourists see to talk about. But the mountains has always been like a comfortin’ friend to me. John and Sarah is buried there—John and Sarah is my two children that died of fever. And then William is there—like I just told you. And the mountains was a comfort to me in all those times of trouble. They’re like an old friend. Seems like they’re the best friend I’ve got on earth.”

“I know just what you mean,” said the girl brokenly. “I know all about it.”

“And you don’t think I’m just notional,” she asked wistfully, “in pinin’ to get back while—whilst I can look at them?”

The girl held the old hand tightly in hers with a clasp more responsive than words.

“It ain’t but I’d know they was there. I could feel they was there all right, but”—her voice sank to a horrified whisper now—“do you know I’m ’fraid I might forget just how they look!”

“Oh, but you won’t,” the girl assured her. “You’ll remember just how they look.”

“I’m scared of it. I’m scared there might be something I’d forget. And so I just torment myself thinkin’—‘Now do I remember this? Can I see just how that looks?’ That’s the way I got to thinkin’ up in the doctor’s office, when he told me for sure it was no use to operate, and I was so worked up it just seemed like I must get up and start!”

“You must try not to worry about it,” murmured the girl. “You’ll remember.”

“Well, maybe so. Maybe I will. But that’s why I want just one more look. If I could look once more I’d remember it forever. You see I’d look for to remember it, and I would. And do you know—seems like I wouldn’t mind going blind so much then? When I’d sit facin’ them I’d just say to myself: ‘Now I know just how they look. I’m seeing them just as if I had my eyes!’ The doctor says my sight’ll just kind of slip away, and when I look my last look, when it gets dimmer and dimmer to me, I want the last thing I see to be them mountains where William and me worked and was so happy! Seems like I can’t bear it to have my sight slip away here in Chicago, where there’s nothing I want to look at! And then to have a little left—to have just a little left!—and to know I could see if I was there to look—and to know that when I get there ’twill be—oh, I’ll be rebellious-like here—and I’d be contented there! I don’t want to be complainin’—I don’t want to!—but when I’ve only got a little left I want it—oh, I want it for them things I want to see!”

“You will see them!” insisted the girl passionately. “The world can’t be so hideous as that!”

“Well, maybe so,” said the woman, rising. “But I don’t know where ’twill come from,” she added doubtfully.

She took the woman back to the doctor’s office and left her in the care of the stolid Emma.

“Seems ’most Like I’d been back home,” she said in parting, and the girl promised to come and see her and talk with her about the mountains. The woman said she thought talking about them would help her to remember just how they looked.

And then the girl returned to the library. She did not know why she did so. In truth she scarcely knew she was going there until she found herself sitting before that same table at which she and the woman had sat a little while before. For a long time she sat there with her head in her hands, her tears falling upon a pad of yellow paper on the table before her.

Finally she dried her eyes, opened her purse, and counted her money. In some way it seemed that out of her great desire, out of her great new need, there must be more than she had thought. But there was not, and she folded her hands upon the two five-dollar bills and the one silver dollar and looked hopelessly about the big room.

She had forgotten her own disappointments, her own loneliness. She was oblivious to everything in the world now save what seemed the absolute necessity of getting the woman back to the mountains while she yet had eyes to see them.

But what could she do? Again she counted the money. She could make herself, someway or other, get along without one of the five-dollar bills, but five dollars would not take one very close to the mountains. And then she saw a man standing before the Denver paper, and noticed that another man was waiting to take his place. The one who was reading had a dinner pail in his hand. The clothes of the other told that he, too, was of the world’s workers. It was clear to the girl that the man at the file was reading the paper from home; and the man who was ready to take his place looked as if waiting for something less impersonal than the news of the day.

The idea came upon her with such suddenness, so full born, that it made her gasp. They—the people who came to read the Denver paper, the people who loved the mountains and were far from them, the people who were themselves homesick and full of longing—were the people to understand.

It took her but a minute to act. She put the silver dollar and one five-dollar bill back in her purse. She clutched the other bill in her left hand, picked up a pencil, and began to write. She headed the petition:

“To all who know and love the mountains,” and she told the story with the simpleness of one speaking from the heart, and the directness of one speaking to those sure to understand. “And so I found her here by the Denver paper,” she said, after she had stated the tragic facts, “because it was the closest she could come to the mountains. Her heart is not breaking because she is going blind. It is breaking because she may never again look with seeing eyes upon those great hills which rise up about her home. We must do it for her simply because we would wish that, under like circumstances, someone do it for us. She belongs to us because we understand.

“If you can only give fifty cents, please do not hold it back because it seems but little. Fifty cents will take her twenty miles nearer home—twenty miles closer to the things upon which she longs that her last seeing glance may fall.”

After she had written it, she rose, and, the five-dollar bill in one hand, the sheets of yellow paper in the other, walked down the long room to the desk at which one of the librarians sat. The girl’s cheeks were very red, her eyes shining as she poured out the story. They mingled their tears of sympathy together, for the girl at the desk was herself young and far from home, and then they walked back to the Denver paper, and pinned the sheets of yellow paper just above the file. At the bottom of the petition the librarian wrote: “Leave your money at the desk in this room. It will be properly attended to.” The girl from Colorado then turned over her five-dollar bill and passed out into the gathering night.

Her heart was brimming with joy. “I can get a cheaper boarding place,” she told herself, as she joined the home-going crowds, “and until something else turns up, I’ll just look around and see if I can’t get a place in a store.”

•    •    •    •

One by one they had gathered while the woman was telling the story. “And so, if you don’t mind,” she said, in conclusion, “I’d like to have you put in a little piece that I got to Denver safe, so’s they can all see it. They was all so worked up about when I’d get here. Would that cost much?” she asked, timidly.

“Not a cent,” said the managing editor, his voice gruff with the attempt to keep it steady.

“You might say, if it wouldn’t take too much room, that I was much pleased with the prospect of getting home before sundown tonight.”

“You needn’t worry but what we’ll say it all,” said the city editor. “We’ll say a great deal more than you have any idea of.”

“I’m very thankful to you,” she said, as she rose to go.

They sat there for a moment in silence. “When one considers,” said the managing editor, “that they were people who were pushed to close even to subscribe to a daily paper—”

“When one considers,” said the city editor, “that the girl who started it had eleven dollars to her name—” And then he too, stopped abruptly and there was another long moment of silence.

After that he looked around at the reporters. “Well, it’s too bad you can’t all have it, when it’s so big a chance, but I guess it falls logically to Raymond. And in writing it remember, Raymond, that the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together. And the chance to write them doesn’t come every day, or every year, or every lifetime. And I’ll tell you, boys, all of you, when it seems sometimes that the milk of human kindness has all turned sour, just you think back to the little story you heard this afternoon.”

•    •    •    •

Slowly the sun slipped down behind the mountains; slowly the long purple shadows deepened to black; and with the coming of the night there settled over the everlasting hills, and over the soul of one who had returned to them, that satisfying calm that men call peace.

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
The Black Cat, Oct 1905

Freckles M’Grath

Many visitors to the State-house made the mistake of looking upon the Governor as the most important personage in the building. They would walk up and down the corridors, hoping for a glimpse of some of the leading officials, when all the while Freckles McGrath, the real character of the Capitol, and by all odds the most illustrious person in it, was at once accessible and affable.

Freckles McGrath was the elevator boy. In the official register his name had gone down as William, but that was a mere concession to the constituents to whom the official register was sent out. In the newspapers—and he appeared with frequency in the newspapers—he was always “Freckles,” and everyone from the Governor down gave him that title, the appropriateness of which was stamped a hundred fold upon his shrewd, jolly Irish face.

Like everyone else on the State payroll, Freckles was keyed high during this first week of the new session. It was a reform Legislature, and so imbued was it with the idea of reforming that there was grave danger of its forcing reformation upon everything in sight. It happened that the Governor was of the same faction of the party as that dominant in the Legislature; reform breathed through every nook and crevice of the great building.

But high above all else in importance towered the Kelley Bill. From the very opening of the session there was scarcely a day when some of Freckles’ passengers did not in hushed whispers mention the Kelley Bill. From what he could pick up about the building, and what he read in the newspapers, Freckles put together a few ideas as to what the Kelley Bill really was. It was a great reform measure, and it was going to show the railroads that they did not own the State. The railroads were going to have to pay more taxes, and they were making an awful fuss about it; but if the Kelley Bill could be put through it would be a great victory for reform, and would make the Governor “solid” in the State.

Freckles McGrath was strong for reform. That was partly because the snatches of speeches he heard in the Legislature were more thrilling when for reform than when against it; it was partly because he adored the Governor, and in no small part because he despised Mr. Ludlow.

Mr. Ludlow was a lobbyist. Some of the members of the Legislature were Mr. Ludlow’s property—or at least so Freckles inferred from conversation overheard at his post. There had been a great deal of talk that session about Mr. Ludlow’s methods.

Freckles himself was no snob. Although he had heard Mr. Ludlow called disgraceful, and although he firmly believed he was disgraceful, he did not consider that any reason for not speaking to him. And so when Mr. Ludlow got in all alone one morning, and the occasion seemed to demand recognition of some sort, Freckles had chirped: “Good morning!”

But the man, possibly deep in something else, simply knit together his brows and gave no sign of having heard. After that, Henry Ludlow, lobbyist, and Freckles McGrath, elevator boy, were enemies.

A little before noon, one day near the end of the session, a member of the Senate and a member of the House rode down together in the elevator.

“There’s no use waiting any longer,” the Senator was saying as they got in. “We’re as strong now as we’re going to be. It’s a matter of Stacy’s vote, and that’s a matter of who sees him last.”

Freckles widened out his ears and gauged the elevator for very slow running. Stacy had been written up in the papers as a wabbler on the Kelley Bill.

“He’s all right now,” pursued the Senator, “but there’s every chance that Ludlow will see him before he casts his vote this afternoon, and then—oh, I don’t know!” and with a weary little flourish of his hands the Senator stepped off.

Freckles McGrath sat wrapped in deep thought. The Kelley Bill was coming up in the Senate that afternoon. If Senator Stacy voted for it, it would pass. If he voted against it, it would fail. He would vote for it if he didn’t see Mr. Ludlow; he wouldn’t vote for it if he did. That was the situation, and the Governor’s whole future, Freckles felt, was at stake.

The bell rang sharply, and he was vaguely conscious then that it had been ringing before. In the next half-hour he was very busy taking down the members of the Legislature. Strangely enough, Senator Stacy and the Governor went down the same trip, and Freckles beamed with approbation when, he saw them walk out of the building together.

Stacy was one of the first of the senators to return. Freckles sized him up keenly as he stepped into the elevator, and decided that he was still firm. But there was a look about Senator Stacy’s mouth which suggested that there was no use in being too sure of him. Freckles considered the advisability of bursting forth and telling him how much better it would be to stick with the reform fellows; but just as the boy got his courage screwed up to speaking point, Senator Stacy got off.

About ten minutes later Freckles had the elevator on the ground floor, and was sitting there reading a paper, when he heard a step that made him prick up his ears. The next minute Mr. Ludlow turned the corner. He was immaculately dressed, as usual, and his iron-gray mustache seemed to stand out just a little more pompously than ever. There was a sneering look in his eyes as he stepped into the car. It seemed to be saying: “They thought they could beat me, did they? Oh, they’re easy, they are!”

Freckles McGrath slammed the door of the cage and started the car up. He did not know what he was going to do, but he had an idea that he did not want any other passenger. When half way between the basement and the first floor, he stopped the elevator. He must have time to think. If he took that man up to the Senate Chamber, he would simply strike the death-blow to reform! And so he knelt and pretended to be fixing something, and he thought fast and hard.

“Something broke?” asked an anxious voice.

Freckles looked around into Mr. Ludlow’s face, and he saw that the eminent lobbyist was nervous.

“Yes,” he said calmly. “It’s acting queer. Something’s all out of whack.”

“Well, drop it to the basement and let me out,” said Mr. Ludlow sharply.

“Can’t drop it,” responded Freckles. “She’s stuck.”

Mr. Ludlow came and looked things over, but his knowledge did not extend to the mechanism of elevators.

“Better call someone to come and take us out,” he said nervously.

Freckles straightened himself up. A glitter had come into his small gray eyes, and red spots were burning in his freckled cheeks.

“I think she’ll run now,” he said.

And she did run. Never in all its history had that State-house elevator run as it ran then. It rushed past the first and second floors like a thing let loose, with an utter abandonment that caused the blood to forsake the eminent lobbyist’s face.

“Stop it, boy!” he cried in alarm.

“Can’t!” responded Freckles, his voice thick with terror. “Running away!” he gasped.

“Will it—fall?” whispered the lobbyist.

“I—I think so!” blubbered Freckles.

The central portion of the State-house was very high. Above that part of the building which was in use there was a long stretch leading to the tower. The shaft had been built clear up, though practically unused. Past floors used for store-rooms, past floors used for nothing at all, they went—the man’s face white, the boy wailing out incoherent supplications. And then, within ten feet of the top of the shaft, and within a foot of the top floor of the building, the elevator came to a rickety stop. It wabbled back and forth; it did strange and terrible things.

“She’s falling!” panted Freckles. “Climb!”

And Henry Ludlow climbed. He got the door open, and he clambered up. No sooner had the man’s feet touched the solid floor than Freckles reached up and slammed the door of the cage. Why he did that he was not sure at the time. Later he felt that something had warned him not to give his prisoner’s voice a full sweep down the shaft.

Henry Ludlow was far from dull. As he saw the quick but even descent of the car, he knew that he had been tricked. He would have been more than human had there not burst from him furious and threatening words. But what was the use? The car was going down—down—down, and there he was, perhaps hundreds of feet above anyone else in the building—alone, tricked, beaten!

Of course he tried the door at the head of the winding stairway, knowing full well that it would be locked. They always kept it locked; he had heard one of the janitors asking for the keys to take a party up just a few days before. Perhaps he could get out on top of the building and make signals of distress. But the door leading outside was locked also. There he was—helpless. And below—well, below they were passing the Kelley Bill!

He rattled the grating of the elevator shaft. He made strange, loud noises, knowing all the while he could not make himself heard. And then at last, alone in the State-house attic, Henry Ludlow, eminent lobbyist, sat down on a box and nursed his fury.

Below, Freckles McGrath, the youngest champion of reform in the building, was putting on a bold front. He laughed and he talked and he whistled. He took people up and down with as much nonchalance as if he did not know that up at the top of that shaft angry eyes were straining themselves for a glimpse of the car, and terrible curses were descending, literally, upon his stubby red head.

It was a great afternoon at the State-house. Everyone thronged to the doors of the Senate Chamber, where they were putting through the Kelley Bill. The speeches made in behalf of the measure were brief. The great thing now was not to make speeches; it was to reach “S” on roll-call before a man with iron-gray hair and an iron-gray mustache could come in and say something to the fair-haired member with the weak mouth who sat near the rear of the chamber.

Freckles was called away just as it went to a vote. When he came back Senator Kelley was standing out in the corridor, and a great crowd of men were standing around slapping him on the back. The Governor himself was standing on the steps of the Senate Chamber; his eyes were bright, and he was smiling.

Freckles turned his car back to the basement. He wanted to be all alone for a minute, to dwell in solitude upon the fact that it was he, Freckles McGrath, who had won this great victory for reform. It was he, Freckles McGrath, who had assured the Governor’s future. Why, perhaps he had that afternoon made for himself a name which would be handed down in the histories!

Freckles was a kind little boy, and he knew that an elegant gentleman could not find the attic any too pleasant a place in which to spend the afternoon, go he decided to go up and get Mr. Ludlow. It took courage; but he had won his victory and this was no time for faltering.

There was something gruesome about the long ascent. He thought of stories he had read of lonely turrets in which men were beheaded, and otherwise made away with. It seemed he would never come to the top, and when at last he did it was to find two of the most awful-looking eyes he had ever seen—eyes that looked as though furies were going to escape from them—peering down upon him.

The sight of that car, moving smoothly and securely up to the top, and the sight of that audacious little boy with the freckled face and the bat-like eyes, that little boy who had played his game so well, who had wrought such havoc, was too much for Henry Ludlow’s self-control. Words such as he had never used before, such as he would not have supposed himself capable of using, burst from him. But Freckles stood calmly gazing up at the infuriated lobbyist, and just as Mr. Ludlow was saying, “I’ll beat your head open, you little brat!” he calmly reversed the handle and sent the car skimming smoothly to realms below. He was followed by an angry yell, and then by a loud request to return, but he heeded them not, and for some time longer the car made its usual rounds between the basement and the legislative chambers.

In just an hour Freckles tried it again. He sent the car to within three feet of the attic floor, and then peered through the grating, his face tied in a knot of interrogation. The eminent lobbyist stood there gulping down wrath and pride, knowing well enough what was expected of him.

“Oh—all right,” he muttered at last, and with that much of an understanding Freckles sent the car up, opened the door, and Henry Ludlow stepped in.

No word was spoken between them until the light from the floor upon which the Senate Chamber was situated came in view. Then Freckles turned with a polite inquiry as to where the gentleman wished to get off.

“You may take me down to the office of the Governor,” said Mr. Ludlow stonily, meaningly.

“Sure,” said Freckles cheerfully. “Guess you’ll find the Governor in his office now. He’s been in the Senate most of the afternoon, watching ’em pass that Kelley Bill.”

Mr. Ludlow’s lips drew in tightly. He squared his shoulders, and his silence was tremendous.

In just fifteen minutes Freckles was sent for from the executive office.

“I demand his discharge!” Mr. Ludlow was saying as the elevator boy entered.

“It happens you’re not running this building,” the Governor returned with a good deal of acidity. “Though of course,” he added with dignity, “the matter will be carefully investigated.”

The Governor was one great chuckle inside, and his heart was full of admiration and gratitude; but would Freckles be equal to bluffing it through? Would the boy have the finesse, the nice subtlety, the real master hand, the situation demanded? If not, then—imp of salvation though he was—in the interest of reform, Freckles would have to go.

It was a very innocent looking boy who stood before him and looked inquiringly into his face.

“William,” began the Governor—Freckles was pained at first, and then remembered that officially he was William—“this gentleman has made a very serious charge against you.”

Freckles looked at Mr. Ludlow in a hurt way, and waited for the Governor to proceed.

“He says,” went on the chief executive, “that you deliberately took him to the top of the building and willfully left him there a prisoner all afternoon. Did you do that?”

“Oh, sir,” burst forth Freckles, “I did the very best I could to save his life! I was willing to sacrifice mine for him. I——”

“You little liar!” broke in Ludlow.

The Governor held up his hand. “You had your chance. Let him have his.”

“You see, Governor,” began Freckles, as if anxious to set right a great wrong which had been done him, “the car is acting bad. The engineer said only this morning it needed a going over. When it took that awful shoot, I lost control of it. Maybe I’m to be discharged for losing control of it, but not”—Freckles sniffled pathetically—“but not for anything like what he says I done. Why Governor,” he went on, ramming his knuckles into his eyes, “I ain’t got nothing against him! What’d I take him to the attic for?”

“Of course not for money,” sneered Mr. Ludlow.

The Governor turned on him sharply. “When you can bring any proof of that, I’ll be ready to hear it. Until you can, you’d better leave it out of the question.”

“Strange it should have happened this very afternoon,” put in the eminent lobbyist.

The Governor looked at him with open countenance. “You were especially interested in something this afternoon? I thought you told me you had no vital interest here this session.”

There was nothing to be said. Mr. Ludlow said nothing.

“Now, William,” pursued the Governor, fearful in his heart that this would be Freckles’ undoing, “why did you close the door of the shaft before you started down?”

“Well, you see, sir,” began Freckles, still tremulously, “I’m so used to closin’ doors. Closin’ doors has become a kind of second nature with me. I’ve been told about it so many times. And up there, though I thought I was losin’ my life, still I didn’t neglect my duty.”

The Governor put his hand to his mouth and coughed.

“And why,” he went on, more secure now, for a boy who could get out of that could get out of anything, “why was it you didn’t make some immediate effort to get Mr. Ludlow down? Why didn’t you notify someone, or do something about it?”

“Why, I supposed, of course, he walked down by the stairs,” cried Freckles. “I never dreamed he’d want to trust the elevator after the way she had acted.”

“The door was locked,” snarled the eminent lobbyist.

“Well, now, you see, I didn’t know that,” explained Freckles expansively. “Late in the afternoon I took a run up just to test the car—and there you were! I never was so surprised in my life. I supposed, of course, sir, that you’d spent the afternoon in the Senate, along with everybody else.”

Once more the Governor put his hand to his mouth.

“Your case will come before the executive council at its next meeting, William. And if anything like this should happen again, you will be discharged on the spot.” Freckles bowed. “You may go now.”

When he was almost at the door the Governor called to him.

“Don’t you think, William,” he said—the Governor felt that he and Freckles could afford to be generous—“that you should apologize to the gentleman for the really grave inconvenience to which you have been the means of subjecting him?”

Freckles’ little gray eyes grew steely. He looked at Henry Ludlow, and there was an ominous silence. Then light broke over his face. “On behalf of the elevator,” he said, “I apologize.”

And a third time the Governor’s hand was raised to his mouth.

The next week Freckles was wearing a signet ring; long and audibly had he sighed for a ring of such kind and proportions. He was at some pains in explaining to everyone to whom he showed it that it had been sent him by “a friend up home.”

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
Munsey’s Magazine, Jul 1904

From A to Z

Thus had another ideal tumbled to the rubbish heap! She seemed to be breathing the dust which the newly fallen had stirred up among its longer dead fellows. Certainly she was breathing the dust from somewhere.

During her senior year at the university, when people would ask: “And what are you going to do when you leave school, Miss Willard?”, she would respond with anything that came to hand, secretly hugging to her mind that idea of getting a position in a publishing house. Her conception of her publishing house was finished about the same time as her class-day gown. She was to have a roll-top desk—probably of mahogany—and a big chair which whirled round like that in the office of the undergraduate dean. She was to have a little office all by herself, opening on a bigger office—the little one marked “Private”. There were to be beautiful rugs—the general effect not unlike the library at the University Club—books and pictures and cultivated gentlemen who spoke often of Greek tragedies and the Renaissance. She was a little uncertain as to her duties, but had a general idea about getting down between nine and ten, reading the morning paper, cutting the latest magazine, and then “writing something.”

Commencement was now four months past, and one of her professors had indeed secured for her a position in a Chicago “publishing house”. This was her first morning and she was standing at the window looking down into Dearborn Street while the man who was to have her in charge was fixing a place for her to sit.

That the publishing house should be on Dearborn Street had been her first blow, for she had long located her publishing house on that beautiful stretch of Michigan Avenue which overlooked the lake. But the real insult was that this publishing house, instead of having a building, or at least a floor, all to itself, simply had a place penned off in a bleak, dirty building such as one who had done work in sociological research instinctively associated with a box factory. And the thing which fairly trailed her visions in the dust was that the partition penning them off did not extend to the ceiling, and the adjoining room being occupied by a patent medicine company, she was face to face with glaring endorsements of Dr. Bunting’s Famous Kidney and Bladder Cure. Taken all in all, there seemed little chance for Greek tragedies or the Renaissance.

The man who was “running things”—she buried her phraseology with her dreams—wore a skull cap, and his mustache dragged down below his chin. Just at present he was engaged in noisily pulling a most unliterary pine table from a dark corner to a place near the window. That accomplished, an ostentatious hunt ensued, resulting in the triumphant flourish of a feather duster. Several knocks at the table, and the dust of many months—perhaps likewise of many dreams—ascended to a resting place on the endorsement of Dr. Bunting’s Kidney and Bladder Cure. He next produced a short, straight-backed chair which she recognized as brother to the one which used to stand behind their kitchen stove. He gave it a shake, thus delicately indicating that she was receiving special favors in this matter of an able-bodied chair, and then announced with brisk satisfaction: “So! Now we are ready to begin.” She murmured a “Thank you”, seated herself and her buried hopes in this chair which did not whirl round, and leaned her arms upon a table which did not even dream in mahogany.

In the other publishing house, one pushed buttons and uniformed menials appeared—noiselessly, quickly and deferentially. At this moment a boy with sandy hair brushed straight back in a manner either statesmanlike or clownlike—things were too involved to know which—shuffled in with an armful of yellow paper which he flopped down on the pine table. After a minute he returned with a warbled “Take Me Back to New York Town” and a paste-pot. And upon his third appearance he was practicing gymnastics with a huge pair of shears, which he finally presented, grinningly.

There was a long pause, broken only by the sonorous voice of Dr. Bunting upbraiding someone for not having billed out that stuff to Apple Grove, and then the sandy-haired boy appeared bearing a large dictionary, followed by the man in the skull cap behind a dictionary of equal unwieldiness. These were set down on either side of the yellow paper, and he who was filling the position of cultivated gentleman pulled up a chair, briskly.

“Has Professor Lee explained to you the nature of our work?” he wanted to know.

“No,” she replied, half grimly, a little humorously, and not far from tearfully, “he didn’t—explain.”

“Then it is my pleasure to inform you,” he began, blinking at her importantly, “that we are engaged here in the making of a dictionary.”

“A dic—?” but she swallowed the gasp in the laugh coming up to meet it, and of their union was born a saving cough.

“Quite an overpowering thought, is it not?” he agreed pleasantly. “Now you see you have before you the two dictionaries you will use most, and over in that case you will find other references. The main thing”—his voice sank to an impressive whisper—“is not to infringe the copyright. The publisher was in yesterday and made a little talk to the force, and he said that anyone who handed in a piece of copy infringing the copyright simply employed that means of writing his own resignation. Neat way of putting it, was it not?”

“Yes, wasn’t it—neat?” she agreed, wildly.

She was conscious of a man’s having stepped in behind her and taken a seat at the table next to hers. She heard him opening his dictionaries and getting out his papers. Then the man in the skull cap had risen and was saying genially: “Well, here is a piece of old Webster, your first ‘take’—no copyright on this, you see, but you must modernize and expand. Don’t miss any of the good words in either of these dictionaries. Here you have dictionaries, copy-paper, paste, and Professor Lee assures me you have brains—all the necessary ingredients for successful lexicography. We are to have some rules printed tomorrow, and in the meantime I trust I’ve made myself clear. The main thing”—he bent down and spoke it solemnly—“is not to infringe the copyright.” With a cheerful nod he was gone, and she heard him saying to the man at the next table: “Mr. Clifford, I shall have to ask you to be more careful about getting in promptly at eight.”

She removed the cover from her paste-pot and dabbed a little on a piece of paper. Then she tried the unwieldy shears on another piece of paper. She then opened one of her dictionaries and read studiously for fifteen minutes. That accomplished, she opened the other dictionary and perused it for twelve minutes. Then she took the column of “old Webster”, which had been handed to her pasted on a piece of yellow paper, and set about attempting to commit it to memory. She looked up to be met with the statement that Mrs. Marjory Van Luce De Vane, after spending years under the so-called best surgeons of the country, had been cured in six weeks by Dr. Bunting’s Famous Kidney and Bladder Cure. She pushed the dictionaries petulantly from her, and leaning her very red cheek upon her hand, her hazel eyes blurred with tears of perplexity and resentment, her mouth drawn in pathetic little lines of uncertainty, looked over at the sprawling warehouse on the opposite side of Dearborn Street. She was just considering the direct manner of writing one’s resignation—not knowing how to infringe the copyright—when a voice said: “I beg pardon, but I wonder if I can help you any?”

She had never heard a voice like that before. Or, had she heard it?—and where? She looked at him, a long, startled gaze. Something made her think of the voice the prince used to have in long-ago dreams. She looked into a face that was dark and thin and—different. Two very dark eyes were looking at her kindly, and a mouth which was a baffling combination of things to be loved and things to be deplored was twitching a little, as though it would like to join the eyes in a smile, if it dared.

Because he saw both how funny and how hard it was, she liked him. It would have been quite different had he seen either one without the other.

“You can tell me how not to infringe the copyright,” she laughed. “I’m not sure that I know what a copyright is.”

He laughed—a laugh which belonged with his voice. “Mr. Littletree isn’t as lucid as he thinks he is. I’ve been here a week or so, and picked up a few things you might like to know.”

He pulled his chair closer to her table then and gave her a lesson in the making of copy. Edna Willard was never one-half so attractive as when absorbed in a thing which someone was showing her how to do. Her hazel eyes would widen and glisten with the joy of comprehending; her cheeks would flush a deeper pink with the coming of new light, her mouth would part in a childlike way it had forgotten to outgrow, her head would nod gleefully in token that she understood, and she had a way of pulling at her wavy hair and making it more wavy than it had been before. The man at the next table was a long time in explaining the making of a dictionary. He spoke in low tones, often looking at the figure of the man in the skull cap, who was sitting with his back to them, looking over copy. Once she cried, excitedly: “Oh—I see!” and he warned, “S—h!” explaining, “Let him think you got it all from him. It will give you a better stand-in.” She nodded, appreciatively, and felt very well acquainted with this kind man whose voice made her think of something—called to something—she did not just know what.

After that she became so absorbed in lexicography that when the men began putting away their things it was hard to realize that the morning had gone. It was a new and difficult game, the evasion of the copyright furnishing the stimulus of a hazard.

The man at the next table had been watching her with an amused admiration. Her childlike absorption, the way every emotion from perplexity to satisfaction expressed itself in the poise of her head and the pucker of her face, took him back over years emotionally barren to the time when he too had those easily stirred enthusiasms of youth. For the man at the next table was far from young now. His mouth had never quite parted with boyishness, but there was more white than black in his hair, and the lines about his mouth told that time, as well as forces more aging than time, had laid a heavy hand upon him. But when he looked at the girl and told her with a smile that it was time to stop work, it was a smile and a voice to defy the most tell-tale face in all the world.

During her luncheon, as she watched the strange people coming and going, she did much wondering. She wondered why it was that so many of the men at the dictionary place were very old men; she wondered if it would be a good dictionary—one that would be used in the schools; she wondered if Dr. Bunting had made a great deal of money, and most of all she wondered about the man at the next table whose voice was like—like a dream which she did not know that she had dreamed.

When she had returned to the straggling old building, had stumbled down the narrow, dark hall and opened the door of the big bleak room, she saw that the man at the next table was the only one who had returned from luncheon. Something in his profile made her stand there very still. He had not heard her come in, and he was looking straight ahead, eyes half closed, mouth set—no unsurrendered boyishness there now. Wholly unconsciously she took an impulsive step forward. But she stopped, for she saw, and felt without really understanding, that it was not just the moment’s pain, but the revealed pain of years. Just then he began to cough, and it seemed the cough, too, was more than of the moment. And then he turned and saw her, and smiled, and the smile changed all.

As the afternoon wore on the man stopped working and, turning a little in his chair, sat there covertly watching the girl. She was just typically girl. It was written that she had spent her days in the happy ways of healthful girlhood. He supposed that a great many young fellows had fallen in love with her—nice, clean young fellows, the kind she would naturally meet. And then his eyes closed for a minute and he put up his hand and brushed back his hair; there was weariness, weariness weary of itself, in the gesture. He looked about the room and scanned the faces of the men, most of them older than he, many of them men whose histories were well known to him. They were the usual hangers-on about newspaper offices; men who, for one reason or other—age, dissipation, antiquated methods—had been pitched over, men for whom such work as this came as a godsend. They were the men of yesterday—men whom the world had rushed past. She was the only one there, this girl who would probably sit here beside him for many months, with whom the future had anything to do. Youth!—Goodness!—Joy!—Hope!—strange things to bring to a place like this. And as if their alienism disturbed him, he moved restlessly, almost resentfully, bit his lips nervously, moistened them, and began putting away his things.

As the girl was starting home along Dearborn Street a few minutes later, she chanced to look in a window. She saw that it was a saloon, but before she could turn away she saw a man with a white face—white with the peculiar whiteness of a dark face, standing before the bar drinking from a small glass. She stood still, arrested by a look such as she had never seen before: a panting human soul sobbingly fluttering down into something from which it had spent all its force in trying to rise. When she recalled herself and passed on, a mist which she could neither account for nor banish was dimming the clear hazel of her eyes.

The next day was a hard one at the dictionary place. She told herself it was because the novelty of it was wearing away, because her fingers ached, because it tired her back to sit in that horrid chair. She did not admit of any connection between her flagging interest and the fact that the place at the next table was vacant.

The following day he was still absent. She assumed it was nervousness occasioned by her queer surroundings that made her look round whenever she heard a step behind her. Where was he? Where had that look carried him? If he were in trouble, was there no one to help him?

The third day she did an unpremeditated thing. The man in the skull cap had been showing her something about the copy. As he was leaving, she asked: “Is the man who sits at the next table coming back?”

“Oh yes,” he replied grimly, “he’ll be back.”

“Because,” she went on, “if he wasn’t, I thought I would take his shears. These hurt my fingers.”

He made the exchange for her—and after that things went better.

He did return late the next morning. After he had taken his place he looked over at her and smiled. He looked sick and shaken—as if something that knew no mercy had taken hold of him and wrung body and soul.

“You have been ill?” she asked, with timid solicitude.

“Oh no,” he replied, rather shortly.

He was quiet all that day, but the next day they talked about the work, laughed together over funny definitions they found. She felt that he could tell many interesting things about himself, if he cared to.

As the days went on he did tell some of those things—out of the way places where he had worked, queer people whom he had known. It seemed that words came to him as gifts, came freely, happily, pleased, perhaps, to be borne by so sympathetic a voice. And there was another thing about him. He seemed always to know just what she was trying to say; he never missed the unexpressed. That made it easy to say things to him; there seemed a certain at-homeness between his thought and hers. She accounted for her interest in him by telling herself she had never known anyone like that before. Now Harold, the boy whom she knew best out at the university, why one had to say things to Harold to make him understand! And Harold never left one wondering—wondering what he had meant by that smile, what he had been going to say when he started to say something and stopped, wondering what it was about his face that one could not understand. Harold never could claim as his the hour after he had left her, and was one ever close to anyone with whom one did not spend some of the hours of absence? She began to see that hours spent together when apart were the most intimate hours of all.

And as Harold did not make one wonder, so he did not make one worry. Never in all her life had there been a lump in her throat when she thought of Harold. There was often a lump in her throat when the man at the next table was coughing.

One day, she had been there about two months, she said something to him about it. It was hard; it seemed forcing one’s way into a room that had never been opened to one—there were several doors he kept closed.

“Mr. Clifford,” she turned to him impetuously as they were putting away their things that night, “will you mind if I say something to you?”

He was covering his paste-pot. He looked up at her strangely. The closed door seemed to open a little way. “I can’t conceive of ‘minding’ anything you might say to me, Miss Noah,”—he had called her Miss Noah ever since she, by mistake, had one day called him Mr. Webster.

“You see,” she hurried on, very timid, now that the door had opened a little, “you have been so good to me. Because you have been so good to me it seems that I have some right to—to—”

His head was resting upon his hand, and he leaned a little closer as though listening for something he wanted to hear.

“I had a cousin who had a cough like yours”—brave now that she could not go back—“and he went down to New Mexico and stayed for a year, and when he came back—when he came back he was as well as any of us. It seems so foolish not to”—her voice broke, now that it had so valiantly carried it—“not to—”

He looked at her, and that was all. But she was never wholly the same again after that look. It enveloped her being in something which left her richer—different. It was a look to light the dark place between two human souls. It seemed for the moment that words would follow it, but as if feeling their helplessness—perhaps needlessness—they sank back unuttered, and at the last he got up, abruptly, and walked away.

One night, while waiting for the elevator, she heard two of the men talking about him. When she went out on the street it was with head high, cheeks hot. For nothing is so hard to hear as that which one has half known, and evaded. One never denies so hotly as in denying to one’s self what one fears is true, and one never resents so bitterly as in resenting that which one cannot say one has the right to resent.

That night she lay in her bed with wide open eyes, going over and over the things they had said. “Cure?”—one of them had scoffed, after telling how brilliant he had been before he “went to pieces”—“why all the cures on earth couldn’t help him! He can go just so far, and then he can no more stop himself—oh, about as much as an ant could stop a prairie fire!”

She finally turned over on her pillow and sobbed; and she wondered why—wondered, yet knew.

But it resulted in the flowering of her tenderness for him. Interest mounted to defiance. It ended in blind, passionate desire to “make it up” to him. And again he was so different from Harold; Harold did not impress himself upon one by upsetting all one’s preconceived ideas.

She felt now that she understood better—understood the closed doors. He was—she could think of no better word than sensitive.

And that is why, several mornings later, she very courageously—for it did take courage—threw this little note over on his desk—they had formed a habit of writing notes to each other, sometimes about the words, sometimes about other things.

IN-VI-TA-TION, n. That which Miss Noah extends to Mr. Webster for Friday evening, December second, at the house where she lives—hasn’t she already told him where that is? It is the wish of Miss Noah to present Mr. Webster to various other Miss Noahs, all of whom are desirous of making his acquaintance.

She was absurdly nervous at luncheon that day, and kept telling herself with severity not to act like a high school girl. He was late in returning that noon, and though there seemed a new something in his voice when he asked if he hadn’t better sharpen her pencils, he said nothing about her new definition of invitation. It was almost five o’clock when he threw this over on her desk:

AP-PRE-CI-ATION, n. That sentiment inspired in Mr. Webster by the kind invitation of Miss Noah for Friday evening.

RE-GRET, n. That which Mr. Webster experiences because, for reasons into which he cannot go in detail, it is impossible for him to accept Miss Noah’s invitation.

RE-SENT-MENT, n. That which is inspired in Mr. Webster by the insinuation that there are other Miss Noahs in the world.

Then below he had written:

Three hours later. Miss Noah, the world is queer. Someday you may find out—though I hope you never will—that it is frequently the things we most want to do that we must leave undone. Miss Noah, won’t you go on bringing me as much of yourself as you can to Dearborn Street, and try not to think much about my not being able to know the Miss Noah of Hyde Park? And little Miss Noah—I thank you. There aren’t words enough in this old book of ours to tell you how much—or why.

That night he hurried away with never a joke about how many words she had written that day. She did not look up as he stood there putting on his coat.

•    •    •    •

It was spring now, and the dictionary staff had begun on W.

They had written of Joy, of Hope and Life and Love, and many other things. Life seemed pressing just behind some of those definitions, pressing the harder, perhaps, because it could not break through the surface.

For it did not break through; it flooded just beneath.

How did she know that he cared for her? She could not possibly have told. Perhaps the nearest to actual proof she could bring was that he always saw that her overshoes were put in a warm place. And when one came down to facts, the putting of a girl’s galoshes near the radiator did not necessarily mean love.

Perhaps then it was because there was no proof of it that she was most sure. For some of the most sure things in the world are things which cannot be proved.

It was only that they worked together and were friends; that they laughed together over funny definitions they found, that he was kind to her, and that they seemed remarkably close together.

That is as far as facts can take it.

And just there—it begins.

For the force which rushes beneath the facts of life, caring nothing for conditions, not asking what one desires or what one thinks best, caring as little about a past as about a future—save its own future—the force which can laugh at man’s institutions and batter over in one sweep what he likes to call his wisdom, was sweeping them on. And because it could get no other recognition it forced its way into the moments when he asked her for an eraser, when she wanted to know how to spell a word. He could not so much as ask her if she needed more copy-paper without seeming to be lavishing upon her all the love of all the ages.

And so the winter had worn on, and there was really nothing whatever to tell about it.

•    •    •    •

She was quiet this morning, and kept her head bent low over her work. For she had estimated the number of pages there were between W and Z. Soon they would be at Z;—and then? Then? Shyly she turned and looked at him; he too was bent over his work. When she came in she had said something about its being spring, and that there must be wild flowers in the woods. Since then he had not looked up.

Suddenly it came to her—tenderly, hotly, fearfully yet bravely, that it was she who must meet Z. She looked at him again, covertly. And she felt that she understood. It was the lines in his face made it clearest. Years, and things blacker, less easily surmounted than years—oh yes, that too she faced fearlessly—were piled in between. She knew now that it was she—not he—who could push them aside.

It was all very unmaidenly, of course; but maidenly is a word love and life and desire may crowd from the page.

Perhaps she would not have thrown it after all—the little note she had written—had it not been that when she went over for more copy-paper, she stood for a minute looking out of the window. Even on Dearborn Street the seductiveness of spring was in the air. Spring, and all that spring meant, filled her.

Because, way beyond the voice of Dr. Bunting she heard the songs of faraway birds, and because beneath the rumble of a printing press she could get the babble of a brook, because Z was near and life was strong, the woman vanquished the girl, and she threw this over to his desk:

CHAFING-DISH, n. That out of which Miss Noah asks Mr. Webster to eat his Sunday-night lunch tomorrow. All the other Miss Noahs are going to be away, and if Mr. Webster does not come, Miss Noah will be all alone. Miss Noah does not like to be lonely.

She ate no lunch that day; she only drank a cup of coffee and walked around.

He did not come back that afternoon. It passed from one to two, from two to three, and then very slowly from three to four, and still he had not come.

He too was walking about. He had walked down to the lake and was standing there looking out across it.

Why not?—he was saying to himself—fiercely, doggedly. Over and over again—Well, why not?

A hundred nights, alone in his room, he had gone over it. Had not life used him hard enough to give him a little now?—longing had pleaded. And now there was a new voice—a more prevailing voice—the voice of her happiness. His face softened to an almost maternal tenderness as he listened to that voice.

Too worn to fight any longer, he gave himself up to it, and sat there dreaming. They were dreams of joy rushing in after lonely years, dreams of stepping into the sunlight after long days in fog and cold, dreams of a woman before a fireplace—her arms about him, her cheer and her tenderness, her comradeship and her passion—all his to take! Ah, dreams which even thoughts must not touch—so wonderful and sacred they were.

A long time he sat there, dreaming dreams and seeing visions. The force that rules the race was telling him that the one crime was the denial of happiness—his happiness, her happiness; and when at last his fight seemed but a puerile fight against forces worlds mightier than he, he rose, and as one who sees a great light, started back towards Dearborn Street.

On the way he began to cough. The coughing was violent, and he stepped into a doorway to gain breath. And after he had gone in there he realized that it was the building of Chicago’s greatest newspaper.

He had been city editor of that paper once. Facts, the things he knew about himself, talked to him then. There was no answer.

It left him weak and dizzy and crazy for a drink. He walked on slowly, unsteadily, his white face set. For he had vowed that if it took the last nerve in his body there should be no more of that until after they had finished with Z. He knew himself too well to vow more. He was not even sure of that.

He did not turn in where he wanted to go; but resistance took the last bit of force that was in him. He was trembling like a sick man when he stepped into the elevator.

She was just leaving. She was in the little cloakroom putting on her things. She was all alone in there.

He stepped in. He pushed the door shut, and stood there leaning against it, looking at her, saying nothing.

“Oh—you are ill?” she gasped, and laid a frightened hand upon him.

The touch crazed him. All resistance gone, he swept her into his arms; he held her fiercely, and between sobs kissed her again and again. He could not let her go. He frightened her. He hurt her. And he did not care—he did not know.

Then he held her off and looked at her. And as he looked into her eyes, passion melted to tenderness. It was she now—not he; love—not hunger. Holding her face in his two hands, looking at her as if getting something to take away, his white lips murmured words too inarticulate for her to hear. And then again he put his arms around her—all differently. Reverently, sobbingly, he kissed her hair. And then he was gone.

He did not come out that Sunday afternoon, but Harold dropped in instead, and talked of some athletic affairs over at the university. She wondered why she did not go crazy in listening to him, and yet she could answer intelligently. It was queer—what one could do.

•    •    •    •

They had come at last to Z. There would be no more work upon the dictionary after that day. And it was raining—raining as in Chicago alone it knows how to rain.

They wrote no notes to each other now. It had been different since that day. They made small effort to cover their raw souls with the mantle of commonplace words.

Both of them had tried to stay away that last day. But both were in their usual places.

The day wore on eventlessly. Those men with whom she had worked, the men of yesterday, who had been kind to her, came up at various times for little farewell chats. The man in the skull cap told her that she had done excellent work. She was surprised at the ease with which she could make decent reply, thinking again that it was queer—what one could do.

He was moving. She saw him lay some sheets of yellow paper on the desk in front. He had finished with his “take”. There would not be another to give him. He would go now.

He came back to his desk. She could hear him putting away his things. And then for a long time there was no sound. She knew that he was just sitting there in his chair.

Then she heard him get up. She heard him push his chair up to the table, and then for a minute he stood there. She wanted to turn towards him; she wanted to say something—do something. But she had no power.

She saw him lay an envelope upon her desk. She heard him walking away. She knew, numbly, that his footsteps were not steady. She knew that he had stopped; she was sure that he was looking back. But still she had no power.

And then she heard him go.

Even then she went on with her work; she finished her “take” and laid down her pencil. It was finished now—and he had gone. Finished?—Gone?She was tearing open the envelope of the letter.

This was what she read:

Little dictionary sprite, sunshine vendor, and girl to be loved, if I were a free man I would say to you—Come, little one, and let us learn of love. Let us learn of it, not as one learns from dictionaries, but let us learn from the morning glow and the evening shades. But Miss Noah, maker of dictionaries and creeper into hearts, the bound must not call to the free. They might fittingly have used my name as one of the synonyms under that word Failure, but I trust not under Coward.

And now, you funny little Miss Noah from the University of Chicago, don’t I know that your heart is blazing forth the assurance that you don’t care for any of those things—the world, people, common sense—that you want just love? They made a grand failure of you out at your university; they taught you philosophy and they taught you Greek, and they’ve left you just as much the woman as women were five thousand years ago. Oh, I know all about you—you little girl whose hair tried so hard to be red. Your soul touched mine as we sat there writing words—words—words, the very words in which men try to tell things, and can’t—and I know all about what you would do. But you shall not do it. Dear little copy-maker, would a man standing out on the end of a slippery plank have any right to cry to someone on the shore—‘Come out here on this plank with me.’ If he loved the someone on the shore, would he not say instead—‘Don’t get on this plank.’ Me get off the plank—come with you to the shore—you are saying? But you see, dear, you only know slippery planks as viewed from the shore—God grant you may never know them any other way!

It was you, was it not, who wrote our definition of happiness? Yes, I remember the day you did it. You were so interested; your cheeks grew so very red, and you pulled and pulled at your wavy hair. You said it was such an important definition. And so it is, Miss Noah, quite the most important of all. And on the page of life, Miss Noah, may happiness be written large and unblurred for you. It is because I cannot help you write it that I turn away. I want at least to leave the page unspoiled.

I carry a picture of you. I shall carry it always. You are sitting before a fireplace, and I think of that fireplace as symbolizing the warmth and care and tenderness and the safety that will surround you. And sometimes as you sit there let a thought of me come for just a minute, Miss Noah—not long enough nor deep enough to bring you any pain. But only think—I brought him happiness after he believed all happiness had gone. He was so grateful for that light which came after he thought the darkness had settled down. It will light his way to the end.

We’ve come to Z, and it’s goodbye. There is one thing I can give you without hurting you—the hope, the prayer, that life may be very, very good to you.

The sheets of paper fell from her hands. She sat staring out into Dearborn Street. She began to see. After all, he had not understood her. Perhaps men never understood women; certainly he had not understood her. What he did not know was that she was willing to pay for her happiness—pay— pay any price that might be exacted. And anyway—she had no choice. Strange that he could not see that! Strange that he could not see the irony and cruelty of bidding her goodbye and then telling her to be happy!

It simplified itself to such an extent that she grew very calm. It would be easy to find him, easy to make him see—for it was so very simple—and then… .

She turned in her copy. She said goodbye quietly, naturally, rode down in the lumbering old elevator and started out into the now drenching rain towards the elevated trains which would take her to the West Side; it was so fortunate that she had heard him telling one day where he lived.

When she reached the station she saw that more people were coming down the stairs than were going up. They were saying things about the trains, but she did not heed them. But at the top of the stairs a man in uniform said: “Blockade, Miss. You’ll have to take the surface cars.”

She was sorry, for it would delay her, and there was not a minute to lose. She was dismayed, upon reaching the surface cars, to find she could not get near them; the rain, the blockade on the “L”, had caused a great crowd to congregate there. She waited a long time, getting more and more wet, but it was impossible to get near the cars. She thought of a cab, but could see none, they too having all been pressed into service.

She determined, desperately, to start to walk. Soon she would surely get either a cab or a car. And so she started, staunchly, though she was wet through now, and trembling with cold and nervousness.

As she hurried through the driving rain she faced things fearlessly. Oh yes, she understood—everything. But if he were not well—should he not have her with him? If he had that thing to fight, did he not need her help? What did men think women were like? Did he think she was one to sit down and reason out what would be advantageous? Better a little while with him on a slippery plank than forever safe and desolate upon the shore!

She never questioned her going; were not life and love too great to be lost through that which could be so easily put right?

The buildings were reeling, the streets moving up and down—that awful rain, she thought, was making her dizzy. Laboriously she walked on—more slowly, less steadily, a pain in her side, that awful reeling in her head.

Carriages returning to the city were passing her, but she had not strength to call to them, and it seemed if she walked to the curb she would fall. She was not thinking so clearly now. The thing which took all her force was the lifting of her feet and the putting them down in the right place. Her throat seemed to be closing up—and her side—and her head… .

Someone had her by the arm. Then someone was speaking her name; speaking it in surprise—consternation—alarm.

It was Harold.

It was all vague then. She knew that she was in a carriage, and that Harold was talking to her kindly. “You’re taking me there?” she murmured.

“Yes—yes, Edna, everything’s all right,” he replied soothingly.

“Everything’s all right,” she repeated, in a whisper, and leaned her head back against the cushions.

They stopped after a while, and Harold was standing at the open door of the cab with something steaming hot which he told her to drink. “You need it,” he said decisively, and thinking it would help her to tell it, she drank it down.

The world was a little more defined after that and she saw things which puzzled her. “Why, it looks like the city,” she whispered, her throat too sore now to speak aloud.

“Why sure,” he replied banteringly, “don’t you know we have to go through the city to get out to the South Side?”

“Oh, but you see,” she cried, holding her throat, “but you see, it’s the other way!”

“Not tonight,” he insisted; “the place for you tonight is home. I’m taking you where you belong.”

She reached over wildly, trying to open the door, but he held her back; she began to cry, and he talked to her, gently but unbendingly. “But you don’t understand!” she whispered, passionately. “I’ve got to go!”

“Not tonight,” he said again, and something in the way he said it made her finally huddle back in the corner of the carriage.

Block after block, mile after mile, they rode on in silence. She felt overpowered. And with submission she knew that it was Z. For the whole city was piled in between. Great buildings were in between, and thousands of men running to and fro on the streets; man, and all man had built up, were in between. And then Harold—Harold who had always seemed to count for so little, had come and taken her away.

Dully, wretchedly—knowing that her heart would ache far worse tomorrow than it did tonight—she wondered about things. Did things like rain and streetcars and wet feet and a sore throat determine life? Was it that way with other people, too? Did other people have barriers—whole cities full of them—piled in between? And then did the Harolds come and take them where they said they belonged? Were there not some people strong enough to go where they wanted to go?

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
The American Magazine, Oct 1909

The Man of Flesh and Blood

The elements without were not in harmony with the spirit which it was desired should be engendered within. By music, by gay decorations, by speeches from prominent men, the board in charge of the boys’ reformatory was striving to throw about this dedication of the new building an atmosphere of cheerfulness and good-will—an atmosphere vibrant with the kindness and generosity which emanated from the State, and the thankfulness and loyalty which it was felt should emanate from the boys.

Outside the world was sobbing. Some young trees which had been planted along the driveway of the reformatory grounds, and which were expected to grow up in the way they should go, were rocking back and forth in passionate insurrection. Fallen leaves were being spit viciously through the air. It was a sullen-looking landscape which Philip Grayson, he who was to be the last speaker of the afternoon, saw stretching itself down the hill, across the little valley, and up another little hill of that rolling prairie state. In his ears was the death wail of the summer. It seemed the spirit of out-of-doors was sending itself up in mournful, hopeless cries.

The speaker who had been delivering himself of pedantic encouragement about the open arms with which the world stood ready to receive the most degraded one, would that degraded one but come to the world in proper spirit, sat down amid perfunctory applause led by the officers and attendants of the institution, and the boys rose to sing. The brightening of their faces told that their work as performers was more to their liking than their position as auditors. They threw back their heads and waited with well-disciplined eagerness for the signal to begin. Then, with the strength and native music there are in some three hundred boys’ throats, there rolled out the words of the song of the State.

There were lips which opened only because they must, but as a whole they sang with the same heartiness, the same joy in singing, that he had heard a crowd of public-school boys put into the song only the week before. When the last word had died away it seemed to Philip Grayson that the sigh of the world without was giving voice to the sigh of the world within as the well-behaved crowd of boys sat down to resume their duties as auditors.

And then one of the most important of the professors from the State University was telling them about the kindness of the State: the State had provided for them this beautiful home; it gave them comfortable clothing and nutritious food; it furnished that fine gymnasium in which to train their bodies, books and teachers to train their minds; it provided those fitted to train their souls, to work against the unfortunate tendencies—the professor stumbled a little there—which had led to their coming. The State gave liberally, gladly, and in return it asked but one thing: that they come out into the world and make useful, upright citizens, citizens of which any State might be proud. Was that asking too much? the professor from the State University was saying.

The sobbing of the world without was growing more intense. Many pairs of eyes from among the auditors were straying out to where the summer lay dying. Did they know—those boys whom the State classed as unfortunates—that out of this death there would come again life? Or did they see but the darkness—the decay—of today?

The professor from the State University was putting the case very fairly. There were no flaws—seemingly—to be picked in his logic. The State had been kind; the boys were obligated to good citizenship. But the coldness!—comfortlessness!—of it all. The open arms of the world!—how mocking in its abstractness. What did it mean? Did it mean that they—the men who uttered the phrase so easily—would be willing to give these boys aid, friendship when they came out into the world? What would they say, those boys whose ears were filled with high-sounding, noncommittal phrases, if some man were to stand before them and say, “And so, fellows, when you get away from this place, and are ready to get your start in the world, just come around to my office and I’ll help you get a job?” At thought of it there came from Philip Grayson a queer, partly audible laugh, which caused those nearest him to look his way in surprise.

But he was all unconscious of their looks of inquiry, absorbed in the thoughts that crowded upon him. How far away the world—his kind of people—must seem to these boys of the State Reform School. The speeches they had heard, the training that had been given them, had taught them—unconsciously perhaps, but surely—to divide the world into two great classes: the lucky and the unlucky, those who made speeches and those who must listen, the so-called good and the so-called bad; perhaps—he smiled a little at his own cynicism—those who were caught and those who were not.

There came to him these words of a poet of whom he used to be fond:

In men whom men pronounce as ill,

I find so much of goodness still;

In men whom men pronounce divine,

I find so much of sin and blot;

I hesitate to draw the line

In men whom men pronounce divine,

Between the two, when God has not.

When God has not! He turned and looked out at the sullen sky, returning—as most men do at times—to that conception of his childhood that somewhere beyond the clouds was God. God! Did God care for the boys of the State Reformatory? Was that poet of the western mountains right when he said that God was not a drawer of lines, but a seer of the good that was in the so-called bad, and of the bad in the so-called good, and a lover of them both?

If that was God, it was not the God the boys of the reformatory had been taught to know. They had been told that God would forgive the wicked, but it had been made clear to them—if not in words, in implications—that it was they who were the wicked. And the so-called godly men, men of such exemplary character as had been chosen to address them that afternoon, had so much of the spirit of God that they, too, were willing to forgive, be tolerant, and—he looked out at the bending trees with a smile—disburse generalities about the open arms of the world.

What would they think—those three hundred speech-tired boys—if some man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and lay bare his own life—its weaknesses, its faults, perhaps its crimes—and tell them there was weakness and there was strength in every human being, and that the world-old struggle of life was to overcome one’s weakness with one’s strength.

The idea took strange hold on him. It seemed the method of the world—at any rate it had been the method of that afternoon—for the men who stood before their fellows with clean hands to plant themselves on the far side of a chasm of conventions, or narrow self-esteem, or easily won virtue, and cry to those beings who struggled on the other side of that chasm—to those human beings whose souls had never gone to school: “Look at us! Our hands are clean, our hearts are pure. See how beautiful it is to be good! Come ye, poor sinners, and be good also.” And the poor sinners, the untaught, birthmarked human souls, would look over at the self-acclaimed goodness they could see far across the chasm, and even though attracted to it (which, he grimly reflected, would not seem likely) the thing that was left with them was a sense of the width of the chasm.

He had a sense of needless waste, of unnecessary blight. He looked down at those three hundred faces and it was as if looking at human waste; and it was human stupidity, human complacency and cowardice kept those human beings human drift.

With what a smug self-satisfaction—under the mask of benevolence—the speakers of that afternoon had flaunted their virtue—their position! How condescendingly they had spoken of the home which we, the good, prepare for you, the bad, and what namby-pambyness there was, after all, in that sentiment which all of them had voiced—and now you must pay us back by being good!

Oh for a man of flesh and blood to stand up and tell how he himself had failed and suffered! For a man who could bridge that chasm with strong, broad, human understanding and human sympathies—a man who would stand among them, pulse-beat to pulse-beat and cry out, “I know! I understand! I fought it and I’ll help you fight it too!”

The sound of his own name broke the spell that was upon him. He looked to the center of the stage and saw that the professor from the State University had seated himself and that the superintendent of the institution was occupying the place of the speaker. And the superintendent was saying:

“We may esteem ourselves especially fortunate in having him with us this afternoon. He is one of the great men of the State, one of the men who by high living, by integrity and industry, has raised himself to a position of great honor among his fellow men. A great party—may I say the greatest of all parties?—has shown its unbounded confidence in him by giving him the nomination for the governorship of the State. No man in the State is held in higher esteem today than he. And so it is with special pleasure that I introduce to you that man of the future—Philip Grayson.”

The superintendent sat down then, and he himself—Philip Grayson—was standing in the place where the other speakers had stood. It was with a rush which almost swept away his outward show of calm that it came to him that he—candidate for the governorship—was well fitted to be that man of flesh and blood for whom he had sighed. That he himself was within grasp of an opportunity to get beneath the jackets and into the very hearts and souls of those boys, and make them feel that a man of sins and virtues, of weaknesses and strength, a man who had had much to conquer, and for whom the fight would never be finally won, was standing before them stripped of his coat of conventions and platitudes, and in nakedness of soul and sincerity of heart was talking to them as a man who understood.

Almost with the inception of the idea was born the consciousness of what it might cost. And as in answer to the silent, blunt question, Is it worth it? there looked up at him three hundred pairs of eyes—eyes behind which there was good as well as bad, eyes which had burned with the fatal rush of passion, and had burned, too, with the hot tears of remorse—eyes which had opened on a hostile world.

And then the eyes of Philip Grayson could not see the eyes which were before him, and he put up his hand to break the mist—little caring what the men upon the platform would think of him, little thinking what effect the words which were crowding into his heart would have upon his candidacy. But one thing was vital to him now: to bring upon that ugly chasm the leveling forces of a common humanity, and to make those boys who were of his clay feel that a being who had fallen and risen again, a fellow being for whom life would always mean a falling and a rising again, was standing before them, and—not as the embodiment of a distant goodness, not as a pattern, but as one among them, verily as man to man—was telling them a few things which his own life had taught him were true.

It was his very consecration which made it hard to begin. He was fearful of estranging them in the beginning, of putting between them and him that very thing he was determined there should not be.

“I have a strange feeling,” he said, with a winning little smile, “that if I were to open my heart today, just open it clear up the way I’d like to if I could, that you boys would look into it, and then jump back in a scared kind of way and cry, ‘Why—that’s me!’ You would be a little surprised—wouldn’t you?—if you could look back and see the kind of boy I was, and find I was much the kind of boy you are?

“Do you know what I think? I think hypocrisy is the worst thing in the world. I think it’s worse than stealing, or lying, or any of the other bad things you can name. And do you know where I think lots of the hypocrisy comes from? I think it comes from the so-called self-made men—from the real good men, the men who say ‘I haven’t got one bad thing charged up to my account.’

“Now the men out campaigning for me call me a self-made man. Your superintendent just now spoke of my integrity, of the confidence reposed in me, and all that. But do you know what is the honest truth? If I am any kind of a man worth mentioning, if I am deserving of any honor, any confidence, it is not because I was born with my heart filled with good and beautiful things, for I was not. It is because I was born with much in my heart that we call the bad, and because, after that bad had grown stronger and stronger through the years it was unchecked, and after it had brought me the great shock, the great sorrow of my life, I began then, when older than you boys are now, to see a little of that great truth which you can put briefly in these words: ‘There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.’ What I am trying to say is, that if I am worthy of anyone’s confidence today, it is because, having seen that truth, I have been able, through never ceasing trying, through slow conquering, to crowd out some of the bad and make room for a little of the good.

“You see,” he went on, three hundred pairs of eyes hard upon him now, “some of us are born to a harder struggle than others. There are people who would object to my saying that to you, even if I believed it. They would say you would make the fact of being born with much against which to struggle an excuse for being bad. But look here a minute; if you were born with a body not as strong as other boys’ bodies, if you couldn’t run as far, or jump as high, you wouldn’t be eternally saying, ‘I can’t be expected to do much; I wasn’t born right.’ Not a bit of it! You’d make it your business to get as strong as you could, and you wouldn’t make any parade of the fact that you weren’t as strong as you should be. We don’t like people who whine, whether it’s about weak bodies or weak souls.

“I’ve been sitting here this afternoon wondering what to say to you boys. I had intended telling some funny stories about things which happened to me when I was a boy. But for some reason a serious mood has come over me, and I don’t feel just like those stories now. I haven’t been thinking of the funny side of life in the last half-hour. I’ve been thinking of how much suffering I’ve endured since the days when I, too, was a boy.”

He paused then; and when he went on his voice tested to the utmost the silence of the room: “There is lots of sorrow in this old world. Maybe I’m on the wrong track, but as I see it today human beings are making a much harder thing of their existence than there is any need of. There are millions and millions of them, and year after year, generation after generation, they fight over the same old battles, live through the same old sorrows. Doesn’t it seem all wrong that after the battle has been fought a million times it can’t be made a little easier for those who still have it before them?

“If a farmer had gone over a bad road, and the next day saw another farmer about to start over the same road, wouldn’t he send him back? Doesn’t it seem too bad that in things which concern one’s whole life people can’t be as decent as they are about things which involve only an inconvenience? Doesn’t it seem that when we human beings have so much in common we might stand together a little better? I’ll tell you what’s the matter. Most of the people of this world are coated round and round with self-esteem, and they’re afraid to admit any understanding of the things which aren’t good. Suppose the farmer had thought it a disgrace to admit he had been over that road, and so had said: ‘From what I have read in books, and from what I have learned in a general way, I fancy that road isn’t good.’ Would the other farmer have gone back? I rather think he would have said he’d take his chances. But you see the farmer said he knew; and how did he know? Why, because he’d been over the road himself.”

As he paused again, looking at them, he saw it all with a clarifying simplicity. He himself knew life for a fine and beautiful thing. He had won for himself some of the satisfactions of understanding, certain rare delights of the open spirit. He wanted to free the spirits of these boys to whom he talked; wanted to show them that spirits could free themselves, indicate to them that self-control and self-development carried one to pleasures which sordid self-indulgences had no power to bestow. It was a question of getting the most from life. It was a matter of happiness.

It was thus he began, slowly, the telling of his life’s story:

“I was born with strange, wild passions in my heart. I don’t know where they came from; I only know they were there. I resented authority. If someone who had a right to dictate to me said, ‘Philip, do this,’ then Philip would immediately begin to think how much he would rather do the other thing. And,” he smiled a little, and some of the boys smiled with him in anticipation, “it was the other thing which Philip usually did.

“I didn’t go to a reform school, for the very good reason that there wasn’t any in the State where I lived.” Some of he boys smiled again, and he could hear the nervous coughing of one of the party managers sitting close to him. “I was what you would call a very bad boy. I didn’t mind anyone. I was defiant—insolent. I did bad things just because I knew they were bad, and—and I took a great deal of satisfaction out of it.”

The sighing of the world without was the only sound which vibrated through the room. “I say,” he went on, “that I got a form of satisfaction from it. I did not say I got happiness; there is a vast difference between a kind of momentary satisfaction and that thing—that most precious of all things—which we call happiness. Indeed, I was very far from happy. I had hours when I was so morose and miserable that I hated the whole world. And do you know what I thought? I thought there was no one in all the world who had the same kind of things surging up in his heart that I did. I thought there was no one else with whom it was as easy to be bad, or as hard to be good. I thought that no one understood. I thought that I was all alone.

“Did you ever feel like that? Did you ever feel that no one else knew anything about such feelings as you had? Did you ever feel that here was you, and there was the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world didn’t know anything about you, and was just generally down on you? Now that’s the very thing I want to talk away from you today. You’re not the only one. We’re all made of the same kind of stuff, and there’s none of us made of stuff that’s flawless. We all have a fight; some an easy one, and some a big one, and if you have formed the idea that there is a kind of dividing-line in the world, and that on the one side is the good, and on the other side the bad, why, all I can say is that you have a wrong notion of things.

“Well, I grew up to be a man, and because I hadn’t fought against any of the stormy things in my heart they kept growing stronger and stronger. I did lots of wild, ugly things, things of which I am bitterly ashamed. I went to another place, and I fell in with the kind of fellows you can imagine I felt at home with. I had been told when I was a boy that it was wrong to drink and gamble. I think that was the chief reason I took to drink and gambling.”

There was another cough, more pronounced this time, from the party manager, and the superintendent was twisting uneasily in his seat. It was the strangest speech that had ever been delivered at the boys’ reformatory. The boys were leaning forward—self-forgetful, intent. “One night I was playing cards with a crowd of my friends, and one of the men, the best friend I had, said something that made me mad. There was a revolver right there which one of the men had been showing us. Some kind of a demon got hold of me, and without so much as a thought I picked up that revolver and fired at my friend.”

The party manager gave way to an exclamation of horror, and the superintendent half rose from his seat. But before anyone could say a word Philip Grayson continued, looking at the half-frightened faces before him: “I suppose you wonder why I am not in the penitentiary. I had been drinking, and I missed my aim; and I was with friends, and it was hushed up.”

He rested his hand upon the table, and looked out at the sullen landscape. His voice was not steady as he went on: “It’s not an easy thing to talk about, boys. I never talked about it to anyone before in all my life. I’m not telling it now just to entertain you or to create a sensation. I’m telling it,” his voice grew tense in its earnestness, “because I believe that this world could be made a better and a sweeter place if those who have lived and suffered would not be afraid to reach out their hands and cry: ‘I know that road—it’s bad! I steered off to a better place, and I’ll help you steer off, too.’”

There was not one of the three hundred pairs of eyes but was riveted upon the speaker’s colorless face. The masks of sullenness and defiance had fallen from them. They were listening now—not because they must, but because into their hungry and thirsty souls was being poured the very sustenance for which—unknowingly—they had yearned.

“We sometimes hear people say,” resumed the candidate for Governor, “that they have lived through hell. If by that they mean they’ve lived through the deepest torments the human heart can know, then I can say that I, too, have lived through hell. What I suffered after I went home that night no one in this world will ever know. Words couldn’t tell it; it’s not the kind of thing words can come anywhere near. My whole life spread itself out before me; it was not a pleasant thing to look at. But at last, boys, out of the depths of my darkness, I began to get a little light. I began to get some understanding of the battle which it falls to the lot of some of us human beings to wage. There was good in me, you see, or I wouldn’t have cared like that, and it came to me then, all alone that terrible night, that it is the good which lies buried away somewhere in our hearts must fight out the bad. And so—all alone, boys—I began the battle of trying to get command of my own life. And do you know—this is the truth—it was with the beginning of that battle I got my first taste of happiness. There is no finer feeling in this world than the sense of coming into mastery of one’s self. It is like opening a door that has shut you in. Oh, you don’t do it all in a minute. This is no miracle I’m talking about. It’s a fight. But it’s a fight that can be won. It’s a fight that’s gloriously worth the winning. I’m not saying to you, ‘Be good and you’ll succeed.’ Maybe you won’t succeed. Life as we’ve arranged it for ourselves makes success a pretty tough proposition. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it pays to be a decent sort. You and I know about how much happiness there is in the other kind of thing. And there is happiness in feeling you’re doing what you can to develop what’s in you. Success or failure, it brings a sense of having done your part—that bully sense of having put up the best fight you could.”

He leaned upon the table then, as though very weary. “I don’t know, I am sure, what the people of my State will think of all this. Perhaps they won’t want a man for their Governor who once tried to kill another man. But,” he looked around at them with that smile of his which got straight to men’s hearts, “there’s only one of me, and there are three hundred of you, and how do I know but that in telling you of that stretch of bad road ahead I’ve made a dozen Governors this very afternoon!”

He looked from row to row of them, trying to think of some last word which would leave them with a sense of his sincerity. What he did say was: “And so, boys, when you get away from here, and go out into the world to get your start, if you find the arms of that world aren’t quite as wide open as you were told they would be, if there seems no place where you can get a hold, and you are saying to yourself, ‘It’s no use—I’ll not try,’ before you give up just remember there was one man who said he knew all about it, and give that one man a chance to show he meant what he said. So look me up, if luck goes all against you, and maybe I can give you a little lift.” He took a backward step, as though to resume his seat, and then he said, with a dry little smile which took any suggestion of heroics from what had gone before, “If I’m not at the State-house, you’ll find my name in the directory of the city where your program tells you I live.”

He sat down, and for a moment there was silence. Then, full-souled, heart-given, came the applause. It was not led by the attendants this time; it was the attendants who rose at last to stop it. And when the clapping of the hands had ceased, many of those hands were raised to eyes which had long been dry.

The exercises were drawn to a speedy close, and he found the party manager standing by his side. “It was very grand,” he sneered, “very high-sounding and heroic, but I suppose you know,” jerking his hand angrily toward a table where a reporter for the leading paper of the opposition was writing, “that you’ve given them the winning card.”

As he replied, in far-off tone, “I hope so,” the candidate for Governor was looking, not at the reporter who was sending out a new cry for the opposition, but into those faces aglow with the light of new understanding and newborn hopes. He stood there watching them filing out into the corridor, craning their necks to throw him a last look, and as he turned then and looked from the window it was to see that the storm had sobbed itself away, and that along the driveway of the reformatory grounds the young trees—unbroken and unhurt—were rearing their heads in the way they should go.

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, May 1904

How the Prince Saw America

They began work at seven-thirty, and at ten minutes past eight every hammer stopped. In the Senate Chamber and in the House, on the stairways and in the corridors, in every office from the Governor’s to the custodian’s they laid down their implements and rose to their feet. A long whistle had sounded through the building. There was magic in its note.

“What’s the matter with you fellows?” asked the attorney-general, swinging around in his chair.

“Strike,” declared one of the men, with becoming brevity.

“Strike of what?”

“Carpet-Tackers’ Union Number One,” replied the man, kindly gathering up a few tacks.

“Never heard of it.”

“Organized last night,” said the carpet-tacker, putting on his coat.

“Well I’ll——” he paused expressively, then inquired: “What’s your game?”

“Well, you see, boss, this executive council that runs the State-house has refused our demands.”

“What are your demands?”

“Double pay.”

“Double pay! Now how do you figure it out that you ought to have double pay?”

“Rush work. You see we were under oath, or pretty near that, to get every carpet in the State-house down by four o’clock this afternoon. Now you know yourself that rush work is hard on the nerves. Did you ever get rush work done at a laundry and not pay more for it? We was anxious as anybody to get the Capitol in shape for the big show this afternoon. But there’s reason in all things.”

“Yes,” agreed his auditor, “there is.”

The man looked at him a little doubtfully. “Our president—we elected Johnny McGuire president last night—went to the Governor this morning with our demands.”

The Governor’s fellow official smiled—he knew the Governor pretty well. “And he turned you down?”

The striker nodded. “But there’s an election next fall; maybe the turning down will be turned around.”

“Maybe so—you never can tell. I don’t know just what power Carpet-Tackers’ Union Number One will wield, but the Governor’s pretty solid, you know, with Labor as a whole.”

That was true, and went home. The striker rubbed his foot uncertainly across the floor, and took courage from its splinters. “Well, there’s one thing sure. When Prince Ludwig and his trainload of big guns show up at four o’clock this afternoon they’ll find bare floors, and pretty bum bare floors, on deck at this place.”

The attorney-general rubbed his own foot across the splintered, miserable boards. “They are pretty bum,” he reflected. “I wonder,” he added, as the man was halfway out of the door, “what Prince Ludwig will think of the American working-man when he arrives this afternoon?”

“Just about as much,” retorted the not-to-be-downed carpet-tacker, “as he does about American generosity. And he may think a few things,” he added weightily, “about American independence.”

“Oh, he’s sure to do that,” agreed the attorney-general.

He joined the crowd in the corridor. They were swarming out from all the offices, all talking of the one thing. “It was a straight case of hold-up,” declared the Governor’s secretary. “They supposed they had us on the hip. They were getting extra money as it was, but you see they just figured it out we’d pay anything rather than have these wretched floors for the reception this afternoon. They thought the Governor would argue the question, and then give in, or, at any rate, compromise. They never intended for one minute that the Prince should find bare floors here. And I rather think,” he concluded, “that they feel a little done up about it themselves.”

“What’s the situation?” asked a stranger within the gates.

“It’s like this,” a newspaper reporter told him; “about a month ago there was a fire here and the walls and carpets were pretty well knocked out with smoke and water. The carpets were mean old things anyway, so they voted new ones. And I want to tell you”—he swelled with pride—“that the new ones are beauties. The place’ll look great when we get ’em down. Well, you know Prince Ludwig and his crowd cross the State on their way to the coast, and of course they were invited to stop. Last week Billy Patton—he’s running the whole show—declined the invitation on account of lack of time, and then yesterday comes a telegram saying the Prince himself insisted on stopping. You know he’s keen about Indian dope—and we’ve got Indian traditions to burn. So Mr. Bill Patton had to make over his schedule to please the Prince, and of course we were all pretty tickled about it, for more reasons than one. The telegram didn’t come until five o’clock yesterday afternoon, but you know what a hummer the Governor is when he gets a start. He made up his mind this building should be put in shape within twenty-four hours. They engaged a whole lot of fellows to work on the carpets today. Then what did they do but get together last night—well, you know the rest. Pretty bum-looking old shack just now, isn’t it?” and the reporter looked around ruefully.

It was approaching the hour for the legislature to convene, and the members who were beginning to saunter in swelled the crowd—and the indignation—in the rotunda.

The Governor, meanwhile, had been trying to get other men, but Carpet-Tackers’ Union Number One had looked well to that. The biggest furniture dealer in the city was afraid of the plumbers. “Pipes burst last night,” he said, “and they may not do a thing for us if we get mixed up in this. Sorry—but I can’t let my customers get pneumonia.”

Another furniture man was afraid of the teamsters. For one reason or another no one was disposed to respond to the Macedonian cry, and when the Governor at last gave it up and walked out into the rotunda he was about as disturbed as he permitted himself to get. “It’s the idea of lying down,” he said. “I’d do anything—anything!—if I could only think what to do.”

A popular young member of the House overheard the remark. “By George, Governor,” he burst forth, after a minute’s deep study—“say—by Jove, I say, let’s do it ourselves!”

They all laughed, but the Governor’s laugh stopped suddenly, and he looked hard at the young man.

“Why not?” the young legislator went on. “It’s a big job, but there are a lot of us. We’ve all put down carpets at home; what are we afraid to tackle it here for?”

Again the others laughed, but the Governor did not. “Say, Weston,” he said, “I’d give a lot—I tell you I’d give a lot—if we just could!”

“Leave it to me!”—and he was lost in the crowd.

The Governor’s eyes followed him. He had always liked Harry Weston. He was the very sort to inspire people to do things. The Governor smiled knowingly as he noted the men Weston was approaching, and his different manner with the various ones. And then he had mounted a few steps of the stairway, and was standing there facing the crowd.

“Now look here,” he began, after silence had been obtained, “this isn’t a very formal meeting, but it’s a mighty important one. It’s a clear case of Carpet-Tackers’ Union against the State. What I want to know is—Is the State going to lie down?”

There were loud cries of “No!”—“Well, I should say not!”

“Well, then, see here. The Governor’s tried for other men and can’t get them. Now the next thing I want to know is—What’s the matter with us?”

They didn’t get it for a minute, and then everybody laughed.

“It’s no joke! You’ve all put down carpets at home; what’s the use of pretending you don’t know how to do it? Oh yes—I know, bigger building, and all that, but there are more of us, and the principle of carpet-tacking is the same, big building or little one. Now my scheme is this—Every fellow his own carpet-tacker! The Governor’s office puts down the Governor’s carpet; the Secretary’s office puts down the Secretary’s carpet; the Senate puts down the Senate carpet—and we’ll look after our little patch in the House!”

“But you’ve got more fellows than anybody else,” cried a member of the Senate.

“Right you are, and we’ll have an overflow meeting in the corridors and stairways. The House, as usual, stands ready to do her part,”—that brought a laugh for the Senators, and from them.

“Now get it out of your heads this is a joke. The carpets are here; the building is full of able-bodied men; the Prince is coming at four—by his own request, and the proposition is just this: Are we going to receive him in a barn or in a palace? Let’s hear what Senator Arnold thinks about it.”

That was a good way of getting away from the idea of its being a joke. Senator Arnold was past seventy. Slowly he extended his right arm and tested his muscle. “Not very much,” he said, “but enough to drive a tack or two.” That brought applause and they drew closer together, and the atmosphere warmed perceptibly. “I’ve fought for the State in more ways than one,”—Senator Arnold was a distinguished veteran of the Civil War—“and if I can serve her now by tacking down carpets, then it’s tacking down carpets I’m ready to go at. Just count on me for what little I’m worth.”

Someone started the cry for the Governor. “Prince Ludwig is being entertained all over the country in the most lavish manner,” he began, with his characteristic directness in stating a situation. “By his own request he is to visit our Capitol this afternoon. I must say that I, for one, want to be in shape for him. I don’t like to tell him that we had a labor complication and couldn’t get the carpets down. Speaking for myself, it is a great pleasure to inform you that the carpet in the Governor’s office will be in proper shape by four o’clock this afternoon.”

That settled it. Finally Harry Weston made himself heard sufficiently to suggest that when the House and Senate met at nine o’clock motions to adjourn be entertained. “And as to the rest of you fellows,” he cried, “I don’t see what’s to hinder your getting busy right now!”

There were Republicans and there were Democrats; there were friends and there were enemies; there were good, bad and—no, there were no indifferent. An unprecedented harmony of thought, a millennium-like unity of action was born out of that sturdy cry—Every man his own carpet-tacker! The Secretary of State always claimed that he drove the first tack, but during the remainder of his life the Superintendent of Public Instruction also contended hotly for that honor. The rivalry as to who would do the best job, and get it done most quickly, became intense. Early in the day Harry Weston made the rounds of the building and announced a fine of one hundred dollars for every wrinkle. There were pounded fingers and there were broken backs, but slowly, steadily and good-naturedly the State-house carpet was going down. It was a good deal bigger job than they had anticipated, but that only added zest to the undertaking. The news of how the State officials were employing themselves had spread throughout the city, and guards were stationed at every door to keep out people whose presence would work more harm than good. All assistance from women was courteously refused. “This is solemn business,” said the Governor, in response to a telephone from some of the fair sex, “and the introduction of the feminine element might throw about it a social atmosphere which would result in loss of time. And then some of the boys might feel called upon to put on their collars and coats.”

Stretch—stretch—stretch, and tack—tack—tack, all morning long it went on, for the State-house was large—oh, very large. There should have been a Boswell there to get the good things, for the novelty of the situation inspired wit even in minds where wit had never glowed before. Choice bits which at other times would fairly have gone on official record were now passed almost unnoticed, so great was the surfeit. Instead of men going out to lunch, lunch came in to them. Bridget Haggerty, who by reason of her long connection with the boarding-house across the street was a sort of unofficial official of the State, came over and made the coffee and sandwiches, all the while calling down blessings on the head of every mother’s son of them, and announcing in loud, firm tones that while all five of her boys belonged to the union she’d be after tellin’ them what she thought of this day’s work!

It was a United States Senator who did the awful trick, and, to be fair, the Senator did not think of it as an awful trick at all. He came over there in the middle of the morning to see the Governor, and in a few hurried words—it was no day for conversation—was told what was going on. It was while standing out in the corridor watching the perspiring dignitaries that the idea of his duty came to him, and one reason he was sure he was right was the way in which it came to him in the light of a duty. Here was America in undress uniform! Here was—not a thing arranged for show, but absolutely the thing itself! Prince Ludwig had come with a sincere desire to see America. Everyone knew that he was not seeing it at all. He would go back with memories of bands and flags and people all dressed up standing before him making polite speeches. But would he carry back one small whiff of the spirit of the country? Again Senator Bruner looked about him. The Speaker of the House was just beginning laying the stair carpet; a judge of the Supreme Court was contending hotly for a better hammer. “It’s an insult to expect any decent man to drive tacks with a hammer like this,” he was saying. Here were men—real, live men, men with individuality, spirit. When the Prince had come so far, wasn’t it too bad that he should not see anything but uniforms and cut glass and dress suits and other externals and nonessentials? Senator Bruner was a kind man; he was a good fellow; he was hospitable—patriotic. He decided now in favor of the Prince.

He had to hurry about it, for it was almost twelve then. One of the vice-presidents of the road lived there, and he was taken into confidence, and proved an able and eager ally. They located the special train bearing the Prince and ordered it stopped at the next station. The stop was made that Senator Patton might receive a long telegram from Senator Bruner. “I figure it like this,” the Senator told the vice-president. “They get to Boden at a quarter of one and were going to stop there an hour. Then they were going to stop a little while at Creyville. I’ve told Patton the situation, and that if he wants to do the right thing by the prince he’ll cut out those stops and rush right through here. That will bring him in—well, they could make it at a quarter of two. I’ve told him I’d square it with Boden and Creyville. Oh, he’ll do it all right.”

And even as he said so came the reply from Patton: “Too good to miss. Will rush through. Arrive before two. Have carriage at Water Street.”

“That’s great!” cried the Senator. “Trust Billy Patton for falling in with a good thing. And he’s right about missing the station crowd. Patton can always go you one better,” he admitted, grinningly.

They had luncheon together, and they were a good deal more like sophomores in college than like a United States Senator and a big railroad man. “You don’t think there’s any danger of their getting through too soon?” McVeigh kept asking, anxiously.

“Not a bit,” the Senator assured him. “They can’t possibly make it before three. We’ll come in just in time for the final skirmish. It’s going to be a jolly rush at the last.”

They laid their plans with skill worthy of their training. The State library building was across from the Capitol, and they were connected by tunnel. “I never saw before,” said the Senator, “what that tunnel was for, but I see now what a great thing it is. We’ll get him in at the west door of the library—we can drive right up to it, you know, and then we walk him through the tunnel. That’s a stone floor”—the Senator was chuckling with every sentence—“so I guess they won’t be carpeting it. There’s a little stairway running up from the tunnel—and say, we must telephone over and arrange about those keys. There’ll be a good deal of climbing, but the Prince is a good fellow, and won’t mind. It wouldn’t be safe to try the elevator, for Harry Weston would be in it taking somebody a bundle of tacks. The third floor is nothing but store rooms; we’ll not be disturbed up there, and we can look right down the rotunda and see the whole show. Of course we’ll be discovered in time; someone is sure to look up and see us, but we’ll fix it so they won’t see us before we’ve had our fun, and it strikes me, McVeigh, that for two old fellows like you and me we’ve put the thing through in pretty neat shape.”

It was a very small and unpretentious party which stepped from the special at Water Street a little before two. The Prince was wearing a long coat and an automobile cap and did not suggest anything at all formidable or unusual. “You’ve saved the country,” Senator Patton whispered in an aside. “He was getting bored. Never saw a fellow jolly up so in my life. Guess he was just spoiling for some fun. Said it would be really worth while to see somebody who wasn’t looking for him.”

Senator Bruner beamed. “That’s just the point. He’s caught my idea exactly.”

It went without a hitch. “I feel,” said the Prince, as they were hurrying him through the tunnel, “that I am a little boy who has run away from school. Only I have a terrible fear that at any minute some band may begin to play, and somebody may think of making a speech.”

They gave this son of a royal house a seat on a dry-goods box, so placed that he could command a good view, and yet be fairly secure. The final skirmish was on in earnest. Two State Senators—coatless, tieless, collarless, their faces dirty, their hair rumpled, were finishing the stair carpet. The chairman of the appropriations committee in the House was doing the stretching in a still uncarpeted bit of the corridor, and a member who had recently denounced the appropriations committee as a disgrace to the State was presiding at the hammer. They were doing most exquisitely harmonious team work. A railroad and anti-railroad member who fought every time they came within speaking distance of one another were now in an earnest and very chummy conference relative to a large wrinkle which had just been discovered on the first landing. Many men were standing around holding their backs, and many others were deeply absorbed in nursing their fingers. The doors of the offices were all open, and there was a general hauling in of furniture and hanging of pictures. Clumsy but well-meaning fingers were doing their best with “finishing touches.” The Prince grew so excited about it all that they had to keep urging him not to take too many chances of being seen.

“And I’ll tell you,” Senator Bruner was saying, “it isn’t only because I knew it would be funny that I wanted you to see it; but—well, you see America isn’t the real America when she has on her best clothes and is trying to show off. You haven’t seen anybody who hasn’t prepared for your coming, and that means you haven’t seen them as they are at all. Now here we are. This is us! You see that fellow hanging a picture down there? He’s president of the First National Bank. Came over a little while ago, got next to the situation, and stayed to help. And—say, this is good! Notice that red-headed fellow just getting up from his knees? Well, he’s president of the teamsters’ union—figured so big in a strike here last year. I call that pretty rich! He’s the fellow they are all so afraid of, but I guess he liked the idea of the boys doing it themselves, and just sneaked in and helped.—There’s the Governor. He’s a fine fellow. He wouldn’t be held up by anybody—not even to get ready for a Prince, but he’s worked like a Trojan all day to make things come his way. Yes sir—this is the sure-enough thing. Here you have the boys off dress parade. Not that we run away from our dignity every day, but—see what I mean?”

“I see,” replied the Prince, and he looked as though he really did.

“You know—say, dodge there! Move back! No—too late. The Governor’s caught us. Look at him!”

The Governor’s eyes had turned upward, and he had seen. He put his hands on his back—he couldn’t look up without doing that—and gave a long, steady stare. First, Senator Bruner waved; then Senator Patton waved; then Mr. McVeigh waved; and then the Prince waved. Other people were beginning to look up. “They’re all on,” laughed Patton, “let’s go down.”

At first they were disposed to think it pretty shabby treatment. “We worked all day to get in shape,” grumbled Harry Weston, “and then you go ring the curtain up on us before it’s time for our show to begin.”

But the Prince made them feel right about it. He had such a good time that they were forced to concede the move had been a success. And he said to the Governor as he was leaving: “I see that the only way to see America is to see it when America is not seeing you.”

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
The American Magazine, Jul 1906

The Last Sixty Minutes

“Nine—ten—” The old clock paused as if in dramatic appreciation of the situation, and then slowly, weightily, it gave the final stroke, “Eleven!”

The Governor swung his chair halfway round and looked the timepiece full in the face. Already the seconds had begun ticking off the last hour of his official life. On the stroke of twelve another man would be Governor of the State. He sat there watching the movement of the minute hand.

The sound of voices, some jovial, some argumentative, was borne to him through the open transom. People were beginning to gather in the corridors, and he could hear the usual disputes about tickets of admission to the inaugural.

His secretary came in just then with some letters. “Could you see Whitefield now?” he asked. “He’s waiting out here for you.”

The old man looked up wearily. “Oh, put him off, Charlie. Tell him you can talk to him about whatever it is he wants to know.”

The secretary had his hand on the knob, when the Governor added, “And, Charlie, keep everybody out, if you can. I’m—I’ve got a few private matters to go over.”

The younger man nodded and opened the door. He half closed it behind him, and then turned to say, “Except Francis. You’ll want to see him if he comes in, won’t you?”

He frowned and moved impatiently as he answered, curtly: “Oh, yes.”

Francis! Of course it never occurred to any of them that he could close the door on Francis. He drummed nervously on his desk, then suddenly reached down and, opening one of the drawers, tossed back a few things and drew out a newspaper. He unfolded this and spread it out on the desk. Running across the page was the big black line, “Real Governors of Some Western States,” and just below, the first of the series, and played up as the most glaring example of nominal and real in governorship, was a sketch of Harvey Francis.

He sat there looking at it, knowing full well that it would not contribute to his peace of mind. It did not make for placidity of spirit to be told at the end of things that he had, as a matter of fact, never been anybody at all. And the bitterest part of it was that, looking back on it now, getting it from the viewpoint of one stepping from it, he could see just how true was the statement: “Harvey Francis has been the real Governor of the State; John Morrison his mouthpiece and figurehead.”

He walked to the window and looked out over the January landscape. It may have been the snowy hills, as well as the thoughts weighing him down, that carried him back across the years to one snowy afternoon when he stood up in a little red schoolhouse and delivered an oration on “The Responsibilities of Statesmanship.” He smiled as the title came back to him, and yet—what had become of the spirit of that seventeen-year-old boy? He had meant it all then; he could remember the thrill with which he stood there that afternoon long before and poured out his sentiments regarding the sacredness of public trusts. What was it had kept him, when his chance came, from working out in his life the things he had so fervently poured into his schoolboy oration?

Someone was tapping at the door. It was an easy, confident tap, and there was a good deal of reflex action in the Governor’s “Come in.”

“Indulging in a little meditation?”

The Governor frowned at the way Francis said it, and the latter went on, easily: “Just came from a row with Dorman. Everybody is holding him up for tickets, and he—poor young fool—looks as though he wanted to jump in the river. Takes things tremendously to heart—Dorman does.”

He lighted a cigar, smiling quietly over that youthful quality of Dorman’s. “Well,” he went on, leaning back in his chair and looking about the room, “I thought I’d look in on you for a minute. You see I’ll not have the entree to the Governor’s office by afternoon.” He laughed, the easy, good-humored laugh of one too sophisticated to spend emotion uselessly.

It was he who fell into meditation then, and the Governor sat looking at him; a paragraph from the newspaper came back to him: “Harvey Francis is the most dangerous type of boss politician. His is not the crude and vulgar method that asks a man what his vote is worth. He deals gently and tenderly with consciences. He knows how to get a man without fatally injuring that man’s self-respect.”

The Governor’s own experience bore out the summary. When elected to office as State Senator he had cherished old-fashioned ideas of serving his constituents and doing his duty. But the very first week Francis had asked one of those little favors of him, and, wishing to show his appreciation of support given him in his election, he had granted it. Then various courtesies were shown him; he was let in on a “deal,” and almost before he realized it, it seemed definitely understood that he was a “Francis man.”

Francis roused himself and murmured: “Fools!—amateurs.”

“Leyman?” ventured the Governor.

“Leyman and all of his crowd!”

“And yet,” the Governor could not resist, “in another hour this same fool will be Governor of the State. The fool seems to have won.”

Francis rose, impatiently. “For the moment. It won’t be lasting. In any profession, fools and amateurs may win single victories. They can’t keep it up. They don’t know how. Oh, no,” he insisted, cheerfully, “Leyman will never be reelected. Fact is, I’m counting on this contract business we’ve saved up for him getting in good work.” He was moving toward the door. “Well,” he concluded, with a curious little laugh, “see you upstairs.”

The Governor looked at the clock. It pointed now to twenty-five minutes past eleven. The last hour was going fast. In a very short time he must join the party in the anteroom of the House. But weariness had come over him. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

He was close upon seventy, and today looked even older than his years. It was not a vicious face, but it was not a strong one. People who wanted to say nice things of the Governor called him pleasant or genial or kindly. Even the men in the appointive offices did not venture to say he had much force.

He felt it today as he never had before. He had left no mark; he had done nothing, stood for nothing. Never once had his personality made itself felt. He had signed the documents; Harvey Francis had always “suggested”—the term was that man’s own—the course to be pursued. And the “suggestions” had ever dictated the policy that would throw the most of influence or money to that splendidly organized machine that Francis controlled.

With an effort he shook himself free from his cheerless retrospect. There was a thing or two he wanted to get from his desk, and his time was growing very short. He found what he wanted, and then, just as he was about to close the drawer, his eye fell on a large yellow envelope.

He closed the drawer; but only to reopen it, take out the envelope and remove the documents it contained; and then one by one he spread them out before him on the desk.

He sat there looking down at them, wondering whether a man had ever stepped into office with as many pitfalls laid for him. During the last month they had been busy about the old State-house setting traps for the new Governor. The “machine” was especially jubilant over those contracts the Governor now had spread out before him. The convict labor question was being fought out in the State just then—organized labor demanding its repeal; country taxpayers insisting that it be maintained. Under the system the penitentiary had become self-supporting. In November the contracts had come up for renewal; but on the request of Harvey Francis the matter had been put off from time to time, and still remained open. Just the week before, Francis had put it to the Governor something like this:

“Don’t sign those contracts. We can give some reason for holding them off, and save them up for Leyman. Then we can see that the question is agitated, and whatever he does about it is going to prove a bad thing for him. If he doesn’t sign, he’s in bad with the country fellows, the men who elected him. Don’t you see? At the end of his administration the penitentiary, under you self-sustaining, will have cost them a pretty penny. We’ve got him right square!”

The clock was close to twenty minutes of twelve, and he concluded that he would go out and join some of his friends he could hear in the other room. It would never do for him to go upstairs with a long, serious face. He had had his day, and now Leyman was to have his, and if the new Governor did better than the old one, then so much the better for the State. As for the contracts, Leyman surely must understand that there was a good deal of rough sailing on political waters.

But it was not easy to leave the room. Walking to the window he again stood there looking out across the snow, and once more he went back now at the end of things to that day in the little red schoolhouse which stood out as the beginning.

He was called back from that dreaming by the sight of three men coming up the hill. He smiled faintly in anticipation of the things Francis and the rest of them would say about the new Governor’s arriving on foot. Leyman had requested that the inaugural parade be done away with—but one would suppose he would at least dignify the occasion by arriving in a carriage. Francis would see that the opposing papers handled it as a grand-stand play to the country constituents.

And then, forgetful of Francis, and of the approaching ceremony, the old man stood there by the window watching the young man who was coming up to take his place. How firmly the new Governor walked! With what confidence he looked ahead at the State-house. The Governor—not considering the inconsistency therein—felt a thrill of real pride in thought of the State’s possessing a man like that.

Standing though he did for the things pitted against him, down in his heart John Morrison had all along cherished a strong admiration for that young man who, as District Attorney of the State’s metropolis, had aroused the whole country by his fearlessness and unquestionable sincerity. Many a day he had sat in that same office reading what the young District Attorney was doing in the city close by—the fight he was making almost single-handed against corruption, how he was striking in the high places fast and hard as in the low, the opposition, threats, and time after time there had been that same secret thrill at thought of there being a man like that. And when the people of the State, convinced that here was one man who would serve them, began urging the District Attorney for chief executive, Governor Morrison, linked with the opposing forces, doing all he could to bring about Leyman’s defeat, never lost that secret feeling for the young man, who, unbacked by any organization, struck blow after blow at the machine that had so long dominated the State, winning in the end that almost incomprehensible victory.

The new Governor had passed from sight, and a moment later his voice came to the ear of the lonely man in the executive office. Some friends had stopped him just outside the Governor’s door with a laughing “Here’s hoping you’ll do as much for us in the new office as you did in the old,” and the new Governor replied, buoyantly: “Oh, but I’m going to do a great deal more!”

The man within the office smiled a little wistfully and with a sigh sat down before his desk. The clock now pointed to thirteen minutes of twelve; they would be asking for him upstairs. There were some scraps of paper on his desk and he threw them into the waste-basket, murmuring: “I can at least give him a clean desk.”

He pushed his chair back sharply. A clean desk! The phrase opened to deeper meanings…. Why not clean it up in earnest? Why not give him a square deal—a real chance? Why not sign the contracts?

Again he looked at the clock—not yet ten minutes of twelve. For ten minutes more he was Governor of the State! Ten minutes of real governorship! Might it not make up a little, both to his own soul and to the world, for the years he had weakly served as another man’s puppet? The consciousness that he could do it, that it was not within the power of any man to stop him, was intoxicating. Why not break the chains now at the last, and just before the end taste the joy of freedom?

He took up his pen and reached for the inkwell. With trembling, excited fingers he unfolded the contracts. He dipped his pen into the ink; he even brought it down on the paper; and then the tension broke. He sank back in his chair, a frightened, broken old man.

“Oh, no,” he whispered; “no, not now. It’s—” his head went lower and lower until at last it rested on the desk—“too late.”

When he raised his head and grew more steady, it was only to see the soundness of his conclusion. He had not the right now in the final hour to buy for himself a little of glory. It would only be a form of self-indulgence. They would call it, and perhaps rightly, hush money to his conscience. They would say he went back on them only when he was through with them. Oh, no, there would be no more strength in it than in the average deathbed repentance. He would at least step out with consistency.

He folded the contracts and put them back into the envelope. The minute hand now pointed to seven minutes to twelve. Someone was tapping at the door, and the secretary appeared to say they were waiting for him upstairs. He replied that he would be there in a minute, hoping that his voice did not sound as strange to the other man as it had to himself.

Slowly he walked to the door leading into the corridor. This, then, was indeed the end; this the final stepping down from office! After years of what they called public service, he was leaving it all now with a sense of defeat and humiliation. A lump was in the old man’s throat; his eyes were blurred. “But you, Frank Leyman,” he whispered passionately, turning as if for comfort to the other man, “it will be different with you! They’ll not get you—not you!”

It lifted him then as a great wave—this passionate exultation that here was one man whom corruption could not claim as her own. Here was one human soul not to be had for a price! There flitted before him again a picture of that seventeen-year-old boy in the little red schoolhouse, and close upon it came the picture of this other young man against whom all powers of corruption had been turned in vain. With the one it had been the emotional luxury of a sentiment, a thing from life’s actualities apart; with the other it was a force that dominated all things else, a force over which circumstances and design could not prevail. “I know all about it,” he was saying. “I know about it all! I know how easy it is to fall! I know how fine it is to stand!”

His sense of disappointment in his own empty, besmirched career was almost submerged then as he projected himself on into the career of this other man who within the hour would come there in his stead. How glorious was his opportunity, how limitless his possibilities, and how great to his own soul the satisfaction the years would bring of having done his best!

It had all changed now. That passionate longing to vindicate himself, add one thing honorable and fine to his own record, had altogether left him, and with the new mood came new insight and what had been an impulse centered to a purpose.

It pointed to three minutes to twelve as he walked over to his desk, unfolded the contracts, and one by one affixed his signature. In a dim way he was conscious of how the interpretation of his first motive would be put upon it, how they would call him traitor and coward; but that mattered little. The very fact that the man for whom he was doing it would never see it as it was brought him no pang. And when he had carefully blotted the papers, affixed the seal and put them away, there was in his heart the clean, sweet joy of a child because he had been able to do this for a man in whom he believed.

The band was playing the opening strains as he closed the door behind him and started upstairs.

Lifted Masks (1912)

“Out There”

The old man held the picture up before him and surveyed it with admiring but disapproving eye. “No one that comes along this way’ll have the price for it,” he grumbled. “It’ll just set here ’til doomsday.”

It did seem that the picture failed to fit in with the rest of the shop. A persuasive young fellow who claimed he was closing out his stock let the old man have it for what he called a song. It was only a little out-of-the-way store which subsisted chiefly on the framing of pictures. The old man looked around at his views of the city, his pictures of cats and dogs and gorgeous young women, his flaming bits of landscape. “Don’t belong in here,” he fumed, “any more ’an I belong in Congress.”

And yet the old man was secretly proud of his acquisition. He seemed all at once to be lifted from his realm of petty tradesman to that of patron of art. There was a hidden dignity in his scowling as he shuffled about pondering the least ridiculous place for the picture.

It is not fair to the picture to try repainting it in words, for words reduce it to a lithograph. It was a bit of a pine forest, through which there exuberantly rushed an unspoiled little mountain stream. Chromos and works of art may deal with kindred subjects. There is just that one difference of dealing with them differently. “It ain’t what you see, so much as what you can guess is there,” was the thought it brought to the old man who was dusting it. “Now this frame ain’t three feet long, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if that timber kept right on for a hundred miles. I kind of suspect it’s on a mountain—looks cool enough in there to be on a mountain. Wish I was there. Bet they never see no such days as we do in Chicago. Looks as though a man might call his soul his own—out there.”

He began removing some views of Lincoln Park and some corpulent Cupids in order to make room in the window for the new picture. When he went outside to look at it he shook his head severely and hastened in to take away some ardent young men and women, some fruit and flowers and fish which he had left thinking they might “set it off.” It was evident that the new picture did not need to be “set off.” “And anyway,” he told himself, in vindication of entrusting all his goods to one bottom, “I might as well take them out, for the new one makes them look so kind of sick that no one would have them, anyhow.” Then he went back to mounting views with the serenity of one who stands for the finer things.

His clamorous little clock pointed to a quarter of six when he finally came back to the front of the store. It was time to begin closing up for the night, but for the minute he stood there watching the crowd of workers coming from the business district not far away over to the boarding-house region, a little to the west. He watched them as they came by in twos and threes and fours: noisy people and worn-out people, people hilarious and people sullen, the gaiety and the weariness, the acceptance and the rebellion of humanity—he saw it pass. “As if any of them could buy it,” he pronounced severely, adding, contemptuously, “or wanted to.”

The girl was coming along by herself. He watched her as she crossed to his side of the street, thinking it was too bad for a poor girl to be as tired as that. She was dressed like many of the rest of them, and yet she looked different—like the picture and the chromo. She turned an indifferent glance toward the window, and then suddenly she stood there very still, and everything about her seemed to change. “For all the world,” he told himself afterward, “as if she’d found a long-lost friend, and was ’fraid to speak for fear it was too good to be true.”

She did seem afraid to speak—afraid to believe. For a minute she stood there right in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the picture. And when she came toward the window it was less as if coming than as if drawn. What she really seemed to want to do was to edge away; yet she came closer, as close as she could, her eyes never leaving the picture, and then fear, or awe, or whatever it was made her look so queer gave way to wonder—that wondering which is ready to open the door to delight. She looked up and down the street as one rubbing one’s eyes to make sure of a thing, and then it all gave way to a joy which lighted her pale little face like—“Well, like nothing I ever saw before,” was all the old man could say of it. “Why, she’d never know if the whole fire department was to run right up here on the sidewalk,” he gloated. Just then she drew herself up for a long breath. “See?” he chuckled, delightedly. “She knows it has a smell!” She looked toward the door, but shook her head. “Knows she can’t pay the price,” he interpreted her. Then, she stepped back and looked at the number above the door. “Coming again,” he made of that; “ain’t going to run no chances of losing the place.” And then for a long time she stood there before the picture, so deeply and so strangely quiet that he could not translate her. “I can’t just get the run of it,” was his bewildered conclusion. “I don’t see why it should make anybody act like that.” And yet he must have understood more than he knew, for suddenly he was seeing her through a blur of tears.

As he began shutting up for the night he was so excited about the way she looked when she finally turned away that it never occurred to him to be depressed about her inability to pay the price.

He kept thinking of her, wondering about her, during the next day. At a little before six he took up his station near the front window. Once more the current of workers flowed by. “I’m an old fool,” he told himself, irritated at the wait; “as if it makes any difference whether she comes or not—when she can’t buy it, anyhow. She’s just as big a fool as I am—liking it when she can’t have it, only I’m the biggest fool of all—caring whether she likes it or not.” But just then the girl passed quickly by a crowd of girls who were ahead of her and came hurrying across the street. She was walking fast, and looked excited and anxious. “Afraid it might be gone,” he said—adding, grimly: “Needn’t worry much about that.”

She came up to the picture as some people would enter a church. And yet the joy which flooded her face is not well known to churches. “I’ll tell you what it’s like”—the old man’s thoughts stumbling right into the heart of it—“it’s like someone that’s been wandering round in a desert country all of a sudden coming on a spring. She’s thirsty—she’s drinking it in—she can’t get enough of it. It’s—it’s the water of life to her!” And then, ashamed of saying a thing that sounded as if it were out of a poem, he shook his shoulders roughly as if to shake off a piece of sentiment unbecoming his age and sex.

He went to the door and watched her as she passed away. “I’ll bet she’d never tip the scale to one hundred pounds,” he decided. “Looks like a good wind could blow her away.” She stooped a little and just as she passed from sight he saw that she was coughing.

Then the old man made what he prided himself was a great deduction. “She’s been there, and she wants to go back. This kind of takes her back for a minute, and when she gets the breath of it she ain’t so homesick.”

All through those July days he watched each night for the frail-looking little girl who liked the picture of the pines. She would always come hurrying across the street in the same eager way, an eagerness close to the feverish. But the tenseness would always relax as she saw the picture. “She never looks quite so wilted down when she goes away as she does when she comes,” the old man saw. “Upon my soul, I believe she really goes there. It’s—oh, Lord”—irritated at getting beyond his depth—“I don’t know!”

He never called it anything now but “Her Picture.” One day at just ten minutes of six he took it out of the window. “Seems kind of mean,” he admitted, “but I just want to find out how much she does think of it.”

And when he found out he told himself that of all the mean men God had ever let live, he was the meanest. The girl came along in the usual hurried, anxious fashion. And when she saw the empty window he thought for a minute she was going to sink right down there on the sidewalk. Everything about her seemed to give way—as if something from which she had been drawing had been taken from her. The luminousness gone from her face, there were cruel revelations. “Blast my soul!” the old man muttered angrily, not far from tearfully. She looked up and down the noisy, dirty, parched street, then back to the empty window. For a minute she just stood there—that was the worst minute of all. And then—accepting—she turned and walked slowly away, walked as the too-weary and the too-often-disappointed walk.

It was with not wholly steady hand that the old man hastened to replace the picture, all the while telling himself what he thought of himself: more low-down than the cat who plays with the mouse, meaner than the man who’d take the bone from the dog, less to be loved than the man who would kick over the child’s play-house, only to be compared with the brute who would snatch the cup of water from the dying—such were the verdicts he pronounced. He thought perhaps she would come back, and stayed there until almost seven, waiting for her, though pretending it was necessary that he take down and then put up again the front curtains. All the next day he was restless and irritable. As if to make up to the girl for the contemptible trick he had played he spent a whole hour that afternoon arranging a tapestry background for the picture. “She’ll think,” he told himself, “that this was why it was out, and won’t be worried about its being gone again. This will just be a little sign to her that it’s here to stay.”

He began his watch that night at half-past five. After fifteen minutes the thought came to him that she might be so disheartened she would go home by another street. He became so gloomily certain she would do this that he was jubilant when he finally saw her coming along on the other side—coming purposelessly, shorn of that eagerness which had always been able, for the moment, to vanquish the tiredness. But when she came to the place where she always crossed the street she only stood there an instant and then, a little more slowly, a little more droopingly, walked on. She had given up! She was not coming over!

But she did come. After she had gone a few steps she hesitated again and this time started across the street. “That’s right,” approved the old man, “never give up the ship!”

She passed the store as if she were not going to look in; she seemed trying not to look, but her head turned—and she saw the picture. First her body seemed to stiffen, and then something—he couldn’t make out whether or not it was a sob—shook her, and as she came toward the picture on her white, tired face were the tears.

“Don’t you worry,” he murmured affectionately to her retreating form, “it won’t never be gone again.”

The very next week he was put to the test. The kind of lady who did not often pass along that street entered the shop and asked to see the picture in the window. He looked at her suspiciously. Then he frowned at her, as he stood there, fumbling. Her picture! What would she think? What would she do? Then a crafty smile stole over his face and he walked to the window and got the picture. “The price of this picture, madame,” he said, haughtily, “is forty dollars,”—adding to himself, “That’ll fix her.”

But the lady made no comment, and stood there holding the picture up before her. “I will take it,” she said, quietly.

He stared at her stupidly. Forty dollars! Then it must be that the picture was better than the young man had known. “Will you wrap it, please?” she asked. “I will take it with me.”

He turned to the back of the store. Forty dollars!—he kept repeating it in dazed fashion. And they had raised the rent on him, and the papers said coal would be high that winter—those facts seemed to have something to do with forty dollars. Forty dollars!—it was hammering at him, overwhelmed him, too big a sum to contend with. With long, grim stroke he tore off the wrapping paper; stoically he began folding it. But something was the matter. The paper would not go on right. Three times he took it off, and each time he could not help looking down at the picture of the pines. And each time the forest seemed to open a little farther; each time it seemed bigger—bigger even than forty dollars; it seemed as if it knew things—things more important than even coal and rent. And then the strangest thing of all happened: the forest faded away into its own shadowy distances, and in its place was a noisy, crowded, sun-baked street, and across the street was eagerly hurrying an anxious little girl, a frail little wisp of a girl who probably should not be crossing hot, noisy streets at all—then a light in tired eyes, a smile upon a worn face, relief as from a cooling breeze—and anyway, suddenly furious at the lady, furious at himself—“he’d be gol-darned if it wasn’t her picture!”

He walked firmly back to the front of the store.

“I forgot at first,” he said, brusquely, “that this picture belongs to someone else.”

The lady looked at him in astonishment. “I do not understand,” she said.

“There’s nothing to understand,” he fairly shouted, “except that it belongs to someone else!”

She turned away, but came back to him. “I will give you fifty dollars for it,” she said, in her quiet way.

“Madame,” he thundered at her, “you can stand there and offer me five hundred dollars, and I’m here to tell you that this picture is not for sale. Do you hear?”

“I certainly do,” replied the lady, and walked from the store.

He was a long time in cooling off. “I tell you,” he stormed to a very blue Lake Michigan he was putting into a frame, “it’s hers—it’s hers—and anybody that comes along here with any nonsense is just going to hear from me!”

In the days which followed he often thought to go out and speak to her, but perhaps the old man had a restraining sense of values. He planned someday to go out and tell her the picture was hers, but that seemed a silly thing to tell her, for surely she knew it anyway. He worried a good deal about her cough, which seemed to be getting worse, and he had it all figured out that when cold weather came he would have her come in where it was warm, and take her look in there. He felt that he knew all about her, and though he did not know her name, though he had never heard her speak one word, in some ways he felt closer to her than to anyone else in the world.

Yet if the old man had known just how it was with the girl it is altogether unlikely that he would have understood. It would have mystified and disappointed him had he known that she had never seen a pine forest or a mountain in her life. Indeed there was a great deal about the little girl which the old man, together with almost all the rest of the world, would not have understood.

Not that the surface facts about her were either incomprehensible or interesting. The tale of her existence would sound much like that of a hundred other girls in the same city. Inquiry about her would have developed the facts that she did typewriting for a land company, that she did not seem to have any people, and lived at a big boarding-house. At the boarding-house they would have told you that she was a nice little thing, quiet as a mouse, and that it was too bad she had to work, for she seemed more than half sick. There the story would have rested, and the real things about her would not have been touched.

She worked for the Chicago branch of a big Northwestern land company. They dealt in the lands of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. The things she sat at her typewriter and wrote were of the wonders of that great country: the great timber lands, the valleys and hills, towering mountain peaks and rushing rivers. She typewrote “literature” telling how there was a chance for every man out there, how the big, exhaustless land was eager to yield of its store to all who would come and seek. Day after day she wrote those things telling how the sick were made well and the poor were made rich, how it was a land of indescribable wonders which the feeble pen could not hope to portray.

And the girl with whom almost everything in life had gone wrong came to think of Out There as the place where everything was right. It was the far country where there was no weariness nor loneliness, the land where one did not grow tired, where one never woke up in the morning too tired to get up, where no one went to bed at night too tired to go to sleep. The streetcars did not ring their gongs so loud Out There, the newsboys had pleasant voices, and there were no elevated trains. It was a pure, high land which knew no smoke nor dirt, a land where great silences drew one to the heart of peace, where the people in the next room did not come in and bang things around late at night. Out There was a wide land where buildings were far apart and streets were not crowded. Even the horses did not grow tired Out There. Oh, it was a land where dreams came true—a beautiful land where no one ate prunes, where the gravy was never greasy and the potatoes never burned. It was a land of flowers and birds and lovely people—a land of wealth and health and many smiles.

Her imagination made use of it all. She knew how men were reclaiming the desert of Idaho, of the tremendous undeveloped wealth of what had been an almost undiscovered State. She thrilled to the poetry of irrigation. Often when hot and tired and dusty her fancy would follow the little mountain stream from its birth way up in the clouds, her imagination rushing with it through sweetening forest and tumbling with it down cooling rocks until finally strong, bold, wise men guided it to the desert which had yearned for it through all the years, and the grateful desert smiled rich smiles of grain and flowers. She could make it more like a story than any story in any book. And she could always breathe better in thinking of the pine forests of Oregon. There was something liberating—expanding—in just the thought of them. She dreamed cooling dreams about them, dreams of their reaching farther than one’s fancy could reach, big widening dreams of their standing there serene in the consciousness of their own immensity. They stood to her for a beautiful idea: the idea of space, of room—room for everybody, and then much more room! Even one’s understanding grew big as one turned to them.

And she loved to listen for the Pacific Ocean, coming from incomprehensible distances and unknowable countries, now rushing with passion to the wild coast of Oregon, again stealing into the Washington harbors. She loved to address the letters to Portland, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma—all those pulsing, vivid cities of a country of big chances and big beauty. She loved to picture Seattle, a city builded upon many hills—how wonderful that a city should be builded upon hills!—in Chicago there was nothing that could possibly be thought of as a hill. And she loved to shut her eyes and let the great mountain peak grow in the distance, as one could see it from Portland—how noble a thing to see a mountain peak from a city! Sometimes she trembled before that consciousness of a mountain. Often when so tired she scarcely knew what she was doing she found she was saying her prayers to a mountain. Indeed, Out There seemed the place to send one’s prayers—for was it not a place where prayers were answered?

During that summer when the West was overrun with tourists who grumbled about everything from the crowded trains to the way in which sea-foods were served, this little girl sat in one of the hot office buildings of Chicago and across the stretch of miles drew to herself the spirit of that country of coming days. Thousands rode in Pullman cars along the banks of the Columbia—saw, and felt not; she sat before her typewriter in a close, noisy room and heard the cooling rush of waters and got the freeing message of the pines. In some rare moments when she rose from the things about her to the things of which she dreamed she possessed the whole great land, and as the sultry days sapped of her meager strength, and the bending over the typewriter cramped an already too cramped chest she clung with a more and more passionate tenacity to the bigness and the beauty and rightness of things Out There. And it was so kind to her—that land of deep breaths and restoring breezes. It never shut her out. It always kept itself bigger and more wonderful than one could ever hope to fancy it.

And the night she found the picture she knew that it was all really so. That was why it was so momentous a night. The picture was a dream visualized—a dreamer vindicated. They had pictures in the office, of course—some pictures trying to tell of that very kind of a place. But those were just pictures; this proved it, told what it meant. It told that she had been right, and there was joy in knowing that she had known. She clung to the picture as one would to that which proves as real all one has long held dear, loved it as the dreamer loves that which secures him in his dreaming.

She came to think of it as her own abiding place. Often when too tired for long wings of fancy she would just sink down in the deep, cool shadows of the pines, beside the little river which one knew so well was the gift of distant snows. It rested her most of all; it quieted her.

She smiled sometimes to think how no one in the office knew about it, wondered what they would think if they knew. Often she would find someone in the office looking at her strangely. She used to wonder about it a little.

And then one day Mr. Osborne sent for her to come into his office. He acted so queerly. As she came in and sat down near his desk he swung his chair around and sat there with his back to her. After that he got up and walked to the window.

The head stenographer had complained of her cough. She said she did not think it right either to the girl or to the rest of them for her to be there. She said she hated to speak of it, but could not stand it any longer. That had been the week before, and ever since he had been putting it off. But now he could put it off no longer; the head stenographer was valuable, and besides he knew that she was right.

And so he told her—this was all he could think of just then—that they were contemplating some changes in the office, and for a time would have less desk room. If he sent her machine to her home, would she be willing to do her work there for a while? Hers was the kind of work that could be done at home.

She was sorry, for she wondered if she could find a place in her room for the typewriter, and it did not seem there would be air enough there to last her all day long. And she had grown fond of the office, with its “literature” and pictures and maps and the men who had just come from Out There coming in every once in a while. It was a bond—a place to touch realities. But of course there was nothing for her to do but comply, and she made no comment on the arrangement.

She pushed her chair back and rose to go. “Are you alone in the world?” he asked abruptly then,

“Yes; I—oh yes.”

It was too much for him. “How would you like,” he asked recklessly, “to have me get you transportation out West?”

She sank back in her chair. Every particle of color had left her face. Her deep eyes had grown almost wild. “Oh,” she gasped—“you can’t mean—you don’t think—”

“You wouldn’t want to go?”

“I mean”—it was but a whisper—“it would be—too wonderful.”

“You would like it then?”

She only nodded; but her lips were parted, her eyes glowing. He wondered why he had never seen before how different looking and—yes, beautiful, in a strange kind of way—she was.

“I see you have a cold,” he said, “and I think you would get along better out there. I’ll see if I can fix up the transportation, and get something with our people in one of the towns that would be good for you.”

She leaned back in her chair and sat there smiling at him. Something in the smile made him say, abruptly: “That’s all; you may go now, and I’ll send a boy with your machine.”

She walked through the streets as one who had already found another country. More than one turned to look at her. She reached her room at last and pulling her one little chair up to the window sat staring out across the alley at the brick wall across from her. But she was not seeing a narrow alley and a high brick wall. She was seeing rushing rivers and mighty forests and towering peaks. She leaned back in her chair—an indulgence less luxurious than it sounds, as the chair only reached the middle of her back—and looked out at the high brick wall and saw a snow-clad range of hills. But she was tired; this tremendous idea was too much for her; the very wonder of it was exhausting. She lay down on her bed—radiant, but languid. Soon she heard a rush of waters. At first it was only someone filling the bathtub, but after a while it was the little stream which flowed through her forest. And then she was not lying on a lumpy bed; she was sinking down under pine trees—all so sweet and still and cool. But an awful thing was happening!—the forest was on fire—it was choking and burning her! She awoke to find smoke from the building opposite pouring into her room; flies were buzzing about, and her face and hands were hot.

She did little work in the next few days. It was hard to go on with the same work when waiting for a thing which was to make over one’s whole life. The stress of dreams changing to hopes caused a great languor to come over her. And her chair was not right for her typewriter, and the smoke came in all the time. Strangely enough Out There seemed farther away. Sometimes she could not go there at all; she supposed it was because she was really going.

At the close of the week she went to the office with her work. She was weak with excitement as she stepped into the elevator. Would Mr. Osborne have the transportation for her? Would he tell her when she was to go?

But she did not see Mr. Osborne at all. When she asked for him the clerk just replied carelessly that he was not there. She was going to ask if he had left any message for her, but the telephone rang then and the man to whom she was talking turned away. Someone was sitting at her old desk, and they did not seem to be making the changes they had contemplated; everyone in the office seemed very busy and uncaring, and because she knew her chin was trembling she turned away.

She had a strange feeling as she left the office: as if standing on ground which quivered, an impulse to reach out her hand and tell someone that something must be done right away, a dreadful fear that she was going to cry out that she could not wait much longer.

All at once she found that she was crossing the street, and saw ahead the little art store with the wonderful picture which proved it was all really so. In the same old way, her step quickened. It would show her again that it was all just as she had thought it was, and if that were true, then it must be true also that Mr. Osborne was going to get her the transportation. It would prove that everything was all right.

But a cruel thing happened. It failed her. It was just as beautiful—but something a long way off, impossible to reach. Try as she would, she could not get into it, as she used to. It was only a picture; a beautiful picture of some pine trees. And they were very far away, and they had nothing at all to do with her.

Through the window, at the back of the store, she saw the old man standing with his back to her. She thought of going in and asking to sit down—she wanted to sit down—but perhaps he would say something cross to her—he was such a queer looking old man—and she knew she would cry if anything cross was said to her. That he had watched for her each night, that he had tried and tried to think of a way of finding her, that he would have been more glad to see her than to see anyone in the world, would have been kinder to her than anyone on earth would have been—those were the things she did not know. And so—more lonely than she had ever been before—she turned away.

On Monday she felt she could wait no longer. It did not seem that it would be safe. She got ready to go to see Mr. Osborne, but the getting ready tired her so that she sat a long time resting, looking out at the high brick wall beyond which there was nothing at all. She was counting the blocks, thinking of how many times she would have to cross the street. But just then it occurred to her that she could telephone.

When she came back upstairs she crept up on the bed and lay there very still. The boy had said that Mr. Osborne was away and would be gone two weeks. No one in the office had heard him say anything about her transportation.

All through the day she lay there, and what she saw before her was a narrow alley and a high brick wall. She had lost her mountains and her forests and her rivers and her lakes. She tried to go out to them in the same old way—but she could not get beyond the high brick wall. She was shut in. She tried to draw them to her, but they could not come across the wall. It shut them out. She tried to pray to the great mountain which one could see from Portland. But even prayers could get no farther than the wall.

Late that afternoon, because she was so shut in that she was choking, because she was consumed with the idea that she must claim her country now or lose it forever, she got up and started for the picture. It was a long, long way to go, and dreadful things were in between—people who would bump against her, hot, uneven streets, horses that might run over her—but she must make the journey. She must make it because the things that she lived on were slipping from her—and she was choking—sinking down—and all alone.

Step by step, never knowing just how her foot was going to make the next step, sick with the fear that people were going to run into her—the streets going up and down, the buildings round and round, she did go; holding to the window casings for the last few steps—each step a terrible chasm which she was never sure she was going to be able to cross—she was there at last. And in the window as she stood there, swayingly, was a dark, blurred thing which might have been anything at all. She tried to remember why she had come. What was it—? And then she was sinking down into an abyss.

That the hemorrhage came then, that the old man came out and found her and tenderly took her in, that he had her taken where she should have been taken long before, that the doctors said it was too late, and that soon their verdict was confirmed—those are the facts which would seem to tell the rest of the story. But deep down beneath facts rests truth, and the truth is that this is a story with the happiest kind of a happy ending. What facts would call the breeze from an electric fan was in truth the gracious breath of the pines. And when the nurse said “She’s going,” she was indeed going, but to a land of great spaces and benign breezes, a land of deep shadows and rushing waters. For a most wondrous thing had happened. She had called to the mountain, and the mountain had heard her voice; and because it was so mighty and so everlasting it drew her to itself, across high brick walls and past millions of hurrying, noisy people—oh, a most triumphant flight! And the mountain said—“I give you this whole great land. It is yours because you have loved it so well. Hills and valleys and rivers and forests and lakes—it is all for you.” Yes, the nurse was quite right; she was going: going for a long sweet sleep beneath trees of many shadows, beside clear waters which had come from distant snows—really going “Out There.”

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
The Delineator, Jul 1912

The Preposterous Motive

The Governor was sitting alone in his private office with an open letter in his hand. He was devoutly and gloomily wishing that some other man was just then in his shoes. The Governor had not devoted a large portion of his life to nursing a desire of that nature, for he was a man in whose soul, as a rule, the flame of self-satisfaction glowed cheeringly; but just now there were reasons, and he deemed them ample, for deploring the fact that fate had made him chief executive of his native State.

Had he chosen to take you into his confidence—a thing the Governor would assuredly choose not to do—he would have told you there were greater things in the world than the Governorship of that State. He might have suggested a seat in the Senate of the United States as one of those things. It was of the United States Senate that his excellency was thinking as he sat there alone moodily deploring the Gubernatorial shoes.

The senior Senator was going to die. He differed from the other Senators in that he was going to die soon, almost immediately. He had reached the tottering years even at the time of his reelection, and it had never been supposed that his life would outstretch his term. He had been sent back, not for another six years of service, but to hold out the leader of the Boxers, as they called themselves—the younger and unorthodox element of the party in the State, an element growing to dangerous proportions. It was only by returning the aged Senator, whom they said it would be brutal to turn down after a life of service to the party, that the “machine” won the memorable fight of the previous winter.

From the viewpoint of the machine, the Governor was the senior Senator’s logical successor. Had it not been for the heavy inroads of the Boxers, his Excellency would even then have been sitting in the Senate Chamber at Washington. It had not been considered safe to nominate the Governor. Had his supporters announced that the time was at hand for a change, there would have been a general clamor for the leader of the Boxers—Huntington, undeniably the popular man of the State. And so they concocted a beautiful sentiment about “rounding out the veteran’s career,” and letting him “die with his boots on”; and by the omnipotence of sentiment, they won.

Down in his heart the venerable Senator was not seeking to die with his boots on. He preferred to sit in a large chair before the fire and read quietly of what other men were doing in the Senate of the United States. But they told him he must sacrifice that wish, for if he retired he would be succeeded by a dangerous man. And the old man believed them, and went dutifully back into the arena.

Now it seemed that a power outside man’s control was declaring against the well-laid plans of the machine. As the machine saw things, the time was not ripe for the senior Senator to die. He had just entered upon his new term, and the Governor himself had but lately stepped into a second term. They had assumed that the Senator would live on for at least two years, but now they heard that he was going to die almost at once. It would hardly do for his excellency to name himself for the vacancy, and it seemed dangerous just then to risk a call of the Assembly. They dared not let the Governor appoint a weaker man, even if he would consent to do so, for they would need the best they had to put up against the leader of the Boxers. With the Governor, they believed they could win, but the question of nominating him had suddenly become a knotty one.

The Governor himself was bowed with chagrin. He saw now that he had erred in taking a second term, and he was not the man to enjoy reviewing his mistakes. As he sat there reading and rereading the letter which told him that the work of the senior Senator was almost done, he said to himself that it was easy enough to wrestle with men, but a harder thing to try one’s mettle with fate. He spent a gloomy and unprofitable day.

Late in the afternoon a telegram reached the executive office. Styles was coming to town that night, and wanted to see the Governor at the hotel. Things always cleared when Styles came to town; and so, though still unable to foresee the outcome, he brightened at once.

Styles was a railroad man, and vulgarly rich. People to whom certain things were a sealed book said that it was nice of Mr. Styles to take an interest in politics when he had so many other things on his mind, and that he must be a very public-spirited man. That he took an interest in politics, no one familiar with the affairs of the State would deny. The orthodox papers painted him as a public benefactor, but the Boxers arrayed him with hoofs and horns.

The Governor and Mr. Styles were warm friends. It was said that their friendship dated from mere boyhood, and the way in which the two men had held together through all the vicissitudes of life was touching and beautiful—at least, so some people observed. There were others whose eyebrows went up mystifyingly when the Governor and Mr. Styles were mentioned in their Damon and Pythias capacity.

That night, in the public benefactor’s room at the hotel, the Governor and his old friend had a long talk. When twelve o’clock came they were still talking; more than that, the Governor was excitedly pacing the floor.

“I tell you. Styles,” he expostulated warmly, “I don’t like it! It doesn’t put me in a good light. It’s too apparent, and I’ll suffer for it sure as fate. Mark my words, we’ll all suffer for it!”

Mr. Styles was sitting in an easy attitude before the table. The public benefactor never paced the floor; it did not seem necessary. He blew several artistic rings of smoke and watched them fade gracefully into nothingness. Then he raised himself a little in his chair.

“Well, have you anything better to offer?”

“No, I haven’t,” replied the Governor, almost tartly, “but it seems to me you ought to have.”

Styles sank back in his chair and for several minutes more devoted himself to the art of smoking. There were times when this philanthropic dabbler in politics was irritating.

“I think,” he began presently, “that you exaggerate the unpleasant features of the situation. It will cause talk, of course; but isn’t it worth it? You say it’s unheard-of; maybe, but so is the situation, and wasn’t there something in the copy-books about meeting new situations with new methods? If you have anything better to offer, produce it; if not, we’ve got to go ahead with this. And really, I don’t see that it’s so bad. You have to go South to look after your cotton plantation; you find now that it’s going to take more time than you feel you should take from the State; you can’t afford to give it up; consequently, you withdraw in favor of the Lieutenant-Governor. We all protest, but you say Berriman is a good man, and the State won’t suffer, and you simply can’t afford to go on. Well, we can keep the Senator’s condition pretty quiet here; and after all, he’s sturdy; and may live on to the close of the year. After due deliberation Berriman appoints you. A little talk? Yes. But it’s worth a little talk. It seems to me the thing works out very smoothly!”

When Tom Styles leaned back in his chair and declared a thing worked out very smoothly, that thing was quite likely to go. In three days the Governor went South. When he returned, the newspaper men were startled by the announcement that business considerations which he could not afford to overlook demanded his withdrawal from office. Previous to this time the Lieutenant-Governor and Mr. Styles had met and the result of their meeting was not made a matter of public record.

As the Governor had anticipated, many things were said. Inquiries were made into the venerable Senator’s condition—which, the orthodox papers declared, was but another example of the indecency of the Boxer journals. The Governor went to his cotton plantation. The Lieutenant-Governor went into office, and was pronounced a worthy successor to a good executive. The venerable Senator continued to live. As Mr. Styles had predicted, the gossip soon quieted into a friendly hope that the Governor would realize large sums with his cotton.

II

It was late in the fall when the senior Senator finally succumbed. The day the papers printed the story of his death, they printed speculative editorials on his probable successor. When the bereaved family commented with bitterness on this ill-concealed haste, they were told that it was politics—enterprise—life.

The old man’s remains lay in state in the rotunda of the State Capitol, and the building was heavily draped in mourning. Many came and looked upon the quiet face; but far more numerous than those who gathered at his bier to weep were those who assembled in secluded corners to speculate on the wearing of his toga. It was politics—enterprise—life.

Mr. Styles told the Lieutenant-Governor to be deliberate. There was no need of an immediate appointment, he said. And so for a time things went on about the State House much as usual, save that the absorbing topic was the Senatorial situation, and that everyone was watching the new chief executive with alert and untiring eyes. The retired Governor now spent part of his time in the South, and part at home. The cotton plantation was not demanding all his attention, after all.

It could not be claimed that John Berriman had ever done any great thing. He was not on record as having ever risen grandly to an occasion; but there may have been something in the fact that an occasion admitting of a grand rising had never presented itself. Before he became Lieutenant-Governor, he had served inoffensively in the State Senate for two terms. No one had ever worked very hard for Senator Berriman’s vote. He had been put in by the machine, and it had always been assumed that he was machine property.

Berriman himself had never given much thought to the matter of his place in the human drama. He had an idea that it was proper for him to vote with his friends, and he always did it. Had he been called a tool, he would have been much ruffled: he merely trusted to the infallibility of the party.

The Boxers did not approach him now concerning the appointment of Huntington. That, of course, was a fixed matter, and they were not young and foolish enough to attempt to change it.

One day the Governor received a telegram from Styles suggesting that he should “adjust that matter” immediately. He thought of announcing the appointment that very night, but the newspaper men had all left the building, and as he had promised that they should know of it as soon as it was made, he concluded to wait until next morning.

Governor Berriman had a brother in town, attending a meeting of the State Agricultural Society. Hiram Berriman had a large farm in southern Iowa. He knew but little of political methods, and held primitive ideas of honesty. There had always been a strong tie between the brothers, despite the fact that Hiram was fifteen years the Governor’s senior. They talked of many things that night, and the hour was growing late. Both were thinking of retiring when the Governor remarked, a little sleepily:

“Well, tomorrow morning I announce the senatorial appointment.”

“You do, eh?” returned the old farmer.

“Yes, there’s no need of waiting any longer, and it’s getting on to the time the State wants two Senators in Washington.”

“Well, I suppose, John,” Hiram said, turning a serious face to his brother, “that you’ve thought the matter all over, and are sure you are right?”

The Governor threw back his head with a scoffing laugh.

“I guess it didn’t require much thought on my part,” he answered carelessly.

“I don’t see how you figure that out,” said Hiram warmly. “You’re Governor of the State, and your own boss, ain’t you?”

It was the first time in all his life that anyone had squarely confronted John Berriman with the question whether or not he was his own boss, and for some reason it went deep into his soul, and rankled there.

“Now see here, Hiram,” he said at length, “there’s no use in your putting on airs and pretending you don’t understand this thing. You know well enough it was all fixed before I went in.” The other man looked at him in bewilderment, and the Governor continued, rather tartly: “The party knew the Senator was going to die, and so the Governor pulled out and I went in just so the thing could be done decently when the time came.”

The old farmer was scratching his head.

“That’s it, eh? They got wind the Senator was goin’ to die, and so the Governor told that lie about having to go South just so he could step into the dead man’s shoes, eh?”

“That’s the situation—if you want to put it that way.”

“And now you’re going to appoint the Governor?”

“Of course I am; I couldn’t do anything else if I wanted to.”

“Why not?”

“Why, look here, Hiram, haven’t you any idea of political obligation? It’s expected of me.”

“Oh, it is, eh? Did you promise to appoint the Governor?”

“Why, I don’t know that I exactly made any promises, but that doesn’t make a particle of difference. The understanding was that the Governor was to pull out and I was to go in and appoint him. It’s a matter of honor;” and Governor Berriman drew himself up with no little pride.

The farmer turned a troubled face to the fire.

“I suppose, then,” he said finally, “that you all think the Governor is the best man Iowa has for the United States Senate. I take it that in appointing him, John, you feel sure he will guard the interests of the people before everything else, and that the people—I mean the working people of this State—will always be safe in his hands; do you?”

“Oh, Lord, no, Hiram!” said the Governor irritably. “I don’t think that at all!”

Hiram Berriman’s brown face warmed to a dull red.

“You don’t?” he cried. “You mean to sit there, John Berriman, and tell me that you don’t think the man you’re going to put in the United States Senate will be an honest man? What do you mean by saying you’re going to put a dishonest man in there to make laws for the people, to watch over them and protect them? If you don’t think he’s a good man, if you don’t think he’s the best man the State has”—the old farmer was pounding the table heavily with his huge fist—“if you don’t think that, in God’s name, why do you appoint him?”

“I wish I could make you understand, Hiram,” said the Governor in an injured voice, “that it’s not for me to say.”

“Why ain’t it for you to say? Why ain’t it, I want to know? Who’s running you, your own conscience or some gang of men that’s trying to steal from the State? Good God, I wish I’d never lived to see the day a brother of mine put a thief in the United States Senate, to bamboozle the honest, hard-working people of this State!”

“Hold on, please—that’s a little too strong!” said the Governor.

“It ain’t too strong. If a Senator ain’t an honest man, he’s a thief, and if he ain’t looking after the welfare of the people he’s bamboozlin’ them, and that’s all there is about it. I don’t know much about politics, but I ain’t lived my life without learning a little about right and wrong, and it’s a sorry day we’ve come to, John Berriman, if right and wrong don’t enter into the makin’ of a Senator!”

The Governor could think of no fitting response, so he made none. This seemed to quiet the irate farmer, and he surveyed his brother intently, and not unkindly.

“You’re in a position now, John,” he said, and there was a kind of homely eloquence in his serious voice, “to be a friend to the people of Iowa. It ain’t many of us ever get the chance of doin’ a great thing. We work along, and we do the best we can with what comes our way, but most of us don’t get the chance to do a thing that’s goin’ to help thousands of people, and that the whole country’s goin’ to say was a move for the right. You want to think of that, and when you’re thinkin’ so much about honor, you don’t want to clean forget about honesty. Don’t you stick to any foolish notions about bein’ faithful to the party; it ain’t the party that needs helpin’. No matter how you got where you are, you’re Governor of the State right now, John, and your first duty is to the people of this State, not to Tom Styles or anybody else. Just you remember that when you’re namin’ your Senator in the morning.”

III

It was long before the Governor retired. He sat there by the fireplace until the embers had shriveled to a lifeless heap, and he was too deeply absorbed to grow cold. He thought of many things. Like the man who had preceded him in office, he wished that someone else was just then encumbered with the Gubernatorial shoes.

The next morning there was a heavy feeling in his head which he thought a walk in the bracing air might dispel, so he started on foot for the State-house. A light snow was on the ground, and there was something reassuring in the crispness of the morning. It would make a slave feel like a free man to drink in such air, he was thinking. Snatches of his brother’s outburst of the night before kept breaking into his consciousness but curiously enough they did not greatly disturb him. He concluded that it was wonderful what a walk in the bracing air could do. From the foot of the hill he looked up at the State-house, for the first time in his experience seeing and thinking about it—not simply taking it for granted. There seemed a nobility about it—in the building itself, and back of that in what it stood for.

As he walked through the corridor to his office he was greeted with cheerful, respectful salutations. His mood let him give the greetings a value they did not have and from that rose a sense of having the trust and goodwill of his fellows.

But upon reaching his desk he found another telegram from Styles. It was imperatively worded and as he read it the briskness and satisfaction went from his bearing. He walked to the window and stood there looking down at the city, and, as it had been in looking ahead at the State-house, he now looked out over the city really seeing and understanding it, not merely taking it for granted. He found himself wondering if many of the people in that city—in that State—looked to their Governor with the old-fashioned trust his brother had shown. His eyes dimmed; he was thinking of the satisfaction it would afford his children, if—long after he had gone—they could tell how a great chance had once come into their father’s life, and how he had proved himself a man.

“Will you sign these now, Governor?” asked a voice behind him.

It was his secretary, a man who knew the affairs of the State well, and whom everyone seemed to respect.

“Mr. Haines,” he said abruptly, “who do you think is the best man we have for the United States Senate?”

The secretary stepped back, dumfounded; amazed that the question should be put to him, startled at that strange way of putting it. Then he told himself he must be discreet. Like many of the people at the State-house, in his heart Haines was a Boxer.

“Why, I presume,” he ventured, “that the Governor is looked upon as the logical candidate, isn’t he?”

“I’m not talking about logical candidates. I want to know who you think is the man who would most conscientiously and creditably represent this State in the Senate of the United States.”

It was so simply spoken that the secretary found himself answering it as simply. “If you put it that way, Governor, Mr. Huntington is the man, of course.”

“You think most of the people feel that way?”

“I know they do.”

“You believe if it were a matter of popular vote, Huntington would be the new Senator?”

“There can be no doubt of that, Governor. I think they all have to admit that. Huntington is the man the people want.”

“That’s all, Mr. Haines. I merely wondered what you thought about it.”

Soon after that Governor Berriman rang for a messenger boy and sent a telegram. Then he settled quietly down to routine work. It was about eleven when one of the newspaper men came in.

“Good morning, Governor,” he said briskly “how’s everything today?”

“All right, Mr. Markham. I have nothing to tell you today, except that I’ve made the senatorial appointment.”

“Oh,” laughed the reporter excitedly, “that’s all, is it?”

“Yes,” said the Governor, smiling too; “that’s all!”

The reporter looked at the clock and gathered himself hastily together.

“I’ll just catch the noon edition,” he said, “if I telephone right away.”

He was moving to the other room when the Governor called to him.

“See here, it seems to me you’re a strange newspaper man!”

“How so?”

“Why, I tell you I’ve made a Senatorial appointment—a matter of at least some slight importance—and you rush off and never ask whom I’ve appointed.”

The reporter gave a forced laugh. He wished the Governor would not detain him with a joke now when every second counted.

“That’s right,” he said, with strained pleasantness. “Well, who’s the man?”

The Governor raised his head.

“Huntington,” he said quietly, and resumed his work.

“What?” gasped the reporter. “What?” Then he stopped in embarrassment, as if ashamed of being so easily taken in. “Guess you’re trying to jolly me a little, aren’t you, Governor?”

“Jolly you, Mr. Markham? I’m not given to jollying newspaper reporters. Here’s a copy of the telegram I sent this morning, if you are still skeptical. Really, I don’t see why you think it so impossible. Don’t you consider Mr. Huntington a fit man for the place?”

But for the minute the reporter seemed unable to speak. “May I ask,” he fumbled at last, “why you did it?”

“I had but one motive, Mr. Markham. I thought the matter over and it seemed to me the people should have the man they wanted. I am with them in believing Huntington the best man for the place.” He said it simply, and went quietly back to his work.

For many a long day politicians and papers continued the search for “the motive.” Styles and his crowd saw it as a simple matter of selling out; they knew, of course, that it could be nothing else. After their first rage had subsided, and they saw there was nothing they could do, they wondered, sneeringly, why he did not “fix up a better story.” That was a little too simple-minded. Did he think people were fools? And even the men who profited by the situation puzzled their brains for weeks trying to understand it. There was something behind it, of course.

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
Munsey’s Magazine, Aug 1904
as “The Awakening of the Lieutenant-Governor”

His America

He hated to see the reporter go. With the closing of that door it seemed certain that there was no putting it off any longer.

But even when the man’s footsteps were at last sounding on the stairway, he still clung to him.

“Father,” he asked, fretfully, “why do you always talk to those fellows?”

Herman Beckman turned in his chair and stared at his son. Then he laughed. “Now, that’s a fine question to come from the honor man of a law school! I hope, Fritz, that your oration tonight is going to have a little more sense in it than that.”

The calling up of his oration made him reach out another clutching hand to the vanished reporter. “But it’s farcical, father, to be always interviewed by a paper nobody reads.”

“Nobody—reads?”

“Why, nobody cares anything about the Leader. It’s dead.”

Herman Beckman looked at his son sharply; something about him seemed strange. He decided that he was nervous about the commencement program. Fritz had the one oration.

The boy had opened the drawer of his study table and was fingering some papers he had taken out.

“Sure you know it?” the man asked with affectionate parental anxiety.

“Oh, I know it all right,” Fred answered grimly, and again the father decided that he was nervous about the thing. He wasn’t just like himself.

The man walked to the window and stood looking across at the university buildings. Colleges had always meant much to Herman Beckman. The very day Fritz was born he determined that the boy was to go to college. It was good to witness the fulfillment of his dreams. He turned his glance to the comfortable room.

“Pretty decent comfortable sort of place, isn’t it, father?” Fred asked, following his father’s look and thought from the Morris chair to the student’s lamp, and all those other things which nowadays seem an inevitable part of the acquirement of learning.

It made his father laugh. “Yes, my boy, I should call it decent—and comfortable.” He grew thoughtful after that.

“Pretty different from the place you had, father?”

“Oh—me? My place to study was any place I could find. Sometimes on top of a load of hay, lots of times by the light of the logs. I’ve studied in some funny places, Fritz.”

“Well, you got there, father!” the boy burst out with feeling. “By Jove, there aren’t many of them know the things you know!”

“I know enough to know what I don’t know,” said the old man, a little sadly. “I know enough to know what I missed. I wanted to go to college. No one will ever know how I wanted to! I began to think I’d never feel right about it. But I have a notion that when I sit there tonight listening to you, Fritz, knowing that you’re speaking for two hundred boys, half of whose fathers did go to college, I think I’m going to feel better about it then.”

The boy turned away. Something in the kindly words seemed as the cut of a whip across his face.

“Well, Fritz,” his father continued, getting into his coat, “I’ll be going downtown. Leave you to put on an extra flourish or two.” He laughed in proud parental fashion. “Anyway, I have some things to see about.”

The boy stood up. “Father, I have something to tell you.” He said it shortly and sharply.

The father stood there, puzzled.

“You won’t like my oration tonight, father.”

And still the man did not speak. The words would not have bothered him much—it was the boy’s manner.

“In fact, father, you’re going to be desperately disappointed in it.”

The dull red was creeping into the man’s cheeks. He was one to have little patience with that thing of not doing one’s work. “Why am I going to be disappointed? This is no time to shirk! You should—”

“Oh, you’ll not complain of the time and thought I’ve put on it,” the boy broke in with a short, hard laugh. “But, you see, father—you see”—his Armour had slipped from him—“it doesn’t express—your views.”

“Did I ever say I wanted you to express ‘my views’? Did I bring you up to be a mouthpiece of mine? Haven’t I told you to think?” But with a long, sharp glance at his boy anger gave way. “Come, boy”—going over and patting him on the back—“brace up now. You’re acting like a seven-year-old girl afraid to speak her first piece,” and his big laugh rang out, eager to reassure.

“You won’t see it! You won’t believe it! I don’t suppose you’ll believe it when you hear it!” He turned away, overwhelmed by a sudden realization of just how difficult was the thing that lay before him.

The man started toward his son, but instead he walked over and sat down at the opposite side of the table, waiting. He was beginning to see that there was something in this which he did not understand.

At last the boy turned to him, fighting back some things, taking on other things. He gazed at the care-worn, rugged face—face of a worker and a dreamer, reading in those lines the story of that life, seeing more clearly than he had ever seen before the beauty and futility of it. Here was the idealist, the man who would give his whole lifetime to a dream he had dreamed. He loved his father very tenderly as he looked at him, read him, then.

“Father,” he asked quietly, “are you satisfied with your life?”

The man simply stared—waiting, seeking his bearings.

“You came to this country when you were nineteen years old—didn’t you, father?” The man nodded. “And now you’re—it’s sixty-one, isn’t it?”

Again he nodded.

“You’ve been in America, then, forty-two years. Father, do you think as much of it now as you did forty-two years ago?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” the man said, searching his son’s quiet, passionate face. “I can’t make you out, Fritz.”

“My favorite story as a kid,” the boy went on, “was to hear you tell of how you felt when your boat came sailing into New York Harbor, and you saw the first outlines of a country you had dreamed about all through your boyhood, which you had saved pennies for, worked nights for, ever since you were old enough to know the meaning of America. I mean,” he corrected, significantly, “the meaning of what you thought was America.

“It’s a bully story, father,” he continued, with a smile at once tender and hard; “the simple German boy, born a dreamer, standing there looking out at the dim shores of that land he had idealized. If ever a man came to America bringing it rich gifts, that man was you!”

“Fritz,” his father’s voice was rendered harsh by mystification and foreboding, “tell me what you’re talking about. Come to the point. Clear this up.”

“I’m talking about American politics—your party—having ruined your life! I’m talking about working like a slave all your days and having nothing but a mortgaged farm at sixty-one! I’m talking about playing a losing game! I’m saying, What’s the use? Father, I’m telling you that I’m going to join the other party and make some money!”

The man just sat there, staring.

“Well,” the boy took it up defiantly, “why not?”

And then he moved, laid a not quite steady hand out upon the table. “My boy, you’re not well. You’ve studied too hard. Now brace yourself up for tonight, and then we’ll go down home and fix you up. What you need, Fritz,” he said, trying to laugh, “is the hayfield.”

“You’re not seeing it!” The boy pushed back his chair and began moving about the room. “The only way I can brace myself up for tonight is to get so mad—father, usually you see things so easily! Don’t you understand? It was my chance, my one moment, my time to strike. It will be years before I get such a hearing again. You see, father, the thing will be printed, and the men I want to have hear it, the men who own this State, will be there. One of them is to preside. And the story of it, the worth of it, to them, is that I’m your son. You see, after all,” he seized at this wildly, “I’m getting my start on the fact that I’m your son.”

“Go on,” said the man; the brown of his wind-beaten face had yielded to a tinge of gray. “Just what is it you are going to say?”

“I call it ‘The New America,’ a lot of this talk about doing things, the glory of industrial America, the true Americans the men of constructive genius, the patriotism of railroad and factory building, a eulogy of railroad officials and corporation presidents,” he rushed on with a laugh. “Singing the song of Capital. Father, can’t you see why?”

The old man had risen. “Tell me this,” he said. “None of it matters much, if you just tell me this: You believe these things? You’ve thought it all out for yourself—and you feel that way? You’re honest, aren’t you, Fritz?” He put that last in a whisper.

The boy made no reply; after a minute the man sank back to his chair. The years seemed coming to him with the minutes.

Fred was leaning against the wall. “Father,” he said at last, “I hope you’ll let me be a little roundabout. It’s only fair to me to let me ramble on a little. I’ve got to put it all right before you or—or—You know, dad,”—he came back to his place by the table, “the first thing I remember very clearly is those men, your party managers, coming down to the farm one time and asking you to run for Governor. How many times is it you’ve run for Governor, father?” He put the question slowly.

“Five,” said the man heavily.

“I don’t know which time this was; but you didn’t want to. You were sorry when you saw them coming. I heard some of the talk. You talked about your farm, what you wanted to do that summer, how you couldn’t afford the time or the money. They argued that you owed it to the party—they always got you there; how no other man could hold down majorities as you could—a man like you giving the best years of his life to holding down majorities! They said you were the one man against whom no personal attack could be made. And when there was so much to fight, anyway—oh, I know that speech by heart! They’ve made great capital of your honesty and your clean life. In fact, they’ve held that up as a curtain behind which a great many things could go on. Oh, you didn’t know about them; you were out in front of the curtain, but I haven’t lived in this town without finding out that they needed your integrity and your clean record pretty bad!

“That was out on the side porch. Mother had brought out some buttermilk, and they drank it while they talked. You put up a good fight. Your time was money to you at that time of year; a man shouldn’t neglect his farm—but you never yet could hold out against that ‘needing you’ kind of talk. They knew there was no chance for your election. You knew it. But it takes a man of just your grit to put any snap into a hopeless campaign.

“Mother cried when you went to drive them back to town. You see, I remember all those things. She told about how hard you would work, and how it would do no good—that the State belonged to the other party. She talked about the farm, too, and the addition she had wanted for the house, and how now she wouldn’t have it. Mother felt pretty bad that night. She’s gone through a lot of those times.”

There was a silence.

“You were away a lot that summer, and all fall. You looked pretty well used up when you came home, but you said that you had held down majorities splendidly.”

Again there was silence. It was the silences that seemed to be saying the most.

“You had one term in Congress—that’s the only thing you ever had. Then you did so much that they concentrated in your district and saw to it that you never got back. Julius Caesar couldn’t have been elected again,” he laughed harshly.

“Father,” the boy went on, after a pause, “you asked me if I were honest. There are two kinds of honesty. The primitive kind—like yours—and then the kind you develop for yourself. Do I believe the things I’m going to say tonight? No—not now. But I’ll believe them more after I’ve heard the applause I’m sure to get. I’ll believe them still more after I’ve had my first case thrown to me by our railroad friends who own this State. More and more after I’ve said them over in campaigning next fall, and pretty soon I’ll be so sure I believe them that I really will believe them—and that,” he concluded, flippantly, “is the new brand of American honesty. Why, any smart man can persuade himself he’s not a hypocrite!”

“My God!” it wrenched from the man. “This? If you’d stolen money—killed a man—but hypocrisy, cant—the very thing I’ve fought hardest, hated most! You lived all your life with me to learn this?”

“I lived all my life with you to learn what pays, and what doesn’t. I lived all my life with you to learn from failure the value of success.”

“I never was sure I was a failure until this hour.”

“Father! Can’t you see—”

“Oh, don’t talk to me!” cried the old man, rising, reaching out his fist as though he would strike him. “Son of mine sitting there telling me he is fixing up a brand of honesty for himself!”

The boy grew quieter as self-restraint left his father. “I mean that—just that,” he said at last. “Let a man either give or get. If he gives, let it be to the real thing. There are two Americas. The America of you dreamers—and then the real America. Yours is an idea—an idea quite as much as an ideal. I don’t think you have the slightest comprehension of how far apart it is from the real America. The people who dream of it over in Europe are a great deal nearer it than you people who work for it here. Father, the spirit of this country flows in a strong, swift, resistless current. You never got into it at all. Your kind of idealists influence it about as much—about as much as red lights burned on the banks of the great river would influence the current of that river. You’re not of it. You came here, throbbing with the love for America; and with your ideal America you’ve fought the real, and you’ve worked and you’ve believed and you’ve sacrificed. Father, what’s the use? In this State, anyway, it’s hopeless. It has been so through your lifetime; it will be through mine.”

The man sat looking at him. He felt that he should say something, but the words did not come—held back, perhaps, by a sense of their uselessness. It was not so much what Fred said as it was the look in his eyes as he said it. There was nothing impetuous or youthful about that look, nothing to be laughed at or argued away. He had always felt that Fred had a mind which saw things straight, saw them in their right relations, and at that moment he had no words to plead for what Fred called the America of the dreamers.

“I’m of the second generation, dad,” the boy went on, at length, “and the second generation has an ideal of its own, and that ideal is Success. It took us these forty years to come to understand the spirit of America. You were a dreamer who loved America. I’m an American. We’ve translated democracy and brotherhood and equality into enterprise and opportunity and success—and that’s getting Americanized. Now, father,” he sought refuge in the tone of everyday things, “you’ll get used to it—won’t you? I don’t expect you to feel very good about it, but you aren’t going to be broken up about it—are you? After all, father,” laughing and moving about as if to break the seriousness of things, “there’s nothing criminal about being one of the other fellows—is there? Just remember that there are folks who even think it’s respectable!”

The father had risen and picked up his hat. “No, Fred,” he said, with a sadness in which there was great dignity, “there is nothing criminal in it if a man’s conviction sends him that way. But to me there is something—something too sad for words in a man’s selling his own soul.”

“Father! How extravagant! Why is it selling one’s soul to sit down and figure out what’s the best thing to do?” He hesitated, hating to add hurt to hurt, not wanting to say that his father’s fight should have been with the revolutionists, that his life was ineffective because, seeing his dream from within a dream, his thinking had been muddled. He only said: “As I say, father, it’s a question of giving or getting. I couldn’t even give in your way. And I’ve seen enough of giving to want a taste of getting. I want to make things go—and I see my chance. Why father,” he laughed, trying to turn it, “there’s nothing so American as wanting to make things go.”

He looked at him for a long minute. “My boy,” he said, “I fear you are becoming so American that I am losing you.”

“Father,” the boy pleaded, affectionately, “now don’t—”

The old man held up his hand. “You’ve tried to make me understand it,” he said, “and succeeded. You can’t complain of the way you’ve succeeded. I don’t know why I don’t argue with you—plead; there are things I could say—should say, perhaps—but something assures me it would be useless. I feel a good many years older than I did when I came into this room, but the reason for it is not that you’re joining the other party. You know what I think of the men who control this State, the men with whom you desire to cast your lot, but I trust the years I’ve spent fighting them haven’t made a bigot of me. It’s not joining their party—it’s using it—makes this the hardest thing I’ve been called upon to meet.”

“Father, don’t look like that! How do you think I am going to get up and speak tonight with that face before me?”

“You didn’t think, did you,” the man laughed bitterly, “that I would inspire you to your effort?”

The boy stood looking at his father, a strange new fire in his eyes.

“Yes,” he said, quietly, tenderly, “you will inspire me. When I get up before those men tonight I’m going to see the picture of that boy straining for his first glimpse of New York Harbor. I’m going to think for just a minute of the things that boy brought with him—things he has never lost. And then I’ll see you as you stand here now—it will be enough. What I need to do is to get mad. If I falter I’ll just think of some of those times when you came home from your campaigns—how you looked—what you said. It will bring the inspiration. Father, I figure it out like this. We’re going to get it back. We’re going to get what’s coming to us. There’s another America than the America of you dreamers. To yours you have given; from mine I will get. And the irony of it—don’t think I don’t see the irony of it—is that I will be called the real American. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to make the railroads of this State—oh, it sounds like schoolboy talk, but just give me a little time—I’m going to make the railroads of this State pay off every cent of that mortgage on your farm! Father,” he finished, impetuously, in a last appeal, “you’re broken up now, disappointed, but would you honestly want me to travel the road you’ve traveled?”

“My boy,” answered the old man, and the tears came with it, “I wanted you to travel the road of an honest man.”

Herman Beckman did not go to the commencement exercises that night. There was no train home until morning, so he had the night to spend in town. He was alone, for his friends assumed that he would be out at the university. But he preferred being alone.

He sat in his room at the hotel, reading. And he could read. Years of discipline stood him in good stead now. His life had taught him to read anywhere, at any time. He had never permitted himself the luxury of not being “in the mood.” It was only the men who had gone to college who could do that. He had to read. He always carried some little book with him, for how did a man know that he might not have to wait an hour for a train somewhere? The man had a simple-minded veneration for knowledge. He wanted to know about things. And he had never learned to pretend that he didn’t want to know. He quite lacked the modern art of flippancy. He believed in great books.

And so on the night that his son was being graduated from college he sat in his room at the hotel—cheap room in a mediocre hotel; he had never learned to feel at home in the rich ones—reading Marcus Aurelius. But his hand as he turned the pages trembled as the hand of a very old man. At midnight some reporters came in to ask him what he thought of his son’s oration. They wanted a statement from him.

He told them that he had never believed the sins of a parent should be visited on a child, and that it was even so with the thought. He had always contended that a man should do his own thinking. The contention applied to his son.

“Gamey old brute!” was what one of the reporters said in the elevator.

He could not read Marcus Aurelius after that. He went to bed, but he did not sleep. Many things passed before him. His anticipations, his dreams for Fritz, had brought the warmest pleasure of his stern, unrelaxing life. There was a great emptiness tonight. What was a man to turn to, think about, when he seemed stripped, not only of the future, but of the past? He seemed called upon to readjust the whole of his life, giving up that which he had held dearest. What was left? Daylight found him turning it over and over.

In the morning he went home. He got away without seeing any of his friends.

He did not try to read this morning; somehow it seemed there was no use in trying to read any more. He watched the country through which they were passing, thinking of the hundreds of times he had ridden over it in campaigning. He wondered, vaguely, just how much money he had spent on railroad fare—he had never accepted mileage. Fred’s “What’s the use?” kept ringing in his ears. There was something about that phrase which made one feel very tired and old. It even seemed there was no use looking out to see how the crops were getting on. What’s the use? What’s the use? Was that a phrase one learned in college?

There had been two things to tell “mother” that night. The first was that he had stopped in town and told Claus Hansen he could have that south hundred and sixty he had been wanting for two years.

It was not easy to tell the woman who had worked shoulder to shoulder with him for thirty years, the woman who during those years had risen with him in the early morning and worked with him until darkness rescued the weary bodies, that in their old age they must surrender the fruit of their toil. They would have left just what they had started with. They had just held their own.

Coming down on the train he had made up his mind that if Hansen were in town he would tell him that he could have the land. He felt so very tired and old, so bowed down with Fred’s “What’s the use?” that he saw that he himself would never get the mortgage paid off. And Fred had said something about making the railroads pay it. He did not know just how the boy figured that out—indeed, he was getting a little dazed about the whole thing—but if Fritz had any idea of having the railroads pay off the mortgage on his farm—he couldn’t forget how the boy looked when he said it, face white, eyes burning—he would see to it right now that there was no chance of that.

He tried not to look at the land as he drove past it on the way home. He wondered just how much campaign literature it had paid for. He wondered if he would ever get used to seeing Claus Hansen putting up his hay over there in that field.

He had felt so badly about telling mother that he told it very bluntly. And because he felt so sorry for her he said not one kind word, but just sat quiet, looking the other way.

She was clearing off the table. He heard her scraping out the potato dish with great care. Then she was coming over to him. She came awkwardly, hesitatingly—her life had not schooled her in meeting emotional moments beautifully—but she laid her hand upon him, patted him on the shoulder as one would a child. “Never mind, papa—never you mind. It will make it easier for us. There’s enough left—and it will make it easier. We’re getting on—we’re—” There she broke off abruptly into a vigorous scolding of the dog, who was lifting covetous nostrils to a piece of meat.

That was all. And there was no woman in the country had worked harder. And Martha was ambitious; she liked land, and she did not like Claus Hansen’s wife.

Yes, he had had a good wife.

Then there was that other thing to tell her—about Fritz. That was harder.

Mother had not gone up to the city to hear Fritz “speak” because her feet were bothering her, and she could not wear her shoes. He had had a vague idea of how disappointed she was, though she had said very little about it. Martha never had been one to say much about things. When he came back, of course she had wanted to know all about it, and he had put her off. Now he had to tell her.

It was much harder; and in the telling of it he broke down.

This time she did not come over and pat his shoulder. Perhaps Martha knew—likely she had never heard the word intuition, but, anyway, she knew—that it was beyond that.

It seemed difficult for her to comprehend. She was bewildered to find that Fritz could change parties all in a minute. She seemed to grasp, first of all, that it was disrespectful to his father. Some boys at school had been putting notions into his head.

But gradually she began to see it. Fritz wanted to make money. Fritz wanted to have it easier. And the other people did “have it easier.”

It divided her feeling: sorry and indignant for the father, secretly glad and relieved for the boy. “He will have it easier than we had it, papa,” she said at the last. “But it was not right of Fritz,” she concluded, vaguely but severely.

As she washed the dishes Martha was thinking that likely Fritz’s wife would have a hired girl.

Then Martha went up to bed. He said that he would come in a few minutes, but many minutes went by while he sat out on the side porch trying to think it out.

The moon was shining brightly down on that hundred and sixty which Claus Hansen was to have. And the moon, too, seemed to be saying: “What’s the use?”

Well, what was the use? Perhaps, after all, the boy was right. What had it all amounted to? What was there left? What had he done?

Two Americas, Fred had said, and his but the America of the dreamers. He had always thought that he was fighting for the real. And now Fred said that he had never become an American at all.

From the time he was twelve years old he had wanted to be an American. A queer old man back in the German village—an old man, he recalled strangely now, who had never been in America—told him about it. He told how all men were brothers in America, how the poor and the rich loved each other—indeed, how there were no poor and rich at all, but the same chance for every man who would work. He told about the marvelous resources of that distant America—gold in the earth, which men were free to go and get, hundreds upon hundreds of miles of untouched forests and great rivers—all for men to use, great cities no older than the men who were in them, which men at that present moment were making—every man his equal chance. He told of rich land which a man could have for nothing, which would be his, if he would but go and work upon it. In the heart of the little German boy there was kindled then a fire which the years had never put out. His cheeks grew red, his eyes bright and very deep as he listened to the story. He went home that night and dreamed of going to America. And through the years of his boyhood, penny by penny, he saved his money for America. It was his dream. It was the passion of his life. More plainly than the events of yesterday, he remembered his first glimpse of those wonderful shores—the lump in his throat, the passionate excitement, the uplift. Leaning over the railing of his boat, staring, searching, penetrating, worshiping, he lifted up his heart and sent out his pledge of allegiance to the new land. How he would love America, work for it, be true to it!

He had three dollars and sixty cents in his pocket when he stepped upon American soil. He wondered if any man had ever felt richer. For had he not reached the land where there was an equal chance for every man who would work, where men loved each other as brothers, and where the earth itself was so rich and so gracious in its offerings?

The old man crossed one leg over the other—slowly, stiffly. It made him tired and stiff now just to think of the work he had done between that day and this.

But there was something which he had always had—that something was his America. That had never wavered, though he soon learned that between it and realities were many things which were wrong and unfortunate. With the whole force and passion of his nature, with all his single mindedness—would some call it simple mindedness?—he threw himself into the fight against those things which were blurring men’s vision of his America. No work, no sacrifice was too great, for America had enemies who called themselves friends, men who were striking heavy blows at that equal chance for every man. When he failed, it was because he did not know enough; he must work, he must study, he must think, in order to make more real to other men the America which was in his heart. He must fight for it because it was his.

And now it seemed that the end had come; he was old, he was tired, he was not sure. Claus Hansen would have his land and his son would join hands with the things which he had spent his life in fighting. And far deeper and sadder and more bitter than that, he had not transmitted the America of his heart even to his own son. He was not leaving someone to fight for it in his stead, to win where he had failed. Fred saw in it but a place for gain. “I lived all my life with you to learn from failure the value of success.” That was what he had given to his boy. Yes, that was what he had bequeathed to America. Could the failure, the futility of his life be more clearly revealed?

Twice Martha had called to him, but still he sat, smoking, thinking. There was much to think about tonight.

Finally, it was not thought, but visions. Too tired for conscious thinking, he gave himself up to what came—Fred’s America, his America, the America of the dreamers—and the things which stood between. The America of the future—what would that America be?

At the last, taking form from many things which came and went, shaping itself slowly, form giving place to new form, he seemed to see it grow. Out beyond that land Claus Hansen was to have, a long way off, there rose the vision of the America of the future—an America of realities, and yet an America of dreams; for the dreamers had become the realists—or was it that the realists had become dreamers? In the manifold forms taken on and cast aside destroying dualism had made way for the strength and the dignity and harmony of unity. He watched it as breathlessly, as yearningly, as the nineteen-year-old boy had watched the other America taking shape in the distance some forty years before. “How did you come?” he whispered. “What are you?”

And the voice of that real America seemed to answer: “I came because for a long-enough time there were enough men who held me in their hearts. I came because there were men who never gave me up. I was won by men who believed that they had failed.”

Again there was a lump in his throat—once more an exultation flooded all his being. For to the old man—tired, stiff, smitten though he had been, there came again that same uplift which long before had come to the boy. Was there not here an answer to “What’s the use?” For he would leave America as he came to it—loving it, believing in it. What were the work and the failure of a lifetime when there was something in his heart which was his? Should he say that he had fought in vain when he had kept it for himself? It was as real, as wonderful—yes as inevitable, as it had been forty years before. Realities had taken his land, his career, his hopes for the boy. But realities had not stripped him of his dream. The futility of the years could not harm the things which were in his heart. Even in America he had not lost His America.

“Perhaps it is then that it is like that,” he murmured, his vision carrying him back to the days of his broken English. “Perhaps it is that every man’s America is in the inside of his own heart. Perhaps it is that it will come when it has grown big—big and very strong—in the hearts.”

Lifted Masks (1912)

The Anarchist: His Dog

Stubby had a route, and that was how he happened to get a dog. For the benefit of those who have never carried papers it should be thrown in that having a route means getting up just when there is really some fun in sleeping, lining up at the Leader office—maybe having a scrap with the fellow who says you took his place in the line—getting your papers all damp from the press and starting for the outskirts of the city. Then you double up the paper in the way that will cause all possible difficulty in undoubling and hurl it with what force you have against the front door. It is good to have a route, for you at least earn your salt, so your father can’t say that any more. If he does, you know it isn’t so.

When you have a route, you whistle. All the fellows whistle. They may not feel like it, but it is the custom—as could be sworn to by many sleepy citizens. And as time goes on you succeed in acquiring the easy manner of a brigand.

Stubby was little and everything about him seemed sawed off just a second too soon—his nose, his fingers, and most of all, his hair. His head was a faithful replica of a chestnut burr. His hair did not lie down and take things easy. It stood up—and out!—gentle ladies couldn’t possibly have let their hands sink into it—as we are told they do—for the hands just wouldn’t sink. They’d have to float.

And alas, gentle ladies didn’t particularly want their hands to sink into it. There was not that about Stubby’s short person to cause the hands of gentle ladies to move instinctively to his head. Stubby bristled. That is, he appeared to bristle. Inwardly, Stubby yearned, though he would have swung into his very best brigand manner on the spot were you to suggest so offensive a thing. Just to look at Stubby you’d never in a thousand years guess what a funny feeling he had sometimes when he got to the top of the hill where his route began and could see a long way down the river and the town curled in on the other side. Sometimes when the morning sun was shining through a mist—making things awful queer—some of the mist got into Stubby’s squinty little eyes. After the mist behaved that way he always whistled so rakishly and threw his papers with such abandonment that people turned over in their beds and muttered things about having that little heathen of a paper boy shot.

All along the route are dogs. Indeed, routes are distinguished by their dogs. Mean routes are those that have terraces and mean dogs; good routes—where the houses are close together and the dogs run out and wag their tails. Though Stubby’s greater difficulty came through the wagging tails; he carried in a collie neighborhood, and all collies seemed consumed with mighty ambitions to have routes. If you spoke to them—and how could you help speaking to a collie when he came bounding out to you that way?—you had an awful time chasing him back, and when he got lost—and it seemed collies spent most of their time getting lost—the woman would put her head out next morning and want to know if you had coaxed her dog away.

Some of the fellows had dogs that went with them on their routes. One day one of them asked Stubby why he didn’t have a dog and he replied in surly fashion that he didn’t have one ’cause he didn’t want one. If he wanted one, he guessed he’d have one.

And there was no one within earshot old enough or wise enough—or tender enough?—to know from the meanness of Stubby’s tone, and by his evil scowl, that his heart was just breaking to own a dog.

One day a new dog appeared along the route. He was yellow and looked like a cheap edition of a bulldog. He was that kind of dog most accurately described by saying it is hard to describe him, the kind you say is just dog—and everybody knows.

He tried to follow Stubby; not in the trusting, bounding manner of the collies—not happily, but hopingly. Stubby, true to the ethics of his profession, chased him back where he had come from. That there might be nothing whatever on his conscience, he even threw a stone after him. Stubby was an expert in throwing things at dogs. He could seem to just miss them and yet never hit them.

The next day it happened again; but just as he had a clod poised for throwing, a window went up and a woman called: “For pity sake, little boy, don’t chase him back here.”

“Why—why, ain’t he yours?” called Stubby.

“Mercy, no. We can’t chase him away.”

“Who’s is he?” demanded Stubby.

“Why, he’s nobody’s! He just hangs around. I wish you’d coax him away.”

Well, that was a new one! And then all in a heap it rushed over Stubby that this dog who was nobody’s dog could, if he coaxed him away—and the woman wanted him coaxed away—be his dog.

And because that idea had such a strange effect on him he sang out, in off-hand fashion: “Oh, all right, I’ll take him away and drown him for you!”

“Oh, little boy,” called the woman, “why, don’t drown him!”

“Oh, all right, I’ll shoot him then!” called obliging Stubby, whistling for the dog—while all morning long the woman grieved over having sent a helpless little dog away with that perfectly brutal paper boy!

Stubby’s mother was washing. She looked up from her tubs on the back porch to say, “Wish you’d take that bucket—” then seeing what was slinking behind her son, straightway assumed the role of destiny with, “Git out o’ here!”

Stubby snapped his fingers behind his back as much as to say, “Wait a minute.”

“A woman gave him to me,” he said to his mother.

“Gave him to you?” she scoffed. “I sh’ think she would!”

Then something happened that had not happened many times in Stubby’s short lifetime. He acknowledged his feelings.

“I’d like to keep him. I’d like to have a dog.”

His mother shook her hands and the flying suds seemed expressing her scorn. “Huh! That ugly good-for-nothing thing?”

The dog had edged in between Stubby’s feet and crouched there. “He could go with me on my route,” said Stubby. “He’d kind of be company for me.”

And when he had said that he knew all at once just how lonesome he had been sometimes on his route, how he had wanted something to “kind of be company” for him.

His face twitched as he stooped down to pat the dog. Mrs. Lynch looked at her son—youngest of her five. Not the hardness of her heart but the hardness of her life had made her unpracticed in moments of tenderness. Something in the way Stubby was patting the dog suggested to her that Stubby was a “queer one.” He was kind of little to be carrying papers all by himself.

Stubby looked up. “He could eat what’s thrown away.”

That was an error in diplomacy. The woman’s face hardened. “Mighty little’ll be thrown away this winter,” she muttered.

But just then Mrs. Johnson appeared on the other side of the fence and began hanging up her clothes and with that Mrs. Lynch saw her way to justify herself in indulging her son. Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Lynch had “had words.” “You just let him stay around, Stubby,” she called, and you would have supposed from her tone it was Stubby who was on the other side of the fence, “maybe he’ll keep the neighbor’s chickens out! Them that ain’t got chickens o’ their own don’t want to be bothered with the neighbors’!”

That was how it happened that he stayed; and no one but Stubby knew—and possibly Stubby didn’t either—how it happened that he was named Hero. It would seem that Hero should be a noble St. Bernard, or a particularly mean-looking bulldog, not a stocky, shapeless, squint-eyed yellow dog with one ear bitten half off and one leg built on an entirely different plan from its fellow legs. Possibly Stubby’s own spiritual experiences had suggested to him that you weren’t necessarily the way you looked.

The chickens were pretty well kept out, though no one ever saw Hero doing any of it. Perhaps Hero had been too long associated with chasing to desire any part in it—even with roles reversed. If Stubby could help it, no one really saw Stubby doing the chasing either; he became skilled in chasing when he did not appear to be chasing; then he would get Hero to barking and turn to his mother with, “Guess you don’t see so many chickens round nowadays.”

The fellows in the line jeered at Hero at first, but they soon tired of it when Stubby said he didn’t want the cur but his mother made him stay around to keep the chickens out. He was a fine chicken dog, Stubby grudgingly admitted. He couldn’t keep him from following, said Stubby, so he just let him come. Sometimes when they were waiting in line Stubby made ferocious threats at Hero. He was going to break his back and wring his head off and do other heartless things which for some reason he never started in right then and there to accomplish.

It was different when they were alone—and they were alone a good deal. Stubby’s route wasn’t nearly so long after he had Hero to go with him. When winter came and five o’clock was dark and cold for starting out it was pretty good to have Hero trotting at his heels. And Hero always wanted to go; it was never so rainy nor so cold that that yellow dog seemed to think he would rather stay home by the fire. Then Hero was always waiting for him when he came home from school. Stubby would sing out, “Hello, cur!” and the tone was such that Hero did not grasp that he was being insulted. Sometimes when there was nobody about, Stubby picked Hero up in his arms and squeezed him—Stubby had not had a large experience with squeezing. At those times Hero would lick Stubby’s face and whimper a little love whimper and such were the workings of Stubby’s heart and mind that that made him of quite as much account as if he really had chased the chickens. Stubby, who had seen the way dogs can look at you out of their eyes, was not one to say of a dog, “What good is he?”

But it seemed there were such people. There were even people who thought you oughtn’t to have a dog to love and to love you if you weren’t one of those rich people who could pay two dollars and a half a year for the luxury.

Stubby first heard of those people one night in June. The father of the Lynch family was sitting in the back yard reading the paper when Hero and Stubby came running in from the alley. It was one of those moments when Hero, forgetting the bleakness of his youth, abandoned himself to the joy of living. He was tearing round and round Stubby, barking, when Stubby’s father called out: “Here!—shut up there, you cur. You better lie low. You’re going to be shot the first of August.”

Stubby, and as regards the joy of living Hero had done as much for Stubby as Stubby for Hero, came to a halt. The fun and frolic just died right out of him and he stood there staring at his father, who had turned the page and was settling himself to a new horror. At last Stubby spoke. “Why’s he going to be shot on the first of August?” he asked in a tight little voice.

His father looked up. “Why’s he going to be shot? You got any two dollars and a half to pay for him?”

He laughed as though that were a joke. Well, it was something of a joke. Stubby got ten cents a week out of his paper money. The rest he “turned in.”

Then he went back to his paper. There was another long pause before Stubby asked, in that tight queer little voice: “What’d I have to pay two dollars and a half for? Nobody owns him.”

His parent stirred scornfully. “Suppose you never heard of a dog tax, did you? S’pose they don’t learn you nothing like that at school?”

Yes, Stubby did know that dogs had to have checks, but he hadn’t thought anything about that in connection with Hero. He ventured another question. “You have to have ’em for all dogs, even if you just picked ’em up on the street and took care of ’em when nobody else would?”

“You bet you do,” his parent assured him genially. “You pay your dog tax or the policeman comes on the first of August and shoots your dog.”

With that he dismissed it for good, burying himself in his paper. For a minute the boy stood there in silence. Then he walked slowly round the house and sat down where his father couldn’t see him. Hero followed—it was a way Hero had. The dog sat down beside the boy and after a couple of minutes the boy’s arm stole furtively around him and they sat there very still for a long time.

As nobody but Hero paid much attention to him, nobody save Hero noticed how quiet and queer Stubby was for the next three days. Hero must have noticed it, for he was quiet and queer too. He followed wherever Stubby would let him, and every time he got a chance he would nestle up to him and look into his face—that way even cur dogs have of doing when they fear something is wrong.

At the end of three days Stubby, his little freckled face set and grim, took his stand in front of his father and came right out with: “I want to keep one week’s paper money to pay Hero’s tax.”

His father’s chair had been tilted back against a tree. Now it came down with a thud. “Oh, you do, do you?”

“I can earn the other fifty cents at little jobs.”

“You can, can you? Now ain’t you smart!”

The tone brought the blood to Stubby’s face. “I think I got a right to,” he said, his voice low.

The man’s face, which had been taunting, grew ugly. “Looka here, young man, none o’ your lip!”

The tears rushed to Stubby’s eyes but he stumbled on: “I guess Hero’s got a right to some of my paper money when he goes with me every day on my route.”

At that his father stared for a minute and then burst into a loud laugh. Blinded with tears, the boy turned to the house.

After she had gone to bed that night Stubby’s mother heard a sound from the alcove at the head of the stairs where her youngest child slept. As the sound kept on she got out of her bed and went to Stubby’s cot.

“Look here,” she said, awkwardly but not unkindly, “this won’t do. We’re poor folks, Freddie” (it was only once in a while she called him that), “all we can do to live these times—we can’t pay no dog tax.”

As Stubby did not speak she added: “I know you’ve taken to the dog, but just the same you ain’t to feel hard to your pa. He can’t help it—and neither can I. Things is as they is—and nobody can help it.”

As, despite this bit of philosophy Stubby was still gulping back sobs, she added what she thought a master stroke in consolation. “Now you just go right to sleep, and if they come to take this dog away maybe you can pick up another one in the fall.”

The sobs suddenly stopped and Stubby stared at her. And what he said after a long stare was: “I guess there ain’t no use in you and me talking about it.”

“That’s right,” said she, relieved; “now you go right off to sleep.” And she left him, never dreaming why Stubby had seen there was no use talking about it.

Nor did he talk about it; but a change came over Stubby’s funny little person in the next few days. The change was particularly concerned with his jaw, though there was something different, too, in the light in his eyes as he looked straight ahead, and something different in his voice when he said: “Come on, Hero.”

He got so he could walk into a store and demand, in a hard little voice: “Want a boy to do anything for you?” and when they said, “Got more boys than we know what to do with, sonny,” Stubby would say, “All right,” and stalk sturdily out again. Sometimes they laughed and said: “What could you do?” and then Stubby would stalk out, but possibly a little less sturdily.

Vacation came the next week, and still he had found nothing. His father, however, had been more successful. He found a place where they wanted a boy to work in a yard a couple of hours in the morning. For that Stubby was to get a dollar and a half a week. But that was to be turned in for his “keep.” There were lots of mouths to feed—as Stubby’s mother was always calling to her neighbor across the alley.

But the yard gave Stubby an idea, and he earned some dimes and one quarter in the next week. Most folks thought he was too little—one kind lady told him he ought to be playing, not working—but there were people who would let him take a big shears and cut grass around flower beds, and things like that. This he had to do afternoons, when he was supposed to be off playing, and when he came home his mother sometimes said some folks had it easy—playing around all day.

It was now the first week in July and Stubby had a dollar and twenty cents. It was getting to the point where he would wake in the night and find himself sitting up in bed, hands clenched. He dreamed dreams about how folks would let him live if he had ninety-nine cents but how he only had ninety-seven and a half, so they were going to shoot him.

Then one day he found Mr. Stuart. He was passing the house after having asked three people if they wanted a boy, and they didn’t, and seemed so surprised at the idea of their wanting him that Stubby’s throat was all tight, when Mr. Stuart sang out: “Say, boy, want a little job?”

It seemed at first it must be a joke—or a dream—anybody asking him if he wanted one, but the man was beckoning to him, so he pulled himself together and ran up the steps.

“Now here’s a little package”—he took something out of the mail box. “It doesn’t belong here. It’s to go to three-hundred-two Pleasant street. You take it for a dime?”

Stubby nodded.

As he was going down the steps the man called: “Say, boy, how’d you like a steady job?”

For the first minute it seemed pretty mean—making fun of a fellow that way!

“This will be here every day. Suppose you come each day, about this time, and take it over there—not mentioning it to anybody.”

Stubby felt weak. “Why, all right,” he managed to say.

“I’ll give you fifty cents a week. That fair?”

“Yes, sir,” said Stubby, doing some quick calculation.

“Then here goes for the first week”—and he handed him the other forty cents.

It was funny how fast the world could change! Stubby wanted to run—he hadn’t been doing much running of late. He wanted to go home and get Hero to go with him to Pleasant street, but didn’t. No, sir, when you had a job you had to ’tend to things!

Well, a person could do things, if he had to, thought Stubby. No use saying you couldn’t, you could, if you had to. He was back in tune with life. He whistled; he turned up his collar in the old rakish way; he threw a stick at a cat. Back home he jumped over the fence instead of going in the gate—lately he had actually been using the gate. And he cried, “Get out of my sight, you cur!” in tones which, as Hero understood things, meant anything but getting out of his sight.

He was a little boy again. He slept at night as little boys sleep. He played with Hero along the route—taught him some new tricks. His jaw relaxed from its grown-upishness.

It was funny about those Stuarts. Sometimes he saw Mr. Stuart, but never anybody else; the place seemed shut up. But each day the little package was there, and every day he took it to Pleasant street and left it at the door there—that place seemed shut up, too.

When it was well into the second week Stubby ventured to say something about the next fifty cents.

The man fumbled in his pockets. Something in his face was familiar to experienced Stubby. It suggested a having to have two dollars and a half by August first and only having a dollar and a quarter state of mind.

“I haven’t got the change. Pay you at the end of next week for the whole business. That all right?”

Stubby considered. “I’ve got to have it before the first of August,” he said.

At that the man laughed—funny kind of laugh, it was, and muttered something. But he told Stubby he would have it before the first.

It bothered Stubby. He wished the man had given it to him then. He would rather get it each week and keep it himself. A little of the grown-up look stole back.

After that he didn’t see Mr. Stuart, and one day, a week or so later, the package was not in the box and a man who wore the kind of clothes Stubby’s father wore came around the house and asked him what he was doing.

Stubby was wary. “Oh, I’ve got a little job I do for Mr. Stuart.”

The man laughed. “I had a little job I did for Mr. Stuart, too. You paid in advance?”

Stubby pricked up his ears.

“’Cause if you ain’t, I’d advise you to look out for a little job some’eres else.”

Then it came out. Mr. Stuart was broke; more than that, he was “off his nut.” Lots of people were doing little jobs for him—there was no sense in any of them, and now he had suddenly been called out of town!

There was a trembly feeling through Stubby’s insides, but outwardly he was bristling just like his hair bristled as he demanded: “Where am I to get what’s coming to me?”

“’Fraid you won’t get it, sonny. We’re all in the same boat.” He looked Stubby up and down and then added: “Kind of little for that boat.”

“I got to have it!” cried Stubby. “I tell you, I got to!”

The man shook his head. “That cuts no ice. Hard luck, sonny, but we’ve got to take our medicine in this world. ’Taint no medicine for kids, though,” he muttered.

Stubby’s face just then was too much for him. He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a dime, saying: “There now. You run along and get you a soda and forget your troubles. It ain’t always like this. You’ll have better luck next time.”

But Stubby did not get the soda. He put the dime in his pocket and turned toward home. Something was the matter with his legs—they acted funny about carrying him. He tried to whistle, but something was the matter with his lips, too.

Counting this dime, he now had a dollar and eighty cents, and it was the twenty-eighth day of July. “Thirty days has September—April, June and November—” he was saying to himself. Then July was one of the long ones. Well, that was a good thing! Been a great deal worse if July was a short one. Again he tried to whistle, and that time did manage to pipe out a few shrill little notes.

When Hero came running up the hill to meet him he slapped him on the back and cried, “Hello, Hero!” in tones fairly swaggering with bravado.

That night he engaged his father in conversation—the phrase is well adapted to the way Stubby went about it. “How is it about—’bout things like taxes”—Stubby crossed his knees and swung one foot to show his indifference—“if you have almost enough—do they sometimes let you off?”—the detachment was a shade less perfect on that last.

His father laughed scoffingly. “Well, I guess not!”

“I thought maybe,” said Stubby, “if a person had tried awful hard—and had most enough—”

Something inside him was all shaky, so he didn’t go on. His father said that trying didn’t have anything to do with it.

It was hard for Stubby not to sob out that he thought trying ought to have something to do with it, but he only made a hissing noise between his teeth that took the place of the whistle that wouldn’t come.

“Kind of seems,” he resumed, “if a person would have had enough if they hadn’t been beat out of it, maybe—if he done the best he could—”

His father snorted derisively and informed him that doing the best you could made no difference to the government; hard luck stories didn’t go when it came to the laws of the land.

Thereupon Stubby took a little walk out to the alley and spent a considerable time in contemplation of the neighbor’s chicken-yard. When he came back he walked right up to his father and standing there, feet planted, shoulders squared, wanted to know, in a desperate little voice: “If someone else was to give—say a dollar and eighty cents for Hero, could I take the other seventy out of my paper money?”

The man turned upon him roughly. “Uh-huh! That’s it, is it? That’s why you’re getting so smart all of a sudden about government! Look a-here. Just le’me tell you something. You’re lucky if you git enough to eat this winter. Do you know there’s talk of the factory shuttin’ down? Dog tax! Why you’re lucky if you git shoes.”

Stubby had turned away and was standing with his back to his father, hands in his pockets.

“And le’me tell you some’n else, young man. If you got any dollar and eighty cents, you give it to your mother!”

As Stubby was turning the corner of the house he called after him: “How’d you like to have me get you an automobile?”

He went doggedly from house to house the next afternoon, but nobody had any jobs. When Hero came running out to him that night he patted him, but didn’t speak.

That evening as they were sitting in the back yard—Stubby and Hero a little apart from the others—his father was discoursing with his brother about anarchists. They were getting commoner, his father thought. There were a good many of them at the shop. They didn’t call themselves that, but that was what they were.

“Well, what is an anarchist, anyhow?” Stubby’s mother wanted to know.

“Why, an anarchist,” her lord informed her, “is one that’s against the government. He don’t believe in the law and order. The real bad anarchists shoot them that tries to enforce the laws of the land. Guess if you’d read the papers these days you’d know.”

Stubby’s brain had been going round and round and these words caught in it as it whirled. The government—the laws of the land—why, it was the government and the laws of the land that were going to shoot Hero! It was the government—the laws of the land—that didn’t care how hard you had tried—didn’t care whether you had been cheated—didn’t care how you felt—didn’t care about anything except getting the money! His brain got hotter. Well, he didn’t believe in the government, either. He was one of those people—those anarchists—that were against the laws of the land.

He’d done the very best he could and now the government was going to take Hero away from him just because he couldn’t get—couldn’t get—that other seventy cents.

Stubby’s mother didn’t hear her son crying that night. That was because Stubby was successful in holding the pillow over his head.

The next morning he looked in one of the papers he was carrying to see what it said about anarchists. Sure enough, some place way off somewhere, the anarchists had shot somebody that was trying to enforce the laws of the land. The laws of the land—that didn’t care.

That afternoon as Stubby tramped around looking for jobs he saw a good many boys playing with dogs. None of them seemed to be worrying about whether their dogs had checks. To Stubby’s hot little brain and sore little heart came the thought that they didn’t love their dogs any more than he loved Hero, either. But the government didn’t care whether he loved Hero or not! Pooh!—what was that to the government? All it cared about was getting the money. He stood for a long time watching a boy giving his dog a bath. The dog was trying to get away and the boy and another boy were having lots of fun about it. All of a sudden Stubby turned and ran away—ran down an alley, ran through a number of alleys, just kept on running, blinded by the tears.

And that night, in the middle of the night, that something in his head going round and round, getting hotter and hotter, he decided that the only thing for him to do was to shoot the policeman who came to take Hero away on the morning of August first—that would be day after tomorrow.

All night long policemen with revolvers stood around his bed. When his mother called him at half-past four he was shaking so he could scarcely get into his clothes.

On his way home from his route Stubby had to pass a police-station. He went on the other side of the street and stood there looking across. One of the policemen was playing with a dog!

Suddenly he wanted to rush over and throw himself down at that policeman’s feet—sob out the story—ask him to please, please wait till he could get that other seventy cents.

But just then the policeman got up and went in the station, and Stubby was afraid to go in the police-station.

That policeman complicated things for Stubby. Before that it had been quite simple. The policeman would come to enforce the law of the land; but he did not believe in the law of the land, so he would just kill the policeman. But it seemed a policeman wasn’t just a person who enforced the laws of the land. He was also a person who played with a dog.

After a whole day of walking around thinking about it—his eyes burning, his heart pounding—he decided that the thing to do was to warn the policeman by writing a letter. He did not know whether real anarchists warned them or not, but Stubby couldn’t get reconciled to the idea of killing a person without telling him you were going to do it. It seemed that even a policeman should be told—especially a policeman who played with a dog.

The following letter was penciled by a shaking hand, late that afternoon. It was written upon a barrel in the Lynch woodshed, on a piece of wrapping paper, a bristly little head bending over it:

To the Policeman who comes to take my dog ’cause I ain’t got the two fifty—’cause I tried but could only get one eighty—’cause a man was off his nut and didn’t pay me what I earned—

This is to tell you I am an anarchist and do not believe in the government or the law and the order and will shoot you when you come. I wouldn’t a been an anarchist if I could a got the money and I tried to get it but I couldn’t get it—not enough. I don’t think the government had ought to take things you like like I like Hero so I am against the government.

Thought I would tell you first.

Yours truly,

F. Lynch.

I don’t see how I can shoot you ’cause where would I get the revolver. So I will have to do it with the butcher knife. Folks are sometimes killed that way ’cause my father read it in the paper.

If you wanted to take the one eighty and leave Hero till I can get the seventy I will not do anything to you and would be very much obliged.

1113 Willow street.

The letter was properly addressed and sealed—not for nothing had Stubby’s teacher given those instructions in the art of letter writing. The stamp he paid for out of the dime the man gave him to get a soda with—and forget his troubles.

Now Bill O’Brien was on the desk at the police-station and Miss Murphy of the Herald stood in with Bill. That was how it came about that the next morning a fat policeman, an eager-looking girl and a young fellow with a kodak descended into the hollow to 1113 Willow street.

A little boy peeped around the corner of the house—such a wild-looking little boy—hair all standing up and eyes glittering. A yellow dog ran out and barked. The boy darted out and grabbed the dog in his arms and in that moment the girl called to the man with the black box: “Right now! Quick! Get him!”

They were getting ready to shoot Hero! That box was the way the police did it! He must—oh, he must—must … Boy and dog sank to the ground—but just the same the boy was shielding the dog!

When Stubby had pulled himself together the policeman was holding Hero. He said that Hero was certainly a fine dog—he had a dog a good deal like him at home. And Miss Murphy—she was choking back sobs herself—knew how he could earn the seventy cents that afternoon.

In such wise do a good anarchist and a good story go down under the same blow. Some of those sobs Miss Murphy choked back got into what she wrote about Stubby and his yellow dog and the next day citizens with no sense of the dramatic sent money enough to check Hero through life.

At first Stubby’s father said he had a good mind to lick him. But something in the quality of Miss Murphy’s journalism left a hazy feeling of there being something remarkable about his son. He confided to his good wife that it wouldn’t surprise him much if Stubby was someday President. Somebody had to be President, said he, and he had noticed it was generally those who in their youthful days did things that made lively reading in the newspapers.

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Apr 1912

At Twilight

A breeze from the May world without blew through the classroom, and as it lifted his papers he had a curious sense of freshness and mustiness meeting. He looked at the group of students before him, half smiling at the way the breath of spring was teasing the hair of the girls sitting by the window. Anna Lawrence was trying to pin hers back again, but May would have none of such decorum, and only waited long enough for her to finish her work before joyously undoing it. She caught the laughing, admiring eyes of a boy sitting across from her and sought to conceal her pleasure in her unmanageable wealth of hair by a wry little face, and then the eyes of both strayed out to the trees that had scented that breeze for them, looking with frank longing at the campus which stretched before them in all its May glory that sunny afternoon. He remembered having met this boy and girl strolling in the twilight the evening before, and as a buoyant breeze that instant swept his own face he had a sudden, irrelevant consciousness of being seventy-three years old.

Other eyes were straying to the trees and birds and lilacs of that world from which the classroom was for the hour shutting them out. He was used to it—that straying of young eyes in the spring. For more than forty years he had sat at that desk and talked to young men and women about philosophy, and in those forty years there had always been straying eyes in May. The children of some of those boys and girls had in time come to him, and now there were other children who, before many years went by, might be sitting upon those benches, listening to lectures upon what men had thought about life, while their eyes strayed out where life called. So it went on—May, perhaps, the philosopher triumphant.

As, with a considerable effort—for the languor of spring, or some other languor, was upon him too—he brought himself back to the papers they had handed in, he found himself thinking of those first boys and girls, now men and women, and parents of other boys and girls. He hoped that philosophy had, after all, done something more than shut them out from May. He had always tried, not so much to instruct them in what men had thought, as to teach them to think, and perhaps now, when May had become a time for them to watch the straying of other eyes, they were the less desolate because of the habits he had helped them to form. He wanted to think that he had done something more than hold them prisoners.

There was a sadness today in his sympathy. He was tired. It was hard to go back to what he had been saying about the different things the world’s philosophers had believed about the immortality of the soul. So, as often when his feeling for his thought dragged, he turned to Gretta Loring. She seldom failed to bring a revival of interest—a freshening. She was his favorite student. He did not believe that in all the years there had been any student who had not only pleased, but helped him as she did.

He had taught her father and mother. And now there was Gretta, clear-eyed and steady of gaze, asking more of life than either of them had asked; asking, not only May, but what May meant. For Gretta there need be no duality. She was one of those rare ones for whom the meaning of life opened new springs to the joy of life, for whom life intensified with the understanding of it. He never said a thing that gratified him as reaching toward the things not easy to say but that he would find Gretta’s face illumined—and always that eager little leaning ahead for more.

She had that look of waiting now, but today it seemed less an expectant than a troubled look. She wanted him to go on with what he had been saying about the immortality of the soul. But it was not so much a demand upon him—he had come to rely upon those demands, as it was—he had an odd, altogether absurd sense of its being a fear for him. She looked uncomfortable, fretted; and suddenly he was startled to see her searching eyes blurred by something that must be tears.

She turned away, and for just a minute it seemed to leave him alone and helpless. He rubbed his forehead with his hand. It felt hot. It got that way sometimes lately when he was tired. And the close of that hour often found him tired.

He believed he knew what she wanted. She would have him declare his own belief. In the youthful flush of her modernism she was impatient with that fumbling around with what other men had thought. Despising the muddled thinking of some of her classmates, she would have him put it right to them with “As for yourself—”

He tried to formulate what he would care to say. But, perhaps just because he was too tired to say it right, the life the robin in the nearest tree was that moment celebrating in song seemed more important than anything he had to say about his own feeling toward the things men had thought about the human soul.

It was ten minutes before closing time, but suddenly he turned to his class with: “Go out-of-doors and think about it. This is no day to sit within and talk of philosophy. What men have thought about life in the past is less important than what you feel about it today.” He paused, then added, he could not have said why, “And don’t let the shadow of either belief or unbelief fall across the days that are here for you now.” Again he stopped, then surprised himself by ending, “Philosophy should quicken life, not deaden it.”

They were not slow in going, their astonishment in his wanting them to go quickly engulfed in their pleasure in doing so. It was only Gretta who lingered a moment, seeming too held by his manner in sending her out into the sunshine to care about going there. He thought she was going to come to the desk and speak to him. He was sure she wanted to. But at the last she went hastily, and he thought, just before she turned her face away, that it was a tear he saw on her lashes.

Strange! Was she unhappy, she through whom life surged so richly? And yet was it not true, that where it gave much it exacted much? Feeling much, and understanding what she felt, and feeling for what she understood—must she also suffer much? Must one always pay?

He sighed, and began gathering together his papers. Thoughts about life tired him today.

On the steps he paused, unreasonably enough a little saddened as he watched some of them beginning a tennis game. Certainly they were losing no time—eager to let go thoughts about life for its pleasures, very few of them awake to that rich life he had tried to make them ready for. He drooped still more wearily at the thought that perhaps the most real gift he had for them was that unexpected ten minutes.

Remembering a book he must have from the library, he turned back. He went to the alcove where the works on philosophy were to be found, and was reaching up for the volume he wanted, when a sentence from a lowly murmured conversation in the next aisle came to him across the stack of books.

“That’s all very well; we know, of course, that he doesn’t believe, but what will he do when it comes to himself?”

It arrested him, coming as it did from one of the girls who had just left his classroom. He stood there motionless, his hand still reaching up for the book.

“Do? Why, face it, of course. Face it as squarely as he’s faced every other fact of life.”

That was Gretta, and though, mindful of the library mandate for silence, her tone was low, it was vibrant with a fine scorn.

“Well,” said the first speaker, “I guess he’ll have to face it before very long.”

That was not answered; there was a movement on the other side of the barricade of books—it might have been that Gretta had turned away. His hand dropped down from the high shelf. He was leaning against the books.

“Haven’t you noticed, Gretta, how he’s losing his grip?”

At that his head went up sharply; he stood altogether tense as he waited for Gretta to set the other girl right—Gretta, so sure-seeing, so much wiser and truer than the rest of them. Gretta would laugh!

But she did not laugh. And what his strained ear caught at last was—not her scornful denial, but a little gasp of breath suggesting a sob.

“Noticed it? Why it breaks my heart!”

He stared at the books through which her low, passionate voice had carried. Then he sank to the chair that fortunately was beside him. Power for standing had gone from him.

“Father says—father’s on the board, you know” (it was the first girl who spoke)—“that they don’t know what to do about it. It’s not justice to the school to let him begin another year. These things are arranged with less embarrassment in the big schools, where a man begins emeritus at a certain time. Though of course they’ll pension him—he’s done a lot for the school.”

He thanked Gretta for her little laugh of disdain. The memory of it was more comforting—more satisfying—than any attempt to put it into words could have been.

He heard them move away, their skirts brushing the book-stacks in passing. A little later he saw them out in the sunshine on the campus. Gretta joined one of the boys for a game of tennis. Motionless, he sat looking out at her. She looked so very young as she played.

For an hour he remained at the table in the alcove where he had overheard what his students had to say of him. And when the hour had gone by he took up the pen which was there upon the study table and wrote his resignation to the secretary of the board of trustees. It was very brief—simply that he felt the time had come when a younger man could do more for the school than he, and that he should like his resignation to take effect at the close of the present school year. He had an envelope, and sealed and stamped the letter—ready to drop in the box in front of the building as he left. He had always served the school as best he could; he lost no time now, once convinced, in rendering to it the last service he could offer it—that of making way for the younger man.

Looking things squarely in the face, and it was the habit of a lifetime to look things squarely in the face, he had not been long in seeing that they were right. Things tired him now as they had not once tired him. He had less zest at the beginning of the hour, more relief at the close of it. He seemed stupid in not having seen it for himself, but possibly many people were a little stupid in seeing that their own time was over. Of course he had thought, in a vague way, that his working time couldn’t be much longer, but it seemed part of the way human beings managed with themselves that things in even the very near future kept the remoteness of future things.

Now he understood Gretta’s troubled look and her tears. He knew how those fine nerves of hers must have suffered, how her own mind had wanted to leap to the aid of his, how her own strength must have tormented her in not being able to reach his flagging powers. It seemed part of the whole hardness of life that she who would care the most would be the one to see it most understandingly.

What he was trying to do was to see it all very simply, in matter-of-fact fashion, that there might be no bitterness and the least of tragedy. It was nothing unique in human history he was facing. One did one’s work; then, when through, one stopped. He tried to feel that it was as simple as it sounded, but he wondered if back of many of those brief letters of resignation that came at quitting-time there was the hurt, the desolation, that there was no use denying to himself was back of his.

He hoped that most men had more to turn to. Most men of seventy-three had grandchildren. That would help, surrounding one with a feeling of the naturalness of it all. But that school had been his only child. And he had loved it with the tenderness one gives a child. That in him which would have gone to the child had gone to the school.

The woman whom he loved had not loved him; he had never married. His life had been called lonely; but lonely though it undeniably had been, the life he won from books and work and thinking had kept the chill from his heart. He had the gift of drawing life from all contact with life. Working with youth, he kept that feeling for youth that does for the life within what sunshine and fresh air do for the room in which one dwells.

It was now that the loneliness that blights seemed waiting for him…. Life used one—and that in the ugly, not the noble sense of being used. Stripped of the fine fancies men wove around it, what was it beyond just a matter of being sucked dry and then thrown aside? Why not admit that, and then face it? And the abundance with which one might have given—the joy in the giving—had no bearing upon the fact that it came at last to that question of getting one out of the way. It was no one’s unkindness; it was just that life was like that. Indeed, the bitterness festered around the thought that it was life itself—the way of life—not the brutality of any particular people. “They’ll pension him—he’s done a lot for the school.” Even the grateful memory of Gretta’s tremulous, scoffing little laugh for the way it fell short could not follow to the deep place that had been hurt.

Getting himself in hand again, and trying to face this as simply and honestly as he had sought to face the other, he knew that it was true he had done a great deal for the school. He did not believe it too much to say he had done more for it than any other man. Certainly more than any other man he had given it what place it had with men who thought. He had come to it in his early manhood, and at a time when the school was in its infancy—just a crude, struggling little Western college. Gretta Loring’s grandfather had been one of its founders—founding it in revolt against the cramping sectarianism of another college. He had gloried in the spirit which gave it birth, and it was he who, through the encroachings of problems of administration and the ensnarements and entanglements of practicality, had fought to keep unattached and unfettered that spirit of freedom in the service of truth.

His own voice had been heard and recognized, and a number of times during the years calls had come from more important institutions, but he had not cared to go. For year by year there deepened that personal love for the little college to which he had given the youthful ardor of his own intellectual passion. All his life’s habits were one with it. His days seemed beaten into the path that cut across the campus. The vines that season after season went a little higher on the wall out there indicated his strivings by their own, and the generation that had worn down even the stones of those front steps had furrowed his forehead and stooped his shoulders. He had grown old along with it! His days were twined around it. It was the place of his efforts and satisfactions (joys perhaps he should not call them), of his falterings and his hopes. He loved it because he had given himself to it; loved it because he had helped to bring it up. On the shelves all around him were books which it had been his pleasure—because during some of those hard years they were to be had in no other way—to order himself and pay for from his own almost ludicrously meager salary. He remembered the excitement there always was in getting them fresh from the publisher and bringing them over there in his arms; the satisfaction in coming in next day and finding them on the shelves. Such had been his dissipations, his indulgences of self. Many things came back to him as he sat there going back over busy years, the works on philosophy looking down upon him, the shadows of that spring afternoon gathering around him. He looked like a very old man indeed as he at last reached out for the letter he had written to the trustees, relieving them of their embarrassment.

Twilight had come on. On the front steps he paused and looked around the campus. It was growing dark in that lingering way it has in the spring—daylight creeping away under protest, night coming gently, as if it knew that the world having been so pleasant, day would be loath to go. The boys and girls were going back and forth upon the campus and the streets. They could not bear to go within. For more than forty years it had been like that. It would be like that for many times forty years—indeed, until the end of the world, for it would be the end of the world when it was not like that. He was glad that they were out in the twilight, not indoors trying to gain from books something of the meaning of life. That course had its satisfactions along the way, but it was surely no port of peace to which it bore one at the last.

He shrunk from going home. There were so many readjustments he must make, once home. So, lingering, he saw that off among the trees a girl was sitting alone. She threw back her head in a certain way just then, and he knew by the gesture that it was Gretta Loring. He wondered what she was thinking about. What did one who thought think about—over there on the other side of life? Youth and age looked at life from opposite sides. Then they could not see it alike, for what one saw in life seemed to depend so entirely upon how the light was falling from where one stood.

He could not have said just what it was made him cross the campus toward her. Part of it was the desire for human sympathy—one thing, at least, which age did not deaden. But that was not the whole of it, nor the deepest thing in it. It was an urge of the spirit to find and keep for itself a place where the light was falling backward upon life.

She was quiet in her greeting, and gentle. Her cheeks were still flushed, her hair tumbled from her game, but her eyes were thoughtful and, he thought, sad. He felt that the sadness was because of him; of him and the things of which he made her think. He knew of her affection for him, the warmth there was in her admiration of the things for which he had fought. He had discovered that it hurt her now that others should be seeing and not he, pained her to watch so sorry a thing as his falling below himself, wounded both pride and heart that men whom she would doubtless say had never appreciated him were whispering among themselves about how to get rid of him. Why, the poor child might even be tormenting herself with the idea she ought to tell him!

That was why he told her. He pointed to the address on the envelope, saying: “That carries my resignation, Gretta.”

Her start and the tears which rushed to her eyes told him he was right about her feeling. She did not seem able to say anything. Her chin was trembling.

“I see that the time has come,” he said, “when a younger man can do more for the school than I can hope to do for it.”

Still she said nothing at all, but her eyes were deepening and she had that very steadfast, almost inspired look that had so many times quickened him in the classroom.

She was not going to deny it! She was not going to pretend!

After the first feeling of not having got something needed he rose to her high ground—ground she had taken it for granted he would take.

“And will you believe it, Gretta,” he said, rising to that ground and there asking, not for the sympathy that bends down, but for a hand in passing, “there comes a hard hour when first one feels the time has come to step aside and be replaced by that younger man?”

She nodded. “It must be,” she said, simply; “it must be very much harder than any of us can know till we come to it.”

She brought him a sense of his advantage in experience—his riches. To be sure, there was that.

And he was oddly comforted by the honesty in her which could not stoop to dishonest comforting. In what superficially might seem her failure there was a very real victory for them both. And there was nothing of coldness in her reserve! There was the fulness of understanding, and of valuing the moments too highly for anything there was to be said about it. There was a great spiritual dignity, a nobility, in the way she was looking at him. It called upon the whole of his own spiritual dignity. It was her old demand upon him, but this time the tears through which her eyes shone were tears of pride in fulfillment, not of sorrowing for failure.

Suddenly he felt that his life had not been spent in vain, that the lives of all those men of his day who had fought the good fight for intellectual honesty—spiritual dignity—had not been spent in vain if they were leaving upon the earth even a few who were like the girl beside them.

It turned him from himself to her. She was what counted—for she was what remained. And he remained in just the measure that he remained through her; counted in so far as he counted for her. It was as if he had been facing in the wrong direction and now a kindly hand had turned him around. It was not in looking back there he would find himself. He was not back there to be found. Only so much of him lived as had been able to wing itself ahead—on in the direction she was moving.

It did not particularly surprise him that when she at last spoke it was to voice a shade of that same feeling. “I was thinking,” she began, “of that younger man. Of what he must mean to the man who gives way to him.”

She was feeling her way as she went—groping among the many dim things that were there. He had always liked to watch her face when she was thinking her way step by step.

“I think you used a word wrongly a minute ago,” she said, with a smile. “You spoke of being replaced. But that isn’t it. A man like you isn’t replaced; he’s”—she got it after a minute and came forth with it triumphantly—“fulfilled!”

Her face was shining as she turned to him after that. “Don’t you see? He’s there waiting to take your place because you got him ready. Why, you made that younger man! Your whole life has been a getting ready for him. He can do his work because you first did yours. Of course he can go farther than you can! Wouldn’t it be a sorry commentary on you if he couldn’t?”

Her voice throbbed warmly upon that last, and during the pause the light it had brought still played upon her face. “We were talking in class about immortality,” she went on, more slowly. “There’s one form of immortality I like to think about. It’s that all those who from the very first have given anything to the world are living in the world today.” There was a rush of tears to her eyes and of affection to her voice as she finished, very low: “You’ll never die. You’ve deepened the consciousness of life too much for that.”

They sat there as twilight drew near to night, the old man and the young girl, silent. The laughter of boys and girls and the good-night calls of the birds were all around them. The fragrance of life was around them. It was one of those silences to which come impressions, faiths, longings, not yet born as thoughts.

Something in the quality of that silence brought the rescuing sense of its having been good to have lived and done one’s part—that sense which, from places of desolation and over ways rough and steep and dark, can find its way to the meadows of serenity.

Lifted Masks (1912)
first publication:
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Apr 1912

The Tragedy of a Mind

In a lecture room of one of the large universities a white haired professor sat alone late in the afternoon. He had just dismissed a body of students and could hear them even now noisily dispersing on the campus beneath his window. “I see them very tired tonight,” he said half aloud as he indifferently arranged his books and papers, and he found himself heaving a sigh of relief because the work of another day was done. Leaning back in his chair he clasped his hands on his tired forehead and noticed what he had not realized, that it was hot and throbbing. “It seems queer” he thought, “my work never used to affect me so.”

The door opened and a tall girl carrying an armful of books entered and came quickly toward him. It was his daughter Edith, who never failed to come and walk home with him at five. He was always glad to see her, tonight especially so for she had such a restful face. He held out his hand and as she came up and took it, she looked lovingly down into his strong, rugged face and a look of tender anxiety came into her deep, thoughtful eyes as she said: “Let’s go home and have our tea father, you look so very tired.”

“Do I?” he said with a little laugh, “Well I believe I am just a little tired tonight, or at any rate my head is troubling me some. I wonder why it is Edith, it never used to take so much effort to hold fifty or more inquiring young minds for an hour on a subject I have spent my whole life trying to get in hand.”

“Well it wouldn’t now,” she answered reassuringly, “if you were perfectly well, but that awful cold you have had all month has kept you from being yourself.”

“No doubt that is it,” he said wearily, and he let her help him on with his coat, and they passed out into the hall.

“I had almost forgotten,” he said, “I have to go into the library for a second, you hold these things and I’ll be back in just a moment.”

Groups of the students were sitting around at the tables beginning preparations for the next days work, and Prof. Hummel’s kind smile seemed to diffuse itself warmly over them all. He loved all the university’s boys and girls, as he was wont to call them, and they were quick to appreciate that he was genuinely their friend. He liked to feel that he was closely in touch with their young, expanding lives, it pleased and stimulated him to be told of their hopes and aspirations, and he always treated their views with the same respect as those emanating from conservative maturity. Their petty disturbances, and so-called trials, were never of small import in his eyes, and in their successes he was never too busy to rejoice. He called them his inspiration, and he worked not for the recognition that followed from the world without the little college sphere, but only to instill into the receptive minds that came daily before him that which would broaden and enrich the lives they were to live. Keenly he felt the responsibility of offering to them the best of what he had assimilated through years of effort, in order that they might use and develop it for themselves, and for humanity, when he had gone from among them.

He was standing in one of the alcoves, looking for what he wanted, when he heard someone enter the little room on the other side of the thin partition, and recognizing the voices of two of his favorites was about to go in and speak to them, when the boy said,

“Wasn’t that lecture this afternoon pitiful?”

“Yes,” replied the girl sadly, “it fairly made my heart ache. I’ve seen it coming on all this year, but the last week has been a great deal worse, and this afternoon certainly was distressing. Once in a while there comes a little gleam that just suggests the brilliancy of other days, but then he weakens and wanders almost instantly and we are only forced to pity the contrast.”

“I was just trying to think,” said the boy, “what it must mean to a mind like that, to feel itself growing weak. To know that the time had come when it must rest passively on what it had done, no matter how it craved to do more.”

“Right there,” responded his companion, “seems to me the pathetic part of it. Prof. Hummel in no sense realizes that he is not the power he once was. Evidently he is entirely unconscious of how dangerously his gigantic intellect is tottering, and his students are all so thoroughly devoted to him, and reverence so profoundly the wonders he has achieved, that they would endure anything rather than let him feel the change. And yet I sometimes wonder how much longer it can go on this way.”

Like shadows not even conscious of the walls they are darkening, they passed on, leaving the old man in the next alcove leaning heavily against one of the shelves. His drawn lips quivered helplessly as a child’s, and he saw the books and familiar things about him through a blinding mist. There are times in life when one does not speak, when one does not even think. As he turned, and walked slowly away, he stooped a trifle more, his age-furrowed face was a little whiter, and the bloodless hand on his cane shook perceptibly, but he had the same cordial smile for the students he met in the hall, and when he joined his daughter he apologized with characteristic courtesy for having detained her so long.

When they reached home he said: “My head is aching badly now, Edith, so I am going right to my room and I will ask you to send my tea there. Try not to have me disturbed.”

“Father, isn’t there something I can do for you?” she asked in a troubled voice, and he answered with a sadness she failed to understand, “No child, there is nothing to be done.”

He lay down on the couch for a long time, then he got up and began feverishly pacing the floor. Pretty soon he stood still, and laughed. Why, it was all a huge joke! He was laboring under at temporary indisposition and his students had conceived the idea that he was losing his mind. Poor deluded children, he must hasten to reassure them. He would make a special effort for tomorrow’s work, and then they would see their absurdity, and know that their old teacher had many years to lead them yet. So almost briskly he settled himself to his books, but his new brightness was of short duration. He was watching himself now, he soon saw, and heaven pity him, he understood. He was weak, and it was too bitter, too awful to bear. He gathered the books he had lived with, and loved so many years up in his trembling arms, and holding them tight, cried as he had not done since the days of his early boyhood. It seemed saying goodbye to his dearest friend. They might meet again, but they would never clasp hands. The sweet fellowship of a long life time was burning low, and soon there would be nothing left him but to worship from afar. He knew it was not the unimpedible wave, natural old age, that this chilly mist foreran. Age that was but the luscious ripening of the half-matured fruit he could adjust himself to, and when his tastes and habits had smoothly molded themselves to the changing years, he would find it, though very different, sweet. He had often thought of the tranquil pleasure reserved for the time when pretensions had ceased and desire and vitality were sleeping in one grave; the passive time when one sits day after day in one’s easy chair meditatively reviewing the life one has lived, content in knowing that the apportioned time had been used, and the day of activity drawn to a symmetrical close. But to feel a mental stupor weighing you down while the body yet held its own, to know that you were not broken with years, but had climbed too high, and were now falling from the dizzy height, falling, falling into something you know not what, save that it was worse than death. For what is death but freedom, and what was this but bondage in which the songs of freedom were chanted from afar?

The many colored sunset that melts from radiance into an ethereal hue and mirrors its soft loveliness far into the responsive east is nature’s choicest masterpiece, and in the beauty of its mellowed splendor the soul forgets the burning of the noonday sun, but the storm that fiercely sweeps the helpless sky while the western horizon waits yet a league a way, shrouds in blackness e’en the hours that went before, and leaves unpainted the sunset that should have been. To the artist, an unfinished painting means a painting lost, and a half-executed symphony leaves the heart tuned to music unsatisfied and restless. To leave one’s work unfinished, this we give as one synonym for failure. Grasping helplessly at half-recognized possibilities, we live on to fulfill them. On the basis of what we have built, do we conceive the superstructive.

On this he brooded, for this he pleaded. He was not through; who would finish his half-written book? Who would lecture to his students? Much that he had to tell them yet lurked phantom-like in the veiled recesses of his brain, and no man even knew that it was there. Was it then forever to go unspoken, this the culmination, the vital essence, of his whole life’s work?

The walls were closing in on him, the air he breathed was heavy and thick. He looked out and saw that it was moonlight, and a strange fancy came over him to go up to the university and walk around a little, for it was large and high there and he could breathe. With the craftiness of a wayward child he let himself out, and with hands clasped behind him and head bowed low on his breast, he sorrowfully went the way that year after year he had gone. It was first in the buoyancy of youth, that with elastic step he had come upon that campus. The years that had ruthlessly silvered his brown hair had busied themselves in scattering far and wide the companions that had made his college days the all they were. In the clear, fresh morning of youth they had met and called themselves friends. In the light of common interests and common desires their friendship had flourished and bloomed. The life they lived fashioned them after one mold, and they came closer to one another than man ever comes to man again. Their minds were at work together, their very hearts beat together, over them all was thrown the sweet mantle of understanding, appreciation, comradeship, and sympathy. A mantle of rare weave, with an existence short-lived, but a memory imperishable. When they were floating down the green banked stream, lingering along just within roar of the sea, they pulled their little barks close together and said; “Remember we are never going to drift apart.” And for a time they did hold together, but it was harder to keep within hailing distance than they had anticipated. The water grew very rough, billow after billow came in fast and wild, storms they had not foreseen blew up and whirled their frail boats round and round in a seething whitecapped mass, foreign crafts pursued and jostled them, and mighty ocean steamers enticed some off to unknown seas. In the blackness of the night they drifted widely apart, and after each had tugged long and desperately to keep himself afloat he knew not in what stream to seek the brother whose gaily painted canoe had floated lazily beside him down the rippling river. All he could do was pause a moment in the lull, and dream fondly of the rolicksome crew of which he was once a part, and wonder if the oars that splashed so musically then had withstood the oceans’ hurricane.

The scattered mass of buildings looked weird and ghostly in the moonlight and failed to appeal long to his whimsical fancy. Unlocking the door he went into the room that had been his for almost forty years. He sat down, and while the pale beams played fantastically about his white head he thought of the work he had done in those years, and how now it was virtually over. Hope, rather than joy, old age struggles against relinquishing. Having done what he could, he was to be supplanted by a man from a new generation, who would be welcomed, admired and loved in his stead. His mind was worn to worthlessness and even now he could feel it slipping cruelly from him. He supposed that soon he would cease to be conscious of his loss, and no longer unhappy. Too great a man to bewail the inevitable, here in the strange solitude he grew calmer and clung only to the one pathetic hope that someone would be found to take up the threads he was untangling and with the dexterity of a well trained intellect, and the strength and fearlessness of blood that is young and untired, weave the beautiful tapestry he had but conceived. He had trodden it long and unflinchingly, he had made giant strides, and had not grown breathless, but now he was to step from the broad highway to sit in an arbor by the wayside, to watch the passers-by, and to wait. Wait until the God who had made him all he was, return to him a hundred-fold enriched the mind and strength that for a short while he was taking from him. Wait, until the stars that the gray twilight was hiding shine luminously and serenely in the deep blue ether of eternity.

The Delphic Feb 1898

An Unprofessional Crime

Note: The incidents in this story are literally true and happened a few years ago in South Dakota.

It being the first hour after dinner on Sunday afternoon, the reporters had nothing to do but elevate their heels to a comfortable angle and intertwine stories with smoke. They were devoting their talents to recounting personal experiences, and were doing this in a way that distinguished them from a Methodist experience—meeting in several particulars.

The talk was interesting but unorthodox, and while distinctly Bohemian, it could not be rated as altogether fanciful. Even the open fire-place, the pride of the Press Club, could not have reflected such strange conglomerations as could any of the lives identified with the respective pair of heels that were toasting before it.

The world has better men than the reporters on daily newspapers. It has smarter men, a few smoother, and quite a sprinkling of meaner ones—the last statement demanding proof. But one thing is sure, it contains no class of men so familiar with the inside workings of all parts of the world’s machinery. No one class so definitely knows how many of the reputed “square” things of life are cut on the bias. No class could give so exactly the percentage of men who become broad-minded and magnanimous—for a consideration.

It is the reporter’s business to know men and some of them have learned the business well. Whenever a situation culminates in an event, sooner or later—and usually not the latter—there is a newspaper man in the field to grasp all that is exceptional or significant. They bring men to justice, likewise away from it. They can obtain an audience with the first man in the land (the aforesaid first man being occasionally created so by them for the sake of a story.) They can be kicked down from the fifth story of a back tenement house—all with the same divine serenity. So to the man who would know things as they are rather than accept them as they seem, there is much that is worth while, when a crowd of the busiest men on earth take an hour off to talk and size things up.

The stories they tell each other are not padded beyond redemption like much of their copy, for they know it takes a clever fake to fool a faker. Privately they have ideas of consistency. They keep decently within the bonds of possibilities when they inform the man on the rival sheet how they shaped political campaigns, engineered reforms, and wrought all sorts of clever dodges to make people live stories that would snap well in print.

A magazine article had just appeared on “The Personal Side of the Reporter.” The crowd of reporters deposited cigar ashes on the Press Club carpet and made irreverent remarks.

“The author of that article was the victim of an over-wrought imagination and lacked both experience and discernment. A reporter with that sort of a ‘personal side’ never held down a good job on an up-to-date paper. He might succeed as a missionary, but that was his limit. He carried a Washingtonian hatchet in his belt. He would get weak in the knees and suppress a good story to keep from breaking somebody’s heart. He couldn’t swim through tears and come up dry and comfortable.” These were crimes not to be condoned.

The Court reporter for the Morning Herald, embedded in a mammoth chair, puffed a Havana—supplied him by a banker whose case was docketed for the next day. He was the oldest reporter in the city, an all around man, one of the best. After thirty years of newspaper experience, it was yet whispered that he had a conscience. Strangely enough he was idealized by the aspirants as the Old Fellow, against whom the genuine scoops could be counted on the fingers of one hand. He alone had not committed himself in the discussion, so all turned their eyes expectantly when he flicked the ashes from his cigar and meditatively cleared his throat.

“I suppose,” he began quietly, “a convention of managing editors would agree with you that a reporter needs enough sympathy to color his story well, but needs no more. He might see ghosts if he was constituted too susceptibly. It is a great thing to have a fine eye for the pathetic in a situation, but that is because it gives the story a brighter tone, and yet—” he was looking into the fire now, “hard and fast lives sometimes snap at the wrong time, and the tears you talk about loose their commercial value, and become human tears, and once in a while it is hard not to have a heart of your own when you are with people whose hearts are aching. I hope I am not a sentimental idiot, but I have lost some sleep in my life that the assignment book could not quite account for. Someday I will tell you how I missed the chance of my life because I was floored by the human side of a situation and committed a crime against my profession, but just now I am due at the office.”

“Office be blowed, let’s have the story! Let her go, it won’t take long.”

The Herald man blew a few long puffs, by way of forming a background for his story, and then began in his rather deliberate way:

“No, it won’t take long, and it may explain what I tried to say. If you want to kick me downstairs when I’m through, you needn’t have any scruples. I’m not exactly proud of the thing, but I’d rather like to know what you think about it.”

•    •    •    •

It was when I was running a paper out west about twenty years ago, and it happened on a Christmas Eve. A prettier night was never put in a poem. I don’t see how a better one could be imagined. It was so crisp and frosty that it was better than a glass of whiskey just to walk around a block, but not cold or mean. The snow was piled in ridges along the sidewalks and sparkled like silver with the regular old Christmas Eve glitter. It was a good sized western town and every mother’s son was on the streets. I never saw such a crowd. Jolly! it made you laugh just to watch them.

News had been bum for a long time and we were getting down in the mouth about it, for out there they like stories that go with a snap and a rush. You are N. G. if you don’t get them. There hadn’t been any shooting on the reservation to speak of for nearly a month, and the men at the mines were like so many Sunday school children. It was awful. I tried my best to run on to something during the evening, but I couldn’t even scare up a single-header.

About nine o’clock I started to the office to run in a little mild copy, but I was suddenly interrupted—that is the story. Right at the corner of an alley a small boy dived into me and nearly knocked me over. He seemed so scared that I collared him and said, “What’s the matter kid?”

“There’s a man layin’ dead in the alley,” he whimpered. I loosened him and he pelted off. I supposed someone was hurt a little and stepped into the alley to see. In about four steps I tripped over a man. I struck a match and saw it was Jim Connor, a brakeman on the new road. One more look and I knew the kid had guessed right.

I went in at the side door of the saloon where he had evidently come out. They said he went out that way about ten minutes before. He had quarreled with Bill Barker, who left by the front door about the same time. There was a young doctor in the saloon and when we carried Jim in he examined a little and found he had received a hard blow in the mouth and that a big wad of tobacco had been knocked into his throat. While he lay there insensible it had strangled him. It was peculiar, but as clear a case as you could want.

None of us doubted that Bill Barker had done it, so I got a hack and hurried to his home in the edge of town. Barker was a railroad man too, Connor’s conductor. He was hot-headed, but a better-hearted fellow never lived and he was one of the best friends I had in town. He lived with his mother and took care of her and his sister who was sick most of the time.

“Glad to see you, old man, come right in here and have a pipe,” he said in his big western way, when he found me at the door. I told him that I couldn’t do it, that I was in a hurry and just wanted to ask him a couple of questions.

“Fire away then,” he said.

“I want to know what the trouble was between you and Jim Connor tonight.” He looked at me and then threw back his head and laughed.

“Well if you came way out here just to ask me that, you must be pretty hard up for news. We had a few words in Larkin’s saloon, and when I left he came out of the side door and stopped me and tried to begin it again. It made me mad and I knocked him down and didn’t stop to pick him up. He’s home by this time and has probably forgotten all about it, I had. Put it in your paper if you want to, but I can’t say I think much of it.”

I heard another hack drive up just then and thought I had better tell him. He was standing in front of me in his shirt sleeves with a broad grin on his face. He was a big fellow, but when he smiled, he looked like an overgrown boy. If you took a good look in his eye you’d trust him with your last cent.

“I’m afraid Bill,” I stammered in a voice I hardly knew myself, “that there’s more in the story than you think. We found Jim lying beside Larkin’s saloon about half an hour ago, he was—he—he’s dead!”

“You’re foolin’ me boy,” he said, and put both his hands on my shoulders. “It’s a Christmas Eve joke on old Bill, ain’t it boy?”

There was a loud knock and two policemen stepped into the room. Bill’s face grew gray and he looked at me like a big faithful dog that needed help and was sure he’d get it. There was nothing on God’s earth I could do, so I backed to the door like a coward, and I’m not sure that some of those tears you tell me about didn’t run down my face.

“Why, boys,” Bill said in a half whisper I’ll hear till my dying day, “I didn’t start in to do anything like that. I didn’t even know I had. I supposed Jim was home by this time. I liked the boy, you know I did, and I wouldn’t kill a cat. I went down to buy Christmas presents for the old woman and the girl. That’s all I started in to do. I didn’t mean to kill no one; most of all not Jim. I—I—didn’t mean to. I tell you I don’t believe I did, did I boys?”

The big, honest fellow looked ten years older than he had a few minutes before. I couldn’t stand another bit of it without acting the school girl, so I shook his hand and told him to bear up, that it would come out all right, and then I left.

I had enough newspaper sense left to know that I couldn’t do the story without going to Connor’s house, so I drove there next. It was all lit up and something seemed to be going on inside. I looked in at the front window, and then I remembered it was Christmas Eve. There was a good-sized tree in the middle of the room and the two children were dancing around it, clapping their hands and acting like kids always do. Their mother, a pretty little woman, was sitting on the floor playing with some dogs. She was just a girl herself, and looked as happy as the kids. I started to go away, but remembered that the story would have to be out in the morning, so I went back and knocked at the door. There was a scramble inside and I heard them yell, “Its papa!—papa’s come!”

I was standing a little in the shadow when the little woman opened the door. “Come on in, Jim,” she said in a breezy, happy voice.

Do you think I told her they were bringing her husband home dead? Well, I rather guess not, not I! I asked to see Jim and when she said he wasn’t home yet—I knew when he would be—I tipped my hat, wished her a merry Christmas and went away.

I looked back in the window as I got into the hack and saw that they had gone back to the tree. She was sitting on the floor again and the children were tumbling around her. They were waiting for Jim. I never saw a prettier sight, nor a sadder one.

As we turned the corner, we met a party of men bringing him home. Of course you will say I should have turned back and helped lay him down in the room by the Christmas tree. It would have made a better story. I should have watched how the wife and the children of that dead man received him at the door, not losing sight of the fact of course, that tears have a commercial value. But I didn’t. I flew back to town and got a drink, that’s what I did. Some of you are stronger newspaper men than I and you might have seen it through. It was a great story, but one too hard for me.

There is no use telling you fellows what the opportunities were, you know the material and that’s enough. Take it from the dramatic standpoint—a beautiful Christmas Eve, everybody jolly, a little scrap that amounts to nothing, and a man knocks his friend down. He goes home, gives his old mother and sick sister Christmas presents bought with his hard earned money, and in a few minutes finds himself charged with murder.

The dead man stumbled upon in the alley had a wife and two children waiting for him around a Christmas tree! If there isn’t a chapter from life furnishing newspaper material, I don’t know what you want.

It was the best chance of my life to make a record, but I fell down hard. Every time I tried to write, I could see big Bill standing there like a child who wanted to be comforted, and I could see the Christmas tree in the window of Connor’s cottage. I tried a dozen times and then turned what I knew over to the cub and went out and took another drink. Newspaper enterprise, wasn’t it!

•    •    •    •

The veteran from the Morning Herald drew a meditative puff and the younger men brilliantly followed suit. Strange enough the youngest reporter there did not say he believed he could have handled the story, and notwithstanding the fact that the Herald man had confessed the commission of an unprofessional crime against his newspaper, his stock did not seem to have depreciated in the fraternity.

The Delphic 1899

At the Turn of the Road

The rain poured uncompromisingly down and down, and the State street crowd swarmed unceasingly on. The girl in the waterproof raglan and the small red turban looked from the holly-trimmed windows to the bundle-laden people swarming along outside them, and kept saying to herself that it was Christmas time, and that she surely was feeling very light-hearted and festive. She tried to smile at the children she saw, and to look contentedly about as though the jolliest thing in the world was to be downtown in the rain the day before Christmas.

But the water was dripping inside her collar, and her heart was taking on something of the sogginess of her feet. The feeling of desolation was creeping so overpoweringly upon her that she threw back her head and said to herself, “Someday I shall be famous—someday my pictures will be hung in the great galleries of the world, and then I shall look back to this, and say it was very funny!” Usually that anticipation of future triumphs went a long way in the mitigation of present discomforts, but today, though she said the words with stern stoutness, the idea was without its charm. She stepped inside Field’s and sat down on a willow seat. All about her were people—people—people, and she supposed she was the only one in the whole great throng to whom Christmas would mean nothing at all. She must simply count Christmas out this year—make it as much as possible like other days. She would go down to the Institute early in the morning and work all day long. She might be all alone there, but that would be inestimably preferable to a hollow mockery in a dreary boarding house. She would not even go out there for dinner. She would run in somewhere for the usual bite, and if she recognized Christmas in any form it would be the substitution of a turkey sandwich for the conventional ham.

She saw herself sitting in the almost empty restaurant; the waiters looking at her in astonishment to think she had no place to eat her Christmas dinner. And then she thought of last year’s Christmas—of all the happy Christmases of the past—the big table—the laughing crowd—the wrapping paper and the string thrown about in beautiful holiday disorder. She rose and started hurriedly toward Michigan. She would go back to the Institute, back to the atmosphere of her work, and perhaps there she would forget those Christmases of other years—when she had not learned that loneliness is the price exacted of ambition.

She went as far as the Library building, and there something made her stop. She could go up to the reading-room and find the paper from home; it would tell her how her friends—who were not ambitious—were spending Christmas, and what she herself would have done were not all things with her subservient to the pictures which would one day hang in the great galleries of the world. The hunger in the heart was more mastering just then than the logic in her head, and she yielded to the impulse. It would moderate the dreariness to see familiar names on the printed page, and to be made sure that somewhere in the world a Christmas was waiting for her, if the pictures of the future would but permit her to go and take it.

The big room was almost empty—Chicago had little time for the reading of newspapers on the day before Christmas. She walked down the long aisle toward the alcove where she knew the Des Moines paper was to be found. A man was standing before it—a man past middle years, and he was reading intently. He looked up and saw the girl in the wet raglan and red turban, and saying, “I have just finished,” pushed the paper toward her. She supposed he went away then, or rather she supposed nothing about it. It seemed she was in the presence of an old and dear friend—a sympathetic, understanding friend. She put her hand down on the well-known page and rubbed it this way and that. It was the paper she had read in other days—the paper which the people whom she loved might be reading even now. She forgot brutally big Chicago—forgot even the pictures of the future. The red turban went down into the sheltering folds of the paper from home, and she bowed without reservation under a long-growing and all-powerful homesickness .

At last she seemed to feel that someone was beside her, and she looked up to see the man who had given her the paper.

“Little girl;” he said, “are you lonesome?—discouraged? What is it?—can’t you go home for Christmas?” The voice was a kind one, and it was a face which seemed to understand. It did not occur to her that he was a stranger. She nodded her head in answer to his question, and rubbed away a new flood of tears.

“And why can’t you go home?—they want you, don’t they?”

She turned her tear-stained face to him in astonishment. “Want me!”—and the red turban went down again into the sheltering folds, while the stranger stood there, quietly, breathing out unspoken sympathy.

At last she looked up, straightened the turban, and tried to bend her wet face to a smile. “I’m ashamed to be such a baby, but—but it’s the first one I ever spent away from home, and there’s something awful about feeling lonesome at Christmas time.”

“And now,” he asked with gentle insistence, “will you tell me why it is you are not going home?”

She flushed, and then threw back her head. “It’s for art. I am studying here. Like most of the art students, I haven’t much money. What little I have I must spend for my work. My teachers say I have a future, they say I am going to do more than any student who ever came here. I am living for that future—sacrificing for it. I can not afford to go home for Christmas.”

The stranger was looking at her peculiarly—his lips smiling, his eyes sad. “And so,” he said, musingly, “the world goes on making the same old mistakes, living over the same old tragedies.”

She turned to him questioningly. “Don’t you think I am doing right to sacrifice for my work? Don’t you believe I will be glad sometime that I lived for other things than the present?”

For a moment he did not answer, and then he said, abruptly: “If you will sit down here by the window I will tell you a little story.”

She leaned her elbows on the table, and looked across at him. The great reading-room seemed entirely deserted, and the city which they could see from the window seemed very far away. For a long time the stranger sat there looking piercingly into space.

“Thirty years ago,” he said, recalling himself at last, “I was standing just where you are standing today. You have made up your mind to get fame, I had made up mine to get money. I grant you that yours is the higher of the two, but that matters little. I had determined to do the things I believed I could do, the things that were in me, and like you, I was prepared to sacrifice. I did just what you are planning to do now—cut myself off from my friends. Well—the hard years rolled on, and with them came the realization of my ambition. I am a rich man today—but—but some way the world is a rather lonely place for me. I cannot hope to make you see it, but after years of isolation—consecration you may call it, if you like—one loses the capacity for friendship—for real fellowship. Of course I have friends—business acquaintances, people I know socially, but I have no strong ties. I cut those long ago—sacrificed them—and after you have once grown a way from them they are not to be had back. Strange isn’t it?—but it’s very true. And some way—my little friend—the human heart was not made to feed upon gratified ambition.

“Shall I tell you why I am up here today? I live in New York City now, but I came out to Chicago on business. I judge that your home is in Des Moines; mine was there, too, once—it was from Des Moines I started out to get rich. This afternoon as I saw the bustle on the streets I realized that it was the day before Christmas, and then it flashed upon me that I was very near the one place in the world that had ever been a home to me. Something of the same Christmas longing you were feeling came upon me too—old man that I am. It seemed it would be nice to go back there—to see some old friends, and to have a good old-fashioned Christmas. Finally I determined to get hold of a Des Moines paper, and if I could find the name of any one person I thought would really care to see me I would go out there and spend Christmas. Well—I’ve looked the paper all over, and I am going back to New York.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” cried the girl stretching out an impulsive hand to him, “their names didn’t happen to be in today, they’ll be glad to see you—I know they will.”

He shook his head. “It’s hopeless. I don’t think I should even be glad to see them. I’ve lived beyond it. It’s too late for me, but—I’ve determined to ask something of you.”

They looked at one another steadily for a minute, and then he put his hand in his pocket and took out a roll of bills. “Oh,” she gasped, pushing back her chair, “Oh, thank you—no.”

“My little friend,” he said, “it’s just like this. I’ve gone over the path, and I want to steer you the other way. You’ll paint your pictures all right, I’m sure of that—you in some way look that way out of your eyes, but I want you to hold on to the other things too. I’m not a religious man, certainly not a superstitious one, but I can’t help feeling that I was sent here to find you today. I want you to take this money and go out and spend Christmas where a girl should spend it—at home. I’ll eat my dinner on the dining car tomorrow, and when I go in and sit down at a table all alone it will make me almost contented if I can say to myself—‘That little art girl’s out home with her friends now—she’s having the right kind of a Christmas.’”

He had pushed the bills toward her, and she was looking at them uncertainly. “I know what you think,” he continued, smiling, “I’m a man and a strange one, and it seems queer. But sometimes people are thrown together in this world in a way conventional rules don’t just fit.—Won’t you gratify an old man’s whim? I wanted to go myself, but it was too late for me, and now I want to send you. They want you, and some way I want to feel that they are always going to want you. You are at the turn of the road now, and if a little of my poor money can steer you the way happiness lies, why—maybe I haven’t quite lost my grip on humanity after all. It will please me to think that at any rate, so you won’t refuse to bring a little brightness into my dining car Christmas, will you?”

She reached out her hand for the money, and before she could find voice to thank him he was gone. She looked from the window and saw that the rain had turned to old-fashioned snow. A store across the street turned on the electric lights just then, and there blazed through the dusk a holly-clad “Merry Christmas.”

The Delphic 1903

From the Pen of Failure

He sat looking down at the blue envelope in a half-retrospective way. He had been editor of the Junior Annual himself when in college, and that is why the words in the upper left-hand corner carried him closer to the old days than he had come for some time. Perhaps they wanted him to write something: or, more likely still, they wanted his subscription.

He tore the envelope across the end, and then he read and re-read the typewritten words upon the piece of blue paper. The editor had said to him:

My Dear Mr. Warren: We are hoping to make the Annual better this year than it has ever been before, and we are sure all Drake alumni will feel a keen personal interest in our effort. I write to ask if you will prepare for us a sketch of Edward Forrest. I am sure you will agree with us that he has taken a higher place in the world than any man who has thus far gone out from Drake, and we wish to show our appreciation of him as a Drake alumnus. We wrote Mr. Forrest last week, telling him what we proposed to do, and asking his preference as to the writer of the sketch. While modestly protesting against the fitness of such a thing, he said that if anything was to be written he preferred it to be done by you, of whom he spoke as his best Drake friend. May we depend upon you to do this for us, and to have it in our hands by February first? Of course we do not want the conventional biographical sketch. We want an appreciation, the sort of thing that is written by an intimate. And please make it plain above all that we are duly proud that the youngest member of Congress today is a graduate of Drake University. I am sure you will see what we want, and I trust you will find time to do it for us.

Hoping to hear from you soon, I am,

Very truly yours,

John Freeman.

At last he folded the piece of paper and returned it to its place in the envelope. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked all about the room. He was seeing it all—the worn matting, the smoky stove, the small and not up-to-date library, with new eyes—seeing it in the light of the fact that back at his old school, back where they had once carried him on their shoulders and shouted his name in great peals of triumph, he was of importance now solely because he had for four years been the roommate of Ned Forrest. With a kind of sick feeling going through and through him, he recalled how, one night, upon returning from an inter-collegiate debate which he had won for the school, Ned had met him at the door and had called out with a jubilant ring in his voice, “Do you know what they’ll say about me ten years hence? They’ll say, See that fellow over there? Well, that fellow was Fritz Warren’s roommate at college.” And now, fifteen years had gone by and Ned Forrest was in Congress, looked to as one of the coming men of the country, while Fritz Warren, the man Drake had believed would carry her name to high places, was sitting in a dingy little law office of one of the country towns of Iowa, using the same things he had bought for himself fifteen years before, doing much the same kind of things, having lost one thing—ambition, and having taken on another—resignation. That is why the smoky stove and the badly worn matting were something more than shabby pieces of furniture. They were the symbols of failure, the things which stood for buried hopes and unfulfilled possibilities, for a life not “made good.”

He got up and put some more coal in the little stove; he finished up a petition he was going to file next day; and then stood there by the window looking across at the court house square and thinking of many things—of Ned Forrest, of himself, of the old days, of failure and success.

What was it that made for failure?—and what for success? Not degree of brain power, for he had always stood higher than Ned in things which were a mere matter of brains. In fact Ned had not even been classed with the really great students in the little college world. Ned was a jolly good fellow, a hustler, a pusher, a great old boy: he was many things that are to be desired, but as to usual scholarship, not even professors who loved him most had ever made that claim for him.

No, it was not scholarship, and it was not alone good fellowship. All who were called good fellows did not succeed: to the contrary, that very thing had kept many of them from success. What was it then? Just chance—fate, something or other that could not be defined. That was the way it was in the world; things just happened: it was all unaccountable, freakish. The people who had in them the qualities which should have made for them success ended their lives in the back woods, and the great men of the country reached their positions through a peculiar series of accidents. So what did it matter? Why should one mind failure? Why should one mind anything in a world that was one great game of chance?

And yet, one did mind, or at any rate one thought about it, and wondered. He went back to the office to keep an appointment with a man that night, and after the man had gone, he sat there alone thinking of things he could not put from him. Ned was a great man: he was going to be one of the great men of the country: and as to him, he was just the commonplace country lawyer—the man without a future. Those were facts hard to understand: facts not easy to face.

They had parted the day after commencement, and he had come to this little town, which it was thought then was booming, and which, like himself, had not made good. Ned had looked around in several of the Iowa cities, and then one day there had come a letter from him postmarked Chicago. “You’ll say I’m crazy,” it read: “you’ll say I’ll starve, and all that, but some way I can’t get away from the notion that this is the place for me, and this is where I’m going to hang out my little shingle, and this is where I’m going to make things go.”

And in a way which no one, not even Ned himself, pretended to understand, he had made things go. Whether it was getting in on that sensational case, whether it was having a newspaper friend who knew just when and how to say the right thing, whether it was a compelling voice, a persuasive smile, a winning personality—no matter what, he had someway made things go. He forced the public to take notice of him, and then he did something to it, hypnotized it, likely, and now he was in the House, and Chicago, at least, was eyeing him for the Senate.

He concluded to write the sketch then and there. That would get Ned out of his mind, and break up a gloomy train of thought. It would be easy enough to tell what a fine, lovable fellow he had always been, tell some characteristic things he had done, tell how proud his old friends were of him, and then wind up with some kind of well-sounding tribute.

But it was not easy. He made three or four beginnings, only to tear them all up with the first page. He did not like the sound of them: he could feel that they did not ring true. They seemed to reflect the spirit that was upon him, the spirit which had grown out of his conviction that it was a world of chance, that most of the great men of the earth were but the favorite children of something called Fate, and that hidden under the debris of unfavorable circumstances was many a man who had in him the real essence of greatness.

It was after midnight: the fire had gone out, the room was growing cold. He decided to give it up. He rose and put on his coat, but while taking his hat from the peg, something came to him with all the force and stimulus of an electric shock. Ned had succeeded. No matter why, no matter how; one fact remained: he had.

Slowly and almost laboriously he began working it out with himself. He began to see that one must face success as a fact, even as life and death, and other things which could not be understood, must be faced as facts. There had been something in Ned Forrest which made for success, and the fact that it could not be defined could in no sense be used as an argument against its existence. It might be baffling of analysis—elusive, but a thing which had proved itself, was a thing which was there.

What was it then? this strange something which held within it the possibilities of success? What could man say? And, after all, did it matter? It was not mind, not temperament, not personality, not character, not fate, none of those alone—perhaps the rightness of the proportion, but withal something distinctive, something half mystic, some kind of a divine spark which marked a few men for the seats of the mighty.

And Ned Forrest, the good old fellow of his college days, the boy whom he had once outclassed, was one of the men born with this strange genius for success! A wholly new sense of pride in his friend’s triumph was coming over him. He had always been glad Ned had done things, but his inability to understand it, his tendency to analyze, had taken some of the sharp edge from his pleasure. It had always seemed chance rather than Ned, but now it was Ned himself, something in him greater than mind, greater than all else—that elusive something which makes a few men master of many.

He looked all around the room, that room which spoke out its own story. He had failed and Ned had succeeded: these two facts he faced. And it was not that he had been in hard luck and Ned had been fortunate. It was because he, of the greater mind, had lacked a something which Ned had possessed. It is hard to say why it was that the fact of Ned’s having succeeded seemed of a sudden to become of more importance than the fact of his having failed. A light was coming into his eyes, and late though it was he sat down at his desk and pulled out some sheets of paper. All alone in the desolate little room the commonplace country lawyer wrote his sketch of Ned Forrest. It was the man who had lost writing of the man who had won, and out of his deep knowledge of failure sprang a true and beautiful appraisement of success.

Was it inspirational? If not, if there be no such thing as the inspirational, from whence came the great deep light in his eyes, and why was he trembling so that when he rose to his feet he must needs lean heavily upon his desk? What was it that Fritz Warren put into that sketch of Ned Forrest? The beautiful, worldwide love of college-boy for college-boy?—the unselfish love of chums?—the spirit of joy in the triumph of a friend?

Perhaps: but back of that which, though beautiful, was altogether human, shown the great white light of Fritz Warren’s soul. At rare, rare times in the life of the world a soul has gone into a pen and at such times words destined to immortality have been born. As he slipped the envelope into the post office late that night he knew that failure, though a hard master, had led him up toward the heights of truth.

The work of that night did not find final resting-place in the college annual. It made its way into newspapers and literary journals all over the land. It was embodied in many a speech: it illumined many a sermon. It added to the luster of Ned Forrest’s name, and it brought from more than one the query, “Who is this Fred Warren, anyhow?” A great critic pondered long over the little sketch. His practiced eye saw something behind the words, something behind even the thoughts. He was keen—this great critic—and that is why, after an hour of thought, he penned upon the margin of the clipping: “It is not impossible that the most beautiful thing ever written of success came from the pen of a man who had failed.”

The Quax 1905

The Girl from Downtown

The closing gong rang sharply through the big store, and the girl at the handkerchief counter began putting away her stock with more than usual eagerness.

She was the first of the many hundred clerks to reach the cloakroom, and pinning on her hat and straightening the sleeves of her jacket as she walked, she was soon pushing along with the swarming crowds of people on State Street who had done their day’s work, and were anxious now to get home for the night.

Millie did not go down and take the cable-car, as she had been doing for the past year. She walked a block farther, and then ran up the steps to the L station. She was the first one to board the train, and finding a seat, she folded her hands and smiled contentedly.

The secret of it all was that Millie was that night going out to her new room. She had rented it the day before, and her things had gone out that morning.

There were a number of reasons why Millie was glad to go. She knew she would like it out by the university. There seemed plenty of room there, and then it was close to the lake, and that made the air smell and feel all the while as if there had been a shower just the hour before.

Then, she liked the looks of the girls she had seen walking round on the Midway, and best of all she liked the great graystone buildings, with their queer red roofs.

It was all so different from downtown, and she was sure it would be nice to sit in her little room in the evenings and see the carriages and automobiles going up and down the Midway, and watch the twinkle of the lights in the big buildings, and see the college boys and girls going back and forth with their books and tennis rackets and golf-sticks.

It would be a great deal better than sitting down in a room from which she could not even see the street, and hearing a lot of girls, with whom she could not feel at home, laughing loudly in the next room.

She had been out on the Midway the Sunday before, and had made up her mind at once that that was where she wanted to live. She had noticed a sign, “Room to Rent,” in one of the windows of a large white house, and so the next Thursday evening, when her work was done, she had gone out to ask about it.

It was a hall bedroom and small, but it looked out on the big stretch of green, and she could see the twinkle of the thousand lights under the red roofs. It seemed to Millie the very place in all the world where she wanted to stay.

The woman who rented her the room did not know until it was all done that Millie was a clerk downtown instead of a student in the university. She had supposed of course she was a university girl, like all the others who applied for rooms.

When the situation was made plain to her she had acted a little strangely for a minute; but something in Millie’s face seemed to convince her, and so she had told her to come as soon as she liked.

The arrival of Millie’s trunk that morning had caused something of a stir among the girls who lived at the house. They were not altogether glad to learn that a girl who worked downtown was coming to live on their floor, and indeed to have the very room adjoining their sitting-room. But college girls have a great many things to take their attention, and so, after the first expression of disapproval, they had given little thought to the girl who was coming to occupy the hall bedroom.

It was almost seven when Millie walked down the Midway toward her new home. She seemed in a new world, and it was hard to remember that she had been selling handkerchiefs all day down in the big store. Many of the university people were just coming from supper, and Millie passed a number of girls walking along by twos and threes, who were laughing and talking as if everything in the world were just to their liking.

The woman who had rented her the room was sitting in the lower hall, and greeted her pleasantly. Millie smiled back radiantly. She was so glad to get away from the room where she could not look out, and from those girls whose way of laughing bothered her. She went out to a nearby restaurant for her supper, and then rushed home to begin unpacking the trunk.

The girls who had the other rooms on the floor had all come in, and were congregated in the sitting-room, which they shared together.

Millie could look in as she came up the stairs. Some of them were sitting on the couch and some on the floor, and the red shade over the electric light made them seem almost as pretty, Millie thought, as if they were girls in a picture.

She went in and turned on her own light, and then for an hour she was very busy. When she had all her things put away, it seemed her home in very earnest, and then she turned off the light, and raising the shade, sat down by the window to look out at the lights that twinkled on the green, and at the calm-looking red-roofed buildings beyond.

There was a great deal of laughing in the adjoining room, but it did not bother her as the laughing of the other girls had done. She liked it.

She decided that the girls were making fudges. Some other girls had apparently come in, for it was plain that there were a great many of them.

Then she remembered that it was Friday night, and she had read an article in the Sunday newspaper just the week before about the university girls not doing any studying on Friday nights. It said they either went somewhere or had “spreads” in their rooms. That was what those girls were doing tonight.

But selling handkerchiefs from eight in the morning until half past five at night was not easy for a girl who had lived the first sixteen years of her life out in the open country; and as the white bed looked very good, Millie began pulling down her hair. Soon the laughter from the other room came to her but indistinctly, and then it seemed that a girl in a white shirt-waist, with a red light round her head, was standing there with some fudge on the end of a golf-stick; at last the girl who worked downtown was fast asleep.

The two weeks that followed were happier than any she had known since she left her uncle’s home in the country the year before, and had come to the city to make her living. Three of the college girls had been in her room to see her, and twice they had asked her to come into their sitting-room and hear them practice their songs.

When they met her on the stairs they always smiled and said something pleasant, and when they saw her out on the street they nodded in their offhand way, quite as if she were an old acquaintance.

One day two of them discovered her in the store, and they had seemed so glad to see her, and had said so many funny things about the different kinds of handkerchiefs, that when they left the other clerks had looked at Millie with new interest.

One night, when Millie came home from work, the college girls were all sitting close together in their sitting-room, and it was plain that they were in a state of unusual excitement. When she started out to supper, she saw a new girl on the end of the couch, and she supposed that was the cause of it. Probably some girl they knew had come back to visit.

That was part of the truth, but not the vital part. The girl she had seen was Harriet Spence, and for three years she had lived in the little bedroom now occupied by Millie. She had taken her degree from the university the spring before, and this year she had planned to live at the big settlement house over on the West Side.

But there were a great many girls who wanted to do settlement work, and Miss Spence was told she would have to wait her turn, and that probably it would be another year before it came. Then she had decided to come back to the university and do some post-graduate work, and, expected by no one, she had appeared that afternoon.

To say they were glad to see her is a very mild way of putting it. Some of them had lived in the house with her for two years, and all of them had been with her the year before. She was the girl they had loved best of all, and many times during the present term they had spoken regretfully of their “missing link.”

“I’m just glad of it, Harrie Spence,” declared one of them, “because we need you a lot more at this house than they do at Hull House, don’t we, girls?”

There was a chorus of replies, and then someone cried:

“But what are we going to do about it? Where will Harrie sleep?”

“You don’t mean to say they’ve rented my room—my room—the one that was almost my very own?”

And when she saw by the look upon their faces that it was hers no longer, she cried, “Oh girls!” in a long, wailing voice, and sat down in dejection.

With that there opened a long conference in the sitting-room.

“I don’t want to do anything dishonorable,” argued Marion Hartwell, at the conclusion of the proposition she had made to them, “but it seems to me that reason and justice and common sense and everything else are on our side. It doesn’t make any great difference to her where she rooms. She doesn’t care anything about being with us, and that room over by Sixty-third Street is a great deal better than the one she has. We’ll pay the moving expenses and do everything we can to help her, and she’s a sensible little thing, and she’ll say in a minute it’s all right. She just happened in here, and Harrie belongs here; that’s the situation. I’ll tell her myself,” she added, persuasively, “and I know I can put it so she’ll not mind a bit.”

Harriet demurred a long time. She was afraid it would hurt the other girl’s feelings, and she did not think it was fair to crowd her out; but her heart was with the girls, and it was so good to be back with them again, and it seemed so desolate to think of going off and rooming by herself when this place was so much like home, that at last she gave her consent.

Millie had come in from supper, and it was agreed to settle things at once. The rest of them were to go over on the campus, and Marion Hartwell would remain behind and talk with the girl from downtown about giving up the room.

In a very short time Marion joined them, radiant with triumph.

“She was perfectly lovely about it!” she cried. “She said it didn’t make a bit of difference to her where she stayed, and she knew of course we wanted our friend. And she doesn’t want the Sixty-third Street room. She says it will be better for her to live down near her work, and she was thinking of it, anyway. Now aren’t you glad I did it?”

A short jubilee session followed, and then they got up to go to a meeting they had promised to attend that night.

“I’m awfully tired,” said Harriet, “and if you’d just as soon, I think I should rather go back to the room and rest.”

They assured her that they would not be long, and so she left them and started for home. It was good to be back at the old place, and she could not help being touched by the welcome the girls had given her. She piled up the pillows and sat down on the couch without turning on the light. She wanted to dream a little about the times she had had in that room, and about the dear girls with whom she had lived there.

She thought of many, many things, and then there broke in upon her reverie a strange sound. It came again, and Harriet sat up, a dull red color creeping into her face.

Someone was sobbing, and the sound came from the little room which the girl from downtown had told Marion Hartwell she was so willing to give up.

Harriet Spence rose to her feet and put both hands to her face. In that minute she understood it all; what it had meant to the girl from downtown to live out there, and how bitterly it had hurt her to be asked to go away. And she saw, too, the inconsistency of her own position.

She was planning to devote her life to making brighter the lives of girls whose lot was less pleasant than her own, and then, when a girl she might have helped had come into her very path, she had pushed her aside, merely that she herself might have a good time with her friends.

The sound of sobbing had ceased, but the silence which followed was not comforting. Harriet sat down on the couch again, but this time not to dream. She put her feet out before her and her hands down on her knees, the way she always sat when thinking very hard.

At last she got up and walked to the door of the hall bedroom, and tapped gently upon it.

There was a sound within as of dashing water, and then the door was opened by a girl who was trying hard to seem unconscious of a pair of very red eyes.

The girl outside smiled winningly. “Harriet Spence is my name,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’ve come back to school for the year, and if I may I should like to come in and talk with you about your room.”

Millie smiled bravely back at her. “Miss Hartwell spoke to me about it. You can have it as well as not. It is too far out for me, anyway.”

Harriet Spence sat down on the bed and tilted her head in a funny way she had. “If I tell you something, you’ll not tell the girls, will you?”

“Why, no,” said Millie, wonderingly. “I’ll not tell them.”

“I haven’t been very well this summer. I’m nervous, you know, and, well—to tell the truth—it’s absurd, I know—and the girls would laugh, but I can’t bear the thought of rooming alone, and—I know it’s an awfully small room, but you see we have the sitting-room for everything but sleeping and dressing, and if you don’t mind awfully—what I’m trying to say is—would you have any objection to rooming with me?”

Millie’s eyes had grown very large, and she was holding tightly to both sides of the chair.

“Hadn’t you better ask someone else?” she gasped.

“It’s an imposition, I know,” the other girl went on, apologetically, “and it’s mean of me to ask it. It will muss your things to have me dump a lot of stuff in on them, but—”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that!” broke in the girl from downtown. “There’s a lot of room, and if you think—”

The older girl held out her hand. “Then let’s shake hands on it, as the boys do.”

They talked for half an hour about where they would put their clothes, laughing gaily over the schemes they would have to devise.

“And, by the way,” said Harriet, after she had risen to go, “I’ve a lot of things I should like to stick up, if you don’t mind. They’re rather silly, I’m afraid—football things, and all that, you know—but they would make me feel more at home, if you think you can stand it.”

Something made Millie brush her hand quickly across her eyes.

“I think I can stand it,” she answered, in a rather low voice.

So, after that, there were two extra girls at the Friday night spreads, and down in one of the big stores a girl sold handkerchiefs all day long with a smiling face. She knew she would go home to friends when the day was done, and that kept her from growing tired. And the girl who had not succeeded in getting into the settlement house did not feel, after all, that her year was being wasted.

Youth’s Companion, 02 Apr 1903

Contrary to Precedent

In spite of the tight feeling in her throat, the tingling of her hands, the awful humming in her head —the dreadfulness of it all — she was conscious of a desire to laugh. She caught herself thinking it was like a play, and a rather cheap, melodramatic play at that. It flashed through her mind that sometime she would make a story of it, only it was such a highly-wrought situation, so wild, that she did not believe she could dispose of it to any of the best magazines. There flitted before her blurred vision the cover design of a periodical which might take it; and then she grew very sick, while something seemed hammering it into her head, into her heart, into every bit of her, that the future of her dreams and toils was sinking to black nothing.

A half-hour before she had come there more light of heart, more full of hope, more joyful than she had ever been in all her life. And now joy and hope and happiness would never come flooding into her heart again. The sun would shine, the trees wave, the birds sing, and yet —oh! —it was strange.

The coldness of her hands was spreading down to her feet, her throat was getting tighter, the buzzing in her head louder. And it was all growing funnier! She could feel herself about to give way to a long, loud laugh when she heard the voice of the woman saying: “I think I had better give you some whiskey.”

She rather resented that, and so she sat up and said in so quiet and even a voice that it frightened her: “Oh no, thank you. I don’t need anything of that sort. I’m going now.”

But she did not go. She merely slid forward in her chair, grasped one hand in the other, thinking whimsically that perhaps there was some law of physics whereby two cold hands could warm each other, and then she looked around the room.

“You have a beautiful home,” she said, after the manner of one making a simple observation.

The woman looked at her keenly, a touch of alarm in her face. “You have seen it many times before,” she answered.

“Oh yes,” said the girl vaguely, “before.”

Then she rose and stood in the arch between the library and the hall and looked all about. Despite the hammering at her head, the sick feeling that was all over her, it came to her again that it was like a play. Her mind was running a good deal to plays just now because she was hoping that after awhile someone might want to dramatize her book. And so she looked all about, and considered that the scene would be very effective. The shades were drawn just right, the colors were good, and the house was so rich and quiet and beautiful. Even the costumes were right, she thought: the woman in her wine-colored morning gown, and she — the girl —in her white linen shirtwaist suit, and her little black hat with its pert sort of quill. Yes, that was surely correct.

She walked to the door and opened it. The woman came and stood there beside her, and they looked out at that vista alive with the sounds and smells of the spring. Two of their friends drove by in a runabout, and they both nodded and smiled at them. The girl even waved her hand, wondering as she did so whether it would ever grow warm again. “I suppose they think we’re deep in what we’ll wear to the dance tonight,” she said with a short, sharp kind of laugh.

The woman walked out on the porch and gave a twist to a vine which was climbing up a trellis. The girl stood there looking at her, thinking that everything of tragedy of which she had read in books was wrong. At crucial times people acted just as they did in the commonplace hours —really they acted more so. And that would be a good feature to bring out in the play. The tragedy of the play must be very quiet, very conventional, and commonplace.

She leaned against one of the big pillars of the porch and looked at the woman. She had never thought it a hard face, and it did not look hard now; not hard, but unfathomable, inexorable.

“There are a number of things I might do,” she began, speaking in the musing way in which she was wont to discuss the possible actions of people in her stories. “I might fall down on my knees and beg —beg of you not to take my future from me, just when it was opening up to me like this, and after I had worked and worked—you know how I have worked,” she concluded simply.

“But I’ll not beg,” she went on. “I don’t like that idea at all. And I’ll not reason, though there are things which might be said to you as a reasonable woman — our being friends, you know, and your making it plain you intended all the time to turn on me when the hour came. It takes the sincerity out of everything you’ve done, doesn’t it?”

The woman turned, a trifle of appeal in her attitude. “I am going to trust you to understand that after you have thought it over,” she said.

“But I’ll not beg,” said the girl, not following this new drift, “and I’ll not reason, and I’ll not deny.”

“I should think not,” said the woman, making the first call upon her great gift of sarcasm.

“I could make a good denial,” said the girl calmly. “I was thinking of it there, when you told me what you were going to do. You have no idea how many things I thought out all in a minute, and how clearly they all came to me. I could say they were literary love-letters, couldn’t I? They’re really very impersonal as I remember them. I could say I gave them to your husband to look over —that I was fixing them up for publication. There’s a publisher I know very well who would say I had had correspondence with him about them.”

“You are very shrewd,” said the woman quietly.

“I could be if I wanted to; but I don’t want to. Some way, I haven’t heart to do anything of that sort. I don’t care anything about denying them. I did write Mr. Kramer some love-letters. I wrote them’ — let me see, I’m twenty-five now, and I wrote them when I was eighteen; that was seven years ago, wasn’t it?”

The woman turned back to the’ climbing vine and made no reply.

“It’s queer about love-letters,” pursued the girl. “You take a girl of my —well, we’ll say temperament, though I hate the word, and there comes a time when it’s as necessary to write love-letters as it is to breathe.”

Her companion flashed her a quick glance betokening an appreciation of just the thing implied. That had been the great bond between them, the way they were able to get at each other. “I think that’s quite true,” she said.

The girl laughed. “Now aren’t we queer? It isn’t at all logical for you to admit you understand that.”

“I do understand it though —perfectly.”

“Well, anyway, it’s true. And as a matter of fact I didn’t write those letters to your husband at all.”

“No, you wrote them to a creature of your ideals,” and the woman smiled bitterly.

“Not that so much, but I wrote them to the man most —I don’t mean available — most eligible, I guess, for them.”

They both laughed a little, and then the girl turned and walked down two steps. But after a minute she turned about and faced the woman.

“Do you know what I think is the hardest thing in life?” she said, tensely now. Nothing but the singing of the birds, the rustling of the trees, the strange, sweet sounds of the spring, broke the silence. “It’s having to pay for things that are all used up!” she said passionately. “It’s living through things, and then when you’ve outlived them, and are up, up higher, you know, to have to go back then, then, and answer for them. You wouldn’t mind it much at the time, when they meant something to you, when they’re worth it, but when they’re away off, outlived, forgotten, then to have them come back and stand in the way of things that are vital —it’s hideous!”

She walked back, then, and leaned once more against the pillar of the porch. “You’re older than I am, you’ve lived more, in a way,” she said, looking at the woman almost confidingly, “won’t you tell me why it is they can’t ask us for the price of our bread when the taste of it is still in our mouths? When the strength of it, you know, is still in our blood?”

The woman snapped off a piece of vine and threw it to the ground. “I must go in now,” she said, the same jerkiness in her voice there had been in her hand, and, as the door closed behind the figure in the wine-colored morning gown, the girl knew that the woman had gone because she had been afraid to stay.

And the woman stood in the arch between the library and the hall, just where the girl had stood a little before, and she said to herself: “When she looks like that, talks like that, I almost care for her! I,” she whispered, passionately, “I — care for anyone!” And she put her hands to her face and tried to hold back the sobs.

II

They had been much together in the past year —Mrs. Kramer and Christine Holt. People said it was nice for Christine, which may be interpreted that it was nice for her to have a friend with a house like Mrs. Kramer’s, and who could do the things for her which Mrs. Kramer could do. For Christine herself did not live in a beautiful house, she did not live with people who could do nice things for her, or who cared to. That was why they said it was very nice for Christine. There were only a few, only one or two, perhaps, who could look a little farther and see what the companionship of a girl like Christine had meant to a woman like Mrs. Kramer.

The woman herself was one of the few who put the obligation on her own side. She knew how much it had been to her life to know such a girl as Christine, and she was quite candid now as she sat with her hands clasped in her lap, looking out at the tops of the trees which she could see from her bedroom window. She was absolutely frank in admitting the obligation. Christine had come close to her, and had taken some of the restlessness, the bitterness, from her life in the past year. And now she—

She rose sharply, and stepping into an alcove of the room returned after a minute with a small package. A very small package it was, for it contained in all but six letters. She did not open any of them now, but just sat there holding them, the contact seemingly giving her strength of purpose. And yet her face was much troubled. It seemed a big storm was gathering in her heart. “My bitter, hateful life!” she sobbed out at last; and then she leaned her face against the window, her mouth drawn in lines of pain.

It was a long time afterward that she went over and sat down at her desk. She spread a writing tablet out before her, she dipped her pen in the ink, and then she sat there, motionless, looking down at the white sheet. At last she began to write:

“I know you are wondering about it —wondering, if not in a personal, at least in an impersonal way. You are trying, after that way you have, to analyze the situation, to get at my motives, to form a new estimate of me in this new light which has come upon me. I know that is what you are doing, and so I will help you a little. I wish I could tell you what kind of a girl I once was. I was something like you temperamentally. I grew up believing in such a lot of foolish, beautiful things. I grew up among my ideals, and there was no one to tell me that someday those ideals would fall upon me and crush me. When I was eighteen I met Charlie Kramer —just at the age you said you met him. There is no need for me to try to tell you what this first, great, short-lived love of mine meant to me. You have said it in your letters, and said it better than I could say it now. Yes, Christine, he made the songs of the birds more sweet, he made the stars of the heavens more numerous and more beautiful, he made the quiet of the night more quiet, the hush of the dawn more holy, the whole world more full of beauty and goodness and love. I know that letter of yours by heart, and it was true not only of you but of me. I think it has the note of the universal. I lived in the clouds, in a dream, in a holy something that was wrapped round and round me. I idealized until my feet never so much as touched the earth. Life was a poem, love was from God — oh, I was absurd, and I was happy to the full extent of my capacity for happiness; and if you can form any true estimate of the kind of girl I was you must know that that capacity was great.

“Such was the I that married Charlie Kramer. Isn’t it part of the great irony of things that a girl to whom love was a sacrament should be given to a man who looked no higher than the clay? To me it was for eternity; to him it was a thing not to outlast the passing fancy. Oh! you don’t know, Christine, no one knows, God doesn’t know, what I suffered. I was shocked, repelled, sickened, deadened! It seemed that the heavens had tumbled down, that the color of the world had changed to muddy grays— that the curves had gone out of everything. I awoke to find myself in the real world, alone in a country that was alien to me, and the memories of my girlhood would rise up to smite and jeer at me. I had nothing — not memory, not hope, not God — nothing! I sometimes wonder what it would have made of me if I had been a stronger character, less of a dreamer and more of a woman, and I wonder what kind of a life I would have worked out for myself had I married a man who had understood — who had cared!

“But the woman I am is more vital to the present situation than the woman I might have been. I had no children, and I was not great enough of soul to let love live on without a specific thing at which to direct it. There was nothing to do with it, and so it soured within me, and got into my blood and poisoned me.

“And because I was not great, I made up my mind that someone must suffer for it. That idea began growing up in me almost at the first, born of my disappointment, the outgrowth of my shattered ideals — this stern, never-to-be-changed, primitive idea that someone must suffer for it. The only thing in the world which I believed in, as the grim years dragged on, was this idea of retribution, that I—I—must put my finger on something that was quivering flesh and give it pain. I could more easily give up my life than put away that one idea which throbs within my shriveled heart.

“I think you know Charlie Kramer too well to ask why I do not fix upon him as the target for retribution. You cannot bring suffering, Christine, where there is not capacity —the fine, high-strung kind of suffering, the kind I must exact. Suffering of the highest type must come from someone with a soul. He has had many so-called affairs since those early days of our married life. But they were not the kind of women you and I are, Christine — they did not know what love meant, and so they did not move me in the least. Then one day I heard him say to one of his men friends: ‘That little Holt girl is home from college —going to spend her vacation here. Jove! — but that girl has a way of looking at a man.’ I went upstairs, very slowly, and I sat down by the window and looked, unseeingly, out across the tree tops. That shriveled heart in me was very much alive now. It was like a great something ready to spring upon its long awaited prey. It wasn’t his voice, it wasn’t anything he did, it was something within myself, something I suppose we must call intuition, which, told me that you —poor little, you, Christine —were the bit of quivering flesh upon which I was to work my idea of retribution.

“I knew you saw a great deal of him that summer, in a more or less harmless way. I knew that he made love to you, and that he made you care for him: he has the gift of feigning the things that are highest, and making the best of us feel — until we have cause to know otherwise — that he knows and understands. And then you went back to college, and you wrote out your heart to him in six beautiful, passionate letters. Oh poor little Christine — he was so unworthy of those letters! I came upon him one day reading them over, smirking fairly — a great, vulgar smirk of vanity—because a woman had written them to him. I watched him put them away, and then I went and took them.

“I think I had something of the cunning of the maniac about it —I waited, I said nothing. I could have waited years and years for the right time to come. When I began cultivating your friendship last year it was because you had a certain gruesome fascination for me. You can understand, can’t you? When I saw that you resented my advances, and knew it was repugnant to you to think of being friends with me, I fairly rejoiced, for I saw you were made of the kind of stuff that is capable of suffering. And then, Christine, as time went on I grew very fond of you. In my way I have been sincere. My friendship has been real. It could be real, because it is something so utterly apart from this idea of retribution which you, Christine, are to help me work out. Don’t you see how it all shaped itself to my ends? You began telling me about this man — about Oscar Fairchild. I knew that he was the love of your maturer years, that your love for him was the greater love of a woman’s rounded soul —the calmer, more enduring love which follows the early-day romance. I understand all about that; I know the way in which you care for him; I know that it is not inconsistent with anything which may have gone before.

“And all the while you talked to me about your book. I knew you were putting your whole life into that book. And so when you came to me this morning and said that the publishers with whom you had most wanted your book to find favor had accepted it, I told you if you did not write them recalling your book, if you did not turn it over to me, relinquishing it forever, that I would read those six unfettered letters to the man for whom you cared. You can have your book, or you can have your love; you cannot have them both. In making you choose I am subjecting you to the finest kind of suffering a woman like you could be asked to endure. My hour has come; someone is paying, dearly. I think you can see it is something quite apart from the fact that we are friends. I seem to have two sets of feelings about it. The one is the part of me which might have been a mother. I am longing to stand over you, to protect you, and to help you. I suffer with you when that mother-set of feelings takes hold of me. But the other set is the real me, Christine; not the me which might have been, but the me which is. Nothing you could say, nothing I could say myself, nothing which could happen, could change this idea of making someone pay for the suffering I have endured, and that logical someone is you.

“I wonder which you will take? I confess I do not know. If I knew you less well I would say that you would recall your book. But I know that book has been your life, Christine. And yet, will you be brave enough, sacrificial enough to say that you will live without love? Will you be willing to lose, not merely him, but his faith in you? There is one thing which I think your understanding of human nature will tell you. There is no chance that he will listen to the letters, and then go to you and say, Christine, you were young, unguided; you did not understand; we will let it go.’ Men are not like that, Christine, as I think you know.

“Isn’t it all strange — and awful! But my life has been strange and awful. It would be different were I a greater woman. I do not know that you will ever see this. I do not know that anyone will ever see it. But I am glad that I wrote it, for it has made things more clear to me; it has helped to put me right with myself.

“You’re thinking about it now, Christine — your big gray eyes looking far into space. I’m sorry it had to be you; you had no mother, you have been lonely, and —and yet, Christine, you are the logical one, and someone has got to pay!”

III

Within an hour after she reached home, Christine Holt wrote a letter to her publishers, recalling her book. It was the primitive woman of her which did it, that essentially human in her heart which called out for love as the thing she could not do without. She thought very little about the book as she wrote the letter, except in a half-impersonal way that it was an awful thing, and unjust.

Her great idea was to get the letter off, to get the reply, and have it all settled up. The one thing in the world which really mattered now was that Oscar Fairchild should never see those awful letters which she had written so long ago. Words from them, sentences from them which she would have supposed she had forgotten, came up to torture her now. She ran out and posted her letter, and then she came and paced back and forth in her room, her face flushing hotly as floods of those awful memories would rush over her with all their tormenting vividness.

She sat down in a chair and covered her face with her hands. She was ashamed! — it seemed the very humiliation of it would madden her. That part of her life had been as something which had slipped away from her, something in the past which supplicated for tolerance. And now it had stepped into the present, stepped in as a grim and hideous thing which was to lay its hand upon the future. Was that the way it was in life? Were the things of yesterday —the forgotten, the outlived —forever stepping in to put their mark on the things of tomorrow?

It was so close and desolate in her room that she got up and put on her things, saying to herself that she would take the Ninth Street car. Taking the Ninth Street car meant getting to the woods, and many times when characters in the book would not behave, or when things at home made her a little more unhappy than usual, Christine had taken that Ninth Street car.

As she sat in it now there came back to her that strange sense of the outward commonplaceness of things that were tragic. She supposed she looked just as she had looked yesterday; in spite of the fact that so much in her life had changed, her hat was pinned on just as straight, her jacket pulled down with the same care against wrinkles. It was strange that when the heart beneath that jacket was beating so passionately she should think of such a thing as wrinkles. To the people in the car she looked just as she looked yesterday, yesterday! —when the world was all bright and beautiful.

There was something which always seemed to go from the soul of the woods into the soul of Christine Holt — something big and tranquil, something which wrapped her round and round with peace, and breathed over her a spirit of quiet. She sat down on a familiar log now, leaned her head against a tree, and letting the sounds and odors of the spring sweep in upon her she waited for that adjustment, that calming something which she was sure would come to her out there in the bigness and the quiet. At last her face cleared to something that was half a smile. After all, she was to have him. The fact that she was giving up her book, relinquishing all of that for which the book stood, failed to come to her with the sharpness she might have anticipated. She was too tired to think about it. Tired! — she was so utterly tired that if Oscar Fairchild were there she would put her head down on his breast and lose the consciousness of everything in the world save the rest, the solace, that was in his presence. He was like the woods— big, and soothing, and steadying; and Christine, poor little Christine — she was full of conflicts.

It was that which made the emptiness, the bitterness, in the life of Mrs. Kramer. She had no one to mean to her what the woods meant, and mean it in its human sense. Strangely enough it was pity, not resentment, which rushed into the girl’s heart at thought of Mrs. Kramer, and plainly as though she had seen it upon those sheets of paper, she could read the story of that life.

She did not dwell upon it, though, for it was her own life, the turbulent, far from happy life of Christine Holt which crowded into her consciousness, and asked for judgments. The first thing she could remember about her childhood was that one day a little neighbor girl had put her arms about her and hugged her very tight and cried out: “Oh Christine — I love you so!” And Christine had jumped up and down in great joy, and she had skipped all about the yard, and laughed and danced, for she was so happy because the little neighbor girl loved her. Though she had not known it, that was the thing Christine had wanted all the time, and no one before had ever said: “Oh Christine — I love you so!”

And in the years which followed, the years of her awakening womanhood, there were few, pitifully few, who said it. They said she was a strange girl —some saw, even then, that she was a talented girl —but there were no understanding, loving eyes to look within Christine’s heart and see the great waves of love which were wanting to pour themselves out upon someone who was waiting for them.

It was in the fullness of her girlhood’s bloom, after a lonely childhood, a childhood so full of strange fancies as to leave her heart crowded with unspoken things, that Charlie Kramer came and talked to her of love. He frightened her at first, but he gave her the first glimpse of a world of reality akin to the world of dreams, and because she was hungry for the things he said she read into them beauties which were not there. She had thought she was living a poem, while in truth — she could see it quite plainly now — she had risen to no greater heights than the breaking of a law.

It was hard for her, though, to force herself now to a real sense of the wrong done — a wrong for which she must pay. She could remember that, when writing the letters, she would sometimes forget all about Charlie Kramer. They were as the mere letting out of things pent up within her heart, and she had been conscious when she posted them that he would not know just what they were about. Then there had come the awakening, the turning on of the glare of reality, the disappointment — half humorous and half bitter — the living away from it, the growing beyond it. And it was now, with her opened eyes, her fuller understanding, her nicer appreciations, now in this hour of her maturity, that she was asked to give up the future in payment for the blindness of the past!

She went to bed early that night, for she thought exhaustion might bring sleep, and it would be blessed to forget all about it for a time. But the quiet of the night only quickened her perceptions, and as she lay there staring up into the dark there was a restlessness, a soreness of spirit, which had not been upon her out in the woods. The thought of Oscar Fairchild was not the balm to her now that it had been then. It did not seem now that if she could only put her head down upon his breast nothing else would matter. Other things would matter! The thing which stood out biggest of all in her consciousness now was her book. She was alive with memories of other nights when she had been restless, unhappy; and she knew it was the book which had been a solace to her then. The book was as something which was born when she herself was born. Even in her lonely childhood the book had been part of her life; not as a book then, but as strange fancies which took her away from the things which were not lovely.

She was sitting up in bed now, her large gray eyes peering out into the dark as though it held the story of the future years. It was with a great rush of hot blood to her cheeks there came to her the thought that she had bartered her book for happiness. That thing which had been all in all to her, which had redeemed, glorified her life, she had kicked into the dust just because she wanted that gift of love —rest. Her throat was growing very tight. After all, would the sacrifice of the book be of any avail? Would that love which had stood for peace, for a beautiful, serene kind of happiness, ever be again to her what it had been before? Would joy come to her after she had sold her very soul to gain that joy?

She threw back the covers, a kind of dry sob in her throat, and, slipping out of bed, stole over to the other side of the room. Pulling open a drawer of her desk, she took out a copy of the manuscript of her book. Then, with the feel of it, with the consciousness that it was there, she broke down. She pressed the sheets of paper tight against her face, and cried as she had never cried before in all the years.

When the sobs had spent themselves she was more calm. She stood there patting the sheets of paper much as though she were soothing an injured child. “Christine will stand it!” she murmured passionately. “Christine will stand it all — and you, you shall have life, and triumph, and power. You’ve earned it, you—”

She sank to her knees then, her head falling to the chair which always stood beside her desk, her face still resting against the sheets of paper. With that acute flash of vision which comes in crucial hours she could see the years stretch out before her. She could see herself unloved, uncomforted, could see herself tired, lonely; but withal she only pressed those pages of her book tighter to her burning face. It seemed to the girl that she had been true to the best that was in her, to the things which something told her in this solemn hour of the night were the highest things of all. The book was her beliefs, her sentiments; it was her soul, herself; and no matter how other things shaped themselves it must live, must work out its destiny.

At last she put the book away. She stood there irresolutely for a few minutes, and then she slipped on a dressing gown and crept stealthily downstairs. They were all asleep, they would not know — and then it would be all over.

“The Western Union? Yes, I have a message. You got the address? ‘Please disregard letter you will receive from me dated twenty-second; I accept your terms, and thank you for them.’ It’s Miss Holt. Yes, Christine Holt. No, charge it to me. Thank you.”

“They’ll call it one of the eccentricities of genius,” she told herself almost gaily, as she crept back into bed. And then the gray eyes closed, the healthful flush of youth came to her cheeks, and Christine Holt was in that land where problems and sorrows enter not.

IV

It was chilly that May evening, and Mrs. Kramer ordered a fire in the library. While it was being laid she made herself busy about the room, putting away books that had been left upon the tables, giving a touch to a picture here, adjusting a shade there, doing things as one who is seeking the calm of occupation. She left the room then, and when she returned she carried in her hand a small package done up in yellowish paper and tied with bluish cord. This she placed upon a table near the fire, and after looking all around the room sat down. The hour in which she was to turn the balance, to work out the idea which had become flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone, was very close at hand. She was waiting for Oscar Fairchild, and when he came she would open the small package which lay on the table near her.

She was thinking now that she would have been much disappointed in Christine had the girl given up her book. She would not have been Christine had she done that: she would have been the normal, average woman, and she would have been less brave — and Mrs. Kramer loved bravery.

The girl’s attitude all through had been full of a daring which Mrs. Kramer liked. Christine had never made allusion to what had taken place between them, and she had gone on much as usual. She had made no move to indicate that she thought a mitigation of Mrs. Kramer’s attitude possible. She had talked freely about the bringing out of her book, of her hopes for it, and her great impatience to see how it looked in print. She said she was even now thinking of another book— a book which she thought would be harder to handle, but of greater possibilities. For the other book was to be the life of a woman, and the first book had been the life of a girl. That was the nearest Christine had come to speaking in words of the new forces which had entered into her life. And she spoke of Oscar Fairchild just as she had always spoken of him. She told that he was coming to see her, and that they were making plans to be married very soon.

But there was a difference in Christine, a subtle difference which the older woman was quick to discern. Not alone in her general attitude, but in the little things — in the modulations of her voice, in the poise of her head, the clasp of her hand, Christine gave evidence of a something held back, a force, a power in reserve, a sort of masterful acceptance of the inevitable. She had that optimism of rare souls which lies in making the best of destiny. She would sip from the cup of joy every drop which she could claim, and when the cup was taken from her she would not cry out.

With Mrs. Kramer it had ceased utterly to be a matter between her and Christine; everything of the personal, the specific, had gone out of it. It was not merely an idea with her —it had become a religion; and she had that devotion to it, that zeal in its execution, which religionists have had all through the ages. The fact that there was ruthlessness in it, that it must cause suffering, was no more an appeal to her than it has been an appeal to the zealots of all time. Her cruelty grew out of her belief, and it was made adamant by her devotion.

Then Oscar Fairchild was standing in the door, and she rose and held out her hand. She had met him before, but she looked at him now with another interest because of the nature of the interview that was before them. She looked at him wondering what he would do and say, wondering how he would take it all. She thought, as she looked into his face, that here would be a test of the stuff that men are made of. For in Oscar Fairchild she had the normal, average man of the better sort. He would do very nearly what the natural, primitive man would do. He would not rise to the great heights of the exceptional. He would stand on the wide, sane plane of the average.

Her conviction as to that grew more settled after they had sat there talking for a few minutes. He had come there to see her as Christine’s best friend, had come because he would know and be liked by the friends of the girl he was to marry. As he talked Mrs. Kramer smiled a little. To the man Christine was different and apart from all the other women of the world. And he held her so, not because of a fact that Christine actually was different, but because he gloved her; and, loving her, it was the normal, average attitude.

And then, in a sense, Mrs. Kramer lost sight of him as an individual, as Christine’s lover, and she looked over at him as representative of the type of normal, average man. Regarding him as such, she was possessed of a keen desire to know, in actuality, what he would think of things.

So she began telling him how she liked to think out stories, how she thought she had a little gift for seeing them, though she could not construct. She thought of them, of course, in connection with Christine, thinking that perhaps sometime Christine might write them. There was one in particular, she told him, which had lain in her mind for a long time. She was going to tell it to Christine before long, but she was not sure of part of it, and she wanted a man’s point of view upon it. She said, with a half-embarrassed laugh, that in the crude telling it would sound much like other stories of that kind, but that he must consider it with a view to the touches, to the artistic, sympathetic treatment which Christine could give it so well.

The woman leaned far forward in her chair, then she clasped her hands tightly together, looked over into Oscar Fairchild’s clean, open, honorable face, and began, unconsciously at first, pleading for Christine. He looked at her strangely; he had not supposed her to be a woman of such intensity. And he had not known before that she had a very wonderful face. He did not know, he had no way of knowing, that he was getting a glimpse, not of the woman who was, but of that woman who might have been. And he did not know — how should he know? — that it was the first time since she had gone into her long sleep that the other woman had sprung out into the heat and glare of life.

Then she had finished, and she looked long into his face, her eyes continuing, reiterating, the things her lips had said. Her words seemed still to throb through the room; the very air was vibrant with the soul-power she had thrown into them.

“You tell it wonderfully,” he said. “Christine should have heard you this time, for I do not believe you could ever tell it just like that again: the starved, lonely life the girl had led, the way love came to her in answer to a real need, and then the way she felt the insufficiency of what had been given her, and grew out of it, and developed into that kind of woman — you put it splendidly, Mrs. Kramer. I admit that you raise it clear out of the vein of the commonplace; and yet, do you know” —he laughed, as in anticipation of what she would term his priggishness —“I don’t just like the idea of Christine writing a story of that kind.”

“Why?” she asked sharply; “don’t you want her to write of life?”

“Of life, of course; but of the other phase of things—of the kinds of things, Mrs. Kramer, that you could read to one person, or to two persons, without —well, without hurrying over a little of it, you know.”

She turned away from him, then, and looked into the fire. “And what do you think of the man in the story?” she asked at last. “Do you think the average man, the man in real life, would have been great enough to understand — to feel that her soul was not tarnished? — was none the less great?”

“To care for her just as though such a thing had never happened, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said, after a minute, “that part of it will pass all right in a story. We expect the idealization of things in books, don’t we? Actually, of course, it would have made a tremendous difference.”

“He would have turned against her?” she asked, with a strange timidity.

The man hesitated: “I don’t just know. I think he would.”

She glanced at him then with a fierce impetuousness, as though she would sound again the old plea against the injustice of men to women. But with her very lips hot with protesting words there came to her the sense of their utter futility, and she turned and looked with a strange white face into the fire.

She had failed. She had made her plea, made it unpremeditatedly, made it with all the soul and power that was in her, and she had failed. And now —now —?

There was one minute, a minute of such kind as stands out from a whole lifetime of years, when that idea which had molded her very soul was wavering. But before she could reach for the package and throw it into the fire that minute had passed, and the passion of years, the passion for retribution, for making someone pay, had come back into its own.

She reached over and took the letters. She sat erect in her chair, as one about to open a subject, but even then she did not speak. For in the fire she was seeing strange visions. She could see the suffering faces of women, she could see the white hands reached out in imploration, and she could see the open, bleeding hearts. And back of the women were the faces of the average, normal men —the good men, the honorable men, the men who would not understand. She saw that women suffered because of the two kinds of men who made up the world — the men like Charlie Kramer, who dragged all that was best in them into the dust; and the good, normal men like Oscar Fairchild, who made women suffer because they did not, would not, understand.

She checked a sob in her throat, and the man looked at her in silent wonder. He knew that she had forgotten him, that she did not want to talk. He supposed she was thinking of something in her own life, something suggested by the story she had told so eloquently. Perhaps —yes, undoubtedly, that was it —the story was the story of her own life. Christine had told him that Mrs. Kramer was a strange woman, and so he settled deep in his chair and waited for her to break the silence.

And the woman lost everything else in this awful sense of the suffering which the world must bring to women. It was not herself now, it was not Christine, it was women —the suffering faces, the white hands, the bleeding hearts which she could see in the fire. Her heart went out in one great throb of pity for women, women who must suffer, women who must lose their ideals, women who must be misunderstood. If there was only something to do about it, some way to relieve, mitigate it, some way to bring compensation! She put her hand to her head. That word —compensation! It was crowding upon her, surrounding her, pushing at something in her. It crowded and crowded, it was making her dizzy, it was pushing at those props which she had builded up for herself during all the years. It was as though a terrible war was going on about her; compensation and retribution were pitted in a terrible, dizzying war of words. The years of the past were crumbling; the props were shaking. Where was she going? What should she do?

She heard the man stirring in his chair. She knew he was about to go away. “Wait!” she said with a fierce imperativeness, and then she held her face in both her hands and looked into the fire. Something was coming to her — something was to be born from out this conflict of words. There was another word fighting for a place in the fire, and the other word—the other word —

The man sat there and waited in wondering silence, while the woman looked into the fire, her face tragic with strange conflict.

V

Christine waited for Oscar Fairchild that night with a strong sense of her hour of surrender being close at hand. All the while she had been with him in the past few days she had been alive with the feeling that she must crowd in the joy, that no hour must go unfilled with something vital, that she must live enough to give her memories for all the years that were to come. Sometimes she would forget, and would sit there near him wrapped in a quiet content; and then something would rouse her, and every nerve of her being would call out that she must hurry, that every minute she lived now must be a minute to be remembered. That great struggle to hurry happiness —that, and the sense of insecurity, of something hanging over her, had left her very worn.

And yet Christine Holt came very close to being beautiful that night. The little tired droop of her mouth, the wistfulness that was in her face, the appeal of love which shone from her eyes —all of that, and then the resolution, the strength, which was back of it all, made it a face not easy to forget.

She wondered why he did not come; and then, in anticipation, she lived through the nights of the future years, nights when she would listen for the step which might have brought him to her, for the voice which might have sounded in her ears —would listen, only to remember, and suffer anew the pain of relinquishing. And then she did hear his step in the hall, and she sat up very straight and told herself she must hear it well, that the memory of it might be all there was for her during the years of the barren future. The sound of the door as he opened it, the very way in which he stood there with his hand upon the knob and looked at her —she forced it all down deep in her memory, for she told herself she would have need of it in the years that were to come.

From the first moment of his coming toward her she knew that something had happened. And then when he just stood there looking at her in a strange, new way —did not come and put his arms about her, just stood there and looked — she felt that she quite understood.

Her first impulse to rush toward him —to tell him that it was not so bad after all, to force him, yes, force him, to understand — was not obeyed because she had no strength. She wanted to move, to speak, but she was powerless, stricken; and so she just stood there and held her hands tightly in each other, and the thing she found herself hoping was that he would say nothing absurd. She wanted to remember these last words as long as she lived, and how could she feed upon memories that had been tinged with the ridiculous?

“I spent an hour or two with your friend, Mrs. Kramer,” he began, his voice plainly indicative of something unusual to follow.

Christine was conscious of her old hideous desire to laugh. But she backed to her chair and sat down, and then she said quietly: “She told you things about me?”

“Yes,” he said. He too had sat down, and he had turned half way from her and was looking straight ahead.

A lump came in Christine’s throat. He was taking no heed of her; they were far away from each other now. He did not know that she was pale, that she looked tired, and different. This, then, was the beginning of the future.

“She said things to me,” he said, his voice throbbing as though the emotion was more than the words could hold, “which made everything—you, life, all of it, seem different.”

The girl clasped her hands tight to her forehead. “Oh, I suppose so,” she said, “I suppose she did.”

No words fell in response to her commonplace, and in the heavy silence which followed Christine’s mind groped out for her book. It was a strange thing that she had begun the new book that very afternoon. For some reason she had felt it would not do to wait another day, and she had written steadily for five hours. That, perhaps, was one of the things which had made her so very, very tired.

She was glad that the new book had been given birth: it was a little something upon which to lean, something upon which to call. But it was insufficient. And so she pressed her hands more tightly upon her forehead, and hoped he would not be long.

The man walked over to the window and, raising the shade, looked out into the night. “Christine,” he said, turning about at last, “shall I tell you all about it?”

“Whatever you wish,” she replied, and wondered drearily how the words got past the tight place in her throat.

“You see,” he began excitedly, “I supposed when she sent for me that it was to talk about you — about the life you and I were going to have. I was glad to go; I thought it would be personal, you know; but I didn’t dream — I didn’t dream,” he repeated, “that she would say things which would put a new light upon everything in the world.”

There was a silence which Christine felt she must break with a scream.

“The first of it wasn’t so strange,” he went on more quietly. “We talked of a number of things —of you, your work, and all that. She even told me a story which she said she was going to give you to write someday, and she asked what I thought of a part of it. And then, when she had finished the story, and when I had told her what she wanted to know, she seemed to forget all about me. She sat and looked into the fire; so strangely, Christine, that I could not have spoken had I tried! I looked at her face, when I dared, and it half frightened me, it was so unlike anything I had ever seen. I could feel that something was going on back of it all, that something was — oh, I’ll not try to tell it, for I don’t begin to understand, but I could feel that I was in the presence of a bare soul, though I don’t know why, or any of that. At last I felt I wanted to go, but she would not let me, and then she sat there, looking into the fire, and the silence —it was like the silence of another world. Finally, Christine, she jumped up and faced me, her face positively glorified, and she cried out, her voice ringing like a bell through the room: ‘It’s the joy must pay! — it’s the joy! — the joy!’

“She saw that I did not understand, and so she came over close to me, smiling as though she had just found out something. I tell you, Christine, it was not the face of the woman I had seen when I came in there an hour before. I can’t tell it in her words, I don’t suppose I can make it clear at all, but she told me I must be very good to you, Christine, good to you —not just in the usual way, not merely true to you, but that I must keep your heart young and full of joy, that I must never shake your ideals, that I must care for your queer little fancies, for the poetry that was in your soul. She said above everything else I was to keep you from ever growing bitter.

“And then at last she said to me, so strangely, I tell you I’ll never forget it: ‘I want you to promise that you will put so much joy into the life you two are going to live, so much of pure, glorious, God-given joy, that it will make up for all the suffering that could possibly have been crowded into the life of another.’ Wasn’t that strange? Wasn’t it? Why, Christine, darling, you’re crying!”

He took her in his arms then, and with her head upon his breast she sobbed away the hateful memories, sobbed out the joy and the thanksgiving.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said, kissing her hair, “I didn’t mean to, little one. I might have known it would upset you, you feel things so. But someway this had gone so deep with me that I wanted you to know it too.”

“It is a strange idea,” he mused, after Christine had grown quiet and lay there very still in his arms, “a strange and beautiful idea which she has conceived. She believes that the joy of the world must pay for the world’s suffering; that one who has been made to suffer must in turn cause joy — cause so much of it that the joy will compensate, and will leave the balance of the world still in joy’s favor. Isn’t it wonderful, Christine?”

Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine, Feb 1904

The Intrusion of the Personal

It was a very cutting editorial, and a very strong one. The Governor read it through twice, and then he spread it out on the desk before him, and sat there looking at it.

“In one respect Governor Henderson is proving a disappointment,” it ran. “He is buying his personal comfort at the expense of justice. He finds it more pleasant to say yes than to say no; it is easier for him to grant the requests of sorrowing wives, mothers, daughters and sisters than it is to refuse them, and so it has become a matter of personalities with him rather than of justice. All of this is a great disappointment to the Governor’s friends. They had believed that his sense of duty to the State would take precedence over everything that was personal, and that hysterical women could not so easily induce him to hold as naught the laws of the great State he has been elected to govern.”

And then it went on to review some of the cases upon which the Governor had acted with leniency, to speak of the harm which would surely come of it, and to deplore again that a man, in many ways so strong, should allow his emotions to sweep away his sense of responsibilities.

It was the source of the editorial, even more than the nature of it, which moved him to seriousness. He had been very proud of the unqualified endorsement the Record had given him during the campaign, and of the strong manner in which it had championed him since he had taken the oath of office. The Record was an independent paper, and the strongest in the State. The Governor looked upon its editor, Frank Morton, as the most honorable as well as the most brainy man of his acquaintance. Morton was conservative, and yet he was fearless; he was slow to condemn, and yet there was no consideration in the world which could have held back the saying of harsh things when he was convinced the time had come for him to say them.

The really hard part of it was that the Governor was forced to concede that upon this, as upon other subjects, the Record’s editorial was well balanced, far-seeing and fair. But he did not believe Morton appreciated how hard he had struggled, in many instances, against his so-called buying of his personal comfort.

A card was handed the Governor at that moment, and he looked at it, and frowned. Mrs. Frank Payne was a woman he did not care, at this time of all others, to see. He knew that it would be one of the most moving cases it had yet been his misfortune to hear, and he knew, that it was a case where justice cried out against clemency.

As he sat there holding the card uncertainly in his hand the telephone rang, and he reached over on his desk and took down the receiver. When he had concluded the conversation, and pushed back the phone, he looked again at the little card in his hand, and a strange light stole over his face. Then he smiled, and turning to the secretary said: “I will see Mrs. Payne at two o’clock this afternoon.”

The telephone message had been from Frank Morton, and he had asked if he might see the Governor that afternoon relative to a certain commission of which Mr. Morton was chairman. The Governor had told the newspaper man that he would be glad to talk with him at two o’clock.

Frank Morton was an entirely unique personality in that State. He was unquestionably the State’s most powerful private citizen. Seven years before he had taken the editorship of the Record, at a time when it was without prestige or power. He had come from somewhere in the West, and was unknown and unbacked. But nevertheless within three months the reading population of the State was rubbing its eyes and asking where this man had come from and what he intended to do. Where he had come from they did not learn; what he intended to do was soon made plain. He intended to make the Record the newspaper of thinking people. And he succeeded.

It was entirely characteristic of the man that when he entered the Governor’s office that afternoon he had nothing to say in explanation of the attack he had just made upon him. The two shook hands warmly, for they had come to be close friends. Their difference in type may have been a factor in drawing them together. The Governor was a man of the world; he was a scholar—in the more conventional sense of the term. His face had never quite lost its boyishness; it was clean, clear-cut and attractive. Frank Morton, on the other hand, was undeniably homely. While the Governor was a man easy to get at, Morton was a man one did not attempt to fathom. He was not a man of the world, and his scholarly attainments had not given him that ease which so graces a great mind. He carried his size awkwardly, he did not dress well, and he was unfortunately conscious of his hands and feet. Nevertheless his friends thought of him only as the brainiest and fairest man they knew.

They had not been talking five minutes when the secretary entered and handed the Governor a card bearing the name of Mrs. Frank Payne.

The chief executive rubbed his hand across his head and uttered a bored exclamation. “Now here’s a nice thing,” he said impatiently. “It’s the second time today this woman has been here to see me—and, I suppose, I’ve got to see her.”

“Don’t let me interfere,” said the newspaper man rising at once. “I can wait in the other room.”

The Governor let him get almost to the door, and then he called: “Say, Morton, I wish you’d come back and sit down.”

Frank Morton looked around at him in some surprise. “It won’t do any harm,” said the Governor, “and as long as you’ve shown some interest in this pardon business I think it would be only fair to me to hear something of how the cases are presented.”

The newspaper man stood there irresolutely for a minute, and then the request evidently appealed to him as a fair one, for he walked back to his seat. Thereupon the Governor instructed his secretary to show the lady in.

When the door opened both men rose to their feet. It was plain that the woman was very sick, and that it was with supreme effort she was walking toward them. When she had almost reached the Governor’s desk she staggered, and would have fallen, had not the chief executive taken her by the arm and assisted her to a seat.

“I—I beg your pardon.” she said, as soon as she was able to speak. “I thought I was strong enough today, but—but I guess the excitement it—it was a little too much.”

It was the newspaper man who poured a glass of ice water from a pitcher nearby and handed it in clumsy fashion to the woman. When she had partaken of it he returned the glass to its place on the table, and shoving his chair a little further back into the corner resumed his seat.

“I am sorry to trouble you, Governor,” began the woman, her voice shaking with nervous excitement, “but—but, you see, Governor, its terribly vital with me.”

The Governor bowed with the kind courteousness he unfailingly showed women, but said nothing. Frank Morton shoved his chair still further back in the comer, and looked longingly at the door.

“You—you got both the petitions, Governor?” asked the wife of Frank Payne, timidly.

“Yes, Mrs. Payne,” replied the Governor, “I have them both here in my desk.”

“You noticed the signatures? The county attorney and—and all the prominent people of the place?”

“I saw the names of a number of people I recognized as leading citizens of your community, Mrs. Payne.”

“And doesn’t that have great weight, Governor? Governor!—in the name of pity can’t you give a husband back to a dying woman?”

The Governor rested his hand on his desk, and he began, very slowly: “Mrs. Payne, I can say in all truthfulness that the refusal of such requests as yours is the hardest thing that falls to my lot. But there are only two instances which justify an exercise of the pardon power: when it can be shown justice was not done in the trial, or where there are such extenuating circumstances to make the crime less great in reality than shown to be under the technical construction of the law.” He paused, and some way he could feel that the face of the newspaper man had grown red. “I do not find,” he went on, his voice trying to take the sting from the words, “that your husband’s case falls under either of these.”

The woman pulled her chair close to the Governor’s desk, and put out a shaking hand. “Governor,” she said, in voice not above a whisper, “do you mean that you are going to refuse to let my husband go?”

“I do not see how I can do otherwise,” he answered, after a pause.

Then she rose to her feet, her hands clutched passionately before her. “And they told me you were kind,” she cried out. “So kind!—they said you would be to me. They said you would be as sorry as my own brother would be, that—oh, they lied!” and she sank upon her knees, her head falling to the Governor’s desk, while sobs which it seemed the frail body could not have held, quivered through the big room.

The Governor heard a chair move behind him, he heard a slight cough, but he did not turn around. Instead he lay his hand upon the head which was resting on his desk, and said in the voice which had so endeared him to the people of the State: “You may not know it, but I am very, very sorry.”

His touch seemed to give the woman new heart, and she raised her head. “Governor,” she began, the flush of the consumptive deepening upon her cheeks, and the fatal glimmer growing more bright in her eyes, “you didn’t quite understand. I see now that they hadn’t told you just how it was, and that was why you said those awful things. But now I am going to tell you all about it, I am going to make it all plain to you, and then”—a smile of appeal overspread her wan features, “then you are going to let him go.”

As she paused for breath the Governor tried to raise her to her feet, but her fingers clung tightly to his desk, and in low, throbbing tones, broken every now and then by a hollow cough, she went on: “You see, Governor, I am going to die. I saw the doctor again this morning, and he said it could not be more than six months. And Governor, for those six months I want my husband. When I die I want to die in his arms—can’t you understand that, Governor? If you had just six months to live wouldn’t you want to live them with the person you loved? If your very days were numbered, wouldn’t you begrudge every hour, every minute even, that you spent away from that person? And, oh, Governor! when you woke up in the long nights with that awful pain in your side, and with that awful feeling in your heart that you were going to die, wouldn’t you want to reach out your hand and feel that someone who loved you was there to care for you?—to be with you till the very end? Don’t you see it? Don’t you see what an awful, awful thing it would be to die alone? To be alone—think of it!—all alone—when you were in pain and dying. Oh!—I can’t tell it right; it’s hard to talk—but—” and then, in sheer weakness, her voice broke, and again the Governor attempted to raise her, but she clung tightly to the desk, and after a minute went on more quietly:

“My father has given me some money. He has raised it for me, and he says if you will let Frank go we two shall go to Colorado. Governor, just suppose that the person dearest to you in all the world was dying, and that you were shut up somewhere and they wouldn’t let you out to take care of her—to bathe her head, Governor, when it ached so hard, to hold her when she coughed, to love her and—and make it easier for her. Why, Governor, don’t you think you’d go crazy? Do you think there is any crime in the world merits such a punishment as that? You say he stole money. I don’t know anything about that. I’m not talking about that now. I’m telling you that I’m going to die, and that I’m afraid—oh, I’m afraid!”—her voice rang out with a kind of fierce terror—“to die alone. It’s easy to be brave when you’re well. But how can you be brave when you’re sick, Governor? When—oh, I can’t say any more! I’m tired—I’m—”

“Governor,” broke in a stern voice behind him, “in God’s name, why don’t you end this scene? Why don’t you tell this woman you will pardon her husband?”

The woman rose to her feet with a low, happy exclamation. “I knew it!” she cried. “I knew from the very first that you were my friend!”

She sank back in her chair and looked at him thankfully—expectantly. “You tell him,” she whispered, and closed her tired eyes.

Governor Henderson looked into the face of his friend. It had grown white and it was twitching convulsively.

“The man was convicted of embezzlement,” said the chief executive quietly, “and was sentenced to five years. He has served not quite two. I cannot see how, in the name of justice, I can write his pardon.”

“Don’t write it in the name of justice!” said the newspaper man defiantly. “Write it in the name of decency.”

A soft little smile was playing about the Governor’s mouth as he pulled a document from his desk and wrote his name. The look of supreme joy upon the thin, fever-eaten face spoke the thanks which would not come in words. And then, after she had started away, she turned back to the large man who was leaning heavily against the wall. “May God ever be good to you and yours,” she said brokenly and left them.

There was a long silence. At last the newspaper man spoke. “For the first time since it has been my paper,” he said. “the Record is bought with a price.”

The Governor made no reply, and Frank Morton stood there twirling his hat in his hand. “It’s a strange world,” he said, taking a few steps toward the door. “We think things out, we lay down laws, we have it all fixed—theoretically. And then we meet the actual—confront conditions, and the first thing we do with our theories is to break them.”

He went away then—forgetful of the commission, and the Governor resumed his work; but for a long time that soft little smile continued to play about the chief executive’s mouth.

Leslie’s Monthly Magazine, Apr 1904

The Work of the Unloved Libby

Libby Anderson hung the dishcloth on its accustomed nail and stood there surveying it. Then she took the tin pie-pan and covered the crock of yeast, without the active consciousness that there was yeast there. Then she walked to the middle of the floor, and looked around. Oh, yes—the coffee. She took the mill from the cupboard and began twirling it with tremendous force. She had nearly forgotten the coffee, and it would have been the first time in twenty years—it gave her a feeling of approaching danger. She put the mill on the table, and walked to the sitting-room. It was plain from the way she closed the door that she had determined to speak.

“Ma,” she asked of the woman who was sitting before the little round stove, “what was it you and Dave were talking about when I came home yesterday afternoon?”

Mrs. Anderson did not stop her knitting, and her mouth closed firmly. “Some business of Dave’s.”

“Who was the man I met down by the bridge as I was coming home?”

“It might have been anybody at all, and it might have been a friend of Dave’s that came out from the city to see him.”

“Dave made you promise not to tell me about it, I suppose.”

“La, now, Libby, how you do go on; as if there was any great thing to tell.”

“What were those papers Dave put in his pocket as I came in?”

“Some things he was showin’ me.”

“Ma,” she asked, quiveringly, “you didn’t sign anything, did you?”

“I didn’t sign your name to anything,” and the needles clashed tartly.

She knew her mother too well to press further. “I just couldn’t understand Dave coming here this time of year,” she ventured, “and I thought he acted queer.”

The old woman was folding her knitting. “I’m going to bed and you’d better come along, too,” was her reply.

But Libby did not come. She sat by the little round stove, going all over it for the hundredth time. She did not know just why she distrusted her brother—it might have been because he had such a silky laugh. “All he’d have to do would be to ask for it,” she told herself, “the asking would be enough.”

She started up to bed, and after she was at the top of the steep stairs remembered she had not bolted the door. She shivered; it was the first time in twenty years she had forgotten. She had only been doing it for twenty years—before that her father had done it. She had been doing a great many things in the last twenty years that her father had done before her, and year after year she had done them in the same way. That was why forgetting the door bothered her.

Libby Anderson did not have a silky laugh—there was nothing silky about her. She was forty, and unredeemably plain, and hopelessly conscientious. She had had “a chance” once, fifteen years before, but had not seen her way clear to leave Ma. In the last year Ma had grown very old-looking and feeble. Libby sometimes wondered how it would be with her after—

A week went by, and although she had twice forgotten to feed the chickens, and had several times let the kettle burn dry, she was beginning to feel more settled in her mind.

Then one day it came.

“I’m going in town this morning, Ma,” she said, “and I suppose I’d better go and see about the taxes on that west forty.”

“You needn’t bother,” said Mrs. Anderson, sharply.

Libby had risen from the table, but at this she sat down again. “Why not?”

“Dave’s goin’ to do it,” and she drummed defiantly with her fork.

Libby Anderson sat very still. “You mean, Ma, that after this Dave is going to look after all the taxes?”

“Yes; he is.”

“Why?”

“’Cause me and him agreed that was the best way.”

“I guess, Ma,” said Libby, very slowly, “that you signed something when Dave was here, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t sign your name to anything,” was the stubborn reply, and she began piling up the dishes.

With that it rested. Libby did up the morning work, and started for town. “Pa wouldn’t have liked this,” she muttered as she rumbled across the bridge, and in some way that comforted her. Dave had a silky laugh, and a caressing voice, and was his mother’s idol; but slow, plain, plodding Libby had always been near to the honest heart of Pa.

She went to the courthouse, and there on the recorder’s book she found it. Ma had deeded the place to Dave. She did not make any fuss; she was too old-fashioned for hysterics. She met one of the neighboring farmers on the street and admitted in response to his inquiry that she was not feeling very well.

It was not until the old place came in sight that she broke down. “It’s not fair,” she cried out, “when I’ve stayed here and worked—it’s not fair,” and for the first time in many years she was crying, passionately crying.

It was a feeling of outraged justice that made her speak, for she was a just woman—the daughter of Pa.

“Ma,” she said, “do you think Pa would like to think of your deeding the place to Dave, when I’ve stayed here and kept it up the best I could for twenty years?”

The old woman put down her knitting. “La, now, Libby,” she said, not unkindly, “don’t take on. You’ll never want for nothin’, and you’re goin’ to get your share just the same. Dave wanted me to sign that paper so he could go ahead with some business that was goin’ to make more money for us all. It’s just a—let me see—he called it a formality.”

“But, Ma,” she protested, wearily, “don’t you see that you’ve signed away your property and left it all to Dave and none to me, and do you think Pa would have liked it when I’ve stayed here and worked, and Dave went off and left the place to run itself the best it could. Do you think Pa would have liked it, Ma?”

“I don’t see why you keep holdin’ up to me what Pa would have liked,” she protested, petulantly, “when I tell you it don’t make no difference whether the place is in my name or Dave’s. You’ll never want for nothin’, Libby.”

The spirit of Libby Anderson rose. “That’s not the question whether I’ll want for anything or not. I’m not a pauper, I’m entitled to something—I’ve earned it.”

“La, now, Libby, don’t go on about nothin’,” and the knitting-needle clashed with finality.

Libby stood there looking at her. “I guess you don’t realize what you’ve done,” she said, and turned to the bedroom to lay off her things.

It was not until the next month, the blustering month of March, that it was all made clear. It was early in the afternoon when Libby looked from the window and saw a man turning in at the big gate. Her heart filled with a strange fear, but she did nothing more tragic than look down to see that her apron was clean. When he reached the top of the hill she recognized him, and her hands grew cold. “That friend of Dave’s from the city is coming, Ma,” she said.

“Land sakes,” exclaimed Mrs. Anderson, “and such a day as ’tis.”

The stranger warmed his hands, and disbursed a number of pleasantries. Libby did not like him, though she saw nothing tangible against him except that he kept looking at her out of the corner of his eye.

“Well, Mrs. Anderson,” he said, finally, “your son wants me to make a little proposition to you.”

It was coming, the most awful thing of her life was coming, but she only reached down and stroked the cat.

Mrs. Anderson looked pleasantly expectant. “Dave’s always makin’ propositions,” she chuckled.

“He’s been a good deal worried about you this winter, afraid you were not just comfortable out here, you two all alone.”

“Dave’s always thinkin’ of his mother’s comfort,” she asserted, and looked triumphantly over at Libby.

“It’s pretty cold out here, sometimes, isn’t it?”

“’Tis a little blustery, that’s a fact.”

“The wind manages to creep into an old house like this, doesn’t it?”

“Good many cracks; Dave thinkin’ of boardin’ it up?”

“No,” laughed the man, “he thinks he has a better scheme than that. You find the place quite a care, do you not, Miss Anderson?” he asked, turning his eyes full upon her for the first time.

“I don’t mind it,” she replied, dully.

“Well,” he resumed, turning back to the older woman, “it worries Dave to think of your being out here alone now that you’re getting along in years, so he’s rented a nice little place in town, and he feels sure it would be better all around if you’d just go in and take it.”

“If that ain’t fer all the world like Dave!—always some new idear in his head. But you just tell him, Mr. Murray, not to be bothering, we don’t want to move to town, do we, Libby?”

“Not if we can help it,” she replied, her attentions still centered upon the cat.

“Dave’s been away from the place so long that he don’t see just how ’tis,” Ma explained; “Libby and me wouldn’t feel to home no place else.”

“Of course—of course, that would be true at first,” he acquiesced, sympathetically. “But it would only be a matter of a little time, and then you would be much more comfortable. It is really impossible for you to think of staying here any longer.”

The last words had a different ring. Even Ma noticed it, and she looked uneasily at Libby. “Me and Libby wouldn’t feel to home no place else,” she repeated, “and we wouldn’t feel right about leaving the place, would we, Libby?”

Libby did not answer, and the old woman looked at Dave’s friend with growing anxiety.

“It’s too bad you feel that way,” he went on, persuasively, “for Dave was so sure you’d like the idea that he’s gone ahead and made all arrangements, and—I’m afraid there might be a little trouble about unmaking them,”—the man pulled his mustache down to cover a smile. “Of course you’ll feel badly at first, but you’ll like it better in town when you get used to it.”

He turned to Libby. “How soon do you think you could move? By the first of May?”

“I suppose so,” she answered in that dull voice.

Then he talked cheeringly to Mrs. Anderson of other things. “You’ll like it better in town,” he assured her, as he shook hands in parting. “After you’ve been there a month you’ll say it was the best move you ever made.”

“Maybe so,” she answered, and turned a beseeching face to Libby.

The younger woman followed him out to the shed kitchen. “If there is any way of preventing it—I mean if there is any way of fighting this—we’re not going to move to town.”

“Well, there isn’t,” he said, shortly, “your brother has sold the place. You can tell your mother or not just as you like, but you’ll have to be out by the first of May,” and without a softening word he drove away.

She did not know how she got back to the house, but probably she could do it just because she was so used to doing the things that lay before her. As she opened the sitting-room door the old woman looked around at her, helplessly—confidingly—the look of a troubled child.

“We ain’t goin’ to move to town; you won’t hear of it, will you, Libby?”

Libby Anderson was not advanced enough to question the divine order of things, but it did occur to her that the world was a little queer. Ma had taken from her her birthright, and now it was back to her that she turned for help. She—the disinherited child—must still be the prop. From somewhere deep in her being words such as she had never even thought before were struggling up for utterance. They were on her very lips, and then she looked at the old woman crouched close to the fire, and habit—if not sympathy—asserted itself. She was used to looking after Ma; she would look after her now.

“Dave didn’t know how you’d feel about it, Ma,” she said.

“You can write him a letter tonight and tell him I don’t want to go.”

“All right, I’ll tell him.”

“It’ll be all right then—that’ll settle it.”

Libby remembered the man pulling down his mustache to cover the smile, and made no reply.

“It’ll be all right then,” she repeated, resenting the silence; “Dave only done it ’cause he thought we’d like to move to town.”

Libby had started to the kitchen. “Yes, Ma,” she said, quietingly, “I know.”

She wrote a long letter to her brother that night, part of it before her mother went to bed—that part she read aloud—and part of it after she had been left alone in the old sitting-room. The latter portion no one ever saw but Dave.

Next week they sent to town every day for mail. Ma said Dave must be sick, and Libby held back the bitter words, and assented that maybe he was. Another week passed—and then the letter came. Dave always wrote nice letters, and this was no exception. He was so sorry they were not pleased with the new arrangement. Had he dreamed they would not like it he never would have gone ahead. But now it was too late to go back, and he was sure they would like it better in town. He would come and see them there often, and would do all he could to make them comfortable.

A silence followed the reading of the letter. For the first time in all Ma’s life Dave’s cause was wavering. But it triumphed. “Dave means well by us, Libby. I can see he means well.”

It was such an old voice—and so feeble; there was in it a note of pleading that made it appealing in its helplessness.

“I suppose so,” answered Libby, “I suppose he does.”

April came, and for the fiftieth time the old woman watched the white give way to the green on the hills that curved in and out around her old home. She felt the frosty scent of winter yielding to the seductiveness of spring, and her old heart, warming within her, grew young again and lived back in the days when Dave and Libby were little, and when she and Pa worked about the place they had so proudly bought with the labor of their hands. All through those soft, sweet April days she sat out on the porch watching the old place re-deck itself in the glory of the spring. She said nothing about moving to town, she had forgotten it, or she looked to it as something far in the future, something that would never happen.

As long as she could, Libby let her have her dream. Her heart was not hard toward Ma now—Ma had not understood. And Libby was glad she could have those few spring days before she was torn from the old home. But it was the middle of the month now, and the man said they must be gone by May. She would have to speak to her that afternoon. No—she would wait until tomorrow. She would let her have another peaceful spring twilight on the old farm, just one more of those rejuvenating April mornings.

And so she waited, and even let the next day drag to evening before she spoke. Ma was, as usual, sitting out on the little porch, looking off at the green hills, basking in contentment. It went hard with Libby to speak, but she had grown used to doing the things that lay before her.

“Ma,” she began, “I think I will have to be packing up this week.”

“Packing up what?”

“Why, don’t you remember, Ma, we’re going in town the first of May?”

“Oh, la, Libby, I’ve give that up long ago. I’m goin’ to die on the old place.”

“But you know, Ma, the arrangements have all been made. I’m afraid we’ll have to go.”

She turned to her crossly. “There’s no use to argue wi’ me, Libby Anderson, I ain’t goin’.”

“But what about Dave?”

“You can jest write Dave his mother don’t want to leave the place. Dave won’t have nothin’ further to say.”

She looked off at the meadow land as though it were all settled. Libby would have to tell her.

“Ma,” she said, “it’s no use to write to Dave.”

“Why not?” she demanded, in a half-frightened, half-aggressive voice. Libby did not have the knack of saying things smoothly. She was not silky-tongued like Dave.

“He’s sold the place, Ma,” and she got up and leaned against the railing.

“What’s that you say? Something about Dave selling my place? Are you gone crazy, Libby Anderson?”

“You know you deeded it to him, Ma. It was his after you did that, and he’s sold it and we’ll have to move out.”

Hearing no answer she turned around, and it was then she coveted Dave’s gift of saying things smoothly. The old woman was crouched low in her chair, and her face was quivering, and looked sunken and gray.

“I didn’t ’low he’d do that,” she faltered.

It was not much—not violent—but it was the first word she had ever spoken against Dave, and Libby knew how much it meant. She had not supposed Ma would be quite that crushed. She went over and took the wrinkled hands that were groping out as though something had been taken from them. “Never mind, Ma,” she said, awkwardly, “poor Ma.”

It was the nearest to a caress that had passed between them since Libby was a little girl.

Nothing more was said until after Ma had gone to bed. Libby supposed she was asleep, when she called quaveringly to her. “Libby,” she said, “you mustn’t be thinkin’ hard of Dave. He must have thought it for the best.”

Libby was used to caring for Ma, and she needed care now. “Yes, Ma,” she answered, “I’m sure he must.”

The next day she began packing up. Ma followed it all with her eyes—those sorrowful old eyes—and watched her put away the things that had stood in their place for fifty years. She did not go out on the porch at all that day, but just stood about watching Libby. Sometimes, when she was putting away something that Ma had most cherished, something that had seemed a vital part of the home, she looked at her reproachfully. But the subject of leaving the place was not broached between them.

Three days passed, and still they had not spoken of going away. Libby continued packing, and Ma stood around hopelessly, just looking at her. On the evening of the third day the house had lost its accustomed look. It was not home at all any more. Even the carpet in Ma’s bedroom had been taken up.

It was not until the morning of the fourth day that the silence between them was broken. Libby got up to take down the clock, when she heard a strange noise behind her, and turning she saw that Ma’s head was down low in her hands, and she was rocking passionately back and forth, and crying as though her old heart had broken.

She put down the clock, and again she wished for a little of Dave’s silkiness of speech. But she did not have it, and the best she could do was to pull Ma’s chair out from the barren room into the sunshine of the porch. The hills, she thought, would still look like home.

That April morning was as soft and as beautiful as the ones that had gone before, but the sunshine had lost its power. What mattered it that the old place looked beautiful?—now that she was going away. All through the long winter she had waited for the spring to come, and now it was here—and she was going away.

Ma did not get up at all next day. Maybe she was sick, or maybe it was only that she did not want to go out in the sitting-room and see how unlike home it looked. But the next day she did not get up either, and then Libby went to town for the doctor. He said the excitement had weakened her, and did not seem very certain she would ever get up again. That night Libby wrote a letter to Dave, asking him again to let his mother die on the old place. A week passed, and an answer had not come, and still Ma had not left her bed. The packing was all done, it was the first of May, and she was just waiting—she did not know for what. Those were not easy days for Libby, the old house, the only home she had ever known, looked so awful in its barrenness, and the future was so uncertain.

Her whole soul rose up against moving Ma from the old place now when her days were so surely numbered, and so she sent a telegram to Dave, telling him his mother was sick, and asking leave to stay a little longer. There came a reply from his partner saying that Dave was in the East, and would not be home for two weeks.

Libby Anderson was not a woman of manifold resources. All she knew how to do was the thing that lay before her, and now she did not know what that thing was. She had forgotten her own destitution, she was only anxious to know how to finish her work of caring for Ma.

That night the old woman raised herself in her pillows and sobbed out the truth. “It’s Dave that’s killin’ me—it’s to think Dave sold the place and turned me out to die.”

And then the way opened before Libby, and she saw her path. Ma was going to die—but she need not die with broken heart. She had loved Dave, and believed in him, for forty-five years. She must die loving him, and believing in him.

The disinherited child wrote a letter that night, and to it she signed her brother’s name. Out in the world they might have applied to it an ugly word, but Libby was only caring for Ma. She was a long time about it, for it was hard to put things in Dave’s round, bold hand, and it was hard to say them in his silky way. But when it was finished it some way seemed she had given Dave back to Ma, and despite her criminal work she sought her bed with conscience clear.

The doctor said next morning that it was a matter of but a few days at most, for Ma was much worse. She still kept following Libby with her eyes—and they were such hungry, disappointed eyes. The tragedy of Ma’s life had come upon her just as she was going out.

“It ain’t that I’m goin’ to die,” she said when Libby came in and found her crying, “but I was thinkin’ of Dave. I keep thinkin’ and thinkin’ of him when he was a little boy, and how he used to run about the place, and how pretty he used to look, and then just as I begin to take a little comfort in rememberin’ some of the smart things he said, I have to think of what he done, and it does seem like he might ’ave waited ’til—” but the words were too bitter to be spoken, and with a hard, scraping sound in her throat she turned her face to the wall.

Libby put her hand to something in her pocket, and thought of last night’s work with thankfulness.

About eleven o’clock she entered the room with the sheets of a letter in her hand. “Ma,” she said, tremulously, “here’s a letter just come from Dave.”

“I knew it’d come! I knew it!” and the old voice filled the room with its triumphant ring. Then there crept into her face an anxious look. “What does he say?”

“He’s sorry about selling the place, Ma. He really thought you’d like it better in town. But he’s fixed it up for us to stay. He says you’ll never have to leave the place.”

“I knowed it! I knowed it well ’nough! You don’t know Dave like I do—but read me the letter.”

She did read it, and the old woman listened with tears—glad tears now—falling over her withered cheeks. “You can just unpack our things,” she cried when it was finished, “and get this place straightened out. The idear of your packin’ up and thinkin’ we was goin’ to move to town! Nice mess you’ve made of it!—jest as if Dave would hear to us leavin’ the place. I always knowed you’d never ’preciated Dave.”

And Libby pretended to straighten out the place, while Ma talked unceasingly of Dave. Now that he had been restored to her he seemed dearer than ever, and she chided herself for doubting him, and censured Libby for never having done him justice.

Before morning broke, Ma was gone. Happy, because she had back her old faith in Dave, the blind, beautiful faith of the mother in the son. And Libby—the homeless and unloved Libby—was happy, too, for she had finished well her work of caring for Ma.

The Black Cat, Aug 1904

An Approximation

She put the letter down, questioning whether upon land or upon sea there were any human beings who were gracious with out hope of reward. A native fair-mindedness forced from her the admission that an impulsive few did not anticipate the sense of obligation they were subsequently going to inspire, but in her present attitude toward things she was not willing to grant to many of those few a soul proof against latter-day opportunities for the exaction of what they could construe as their due.

After making a number of unsuccessful attempts to forget the letter, she concluded that she might as well read it again. It ran:

My dear Miss Falkner—

First—congratulations. While I always knew the great things were there, I will confess you have surprised even me in the rapidity with which you have proved yourself. It is glorious, and I watched you Monday night with many thrills of gratification.

Now, I have a request to make. You have always been kind in saying I was the first of the critics to take up your cause. I did it because I believed in you and not, as I am sure you know, for hope of reward. But because of all that, I know that while my request may seem to you surprising you will not regard it as presumptuous.

We simply must have some new features—more of the personal, and—if you will not tell on me—the sensational. Call it what you may, it’s the stuff people want to read. And so I have mapped out a little “stunt” for you. Won’t you write for me a brief sketch that will work in under the heading, “The Happiest Moments of My Life”? If you haven’t time to write it, make a sort of outline, and I’ll fix it up. You can make it somewhat in the nature of a review of your various dramatic triumphs—how you felt about this word of encouragement, or that bit of recognition. It’s being done now right along, and you may be sure I would not ask it if I felt it would be at all cheapening.

Congratulating you again, and once more giving myself the joy of saying, “I told you so,” I remain,

Your very good friend,

Herbert Lacey.

The amusing side of it was, after all, not to be ignored. There passed before her a long array of people who had befriended her in her struggling days crowding up now with the prefatory, “While we did it without hope of reward, at the same time—”; and that sense which permitted her to get the humor from the disagreeable as well as the pleasant made her hope, mindful of such genera as hair tonic advertisements, that her list of benefactors had not extended too far beyond her own sphere of action.

But in returning to it with seriousness she found that her insight into its humorous possibilities had lifted from her nothing of the hurt. She had long believed in Herbert Lacey’s disinterested friendship, in his absolutely sincere desire to see her succeed. She knew, and she knew that he knew, that she had grown beyond his paper, and that it was a compromise of her dignity which he asked. He was sure, of course, that she would do it. In that he was taking advantage of her temperament as well as of the situation, and even a reaching out to the possibility of his being desperately hard pressed did not make it right.

There were a number of letters upon her desk, and after she had read them all she let herself dwell for the minute upon how unquestionably they stood for success. There was one from an actress of advanced years which pleased her most of all.

“After I watched your work on Monday night,” she wrote, “I felt for the first time in many years that the art I love so well is in safe hands. There was joy for me in your work, my dear Olive Falkner. Your sincerity, your unmistakable devotion, your high purpose, your glorious ideals—oh, it was fine to feel it all after this reign of tinsel and red lights! May you go on and on to bigger things, and may you never forget the sacredness of your trust.”

Her fancy was reaching out into strange recesses as she made ready for the night. And then for a long time she sat there turning over the letters upon her desk. It was when she found she had taken the long tablet and folded some sheets across the middle, simulating notepaper, and had taken up her pen and opened the ink bottle, that she determined she would do it then and there. There was in her mind a half-formulated theory that the sooner it was done the sooner she could begin to forget it. Her mouth was set in the firm lines of one discharging a despised duty, as she began:

“Perhaps one of the first moments to stand out as among the happy ones of my life was when Dedrick admitted me to his school. He had me do a couple of things for him, and then he said, ‘Oh, yes—I guess you may come.’ And as I went away that day I was very happy.

“And on the night of my first appearance, small though the part was, I knew one of my happy moments. After it was over, the manager was pouring out wrath upon some of the people, when I came along and he said, ‘Now, you—your work wasn’t half bad.’ And, grudging though it was, it made me happy.

“Then there was my big stroke of luck in getting on with Merriman. I never worked so hard in my life as I did getting ready for that. He is not what one would call a gracious gentleman, but after the second night he said to me, ‘I think you are going to do very well,’ and I went away so happy I scarcely touched the earth.

“And then—let me see—my first good notice. It was in The Searcher. It said: ‘Olive Falkner, as Nancy, is doing good work. She is capable of better things. Indeed, she is a young woman of rare possibilities. We shall hear more of her, and soon.’”

And so it went with steady swing from the straggler to the star; a mere record of the dramatic stepping-stones—conventional, but, in a sense, honest, and done with the same freedom from emotion there would have been in the jotting of a memorandum in her engagement-book. At the close she wrote:

“But perhaps the happiest moment of all was when the curtain went down on the first production of ‘The Unforgotten’ the other night, and I knew by the long, long applause that the work I wished most to do was approved by the people I wished most of all to please.”

She read it over with a smile which shifted from the cynical to the tolerant. It was after she had darkened the room and was lying there, hands clasped upon her forehead, that there was borne in upon her a sharp consciousness of what, if not its insincerity, was at any rate the preposterous and the farcical in it. “The Happiest Moments of My Life!” The lights from a building opposite were throwing it in tracery upon the ceiling, and beyond the glints and the shadows, beyond what she could fancy as the letters and the words, there floated the whole great land of longing and dreams. A something long and sternly held beneath was crowding up within her. Up through the strata of conventions, of training and of ambition it crowded, until her eyes—wide, deep eyes, empowered with the telling of heart stories—were blinded, until sobs were in her throat, and until at last she was sitting up in bed, her head upon her knees, her long hair falling all about her, and was sobbing with the tumultuousness long repression alone can foster.

And then it was with the defiance springing from strong emotion that she threw back the covering and stepped to the floor. She stood there a minute, peering into the shadows like a willful child who is half fearful and yet a little desirous of being caught. It was with a quick drawing in of her breath, an impulsive reaching out of her hand, that she stole over and sat down before her desk. She did not turn on the light—she just sat there, hands clasped before her, letting the all she had long desired sweep in and possess her.

And then at last she did reach up and turn on the light by her desk. She took those folded sheets of paper she had written a little while before, and, one by one, turned them over on the other side. Then, dreamily, her hand not steady, she wrote the heading, “The Happiest Moments of My Life.” Her smile grew tremulous as she looked down at it; but when the mists had gone from her eyes the lights deep within were passionate and wonderful. And outside was that subdued state which stands for quiet in a great city, and just before she began to write she looked about again as though half expectant of being caught. And then this is what she wrote, fine, soft lights upon her face, the letters of congratulation lying unheeded around her, many a smile and many a tear born with the fast coming, resistless words:

“You funny old don’t-care world!—are you in earnest about wanting me to tell of the happiest moments of my life? It’s a strange thing to ask, dear, queer world, but perhaps you mean it; and, as you’ve done quite a lot for me, I think maybe I should do this little bit for you.

“There is a joy in realized ambition. Yes, there is joy in hearing so much applause that it makes one’s head swim in having to go before the curtain again and again and again and then having a fight with the manager because he wants you to go once more and you don’t want to. There is the kind of joy in that which makes you straighten up your shoulders and hold your head very high. There is joy in forcing from the great critics the very things they are most reluctant to say. Reading their comments is like drawing in great breaths of pure air after you have been stifling. Oh, yes, there’s joy in it, and I guess—yes, I know full well, it’s worth working for. And there’s great joy in doing something that pleases oneself, in feeling you are beginning to fulfill yourself, in interpreting to your own satisfaction, in—oh, you know what I’m talking about now! I am talking of artistic gratification, and it’s worth having. It’s a fine, high kind of joy that makes up for a great deal of work.

“But, dear old world, aren’t we getting very much mixed up? That is not what you were asking me about—not ambition, success, the joy of doing and winning. Oh, no, that wasn’t it. You were asking about happiness, and don’t you know—oh, surely you do!—that happiness hasn’t anything to do with the clapping of hands or with the things that appear in print?

“It’s a little queer to come to me about it, for of course I don’t know as much of it as most women do. Most women just make a business of being happy, and I have had to make a business of the other things. But perhaps that is the very reason I can tell of it better than they. They are too submerged in it to tell of it. But with me—oh, the things I do know about it stand out big and distinct and glowing, and I can see that perhaps I understand it all the better for not being immersed in it.

“… I was so little I could not much more than walk, and a grown-up lady, a beautiful lady she was to me, was bending over me and putting a doll in my lap, and she was saying to me, ‘Auntie brought this for baby, because auntie loves baby very much.’ Don’t you think, world, if you were a little baby girl without a mother, or without much of anybody, that you’d like to have a beautiful lady come and say that to you? And don’t you think, if it was the first time you had ever felt just like throwing your arms about anyone’s neck, that you would look back to it as one of the very happy moments of your life?

“… It was almost a mile away from our house—that river. I went up a hill and then down a hill, and then across a little stretch of level—and there it was. I am not sure most people would call it a beautiful river, but I do know that it looked beautiful to me. I couldn’t go very often, for there is lots of work to do on a farm; yet sometimes, when the dinner work was done and it wasn’t time to begin on supper, I could go. And one day—oh, I couldn’t tell how happy that day was!—I got away at two o’clock, and I wouldn’t have to be back until five. Someone had given me a book. It was in a paper cover, and I have read since that it is not very good poetry; but I never cared so much for any book before, and I’ve never cared for one in just that way again. I rowed about in that rickety old boat—most of the time not rowing at all—and I read in that book about old castles and about men who died for love of women. And then, just before I went home, I lay down in the bottom of the boat and I held the book in my hands; but I did not read it, for my eyes were shut and I could hear the water lapping all about me, and I could hear birds singing, and I could feel myself drifting—drifting—drifting. And as I drifted I dreamed a wonderful dream of myself in an old gray castle, and of a man who loved me. I was scolded when I reached home that day, for it was long after five o’clock; but do you think I cared? There’s never been a scolding yet that could rub away the glory from a dream!

“And then, world, did you ever have a chum? I suppose not—you are so far away from everything you could chum with. I had one once—just one, but if I am to tell of the happy moments of my life then I shall have to tell about that little chum. If you had always been told that you were queer; if all your life you had known the great, heavy pain of loneliness; and then if one day soon after you had come to the city, and when it all seemed—oh, so don’t-care and foolish!—a girl in the class who was always smiling, who was always saying things to make other people laugh, were to come to you and ask you if you wouldn’t room with her, and say she had rather room with you than anybody—don’t you think, as you stood looking down into her brave, beautiful face, that that would mark itself upon your soul as one of the very happy moments of your life? If no one had ever wanted you before, and then if a little girl with big gray eyes, a little girl who could laugh and be strong, came right up to you and said she wanted you very much, don’t you think you could just feel something thawing in your heart, and don’t you think a new and beautiful light would shed itself back over all the years of the past and on and on into the unlived years of the future? Yes, world, if you want the truth—then here it is! I stood tonight before a great theater crowded with people, and they were the people who are most worth while. As I stood there with one hand upon the curtain, looking out across the mass of them, I knew, not so much by the clapping of the hands as by a something tingling in the atmosphere, that it was a moment of far-reaching success. I liked it, world—oh, yes, I liked it. But as among the happy moments of my life it is not so much as given place with that day long ago when, poor and unknown, I found a friend.

“And what did we do, my little chum and I? I’ll tell you what we did! We lived and worked and dreamed and played together. We rode on the streetcars! Did you ever know that was a wonderfully exhilarating, a beautiful, restful thing to do? I don’t often ride on the streetcars now, and when I do I ride just stupidly—just for the sake of getting somewhere; but that was not the way I rode in those days of long ago. No—this was the way we did it then. After we had eaten our dinner—we paid twenty-five cents for those dinners—and just at the hour when wine was flowing, when all over the big city there were soft lights and music and women in laces and diamonds—just at that very hour of striving for much show, my chum would say to me, ‘I’ve got twenty cents—let’s take a ride.’ And then we would get the very front seat on the car—often we had to let three or four cars go by to do it, but we would have felt untrue to our ideals in taking any other.

“There was just room for two on that front seat, and the air would fairly swim up against our faces as we sat there, deciding the people in the carriages and the automobiles were not getting as much from life as we were. ‘What do they understand?’ my chum would say to me, and then we would laugh, and we would talk of the things we wanted to do in the world, for we dreamed big dreams in those streetcar days. And that car would rush on and on, clear out into the country, just pushing us straight into the night, and there was one place for almost a mile where the trees came right down over us, and we could hear crickets, and could look into big, dense darkness. We loved that place, my chum and I, and some nights when we came to it we were very still, and at other times we would say little poems to each other, poems we loved most of all. And then we would go back to our room and work.

“Oh, big, queer world, those were happy moments in my life! How sorry I am for the people who have never known the joy there can be in riding on streetcars!—the people who have never known the bliss of saving their money for a week and then getting a real dollar seat at the theater!—the poor, dull rich people who have never lived through the joy of eating at cheap places for two weeks just for the sake of going at last to a place they like most of all, and with princely abandonment paying more to the waiter than they usually pay for their dinner! There’s tragedy in missing all of that, dear world, and in my inmost heart there is lots and lots of pity for the poor, sleek, prosperous people who have never known the plunging joy of paying ten cents for coffee when they knew they should have paid but five!

“And do you want me to tell of the most thankfully happy moment I ever had in all my life? She got sick—that brave-hearted little chum who had brought so much of light to me. They took her away to the hospital, and for three weeks, dizzy with fear, helpless at thought of what might be before me, I went up those big steps every night when my work was done, and I would stand and look at the nurse, and in answer to my look the nurse would only shake her head. And then one night—I had scarcely worked at all that day, for the nurse had shaken her head so very slowly the night before—I was afraid to go into the big place, and I just sat there on the front steps with my face in my hands; and when at last I did get up the steps and down the long corridor my feet would not take me to the room, and I stood there leaning against the wall, my heart beating itself to suffocation one minute and not beating at all the next. And then, just as I felt everything slipping from under me, the nurse came out and took my hand, and she said to me: ‘It’s good news at last, dear. The doctor says she’s going to be all right.’ And then I walked into the room very quietly. Upon the bed my chum was lying restfully asleep, and I sat down on a chair at the foot of the bed, leaned my head up against the iron rods and held my two hands tight in my lap. Tears and tears and tears rolled down my face. Don’t talk to me of the night I found myself a star! Oh, no—that wasn’t it; it was the night I sat there by my chum’s bed and softly cried out my joy of keeping her that I knew the moment of my life most thankfully happy.

“… Shall we leave it here?—leave the rest of it—the big, big rest of it—unsaid? That is what we do with the innermost things of life, world. Words cannot hold them, and so we keep them close within our hearts, where no one knows that they are. Did you ever think how the unwritten stories, the unsung poems, are the greatest of them all? Too great to be sung or written, they are only to be lived, world—only to be lived. And so each heart has its own song and story, and it feeds upon it until the heart is cold and needs to feed no more.

“It was in the mountains—I have always been glad of that. It was two years ago, as time is reckoned, but sometimes I wake in the morning to think it was the day before; and sometimes, so much a part of me it is, I think it was a thousand eternities ago. If there was something which could begin where words stop then perhaps I could tell of that place in the mountains. I can only say now that it was high up—close to the stars and to heaven, and that one could look far—oh, far!—and that the world of petty struggles was off in another sphere—that here great, strong breaths from God blew in upon one’s soul, and that one grew bigger and stronger and freer and truer every time one stood and looked off at the haze there was on distant mountain tops. Don’t ask me to tell of it, world—no, don’t! I know now, what before I guessed, that the greatest things of life must remain forever the unexpressed; but just let me say to you that the happiest moment of my life, the glorified, supreme, never-to-be-dimmed moment was when he and I, very early one morning, climbed higher on the mountain side than we had ever climbed before—on and on until at last we stood upon the top; and then, his hand in mine, we stood there, above the mists, above the things that make men blind, and we knew then that the spirit of love had descended upon our hearts, and that henceforth forevermore we were of love’s elect. Oh, world—wonderful and cruel!—they came the next day and took me away. They had subscribed to stock in my future—those people who believed they were my friends—and, you see, world, they don’t let racehorses browse in country lanes. It’s the half a second some day in the future—not the browsing by the way. And so they told him, told him in the way people of a cold philosophy can tell things, that he could show he cared for me only by going away and letting me alone. For he was of your dreamers, and not your doers, world; and so, believing he was serving me, he went away. And I? Oh, I went back to the marketplace. I have done the things we all knew I could do. I have won the place we all knew I could win. But, men and women of a cold philosophy, your victory was but a sorry one! You do not know that there blows over me still that strong, fine breath from the mountains, and you do not know that in dreams I shall ever stand high upon that mountain top, the mists and the struggles far below me, the man I love close, close beside me. Not much of life, you say, oh, heart of mine? But try to be content. With other women love may have stayed a longer time, but perhaps to them love did not come so perfectly.

“You’ll not laugh at my little story, will you, big heart of the world? Perhaps it is not so much of a story as most women’s hearts could yield to you, but I sometimes wonder if unfinished stories do not have their compensations. The yearning heart, knowing much has been denied it, returns and satisfies itself in sounding new depths in the little that it had. And so, may it not be that those who have lived what men would call little have lived more profoundly than those who have lived what men would call much? If the story be not a long one, then the heart, not to be cheated, makes the short story yield the more. Mine was a short story, but it has yielded me much. Lean close to me now, dear world, and listen while I whisper—for I am very tired tonight and lonely—that I thank God for my dreams!”

A breeze from without stirred her papers. Her pen trembled for a minute in her fingers and then fell to the floor. Her head drooped lower and lower, until at last it rested upon the things she had written, and she lay there many minutes motionless. Then a clock struck four, and the voice of the marketplace admonished her of a rehearsal in the morning at eleven. There was a paper-cutter on the desk, and slowly, for she was numb with weariness, she cut those long sheets she had folded hours before and arranged them side by side. Upon the one was the conventional statement of her dramatic triumphs, upon the other the story of her woman’s heart. She took the first, folded it and put it away, saying:

“I will send it tomorrow. He can fix it up somehow. It is the best I can do.” She held those other sheets of paper in her hand for just a minute, and then, very slowly now, she tore them into strips and threw them into the basket that was beside her desk. And then at last, spent with much feeling, the favorite of the city, she whom many women envied went to sleep.

When, a week later, Olive Falkner’s sketch, “The Happiest Moments of My Life,” was printed and copied everywhere, there were critics of vaunted insight who pointed to it as betokening the perfect type of the woman devoted solely to her art.

The Smart Set, Feb 1905

For Tomorrow

“You don’t mind if I look it over, do you, George?”

“Not at all. I’d mind if you didn’t.”

She picked up the typewritten sheets and settled herself in a big chair. “You know when you had the little church at home I used to look over your sermons,” she said; and then she threw back her head a little, held the paper straight up before her — he smiled as he remembered that trick — and began upon it.

He had always admired her concentration. Her mind had a way of striking straight out from the shoulder. Their father had spoken of her once as a wonderfully devised instrument for divining the truth; and as he sat there looking at her turning page after page he found himself wishing her father could see her now, rich in the mental poise given her by her years of university training.

All the week long they had skirted around on the edge of the things that were vital. She told him of the university, and he told her of his church; but of the spirit of the university and of the spirit of the church they were silent. She would have forced real issues once or twice, but he had held her off, wanting to get a little more accustomed to her before he met her face to face. He knew that the delay had fretted her, and that she would call for the question very soon now. His sister Mary was not one to be lightly put off. He had put off himself, he had put off the signs of the times, but he could not put off Mary. And so, when she came into his study that morning and found him looking over the newly prepared sermon, he knew that the inevitable moment had come.

She made no attempt at keeping her emotions from her face as she read the sermon through. But when she put it down, the disdainful and condemnatory had gone. There remained nothing but the disappointed. She sat there, her chin on her intertwined fingers, offering nothing at all.

“I believe it is customary,” he began at last, in something of his old bantering way, “when one has finished reading an original production to make a few civil remarks. There is usually something good one can find to say. Now, the style of it — that’s not wholly bad, is it?”

His forced lightness did not break in upon her. For a long time she sat there looking straight ahead. Then she turned and faced him. “You and I grew up together, George,” she began with an earnestness fairly tense. “We grew up in the spirit of the same household, under the guidance of the same great man. We read the same books, we worshiped the same heroes —usually; we matured with much the same point of view, had much the same ideas of doing things in the world. We were very close together —you and I; and that is why I want to ask just one thing of you, George. You can parry with the rest of the world — your congregation, your denomination, your colleagues, but out of respect to the spirit of father I do want you to be straight out and honest with me!” There was a hard pause. “Let the rest of them think you believe these things, if that’s your idea of the way of meeting the world; but for the sake of your own self-respect don’t hesitate to tell me that you preach the stuff you do because you like the seven thousand dollars a year that it brings in!”

“No,” he hastened, flushing a little; “no, that’s not putting it quite fairly. It’s rather that I don’t think the time ripe here for the speaking of the whole of the truth. I don’t actually say things that I don’t believe. I just don’t say all that I do.”

“You don’t say things that you don’t believe! In letter — perhaps not. But who cares about the letter of things in this day? The whole spirit of your sermon is a lie! You temporize —you quibble. You put an interpretation on things that is an apology to yourself, all the while knowing your congregation will interpret it in a way satisfying to them. And then you try to make yourself believe that’s honest! If you’d turned out a drunkard or a gambler,” she concluded hotly, “I couldn’t have felt any worse.”

“Have you reckoned with the fact,” he began quietly, “that our lives in the last eight or ten years have been lived in rather different atmospheres? You went into the university just at the time I was leaving it. You were beginning upon the abstract things just at the time I was going out to meet the practical. Most of us get a little away from things scholastic and speculative when we leave school, but you really got farther in. Then, going abroad with the Syddons, you fell under the German influence. I’ve seen that very clearly even in the one week you’ve been here. While you’ve been — well, not only studying philosophy but absolutely drinking it in through the pores, I’ve been doing the work of a practical clergyman. We see things a little differently — we’re bound to. I have the church to deal with from the sociological as well as the philosophic standpoint. After all, you really don’t quite know what you’re talking about. I couldn’t get up in any pulpit of the country and preach the things you believe. Why, you’re an atheist, Mary,” he concluded good-humoredly.

“I’m not fighting for you to preach the things that I believe! I’m asking you to preach the things you believe. If you got up and preached that the moon was made of green cheese — why I’d deplore your unenlightenment, and I’d try to lead you out of it; but if I were convinced you honestly believed that, I’d have a great deal more respect for you than I have this minute!”

They both laughed a little. It was their sense of humor that kept their quarrels from deepening to estrangements.

“It’s such a wonderful age we’re living in, George,” she went on; “it’s such a glorious thing just to be alive now. And it was men like father, not afraid to be honest, who made this age possible. I do so want you to be one of the men to make the next age still greater than this! And philosophy hasn’t stripped me of my religion. I still believe the things that are vital — believe them more knowingly than ever before. But it has made me hate a compromise with truth. And that’s just what this Easter-day sermon of yours is. I can see that sleek, prosperous, self-satisfied congregation of yours behind every line of it. The style of it? Of course it’s good. Can’t you see that the fact of your being able to say things the way you do makes your cowardice in holding back the truth all the greater? It seems that you have crucified truth — for seven thousand dollars a year.” “That’s a little spectacular,” he said sharply.

“No,” she responded wearily; “it is merely unpleasantly true.”

“I can see the whole scene,” she went on. “That’s a magnificent structure you have down there — you’ve surely made a success of it from the sociological standpoint. And they’ll have beautiful flowers, won’t they? And the music will be the best to be had. Yours is the fashionable church of the city now— isn’t it, George? And, of course, there will be a great jam, and then you’ll get up and in your very elegant way preach this comfortable sort of sermon, and send everybody home filled with poetic phrases and with nothing in particular to think or worry about, and — oh, no, George” — she broke off, leaning over the desk and letting her hand fall upon his — “no, you’re all wrong.”

“I think I have been able to do a little good down here,” he said half-doggedly.

That comment, falling upon her as a temporization, went unheeded. “You haven’t come squarely face to face with your own soul for so long a time that you don’t know how you yourself hate it all! I haven’t been unheedful of your covert interest when I talk of the people you call radicals. I know where your heart is —your sympathies. You’re in a rut. You have a peculiar kind of congregation, and you made a few concessions to them in the start. Now it seems to be rather expected you’ll take the conservative view of things, and you don’t know just how to get away from it. They call you safe. Oh, George, what a name for you to have to live under — safe!”

He rose with a laugh. “You belong with a dangerous crowd, Mary. You belong with the revolutionists, the—”

“People who have moved the world!”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll write an Easter-day sermon for you.”

“And you’ll put into it—?”

“Whatever I wish to say; the things I believe and feel. But mind you,” he called after her as she was leaving the study, “I make no promise to preach it to my congregation.”

II

Children of a great clergyman, who was also a great man of letters, they were both dowered and surrounded with the things which make for a rich mentality. Back unto the third and fourth generation they were of a family of thinkers and scholars. From the days of their earliest fancies they had known the atmosphere of one who thinks.

George Wayneworth was thinking back to it all as he sat in his study upon the evening of the day he had the combat with his sister. For a half-hour he had been drawing lines on a pad oi paper. Finally he pushed it impatiently from him, with the fervent wish that he could take back the promise of the morning. He had formulated a dozen opening sentences and half as many basic arguments, but it all thinned to nothingness upon his coming back to the fact that he was writing this sermon for Mary. There was no use saying things for her just because they sounded well. If one did not mean them, if they did not spring hot from one’s mind and heart, then she would regard them merely as a more or less elegant combination of empty words. After these repeated failures in getting a start on the sermon he was willing to grant that his offer to write it had sprung largely from motives of pique. Plainly, Mary felt that he was standing still; that in the routine of running a church he had let himself get out of touch with the best of the world’s thought. Her life had been cast so largely with the men who were not only in touch with it, but creators of it, that it made her, unconsciously perhaps, arrogant in her requirements.

He had wanted to show that he could come up to those requirements, and that adapting himself to a conservative congregation did not mean a failure to understand the significance of the day’s thought. Perhaps — it was a rasping thought — he had wanted to prove that he was capable of interpreting the times; that, though safe, he was none the less scholarly. She knew, of course, that he had read the books; what he wanted to show was that he had not failed to grasp them.

But when the time came for writing it, he began to get at the fact that she would hate such a sermon just a little more than she had hated the one of the morning. She had been quick to see that he had written the first with the well defined idea of being conservative. She would be equally quick to see that he had written this one in order to be showy. She would resent the second even more than the first. Mary did not want spiritless scholarship. She wanted truth.

He had never seen as clearly as he did tonight how truly she was the daughter of her father. She was what might be called the logical child of all those men behind her — her father, her father’s father, and then the father of him, those men who had given their lives to the seeking and translating of truth, and who had sacrificed for the truth as they saw it. Now he faced the query whether it was indeed true that he was less a child of them than she. Had less of the inheritance fallen to him? Mary would have fairly embraced privations for the truth. Even assuring himself that the world had not room for many Marys did not quite take the hurt from the comparison.

Finally, he decided to give up the sermon for that night, and settled down to reading a novel. The book was one which a literary weekly had sent him to review. He was annoyed, and not a little chagrined, to find that the opening chapters dealt with the dismissal of a college professor from a denominational school because of the expression of what were termed “advanced views.” He put the story aside, but could not with equal ease throw off the thoughts it had engendered. After all, there was no getting away from it. Self-satisfied and indifferent statements that it would settle itself, bravado expressions that it did not matter, were altogether impotent in arguing away the fact that it was an age of sweeping transitions in the world of theology. One who read the newspapers and the literature of the time, one who so much as glanced through the curricula of the colleges, impeached his own veracity when he said the whole thing did not amount to much. As George Wayneworth sat now in that big chair in which his sister had sat not many hours before, it sprang full-born into his brain that it would be a sorry thing for a man in his old age, if he were granted a peep into the things of a glorious tomorrow, to be forced to say: “It began in my early manhood, but I knew it not; I was of those who were blinded by conventions and fear!”

With that came back those words of his sister: “You haven’t come squarely face to face with your own soul for so long a time that you don’t know how you yourself hate it all.” The words reiterated themselves irritatingly, and finally formed themselves into the query: “Hate what?”

He made no attempt now at getting away from it. What was it he hated? It was insincerity of attitude. It was the reticence that is deceit. It was saying nothing because saying something would have fostered trouble. It was adapting himself to a cramped point of view. It was standing for things he did not believe, or as the exponent and defender of things he regarded as valueless.

Why did he do it? Was Mary right about the seven thousand dollars a year? Not wholly. Indeed, when he tried to formulate a dignified reason for having submitted to fetters, he found it hard to fix upon any one thing in itself important enough to advance in defense. Rather than any one thing, it was the usual combination of seemingly inconsequent things. It was the fact that he owned the house in which he lived, and that it was a very pleasant, comfortable sort of house. It was the fact that the schools were good, and that the children were getting on well in them. It was the fact that the conventional associations were agreeable, and that his wife was one who enjoyed her friends, shrinking from places and people unknown to her. It sounded trivial enough, reckoned with in separate clauses; but, in combination, it stood for the everyday things of life, always determining factors in the destinies of men. But, perhaps most of all, his prolonged silence grew out of the mere fact that he had been silent at first. He could think of no good reason to give for saying now what he had not said then. What he had in his heart to say today would— for them — throw the bane of insincerity over all he had said in the past. It was knowing he was wrong, and that after all it was the incidental holding down the vital, which fretted him.

He took several nervous turns around the study, then stopped and leaned against the shelves. With a start he saw that his elbow was resting against a modest-looking volume which bore the marks of much usage. Slowly, as if not wanting to do so, he took it from its place. A long time he stood and looked down at the words on the title-page: The Spirit of Truth; and Other Essays, and the author’s name, David Wayneworth.

George Wayneworth made a move as if to replace the book, but did not do so. Then, after a long minute full of conflicts, he took it and sat down in the big chair. He held the book dreamily in his hand for a moment, and then began to read. He had let his father’s books very much alone of late, though he would not admit an actual avoidance of them. It is a new proof of the universality of the thought of David Wayne worth, the depth of the note he struck, that in coming to him now with new mood and new need his son found himself enfolded in a mantle of which he had never been cognizant before. The essay on “The Spirit of Truth” was written with a simple dignity, directness of appeal and freedom from the pedantic; and it was convincing. The institutions and forms of today must pass, the spirit of truth ever remains — that was its keynote; its plea was that the spirit of truth be given full access into the thought and actions of men; its assurance, that the spirit of truth never has proved, and never can prove, an idle destroyer.

It may have been his knowledge of how the spirit of his father had been at peace with the spirit of truth which gave the deepest power to the words he read. And, perhaps, in thinking of the spirit of truth as something humanized, that spirit came to him now with propelling force. He went over to his desk and took up the pad of paper upon which he had marked restlessly an hour before. For a minute he sat there —his pencil in his right hand, his left resting on the little volume of essays — and when he began to write it was without thought of diction or of final intent. He was not creating words or thoughts; he was but giving voice to that long held-in spirit of truth. And those matured things, to which he had long denied birth, now came hotly, fiercely, almost with a kind of glee. He took up the cry of his father, “Make way for tomorrow,” as he poured his soul into Mary’s sermon.

III

After Mary had tried three times to reach his study, and each time had turned back to her room, she gained a new comprehension of the kind of force it takes to meet the actual issues of life. She was divided between a fear of leaving unsaid something she should say and of saying something she should not. It was the first time in her life that she was consciously going out to meet a situation she regarded as absolutely vital, and it gave her a new appreciation of the art of dealing with another human soul. She knew now the tenseness engendered in knowing that upon the success or failure of a minute hangs the success or failure of a cause. But she was not one to shrink from that minute. She simply walked into her brother’s study, sat down beside him at the desk, laid down before them the sermon she had been reading — the one that he had written for her —and said with just the slightest note of challenge in her voice:

“I think I should be entirely happy if only father were here to hear you preach it.”

He met that at once, and briefly: “I am not going to preach it.”

“I do not believe you,” she answered quickly. And then both waited for the other to take ground.

It was she who did it. “I refuse to believe that one who could write that sermon would be capable of holding it back. If you fancy you are going to hold it back, then you do not understand the spirit of it — the spirit of your self—as I do.”

“Will you try to be just to my reasons for not preaching it?”

She nodded, looking at him steadily.

“You can fancy, I presume, how the sermon came. You know, of course, something of the joy there was to me in writing it. You know how those things have been crowding up in me for a long time, and how great a satisfaction there must have been in finally letting them loose. In the first heat of it — all during the next day in fact — I intended that the sermon should be preached on Easter morning. But — it’s my sense of obligation to this church which holds me back.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, and you never can. However, I will try to tell you.” His tone redeemed the words a little, but they both laughed. They were always easier after a laugh together; and the man went on, less in the manner of one dealing with a situation: “You see, Mary, our church isn’t paid for. Don’t blame us for that; churches rarely are when they’re built. A church is like a government — it’s a good thing for it to have reasonable debt. However, this debt is rather large, and it’s all because of me that it is. I was enthusiastic. Don’t you see the situation? Don’t you think it would be pretty small for me to get them to take the plunge and then say: ‘Now I’ll have to work out my own salvation and leave you to work out yours’? I didn’t think so much about this side of it until this morning when there was a meeting of the board regarding a note we have to meet. Then it all came to me in a heap how dastardly they would think me.”

She caught that up sharply. “They would think you! Yes, perhaps. But isn’t it purely a question of whether you will think more of yourself by preaching it or leaving it unpreached?”

“No, I don’t quite think so. You see, Mary, yours has become so much the life of a student that you’ve lost the sharp edge of your sense of obligation to other people.”

“I’ve lost nothing of the kind! And, anyway, you know well enough they can get out of their debt all right. They’re not a poor people.”

He smiled inwardly at that. It was always a joy to see the woman in Mary rise out of the scholar. It was a joy to see Mary —even Mary —stoop to argue away a thing which she was claiming had nothing to do with the issue.

“Life can’t be worked out along straight lines,” he said very earnestly. “We’re living in a world of men and women, not a world of abstract truth. You don’t appreciate how such a sermon as this would hurt these people. They care for these things I’m striking at. Heredity is a hard thing to meet; and I don’t know that I could make them see the higher beauties in this newer, franker attitude. And on Easter Sunday, the day of their traditions, the first Easter in the new church, a day when they would come there happy, and — satisfied; then for me to get up and — well, turn traitor— that’s what it would be to them — can’t you see how it would shock them, hurt them, do more harm than good?”

A sense of approaching failure poured a hot stream of passion into her usually guarded utterance. “Do you know what you’re saying? Do you know where you’re standing? You’re standing where theological bullies stood centuries ago) You’re saying: ‘Of course it isn’t all true, but let the people think so; there’s no use stirring them up. They’re satisfied; just keep on giving them what they like.’ You’re saying: ‘Don’t tell the truth when it makes people feel badly! Don’t let truth interfere with tradition! Don’t say things people won’t understand because it might make them feel hard toward you!’ That’s what you’re saying! Just face it as it is. How does it sound? What do you think of it?”

The man’s face had grown set. “All around you,” she went on with a more quiet passion, “strong men are waging a battle for the truth. We’re so close upon it that we don’t get a true sense of its bigness. I believe with all my heart that it will stand out as the distinctive thing of our whole great age —this mighty struggle a few men are making. Don’t you see the glory of what they’re doing? With fearlessness and with patience they’re trying to adjust the church to the things of today! Oh, you’ve said it all in your sermon so much better than I can say it. And they need you, George. Stand there on Easter morning and be honest with yourself, no matter where the blow may fall. There has never in all the world been a woundless battle. Because someone must be hurt in the struggle — is that any reason for giving up the cause? Would the world have gone very far at that rate? There’s the same old fight for the truth today that there was centuries ago. You love the men who fought for it then. You have contempt for the men who said it was not well to give men and women all of the truth. George, for the sake of father — no, for the sake of yourself — take your place where you belong!”

Twice he started to speak, and stopped. At last he said, his voice cramped: “I cannot do what you ask; it is impossible.”

The girl rose then, and stood there by his desk. Her face, had he looked up to it, would have told him better than any word she had uttered how much it meant to her.

She turned and walked slowly away. But when she reached the head of the stairway she glanced back. Her brother’s head had fallen low and was resting upon his outstretched arms. Quietly she walked back and stood in the door way, her clear gray eyes swimming in tears. Then, a little timidly, she stole over and laid a hand upon his bowed head. “You will soon see the light, dear,” she whispered with a great tenderness; “you will come at last to the truth.”

IV

After she went to her room that morning she sat thinking it all over, and there settled upon her a conviction that with the coming of the hour a spirit stronger than words of hers, a spirit able to override his conservatism, would prompt him to speak. And so she went to church on Easter morning expectant that the day would mark a turning point in her brother’s life.

It was possible, sitting there under the perfume of flowers, listening to the rustling of silks, keenly alive to the value put upon ceremony and conventions, for her to estimate, perhaps more justly than she had been able to do before, the difficulties of the situation. But with her the difficulties involved had no bearing upon one’s attitude toward a cause; and she did not believe, under final test, that they would have with her brother. She could only get glimpses of his face from where she sat, the flowers around the pulpit coming between them. But those glimpses easily revealed to her his careworn, fretted look. He had seemed absentminded and worried in the last few days. There was little of good cheer, of his usual bright wholesomeness about him. She had known that there were hard conflicts in his mind, that he was far from at peace with himself. And he was not at peace with himself now. Even after the music had begun she could see that he did not know he was going to preach the other sermon. But she remained sure that he would do it.

When at last he stood up before the congregation, she thrilled with pride as she marked his fine bearing, his clean, cultivated, handsome face. How strong he looked — a man that should have little to fear!

He cast one long glance around at the congregation; in that glance she was keen to read the failure of her cause. An almost sullen look, perceptible perhaps to her alone, settled upon his face. He made a strange little gesture, as though submitting to something. She saw him frown a little; then he quickly recovered himself and began in calm, deliberate way upon that sermon which was a concession to the past, a drug upon the present, a bias to the future.

The elements which made for her disappointment were not, even to herself, easy of analysis. Perhaps she could not have told whether the intellectual or the human disappointment went more deep. Since the days of her early girlhood her real life had been cast with the men, both of the past and of the present, who were pioneers in the cause of truth. Since first she read the world’s great books, her blood had flowed fast within her at the stories of how men had given up their lives for the things they believed. The life of her own father had moved her to a passionate adoration, not only for the truth itself but for all seekers of and sacrificers to that truth. And now that the spirit of her father had passed, she looked to her brother to do for his time what the father had done for the day just gone. She herself, with all her high scholarship, had little of the creative. She could move only those who breathed her own atmosphere. But George had the gift of humanizing truth. His channel of expression was a broad one. That was why she felt it was for him to keep within the very heart of the world the spirit of their father. And now that he had failed, her sense of loss, of something precious having been outraged, was strangely deep.

Her cheeks burned hotly as the words he uttered fell upon her. It was not that he said things out of harmony with her own beliefs — her own attitude; it was the fact of his consciously deceiving, of his appearing as one who accepted rather than one who thought. Above all, his well-defined consciousness of insincerity sickened her. Returning, as she could not but do, to that sermon which rang with truth — this one which resounded, tinkled, with conformity, grew upon her as almost unbearable in its hollowness and worthlessness. The people heard him in a self-satisfied, unthinking way. With hot resentment she wondered why it was they could not see, hear, feel, his own unbelief in the things which stood behind those well-turned sentences.

With a barely repressed sob there swelled within her a great longing for a gift of the spirit to send him power to break through the crust and to come into the things which were his own. The words she longed to hear him speak rushed flamingly into her consciousness, possessing it to the exclusion of those spoken words which fell upon her ear. In imagination she was hearing him say: “It is too marvelous a story, too full of the spirit of truth, too deep-seated, too broad, and too high for us to approach it with anything of insincerity. We are unworthy of the story when we take what other men have believed of it, and claim untruly that belief as our own. What other men have said of it matters not at all. It is the story itself, the things which we ourselves believe concerning it. A story which stands for simplicity, sincerity, courage, peace, and truth, is a poor target for hypocrisy, fear, duplicity, and cant. You speak of the traditions of the church; but it was the very founder of the church who taught honesty rather than blind following of tradition. Let us come forth with the things we believe. Let us say —as I see things today, this is the truth. I did not see them that way yesterday. I do not know that I will see them that way tomorrow. But this is the truth as I see it today. And then, when we have stepped out into the broad arena of receptivity, let us open wide our mind and our senses to the beauty and the wonder of this story of a man who laid down his life for the things he believed to be true!”

She came back to the actual with the pang always attendant on disillusionment. With elegance of style, with charm of manner, with beautifully modulated voice, her brother was drawing to a close that Easter-day sermon which she knew he hated himself for having preached. When he sat down he turned a little to one side, his head lowered, the lines of his body lines of weariness. The joy of having done his work was not upon him. He was unsatisfied. He was out of tune.

She hurried from the church as rapidly as possible, waiting to speak to no one. Her brother and his wife were leaving the city for the day, Dr. Wayneworth having an appointment that evening to preach elsewhere. She had thought of going with them, but now asked to be excused, and returned home alone. She would have the house to herself for the day, but preferred the possible loneliness to a simulated interest in things about her.

But the hours were long. For almost the first time in her life the companionship of books was insufficient. She tried everything, from the newspapers to the work of a German scientist which had come from the publisher the day before. But neither the chroniclings of the world of action nor the products of the world of thought had power to lift her from that disappointment which was settling more and more heavily upon her.

She heard the bell ring, and a moment later the maid tapped at her door. “There is a reporter here to see Dr. Wayneworth,” she said. “It’s something about a sermon. Will you see him?”

She rose with an alacrity which called from her a faint smile; she had never supposed that the coming of a reporter would be hailed by her as cause for thankfulness, but just now she welcomed anything in the nature of a breaking-in.

The reporter proved to be a very young fellow who looked quite pleasant and harmless. “I guess Dr. Wayneworth was so busy with his Easter service that he forgot to send us his sermon,” he said, with a smile which showed all of his teeth. “Every Monday we run a column or so of sermons — synopses, you know; and Dr. Wayneworth sends us his outline on Saturday. This week it didn’t come, and so you see I’ve come after it. We want to make a special feature tomorrow on account of Easter.”

“Well, now, I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “I don’t suppose he has made any outline, but perhaps I can get you a copy of the sermon.”

“All right,” he replied, with the avidity of his profession. “We can fix it up at the office.”

“I’ll see if I can find it,” she told him, and started up the stairs.

A strange heaviness, a kind of sickness, had come upon her. So the sermons he preached fell not only upon the ears of men but were set before them in the public prints; he reached not merely those who attended his church, but the thousands upon thousands of readers of the daily newspapers! It gave her a new consciousness of the greatness of his opportunity; and with that came a new sense of the cowardice, the sin, there was in his emphasis of the valueless and his evasion of the vital.

She had but little difficulty in finding the sermon. It was after she had turned to leave the room that a fierce antagonism, a sharp desire to tear the thing into shreds, took hold of her. Why should she assist in putting on record an empty document? Why should she be a party to her brother’s downfall, to the warping of his soul? And then, in the very heat of her feeling, her glance fell upon his desk, and there under her very eyes, within reach of her hand — right there where she could possess it — lay the sermon which stood for truth.

She lost control of herself, then, she sank to the chair which stood before his desk, the two sermons spread out before her, one standing for the husks of life, the other for its grain; one standing for that which crumbled, the other for that which throbbed; one — this was paramount —standing for hypocrisy, the other for fidelity to self. And then to her mental vision they were no longer typewritten sheets of paper representative of two points of view, two attitudes of mind, two phases of self; they were two long roads stretching out before her. Upon the one that brother whom she loved with the great devotion of her life traveled with bent head and aching eyes —slowly losing his grip, growing encrusted in a shell which he was daily more powerless to break, hating himself, looking out on the world with sinking spirit — changing, warping, and coming at last to bigotry and bitterness. And upon the other road she could see him marching with firm step and with well poised head, reaching ever ahead, walking rapidly, eager, alert, watchful of all he saw by the way, tiring not at all, growing day by day more firm, more rich, more eager to push on. Then why, when he stood now at the forks of the road, did he start out on the path which he knew would crumble? He wanted to go the other way; why then did he turn from the things that called him? Why? Slowly she saw a little of the truth. There was a ditch to cross, a jump to make, a bad place — and he was a little fearful. He was not just sure, and so he hesitated; he was turning his face toward the goal of his own destruction. With a passionate little sob, with a clutching tight to her breast of the sermon which stood for fidelity, it came to the girl that it was she who must lay down the plank which would guide him over. He would walk gladly and firmly could he but once reach the road. Something in him, some little part of his temperament which she could recognize though not fully understand, held him back. Before the forks of the road were past beyond recall she must help —nay, force him across!

She turned from the room and rushed down the stairs. Out of breath, her cheeks flushed, her eyes glowing, she stood before the astonished reporter. “There,” she said, “take it!”— and she was gone.

And as he let himself out, the reporter meditated upon the fact that Dr. Wayneworth’s sister was said to be a very fine student; perhaps that was what made her act a good deal like a lunatic.

V

“I went for a walk right afterward — I simply had to get out in the air— and when I came back the telephone was ringing like mad. Betty said it had been ringing for fifteen minutes. It was the Tribune. They wanted an interview with you; they wanted to know where you were; they wanted your picture — oh, I don’t know what they didn’t want. But even then, even though I could see plainly enough what an awful furore it was going to make, it never occurred to me to take it back. If it had been a question of taking it back or being shot down, I guess I would have been shot down. I guess I would even have had you shot down before I would have taken it back. That’s the way I felt about it. All night long I was in a kind of ecstasy. I lived over father’s life, and over your life — the part of it you’ve already lived; and then I lived ahead into the part that is before you. And I could fairly feel the world going ahead because of you. I could feel you — you — creeping into every little dark crevice of the world and lighting it up. Oh, it was glorious — those things I thought. I don’t suppose I’ll ever have such wonderful thoughts again. And then, before breakfast this morning the members of your church began calling you up. They wanted to unite in one grand suit against the paper, to — well, to murder the editor, I guess. You see, the Tribune called up some of the leading members yesterday and asked what they thought of that sermon you preached in the morning, and they said they thought it was great, believed every word of it; and so here they are standing for things they regard foul heresy. Well,” — her voice broke nervously— “why don’t you begin? Why don’t you tell about the moral wrong? Why don’t you say something?”

He had just returned to the city. He had entered the study, a copy of the Tribune in his hand, to see her sitting there in his big chair, an expression on her face such as he had never seen on it before. She had begun upon the story before he could venture a word. She had not told it as Mary was wont to tell things, but convulsively, her eyes large and her mouth drawn.

“Why don’t you say something?” she repeated. “Why—”

And then she looked up to see three men standing at the door. One was a leading member of her brother’s church, one was the reporter of the day before, and the other she rightly divined to be the editor of the Tribune.

“Dr. Wayneworth,” said the editor — he was very tense— “did you or did you not preach the sermon we printed in the Tribune this morning?”

“He did not,” thundered the churchman.

“Did you or did you not, please?” repeated the newspaper man.

“I did not,” said the minister quietly.

From the reporter there came a quick gasp. “It was given to me as the sermon you preached. Your sister —she gave it to me.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mary Wayneworth, in a voice which seemed to come from far away; “yes, I gave it to you. It’s not your fault.”

“Then will you kindly tell me what explanation we can make of the mistake,” said the editor curtly.

She looked up and met her brother’s eyes. He was looking at her squarely, steadily. In the intentness of that look, in the new something there was about him, she read that he believed he was facing the ruin of his career. It was at that moment that the eternal mother in Mary Wayneworth rose high above the searcher for truth, rose high above all else in all the world. As to herself, with a keen joy she would have surrendered all for the cause she loved; but standing there, facing the hurt to her brother, a passion to protect him, a passion vehement as it was inconsistent, took hold of her and swept away all else. “You might put it this way,” she began, her face white, her voice far from steady; “the sermon was written by a friend of mine; I came up here to get my brother’s sermon for the reporter. They were both here on the desk. I got them mixed up. Would — do you think that will settle it?”

“It was a most unfortunate mistake,” said the editor shortly.

“I know,” she replied humbly, “but—”

And then George Wayneworth stepped forward. There was a smile upon his face. He was easy in bearing. He looked as though some great good had come upon him. “It is true,” he said, his voice sounding as if it was glad to carry the words, “that the sermon was written by a friend of my sister. However, the friend happens also to be her brother. I intended to preach it on Easter Sunday, but you see I quite lost my nerve. But it’s my real Easter sermon, for it’s the one I should have preached; and I’m eternally indebted to you for this intervention, this stimulus, you know, of cold type. As to the sermon, I believe it to the very core, and you may say, if you care to, that it accurately expresses my views and will define my position in the future.”

A number of things happened. The churchman protested that Dr. Wayneworth had of a sudden lost his mind. The editor, knowing his story was better than ever, persisted in numerous questions. And the reporter smiled and showed all of his teeth.

But the group of callers managed to get away at last, and the brother and sister were alone in the study. The man went over to a window, and throwing it wide open, stood there drinking deep of the fresh spring morning. “Do you know, Mary,” he said, turning to her at last, “I feel for all the world as though my life had just begun —and as though I had all the energy of a lifetime to throw right into it now!”

Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine, Apr 1905

The Hired Man’s Point of View

The new hired man was a struggling soul who insisted upon living up to the best and highest that was in him. He cultivated the place by day and the minds of the family by night. The former he irrigated with water and the latter with New Thought. It was assumed early in the acquaintance that he was from Boston, but he himself, with a fine fearlessness one could not but admire, confessed to Boise.

He had come to Lone Prairie through a soulful desire to get nearer to nature. He said it had never been intended man should spend his days in the feverish marketplace. Elizabeth, who giggled and was in many ways impossible, said she did not believe one could catch much of a fever in Boise, but the new hired man exercised a beautiful tolerance toward his inferiors. That they were his inferiors they soon came to understand.

His name was Horatio Mackintosh. His clothes were passe and his eye large and wonderful. He was a mechanic by trade and a mystic by soul. He had a way of casting down his knife and fork at Unexpected moments and crying out—“Beautiful! Beautiful!” At first they thought he referred to the food, but experience taught them the explosive was caused by things mental rather than things gastronomic.

As the Brown family had never before had a hired man, and as the hired man had never before had a family, they underwent, hand in hand, as he would have put it, the delicate experience of adjusting themselves to one another. The Browns had turned their backs on Chicago, and their faces toward Idaho, because Mr. Brown had a bad cough and it seemed that life as a shipping clerk would be, for him, a very uncertain life. They were a jolly sort of family, and their new existence had seemed a good deal like a prolonged picnic until one day Horatio Mackintosh stopped at the door and said he would work for them. They were not at all sure they wanted anyone to work for them, but Horatio, so Tom said afterwards, hit them with a thought wave, and stayed. His arrival took place—that is advisedly put—at two o’clock in the afternoon. He spent the remainder of the day interviewing his soul in order to ascertain whether it would be willing to take up permanent residence there. To do this he sat silently upon the back porch for three consecutive hours. Then he walked into the house and said, with the solemnity of a great deliverance: “The atmosphere is right. I have obtained a consent.”

Now the Browns were mere Presbyterians, and as to literature, read only the big sellers and the popular magazines. However, Elizabeth had spent one quarter at the University of Chicago, and she had a faint recollection of having heard something about consent. So she translated the new hired man in this wise: “He thinks we’re all right. He’s going to stay right with us.”

In Chicago the Browns had known the luxury of one small maid, and this one small maid had never partaken of her daily bread at the same time and place as did the family she served. Going upon the erroneous theory that a hired man in Idaho is the same as a maid in Chicago, Mrs. Brown that night blunderingly put down the usual number of plates. But just before the evening meal was served Mr. Mackintosh, following either the call of his soul or the odor of well-done sage chicken, walked into the dining room, pulled back his chair, adjusted his napkin, took up his knife and fork, and leaning sadly upon the table, his eyes hitting a far distance, said with a tender melancholy: “Yes—ah yes, we must make concessions.” Mrs. Brown shamefacedly smuggled in another plate, and in the kitchen ensued a heated discussion as to what concessions were referred to. Elizabeth thought it was the concession of the soul to the body, but Tom held that it was the concession of Mr. Mackintosh to the Browns. To the end of days they had the satisfaction of their own conclusions, for Horatio never explained himself. He paid you the compliment of free expression, and if you were unworthy, he did not seek to humiliate you with explanations.

Tom, who was much interested in getting the ranch in full swing, thought it would be fitting that evening to talk a little with the new hired man about starting in in the morning to break some more of the land. He was about to say: “I guess you and I will do some breaking in the morning,” when the hired man, reaching out a long, lean arm to the west, said in fervid tones: “Yes—ah—yes, may the after-glow of our lives be as clear and lasting and beautiful.” And as Tom put it, “How was a fellow going to butt in on that!”

Indeed, it was evident from the first that the hired man’s soul was not to be butted in on. The Browns had heretofore associated souls largely with churches and poems, and that made it a little gruesome to feel they were literally floating around over the dinner table and following one down to the field. Elizabeth said she could stand her soul pretty well during the day, but she hoped it would not get in the habit of following her to bed at night. The day after his arrival the hired man went in to town for his library. This consisted of a large box containing books and pamphlets, all of which seemed to deal with souls and atmosphere and struggle. The idea of struggle appeared to predominate. Tom thought that if the hired man would give his soul a rest once in a while he would make better time in the long run. He—Tom—had been on the track team of the Hyde Park High School and he said that nothing was so bad as overtraining, and he was sure there could be nothing in the world quite as awful as an overtrained soul. But it was impossible to talk to the hired man about this, because, whenever you attempted to say anything which would jar on his soul, he commanded his ears not to listen, and never was as fine team-work seen as that done by the hired man’s ears and soul.

He believed that you could have anything you wanted by affirming it. As growth was the most precious thing in the world, it was growth he affirmed most frequently. He contended that it helped to affirm verbally, and so every night as he rose to go to bed he said: “I have grown a little today,” and every morning when he came down to breakfast he announced: “I grew a little in the night.”

The Browns were so far behind him in soul life that their attitude naturally became very apologetic. When evening came the hired man would get out various pamphlets and books, take from his pocket a notebook in which he wrote some of the most precious thoughts, and settle himself down at the big table in the sitting-room. When sure he was not looking, the members of the family would produce newspapers, magazines and books, slide into unobtrusive places and assume a hang-dog look of knowing they did not amount to much. Ever and anon the hired man’s soul would burst forth—“True—most precious—I affirm it.”

Meanwhile, despite the soul essence which floated about the place, the wheat continued to grow and prospects for a good crop were very bright. But there was one thing haunted them night and day, and that thing was grasshoppers. The Browns had always supposed that all grasshoppers lived in Kansas, but after taking up their land they learned there were a few floating around in Idaho. However, the Idaho grasshoppers were supposedly intermittent, and this was not their logical year. A young man from an Eastern University had pronounced them degenerate and had predicted that never again would they appear as beings to be feared. But still the Browns worried, for they were not of the soul stuff which makes life a matter of affirming and denying.

For some reason best known to themselves, the grasshoppers overlooked their schedule and suddenly appeared at a ranch just five miles north of the Browns. It was Tom who brought the news, and a very serious-faced Tom was he. “They’re headed right for us,” he concluded. “We’re bound to get them.”

Someway no one felt like saying anything just then. The silence might have lasted a long time had there not come from the hired man a slow, weighty: “I—deny—it.”

Elizabeth laughed hysterically, and with much emphasis Tom said: “Rot!” adding, with an aggressiveness born of his disappointment: “I guess if you can work that stuff on grasshoppers you’ve got a steady job for life.”

“We’ve got such a little bit of wheat,” mourned Elizabeth. “that I should think they might have the decency to let it alone.”

“Don’t talk to the old-timers here about decency in a grasshopper,” sniffed Tom.

“Well, it’s very strange to me,” she declared, heatedly, “that these precious old-timers don’t know anything to do but just sit still and let the grasshoppers take their crop! Why don’t they get up and do something about it?”

“Nothing to do,” replied Tom, with a splendid masculine acceptance of the inevitable.

The hired man turned to leave the room. At the door he paused, faced them, raised his hand, and again in the manner of a judge pronouncing sentence, or of a minister declaring the bond, he said: “I—deny—it.”

“Say,” said Tom, “isn’t he just the daffiest?”

There was gloom that night in the house of Brown. They had not broken a great deal of their ground that first year, for the breaking of ground demands capital, but, as Elizabeth said: “The fact that we haven’t much makes what we have just that much more important to us.” A neighboring rancher came in during the evening and they had the melancholy pleasure of obtaining much information concerning the methods of grasshoppers. All they learned but served to deepen their hopelessness. It seemed the universal verdict of the old timers on Lone Prairie that there was nothing to be done about it. After the neighbor had departed the family sat there in silence for some time, thinking a good many things they were too plucky to put into words. At last the hired man began gathering up his papers. After he had risen and pushed back his chair he said, each word falling with an individual solemnity: “I—deny—it.”

“Why, he forgot to affirm growth,” said Elizabeth.

“Yes,” said Tom, “he’s cutting out growth tonight and using all his soul to deny the grasshoppers. Good of him, isn’t it?”

They laughed a little, but the situation was not to be enlivened, even by the hired man’s soul.

Elizabeth slept very little that night; the cares of the family were resting heavily upon her. “It isn’t fair,” she kept saying, “when we need it so badly, and when we’ve done our part.” And over and over again she told herself: “We ought to do something!”

She was up early next morning and walked out toward the wheat to see if there were any forerunners of the grasshoppers. She did see some half dozen of them, and her heart sank. “They’re coming,” she said, a great lump in her throat, “they’re probably in Mr. Mason’s field now.”

And then she heard a strange sound, and turned around. The hired man was standing just behind her. His arms were out stretched, palms upward, and in the manner of a child learning phonetic spelling he was saying: “B-a-c-k!” Elizabeth laughed a little, cried a little, and ran back to the house. “Well, I don’t care,” she declared, in telling Tom about it, “it’s crazy, I know, but at any rate he’s doing something. He thinks that’s the right thing to do, and he’s doing it. And I do think we ought to do something ourselves, and not sit here like mummies and let the grasshoppers rush in and take all we’ve got!”

“Nothing to do,” repeated Tom. “If there is, the folks here don’t know about it, and we’re nothing but city jays, and we certainly can’t do anything if they can’t. The wheat’s not ready to cut, and there you are.”

Mr. Mason came over after breakfast to say that his wheat field was so thick with hoppers he did not believe he could get a pin head in between them.

“Well, what I’d like to know,” blazed Elizabeth, when he had finished, “is how you can sit there
and be so mighty calm about it!” He turned to her in astonishment. “Well—why, what are you going to do?”

“Do? How do I know? But I think it’s pretty strange to sit still and let a thing go without any kind of a fight!”

He shook his head. “Ranchin’ in a ’hopper country is a good deal of a gamble. I’ve had a crop for two years—this year I get no crop. You take your chances when you take the land. Oh—we old-timers keep pretty cool about it,” he concluded, smiling tolerantly upon her.

“But I think it’s outrageous to keep cool about it! I want to do something! Why, I’d do anything—anything, rather than do nothing!”

She heard an imperative cough, and turned to see Horatio Mackintosh observing her meaningly. He turned, and walked out on the back porch. After a minute of hesitation she followed.

“Mind rules matter,” was his opening sentence.

Elizabeth sat down on a box, determined to hear him out.

“But when a large amount of matter is involved it takes a certain amount of mind to dominate it. You follow me?”

“I—I think so,” said Elizabeth, meekly.

“I find, despite my most earnest efforts, that I alone cannot create an atmosphere sufficiently strong to drive back those approaching grasshoppers. If the thought waves denying them—sending them back—were stronger, the grasshoppers would be obstructed as completely as if a mighty iron wall were built from earth to heaven. You get that?” he asked, solicitously.

Elizabeth looked around to make sure no one was within hearing. “Yes,” she murmured, “I get it.”

“You say you would do anything rather than do nothing. Then, despite your unbelief and ignorance, come out here with me and deny these grasshoppers!”

Elizabeth, struggling with both tears and laughter, could at first find no words. “I—I’m afraid I wouldn’t do any good,” she said at last. “I—you see, I don’t just understand how to use my mind.”

“Concentrate all your thought upon sending them back—say back, think back, feel back. Send out your soul to deny them—let the vibrations which you control go forth against them, and then—when they strike our thought wave they will simply turn and fly the other way! With such an atmosphere as we two can create”—he held up his hand to solemnize the declaration—“the victory is won.”

Elizabeth’s mental processes were now something like this—It sounds foolish—but how do I know? Lots of people besides him believe it. And there’s nothing so foolish as doing nothing when you ought to be doing something, and nobody else knows anything at all to do, so, even if he is foolish, he isn’t as foolish as everybody else. And, as the woman in the flat above us said about Christian Science when her baby was dying—“I’m willing to try anything that can’t make things any worse.”

Anyway, after one long glance across that wheat field, out of which had floated many a dream, Elizabeth went. And when Elizabeth went into a thing she went into it right. She was a courageous maiden, courageous enough to brave even her own ridicule, and she was what Tom called gamey. If she was going, to try this thing at all she was going to give it a square deal; if it failed it should not be because she had not done it right. And so, at cost of never again being able to take herself seriously, she stood as the hired man told her to stand, arms outstretched, palms upward, and in a voice which seemed to come from very deep in her being she breathed, weightily, forcefully—“Back!—Back!”

She soon became so interested in seeing how many thought waves she could send out that she forgot all about being ridiculous. Harder and harder she worked to get the vibrations in motion against the grasshoppers. There were a number of them scattered about just beyond the fence, and the field which they could see a little way ahead was fairly a moving mass. The sight of them added much to her intensity. In the natural course of events, according to Mr. Mason’s story, the grasshoppers would be upon them in half an hour. Faster—faster she rolled out the thought waves. “Back—Back!” she breathed, and “Back—Back!” came from the soul of the hired man, her compatriot in the creation of an anti-grasshopper atmosphere.

So completely was her mind used in the denying of the grasshoppers that she never knew anything about the storm until the wind almost took her off her feet. Even then she was hardly conscious that it was wind. It seemed as if other thought waves were being marshalled to their aid, as if some mighty force were pushing them right on to the grasshoppers—denying them, sending them back. Every bit of her being was concentrated now in the “Back—Back!” and Elizabeth’s soul was working at full pressure.

But when the first bit of hail—hail about the size of an unpretentious egg—hit her square in the back of the neck, she forgot all about vibrations and turned around. Then she saw it as it was. A terrible storm had come up. Clouds from all directions were hanging low in the sky, the wind was blowing furiously and the hail was coming faster and faster, bigger and bigger.

And yet Elizabeth did not quite surrender.

“Oh, back,” she cried—“back!” But the note of the imperative had gone; it was nothing now but a pathetic plea. She looked at the hired man; he had not abated. “Back—Back!” she wailed. But the sobs were coming—and so was the hail. Thicker and faster it came, until at last, utterly panic-stricken and sick at heart, Elizabeth covered her head with her arms and ran for the house.

Tom was coming after her. “Where—where you been?” he gasped. “It—it’s awful.”

“I—I—just taking a little walk,” screamed Elizabeth. “I—I wasn’t doing anything at all!”

When the storm abated they looked out on a stricken wheat field. “I’m glad the beastly hoppers didn’t get it,” said Tom, trying to whistle. “I’d rather be beaten by hail than hoppers.”

It was a few minutes later that Elizabeth saw a strange figure coming across the yard. It was Horatio Mackintosh, but a very demolished hired man was he. The wind and hail had done strange things to him.

He came hurrying into the room—Elizabeth was thankful Tom had just left—holding out to her an enthusiastic hand. “A magnificent victory!” he cried, his face glowing, his voice jubilant, “magnificent!”

“Why, what in the world are you talking about?” demanded Elizabeth.

“Our glorious triumph! Our unqualified success!”

Elizabeth gasped. “Are you crazy, man? Haven’t you any sense at all? Look out there at that field! Where does the triumph come in?” Horatio Mackintosh waved both of his arms with the full abandon of the victor. “The grasshoppers have turned back! There is not one in the field! Most of them have even perished! They have not only turned back—they have died!”

“Well, what if they have?” blazed Elizabeth. “What difference does it make? There isn’t any crop for them anyway. I tell you the crop is ruined.”

He looked at her then with a pitying tolerance. “My dear young lady,” he explained, with the gentle patience of a high soul, “that is quite without bearing on the issue. We did not affirm a crop; we merely denied the grasshoppers.” And he turned away murmuring softly—“Wonderful—most precious!”

The Black Cat, Apr 1907

The Lie God Forgave

“Of course—git up there, Adam!—there’s nothing good you can say about him, and no use pretending there is. Nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand there’s something good you can find out about a man to put in his funeral sermon, but you’d have pretty hard work hearin’ anything good about Charlie Stacey round this country. Looks like we might have snow ’fore night.”

“It’s pretty hard to believe,” said the young minister, a trifle sharply, “that there’s any human being about whom something good cannot be said.”

“I admitted it wasn’t the usual thing,” commented the old farmer dryly. “Git up there, Adam!”

“You see,” he resumed, when they were about half way up the long hill, “you’ve only been here six months, and I’ve been here since the day Charlie Stacey was born—yes, and long before that. Our place and the Stacey place joins, and all I can say is that if there was anything good about Charlie Stacey that thing somehow missed my observation. Gettin’ pretty windy, ain’t it?”

“If there is nothing good to be said about the dead,” said the minister, striving not to speak hotly, “we can at least show them the courtesy of saying nothing at all. There is something—oh, it doesn’t seem just square to speak against any man—no matter how big a villain—after he has lost the power to defend himself.”

“That sounds well and good,” agreed David Lowery. “I’m not saying these things generally. Generally speaking, I’m saying nothing at all. But I was just trying to make you understand that in preaching the funeral sermon of Charlie Stacey you’ve got no easy job on your hands.”

Stuart Linwood knew that was true enough. When word had come to him the day before that Charlie Stacey had been killed in a drunken brawl, and that it was requested he conduct the funeral services out at the Stacey place the following day, he knew at once that he was to get his first real taste of the hardships of his profession. Charlie Stacey was the village tough. He was leader of the crowd which occupied the chairs in front of the saloon and commented on the passers-by. The young minister, who knew a thing or two of the world, and of human nature, had been quick to see that Stacey was not what might be called a good, square tough. He had a sullen, tricky kind of face, which made one feel that even his best friends might become his prey. He was a young fellow, younger than the minister himself, but for so long a time the phrase “as bad as Charlie Stacey” had been current around there that the length of his record seemed to add to the number of his years. The minister had stopped him on the street one day and asked him, jovially as he could, if he wouldn’t drop in sometime and see what they were doing up at the church, and Charlie Stacey had replied with a swagger and a leer that it would be a cold day when they got him at any such show as that.

“He was mean from the time he was able to walk,” went on David Lowery. “It’s not a case of a high-spirited young fellow bein’ led astray. He was just born bad, and it’s hard to figure that, out, too, when you consider that his father and his grandfather before him were deacons in the church, and that his mother is as good a woman as ever lived, and come of good stock at that. The two oldest boys has got farms of their own now. Josie—that’s the girl, married Joe Free, one of our best young farmers ’round here, and Will—he’s two years younger than Charlie—is a good, steady young fellow who stays home and looks after the farm. Seems like Charlie got all the meanness of the family. Git up there, Adam!”

“How much farther have we to go?” asked the minister.

“Only two miles more—git up, Adam! They call the Stacey place seven miles from town, and this school house here is the five-mile point.”

They jogged along for some time in silence. The minister was anxious that the long drive come to an end. It was not that he minded the raw wind, but something in the companionship of David Lowery irritated him. And yet he knew the old farmer was spoken of as one of the best men of the community.

The Iowa farms, stripped of their substance, had a forbidding look that November afternoon. The leaves had fallen from the trees, and there was a bareness in everything. There was something in the bleak stretches more chilling even than the strong east wind. Stuart Linwood wished with all his heart that the afternoon was well over, and that he was back in his little study at home.

They turned a corner, and a long, straight road stretched out before them. “That’s the Stacey barn,” said the farmer, pointing with his whip, “and the house is just beyond.”

The young minister was growing very nervous. He felt he would rather face a large city congregation than get up before that handful of country people and say something about Charlie Stacey.

“How does his mother feel about it?” he asked, suddenly.

“She ain’t got nothing to say.”

He turned to his companion inquiringly. “Just what do you mean by that? Do you mean she doesn’t care?—or that she is crushed?”

“Well, for a long time Mary Stacey tried to cover up Charlie’s meanness. She was always making excuses to the neighbors for the low tricks he played on them. She’d say that his pa didn’t understand him—she’d say anything she could think of. Some of the excuses she made was pretty senseless. But when he got to carryin’ on so in town, and it was known all over the country that he was a general disgrace to his family and the community, why then she couldn’t think of anything more to say, and so she just kept still. Of late years she never mentioned him to the neighbors, and when they spoke of him to her she’d give them to understand it would be more agreeable to talk about something else. So far as I know, she hasn’t said one word about his bein’ killed in a saloon. She just goes round making preparations, and saying nothing at all. Now, Josie and the boys is more outspoken. They don’t hesitate to say they’re outraged and disgraced, and they don’t know what they’ve done that this blow should come on them. Everybody round here feels great sympathy for Josie and the boys. But Mary Stacey—I’ve known her all my life—don’t seem to want no sympathy. I must say she’s actin’ queer.”

The minister started to say something, and then closed his mouth tightly. “I never noticed until last night,” went on the farmer, “how fast she has aged. She’s not a day over sixty, but last night, after they’d brought Charlie home and she was puttin’ the finishing touches to him—she tied his necktie over again, and combed his hair—why, it just struck me all in a heap that she was an old woman. I started to say something to her about the cross she had to bear, but she broke right in and asked me if I’d mind fetchin’ you out today. Well, here we are, and I don’t suppose you’re sorry. It’s turned raw in the last hour. Hope it won’t snow ’til the funeral’s over.”

Within was the sombre excitement, the kind of hushed bustle characteristic of such an occasion. It was within an hour of the time set for the funeral, and many of the neighbors had come early to “help.” They stood stiffly around in the dining-room and sitting-room, whispering to one another. To the young minister there was about them all a look of having come because they felt it their duty to do so. Their mien seemed to be saying—what he was sure they were saying to one another in words—that they wished to show the proper spirit and give a decent burial to even Charlie Stacey. Josie and the boys were meeting newcomers at the door, and he was somewhat surprised to find him self resenting their looks of grieved resignation.

He had been there only a few minutes when Mrs. Stacey came in from the kitchen and spoke to him. The woman’s face was hard to fathom. She spoke very quietly, almost coldly, and yet, despite the homely dignity of her voice and bearing, there was a hunted look in her eyes, and about her mouth a kind of wistfulness—a something which caused a tightening in the young minister’s throat. He found, after a minute, that she was looking at him strangely. He could not forget the look, and after she had turned away, it came to him that it was a look of appeal.

Josie and one of the boys ate dinner with him. They spoke freely of their brother, of how great a trial he had been, and of how they did not know why this blow had come to them. Something about them irritated him, and when Josie advanced the idea that perhaps it was the hand of God took Charlie before worse calamities could come, the Reverend Stuart Linwood was moved by an altogether unclerical desire to throw a plate at her. He knew they were disappointed in his not saying comforting things about the bearing of their cross. The giving of professional sympathy, just because it was expected, was one of his hardest duties, and he always found it difficult to talk with people about their crosses when he felt they were taking a pious satisfaction in the bearing of them.

He was sitting in the big rocking-chair in the sitting-room when Mrs. Stacey came up and spoke to him. In spite of the bent shoulders, the wan face, and the tightly pulled-back iron-gray hair, there was something gave a strange dignity, a kind of queenliness to the spare, unlovely figure.

“It will soon be time to begin,” she said. “If you will come in the front room with me now, you can see him.”

He barely repressed a start of surprise. He knew that what she suggested was the custom at funerals around there, but he had not thought of it in connection with this one. As she walked ahead of him and opened the parlor door, his eyes grew a little dim. He was quick to see the pathos in her demanding for Charlie those formalities of respect she had many times seen enacted for others.

Her dignity did not fail her. As she pulled back the cloth and exposed the face which in death bore plainly the stamp of the life the boy had led, she gave no sign, by word, look, or move that there was any incongruity, any need of explanation, in what she did. It was the hardest moment Stuart Linwood had ever known. He knew it was deemed fitting at such times to say something of the dead, but he looked down into the dissipated, heavy face before him with an utter helplessness. Something told him she would not care for platitudes or professional condolence, and he knew of nothing else to offer.

He was sure she felt his embarrassment, for after a minute she said, a little haughtily: “You notice what beautiful hair he has, Brother Linwood?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the minister, eagerly, “It’s beautiful hair.”

“He had the prettiest hair of any of my babies. It was beautiful before he was a month old.”

“I’m sure he must have been a very pretty baby,” said the minister.

“He was,” she answered, quietly.

There was another hard pause.

“He was very fond of apple pie,” she resumed, her voice quivering, but charged with a hauteur not free from defiance. “I’ve never known anyone who was as fond of it as he was. And he thought no one could make apple pie right except me. The last, time he was out home I made one for him—I always did when he came, and as he got up from the table he said: ‘I tell you, Mother, if there was a medal for apple pie, you’d get it sure.’”

The minister could not speak. His throat had tightened up. His hair, and his fondness for her apple pie! But she had fulfilled with dignity the custom of the hour. Something good had been said of Charlie.

When they began upon the opening hymn he was moved by an almost irrepressible desire to turn and run away. He wondered if they knew how plainly they were telling, in the way their hands were folded, the way their mouths were drawn, that they were there, not as mourners, but as men and women doing what they believed their duty. There was but one mourner at that funeral. She sat there between Josie and the boys—her head erect, her face very pale. It was the lines about her eyes which gave some faint idea of the struggle she was making.

At last he rose to speak. He read a few verses of the Scripture, and then he said a few things about how it was one of the laws of the universe that death should come in the midst of life, and of how hard it was to fathom the ways of God. He intended saying very little, and making that little very general. It was when he was about to make his closing remarks that his gaze fell full upon the face of the mother.

She was looking at Charlie’s coffin. Something about her—he could not have told what it was—made the minister draw in his breath sharply and lean heavily against the table. He did not know just what it was the fond mother had expected of him, but he was sure that in some hidden corner of her heart she had—perhaps unknown to herself—nurtured the hope that at the very last there would come something to bring a semblance of the human, bring a little of feeling and of sentiment, to this burial of her Charlie.

And in her folded hands and despairing face he read the tragedy, the heartbreak of it, all anew. He saw, as he had not seen before, how all the years which awaited her would be lightened—glorified—by one good word said of Charlie. She would stand that one good word over against the black years of the boy’s life, and by the mystic logic of a mothers heart would some way make that little crumb of goodness outweigh the sodden mass of bad. About one good word she would weave an ideal and build up a memory. Little by little the hateful things would slip away, and there would remain only that one thing—enlarged, illumined, all-pervading. With a deep, warm rush of feeling it came to the young minister that, night after night, this mother had lain awake thinking of and praying for Charlie. He remembered what David Lowery had said of the persistence with which she made excuses to the neighbors. And then, when driven to bay, when it had grown beyond all hope of talking it away, how glorious had been the pride—the courage—of her silence! The resolution to do it swept over him all in an instant. It came overwhelmingly, with a force not to be turned aside, with a clearness of insight not to be questioned. He had ever been a passionate lover of truth, but, standing there now in the presence of that lonely, hungering, defeated soul, filled with a consciousness of the fight she had made, and with an appreciation of the barrenness that was before her, it came to the young minister, came as a voice from God himself, that a lie which was poured as balm upon a breaking heart could not greatly offend even the spirit of truth.

It was strange how it all formulated itself for him. He did not think out the thing he would say. It simply rushed in upon him, and he could no more have desisted now from uttering it than he could have stopped the fast falling of the snow in the world without “My friends,” be began, folding his hands behind him and taking a step forward, “I have decided at the last minute that I will say something which I had intended to hold back.” The mother shot a frightened glance from the speaker to the coffin of Charlie, as though she would guard against any ill word the one who was sleeping there. She was quivering as an animal quivers when, after a long chase, it sees its pursuers closing in about it. The rest of them were leaning a little expectantly for ward. He was going to speak now—they thought—of the life of Charlie Stacey. He felt it his duty—probably—to draw a lesson from the awful example.

“I have not lived in this community a long time,” he went on, “but I think perhaps I knew Charlie Stacey better than you who have been his neighbors for many years.”

He said it slowly, and a curious look overspread the faces of the listeners. The mother turned her gaze from her son’s coffin to the minister’s face. Doubt and fear and hope were in her look. Her lips were parted. Her breath was coming heavily.

“I had not intended to say it publicly. I thought I would tell it to his mother after this was all over. But I was decided now, in spite of my promise, that I owe it to him to tell you all.”

He paused, and no sound broke in upon the stillness save the moaning of the wind about the unprotected farmhouse. The eyes of the young minister swept the little crowd before him, and then turned and rested upon the face of Mary Stacey. Two red spots had burned into her withered cheeks—her head was held high—her hands were clasped tight in her lap. He could feel the awfulness of her tension—that is why he said it so abruptly: “Charlie Stacey had it in his heart to do better. His better nature was beginning to assert itself. He wanted to lead a different life, I know it, because he told me so himself.”

Each sentence fell clear-cut and decisive—fell with the force of a blow. Every eye was riveted upon the minister’s face, and from the woman who had all her life stood between Charlie Stacey and the world, there came one quick, throbbing cry.

“He came to my study one night just before be died, told me how he hated himself for the evil be had done against his will, and that he wanted me to help him to get away from here where everyone thought of him as bad, and I agreed that would be best.”

Mary Stacey had pulled her chair a little closer. The light of a wonderful joy illumined her face. Her clasped hands were stretching themselves out toward the minister. It was as if body and soul were drinking in the long-fought-for and long-denied breath of life. Half rising in her seat, she uttered a strange cry. It was exultant—triumphant, as though a something had burst around her heart and was letting out a flood of feeling. The neighbors were casting startled looks at one another. It was hard for them to credit it, but they were not given to questioning the word of a minister.

“I know that a fight such as he proposed to make does not admit of an easy victory, but I know that in the end Charlie Stacey would have won.”

For a minute Stuart Linwood stood there, looking straight ahead. The tumultuous sobs of the mother, the first which had come from her, filled the room. He opened his lips as if to say something more, and then, instead, he turned and walked to the coffin, rested his two hands upon it, and prayed in low, appealing voice: “O God, who knoweth the hearts as well as the deeds of men, deal in great kindness with the soul of Charlie Stacey. He was cut off before he could fulfill the better promptings of his heart, but we pray that you will reckon with him, Lord, according to what he had it in his heart to do, rather than in accordance with what he had already done. He suffered for his weaknesses, but he hated his sins. And that is why we pray that you will give him the chance in the hereafter to make the fight he was just beginning upon here. Comfort the sorrowing mother today with the thought that her boy, despite the slipping of his feet, had within him the promptings which make for manhood. Take this poor, storm-tossed soul unto thyself, Lord, and deal with it in the love and the mercy and the understanding which ever temper thy justice.”

The words died away—the passionate sobs of the mother were stilled—and there was over them all a strange hush. It was out of that hush that there came to the minister—suddenly, staggeringly—the consciousness that in a prayer to his God, a prayer uttered over the dead, he had voiced an absolute lie. Everything swam before him for the minute. And then something drew his eyes to the face of Mary Stacey, and the things he read there took from him forevermore all feeling of guilt Upon the face which had been frozen with despair there rested now a kind of holy tranquility. There was about her an uplift—an exultation. There was thankfulness, pride, and joy. The long fight was at an end, and over her worn features was stealing the softening veil of peace.

As he turned from her then to the rest of them, his heart warmed to the thought that they were, after all, a kindly people. Their moist eyes and softened faces told that they would be quick to forget the wrongs Charlie Stacey had done them, would be eager to say the boy had never been understood.

And while the November wind piled the snow in fantastic heaps about the old farmhouse that night a woman sat in an upper room fingering a little basket of baby clothes. Charlie seemed to her as pure tonight as in the days when he had worn the little things she held so tenderly in her lap. She had already forgotten all she did not wish to remember. She had come into her heritage of ideals.

The Black Cat, Jul 1909
reprinted:
Canadian magazine, Nov 1916
as “Her Heritage of Ideals”

Bound

It was evident that they did not know her, and when she saw that they were talking earnestly and seemingly intelligently, she drew nearer that she might hear what it was they were saying of her picture.

“Not at all bad,” the older man was saying. “In fact, if she were not such a swell, it is quite likely she would be really an artist.”

She was standing behind them, half turned away, as though looking at another picture. Now she narrowed her eyes—seemingly for better perspective, in reality to keep back the quick, angry tears. She wanted to step forward and tell him how small and contemptible and cruel he and his kind—the whole artist world—were to her.

“I’m not at all sure that she isn’t one, anyway,” mused the younger man.

She came a step nearer, eyes still fixed on the other picture, and listened hungrily—though people would have smiled at the idea of Helen Lester Darrows hungering for anything.

“I don’t care whether that child’s hand was drawn by a fashionable woman or whether it was drawn by a beggar,” he pursued. “It’s great.”

“Yes,” the other admitted, “it’s good drawing, all of it, and I like her violets and yellows. The woman’s face is done very simply—she has the right idea there. As I say, if she hadn’t the limitations of her position, she might be an artist.”

“Fallows,” exclaimed the younger man, “that’s devilishly narrow, and rottenly unfair. Furthermore, it’s antiquated, provincial, sour and childish. Art is bigger than either money or the lack of it. Starvation is often an attendant, but it’s surely not a requisite, is it? And a woman may transcend—even a Fifth Avenue house.”

He said it hotly, and she could not restrain a glance toward him. There was gratitude in that quick glance at the back of the younger man’s head.

“If she did actually transcend it,” he defended himself, “yes. But I am quite conscious that the studio in which this was painted cost a great many thousand dollars to fit up.”

“Rot!” jeered the younger man. “It’s so easy to be ‘conscious’ of things that we know are so. Good work can be done—even in a steam-heated studio. I call it a pretty small point of view—damning a picture just because the artist was well fed. I say now, be fair—even to the rich. If you didn’t know who painted this you’d call it a big thing.”

“I think not, John,” seriously, after consideration. “As I say, it’s good. When you go to pick it to pieces, it’s very good. But in the whole, it’s not big. I’ll tell you what’s the matter with it. It’s class.”

“Well, what of it? Why should everybody paint beggars and barmaids? They don’t make up the whole of life, do they?”

“I don’t mean her subject,” impatiently. “I mean the woman who did it. Don’t you feel her class feeling?”

“No, I don’t, Fallows”—jeeringly—“and I don’t think you would, if you fellows weren’t just a little sore at this thing of a patron of art butting in on your end of the game.”

“You’re absurd.” He dismissed that idea sharply. “What this picture lacks, what this woman’s work lacks, is the big grasp—universality. She’s the victim of her traditions—an aristocrat first, then an artist. She doesn’t understand her own people, because she can’t stand off and look at them; she doesn’t see it every way round. You can’t understand anything that you don’t see in its relationships. It’s too bad; she just misses it. I see that you don’t understand. You would if you knew more.”

She was not sorry that at that moment Mrs. Van Brew came up to speak to her. For it was easier to talk about other things than to go on thinking about this.

She had not seen Mrs. Van Brew since her coming to Paris. They spoke first of New York, and of New Yorkers who were there.

“And you, my dear,” she said then, “do you know how proud we are of you?”

Helen murmured something about being glad if her friends were pleased.

“It’s so nice to have one of us really do something,” she laughed. “It’s so refreshing.”

Helen frowned. She did not like the “one of us.” It touched a sore spot just then.

“I was talking to General Carew a minute ago. He said it seemed good to see a woman one would like to take in to dinner hanging on the wall. Most of the pictures one sees now look as though the butcher’s daughter had sat for them.”

She laughed. She did not mind that. She had aimed at a woman like that, and was glad to have conveyed a sense of traditions. Surely she had a right to her choice of subject.

“And he said, my dear, that he could just feel your dear grandfather, his old friend Colonel Lester, in the background of that picture.”

“Oh, but he couldn’t!” sharply. “It’s simply that he knew.”

The older woman laid her hand upon Helen’s arm. “My dear, you couldn’t be anything but Colonel Lester’s granddaughter if you tried—unless,” whimsically, “it were Ann Douglass’s daughter—or Paul Darrows’s wife.”

She raised a passionate glance to her own picture. “And I wanted to be an artist!” she murmured very low.

“And so you are, my child—why not? But blood is deeper than art—you can’t get away from that. And do you want to?” looking at her curiously.

“I fear I am in the sad position of not knowing what I want,” Helen laughed uncertainly.

“I’ll tell you what you want. You want a little sail on the Mediterranean—in Dick’s new yacht. We’ll talk it over at the Hustons’ tonight,” and with an affectionate little tap of her fan she passed on.

Helen wanted to get away. She had thought she would be very happy that afternoon, for she had been proud that her picture should be hung at this, one of the smallest and most distinctive of the exhibitions. But now everything said to her seemed to irritate. “This is one of the most fashionable exhibitions in Paris, isn’t it, Helen?” one of her friends asked. “Fashionable exhibition!” she scoffed to herself; no wonder the artists, real artists, made fun of them!

There were several art students there whom she knew. Two of them she was keeping in Paris. They came up, rather timidly, to speak to her. Their timidity, too, irritated her. It was not understanding of them—fine—big—to treat her as the Patron!

“How do you like my picture?” she asked one of them abruptly.

“Oh, it is so charming, Mrs. Darrows,” she explained effusively, “so charming.”

Again she was disappointed. She had hungered for the things one artist can give another. Why should she be shut out from all that? It was small, she told herself hotly, bitterly.

In the cloak room, as she was leaving, two girls were talking in the next stall. “What did you think of Mrs. Darrows’s ‘Mother and Child’?” one of them asked.

“I liked it,” the other answered simply.

“Yes, it was good. But you know Mr. Sears couldn’t get in here at all. It’s a shame. He’s awfully hard up. Oh, it’s pull—pull—pull, just as bad here as it is in music.”

“But perhaps Mr. Sears’s picture really wasn’t as good? Did you stop to think of that?”

“Huh! It would have been all the same if it had been. The president of this society is a howling swell; Mrs. Darrows is a howling swell. Voila! And now they even tell me that this picture is to be bought by the State—oh, she has all kinds of French friends. And she doesn’t need it, and Mr. Sears—”

She was sick of it, heartsick and hurt and furious! She hated them all! They didn’t deserve to get on, most of them. Talk about the big spirit of art—the camaraderie of work! She hurried out into the open air. She was afraid she was going to cry.

She was giving her man the name of Sarah’s little street over in the Quartier before she really knew that she was intending to go there. She should go to a tea which one of her friends was giving for some other friends who had just arrived. But she needed Sarah. This thing of starting there without knowing it proved that she needed her.

She and Sarah Powers had studied in the same studio in New York. And Sarah Powers had never seemed to have the slightest consciousness that she was the rich Mrs. Darrows. For that she loved her.

They were friends. And she was perhaps more proud of that friendship than of anything she possessed. It gave her courage and confidence. It even gave her self-respect.

Sarah told her what she thought good and what bad in her work just as simply and honestly as she would tell the girl in the next studio who might not have money to pay for her coal. The fact that Helen never had to worry about paying her rent did not enter into either Sarah’s friendship or her criticism. That was why she needed her today. Both Sarah’s heart and Sarah’s art were greater than either riches or poverty.

She was thinking of that as she drove through the Garden of the Tuileries. It was balm to her wounded soul.

And Sarah had liked this picture. She said it was a really big thing; she dwelt upon that now, needing it. Sarah had liked everything about the picture except the baby’s neck, which she said was too thin. She said that even aristocrats had fat necks when they were babies. They had had an argument about that, and Helen had refused to change it, and there had ensued one of those invigorating, delightful quarrels—the great tonic of a friendship builded upon work.

In the quarrels, in all things, Sarah treated her as a fellow artist, not at all as the society woman who paints and perhaps does very creditable work. Her heart sent out a great flood of affection and gratitude at the thought of the rare simplicity and generous understanding of that.

For Helen Darrows was an artist—more than a good technician, more than a clever woman with taste and skill, deeper, less easily found, than that. She had the humility and the arrogance of the art impulse. Her work did not represent the longing of an idle woman for something to do, the impulse sometimes taking form in lion hunting, perhaps in theosophy, and most often in charities. It was simply that she, an artist, happened to be rich and socially important. She loved her work passionately, sacrificially, buoyantly, reverently; and yet that was not why she did it. She did it because she could not help it. She deserved neither praise nor blame for it.

It was her very simplicity and freedom from affectation which kept her in her natural environment, the thing which seemed most resented. It would have seemed to her affectation, a pose, to rent a studio over in the Quartier and shovel in her own coal. It was part of her modesty and simplicity to stay where she belonged.

And it had been a manifestation of her modesty and simplicity to turn to the near at hand. She had painted the people of her own kind because she knew them best. It seemed fairly axiomatic that one could do best what one understood best. She understood a woman like her own mother better than she understood the laundress. And yet this man had said that she did not really understand. Was that truth, or some more of this pseudo-truth born from the possible? Did he see those things in her work, or only think he saw them because they might have been there? One would like to distinguish insight from injustice. And just what did he mean by a “universalist”?

She brooded over it all as they made their way through the narrow streets of the Left Bank. And yet neither resentment nor perplexity quite smothered her sense of humor. She could see how people would smile over the pathos of her situation. “God pity the poor rich!” her brother Jack would say.

Yes, Sarah was at home. She heard her moving about in there after the ring. She heard something slam, and smiled—the big box into which Sarah threw things which she wanted to get out of the way in a hurry. It sounded to her like a peal of freedom.

Sarah came to the door with a towel in her hands, wiping them. And just then that towel looked like a banner triumphant.

“Oh, Helen, I am glad to see you! For pity’s sake, come in here and tell me what’s the matter with this woman’s lap. It looks about as much like a lap as it does like a tub. Do you ever get stuck on things that you’ve done a thousand times?”

There was a tight place in her throat, so she did not speak. She could scarcely look at the lap for the tears blurring her vision—fortunately Sarah was too absorbed to notice them. This seemed so good!

Sarah said she could work a few minutes longer, filling in the chair. Would Helen mind sitting in the chair? She would just as soon sit there as anywhere, wouldn’t she? And it would be easier for her—Sarah. She wasn’t to lean back; she was to sit forward.

And so meekly she sat forward, though she had come to “lean back.”

She was happy—very happy, indeed, at thus peremptorily being told to sit down and fill the place of a franc-an-hour model. It restored her self-respect. It warmed her heart.

And when it was too dark to work longer on even the legs of a chair, they had tea. Sarah boiled the water on top of her very rusty little stove, and took the tea caddy from what in faraway days had been somebody’s music cabinet. She spread a towel over Helen’s dress to keep it clean, scolding her for having worn such a dress as that over there, when she knew she would have to come through that dirty courtyard.

But, on the whole, they were both very quiet. They drank the tea almost silently.

Sarah seemed tired. And the more she looked at her, the more she believed that she was not only tired, but worried.

It was curious about Sarah. She was slight—really frail, but when standing before a canvas, poised for work, she looked fairly heroic. Sarah aroused, absorbed, achieving, was a Sarah of masterful lines and buoyant strength. The joy of working made a goddess of her; the sense of mastery made her frail little body fairly rugged. The spark in her made for a superb bodily control, for the dignity and force and joy of unity. When it died down she seemed to become disunited, forceless, purposeless. Even the features of the uninspired Sarah seemed smaller and thinner, and the hair more drab.

She was not relaxing now. She kept looking at one of her canvases which she could see in the mirror. She looked dissatisfied, and that made her look inadequate.

“And how is your picture you were beginning the day I was over last?” Helen asked, wanting to lift that fretted look. “You thought you were going to get something so good out of it.”

“Which one?” Sarah laughed grimly. “I always think that when I’m beginning them.”

“The little violin girl was posing for you. You were so interested in her face.”

The gloom deepened. “I’m looking at it now. You aren’t sitting where you can see it. No, don’t move; I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

“Hasn’t it been going well?”

“Oh, yes, well enough. Very well, until yesterday. Then she told me that if it looked like her she thought her uncle would buy it.”

“How splendid!”

“Splendid?” bitterly. “How—devilish!”

“Why, Sarah,” she laughed, “are you arriving at that interesting state where you don’t want to sell your pictures?”

“I’m arriving at that state, interesting or anything else you want to call it”—hotly—“where it makes me mad and sick and sore to spoil a good thing in order to get money enough to pay the rent!”

“I don’t understand,” said Helen—and very honestly.

“No,” bitterly, “you’re rich.”

It hurt so—disappointed so—this day of all others, that she was silent.

“Don’t mind me, Helen”—and she thought Sarah was going to cry; “don’t mind me. I’m all out of gear today. You know I didn’t mean that.”

“But what do you mean, Sarah?” she asked gently. “I wish you could tell me.”

She put down her cup—though she had scarcely tasted her tea. “Helen, did you ever feel that there were two beings in you—oh, this sounds occult and melodramatic and all that, but I don’t mean it that way—but did you ever feel that there were two beings in you, and that one of them interfered with the other?”

She could not but smile—a strange smile—at the timeliness and significance of the question. “I doubt whether anyone has felt that much more strongly than I, Sarah,” she answered quietly.

“Well, there are in me, I know. One of them is an artist—a more or less decent artist—who doesn’t know anything about money nor care anything about it. The other thing in me is a Yankee—a good, shrewd, keen Yankee, with an eye to dollars and cents. And the Yankee just simply won’t permit the artist to pass up the chances to make money. And if the artist could just once cut loose from the Yankee—”

“Why, Sarah—how absurd! I don’t know anybody who has less sense about money than you have! What you need is more Yankee!”

“You don’t know me. You don’t see it. It’s inside, almost unconscious—which is so much the worse. But I tell you, Helen Darrows, I never painted a picture yet that wouldn’t have been better if there were no such thing as money in the world. Money—money! I hate it! It’s the devil that stands in the corner and jeers at us artists—and runs us—and ruins us!”

She was dumfounded—for Sarah’s face was tense with passion.

“Look at this picture! Yes, come around here where you can see it. I was going to have a great thing—a real thing—a thing I wanted to do. And what will I get? A picture of a sweet young girl that uncle will want to buy and hang in the library and say: ‘This is a portrait of my niece, who plays the violin’!”

“But, dear—what did you want? And why can’t you get what you want?”

“Cause the Yank won’t let me!”

“Sarah,” impulsively, “pack your suitcase and come over home with me. You’re tired.”

She shook her head. “I know what you think. You think it’s nerves. Well, it’s not. It’s truth.”

“What did I want to do with it?” she went on, not taking her eyes from the picture. “When I first saw that girl I was wild to paint her. I wanted to take her and just work out one thing I saw in her. I didn’t want to do a portrait; I’m tired of being a copy-cat! I wanted to say something—reveal something—unearth something. I was full of it—crazy about it—and I was getting it. And then yesterday she poured poison into my paint by saying her uncle would buy it if it looked like her. I held myself stern. I said uncle might go to the devil! And yet—see that ‘sweet girlishness’ in the eyes? I put that in today. Uncle will like ‘sweet girlishness’—won’t he? And uncle would never have stood for the slumbering possibilities I wanted to show in those eyes. And I actually saw it there—the things uncle would want—that’s my excuse—and my damnation. Oh, yes, I know—I know better than anybody else—if I were greater—the artist really supreme—my vision would keep clear and I wouldn’t know what uncle wanted to see! But, you see, I’m not all artist. Part of me is just a little, ‘tight’ New Englander, with an eye to the five hundred dollars uncle might be willing to dig up!”

And then Sarah was crying, and Helen was kneeling beside her, her arm about her.

“Sarah, dear”—oh, she did hope she would be able to say it right—it was so vital to her—“I want to talk to you about something, and I want you to listen to me, and I want you to try, for the sake of our friendship, not to be angry, and to understand.”

After a moment Sarah looked up, her face streaked with the tears; the crying had been most unbecoming. She was a forlorn-looking little thing just then.

“Sarah, I, too, have been unhappy about money. I think perhaps I have been even more unhappy about it than you have.”

Sarah stared.

“I have been unhappy because it—the things it represented—have stood between me and the things I have wanted to do. It has closed doors to me—yes, truly. It has put wormwood into my happiest cups. When I came over here today I was very miserable. I came to you because I needed you. And I needed you because you have always been big enough to make me feel free. Sarah, dear, then won’t you have enough of the understanding heart to remove my own chains by making me feel I am taking away yours?”

A little comprehension had come into Sarah’s face and hardened it.

“No—don’t look like that! I’m asking you to be big—generous. Just put away the things in you too narrow to understand. We are both bound by money, I by the atmosphere it has created around me and against me—it does bind me, Sarah; it’s going to cramp me and stifle me, because it’s going to hurt my spirit—and you by your need of it. Aren’t we big enough then to reach out and set ourselves free?”

Sarah had pushed back her chair. “I thought you understood me better than that, Helen,” she said. “I am sorry I spoke of this.”

“No—no! Now don’t close your self up in that mean, hard little way! That is the Yankee in you—the bigoted old Yankee saying smug things about self-respect and honest living and no man’s bread. I see it—it’s in your face. Sarah, let the artist in you have a chance. Let the artist in you tell you that art is bigger than either money or the lack of it—I heard that phrase today. Sarah, dear”—the tears were running down her cheeks now—“don’t you love me enough to let me kill off that mean old Yank and give you a clear vision and a steady hand for the things that I know are in you? Can’t you look down deep enough to see that, after all, I am only trying to free myself—free myself in putting it right with myself? Won’t you help me, Sarah?”

Sarah’s face had softened. She saw the genuineness of it, the bigness. It moved her.

She reached over and took her friend’s hand. “Helen, I do understand, but—I can’t. I’m sorry—I wish I were bigger—but I can’t. Oh, yes, it’s the Yank again—the same old Yank, perky and smug now, saying that he can earn his own living. I know that it’s not the biggest point of view, but truly, Helen, I’ve got to earn my own living—even though I sell my soul to do it! It’s a species of stubbornness and narrowness which we dignify by the name of self-respect,” she ended with a sobbing little laugh.

Helen was silent—hurt, disappointed, discouraged. And what surged up in her heart was this—the waste of it, the foolish, wicked waste of it!

Emotion carried her to larger vision, to many Helens and many Sarahs, and with larger meaning came the passion ate, protesting thought—the waste of it, the foolish, wicked waste of it! A world in chains, refusing to set itself free—the gods must smile at the spectacle! Friendship, art, the things which were biggest, most bound. Life seemed to have gotten itself into a strange twist.

Sarah was sitting there somberly, with her face in her two hands. What was Sarah thinking about? Did Sarah see? And did Sarah ever dream—dream dreams of a freed art, a bigger, saner humanity?

She wondered. She would like to have known. She would like to talk of some of those things. But she was afraid, afraid that, coming from her, it might seem absurd. Newborn thoughts were such tender things to find their way across a barrier, and perhaps into an unwarmed atmosphere.

And so she sat there wondering about it all. Perhaps these were the world’s days of wondering. And beyond the wondering?

The Smart Set, Apr 1911

At the Source

The fire would not burn. Doubtless, the wood was the worse for last night’s rain; she remembered Hal’s saying something about having to put it in a different place. Wet wood was an enigma to her, so she stood there poking at it forlornly. Then she brightened. She would crowd in a lot of paper, and the burning paper would appease the wood until it would consent to act. It seemed a plausible theory, so she sacrificed some Figaros which had come in last week’s mail. “Poor old Figaros,” she mused to them—one grew so lonely, one must talk to something—“it’s tough, isn’t it? You were meant to be read on the boulevards, at a little table on the sidewalk, and instead you’ve had to come miles and miles across the sea, and more miles and miles across the continent, and now you’re way up on top of a mountain in Colorado, clear across the range from anyone whoever heard of the boulevards, and you must end your life drying out some spiteful old wood—” she paused, brow wrinkled, mouth wistful, and, just as she touched the match to them, wanted to know, “But, Figaros, isn’t it perhaps better to go all at once, in a triumphant blaze, than to lie around in corners, beside silly little Monte Rhea Bugles, and day by day grow more faded and dirty; more used to things not like your lovely Paris?” By the light of their own burning she leaned forward for the last they had to give: a blazing word about Massenet’s new opera, one quick brilliant flash as to the races at Longchamps, a little whirlpool of flame exposing some Americans arrested for speeding, and then the big death-flash lighting up the exhibition at the Georges Petit Gallery, and with that Paris shriveled down to smoking desolation, and she shriveled down, too—to the homesick tears she had for so long a time laughed back.

Taking one of the navajos from the floor and wrapping it around her, for the Figaros had scornfully refused a mission to which they did not feel themselves called, holding her face in her two hands as if to comfort it a little, she sought justification in an inventory of the living-room of their cabin. She must have made it sound attractive in her letters, for her friends always wrote back: “How fascinating! Lucky girl! What an experience.” All except Fannie. Fannie had said: “The mountains are great, life in a bungalow a lark, but I fear you must sometimes waitpeople, your own sort of people, and ‘things doing’.” She would always feel the closer to Fannie for that letter, written before one telltale word had escaped. People, her own sort of people, and “things doing,”—why, her heart was fairly breaking for just that!

And on the morrow she would seek to appease her hunger at the Monte Rhea Fair—valley fair, county fair, whatever it was, some crude, stupid little thing. Hal had said it would “cheer her up.” He said she needed people, seeming to think any sort of people would satisfy her need of the people she could not have. He had even wanted her to join the Thursday Sewing Club at Monte Rhea; said it would do her good! And she had retorted that she trusted she had not yet sunk to the state where the Thursday Sewing Club could “do her good.”

Her inventory halted at her photograph of Rodin’s “Le Penseur,” hanging above a toolbox which had been elevated to bookcase, and looked its embarrassment at the dignity thrust upon it. She wondered what “The Thinker” thought about it all. At first he had looked so strange in a little mountain cabin; but he seemed to go right on thinking, undisturbed by the fact that the wallpaper did not furnish suitable background for him. Yes, to be sure, big people, thinkers, could live anywhere. Inharmonious wallpaper could not reach thoughts on—oh, the ultimate destiny of the planetary system, seemingly. But what of the people not detached, brooding, immense, but just of that crowd over which he brooded?

Her lamp had gone out. Lamps were such sulky things, always pouting for more oil. In no mood to coddle it, she stepped out into the night.

Out into the vast, still night of the mountains, a night one could not get into. “The Thinker” could, but only they whose thoughts could penetrate it were admitted to this night of the high, silent places. And when it would not take one in, it overwhelmed, and one wanted to run away and hide one’s head on someone’s shoulder, hold out one’s hands to someone’s bright fire. It was so, too, with the mountains. She did love the mountains; she affirmed that stoutly, seeing it challenged. But she had been alone in them so much: Hal was away all day long on his forest-service work, and often, as now, even into the night, and, as her desire for people and familiar things grew more and more imperative, the mountains had seemed to withdraw into brooding silence. When one could not reach them, they crushed one. If only she had had someone to laugh with her sometimes on her rambles, they might not have shut her out like that.

A sound of horse’s feet on the trail turned her back to the cabin. No light, no fire; what would poor Hal think?

But he was too preoccupied to note the desolation. He attacked the fire and the railroads simultaneously and with equal vigor. “I tell you,” he began, scientifically constructing a wigwam of the kindling, “it’s simply an outrage about the potatoes!”

“I suppose it is,” she replied absently, beating the eggs for his omelet and looking over at a little etching of Rue de Bac, Paris in the rain.

“It would simply make your heart ache to go down there and see those sacks of potatoes piled up along the track!”

She doubted it. Her heart was aching for too many other things.

“A whole summer’s work, and money, and hopes! The most magnificent crop ever turned out of the valley. They did their part, and now sit there hands tied; goods ready to deliver; no way of delivering them, and everything at stake!”

“Well, why don’t they send for some cars?” she murmured, cutting the bacon and wondering if Anna Fowler were back in the same old studio on Boulevard Raspail.

“Send for them!” He laughed at the naivete of it.

“It’s not quite kind to sneer at me about it, Hal,” she returned quiveringly. “I trust I understand a few things, even though freight cars and potatoes are not among them.”

He was beside her in an instant. “Poor little one! She wasn’t reared on freight cars, was she? And she’s dumped down with a lot of barbarians, isn’t she? But never mind,” whirling her around, much imperiling the bacon, “tomorrow she’s going to the Fair!”

“No, dear; I believe she’s not going. You see—”

“She’s going. And let me tell you, she’s going to see one of the neatest little Marathon races ever pulled off. You know that slim little Indian who’s going to run—”

He was off into the story of how the little Indian, State champion, had a contract with someone, or someone thought he had a contract; how the town was for the Indian, and how there was bound to be something doing if they tried—She wondered how Hal could; Hal, who knew well his Yale—Harvard game, who had drunk deep of many a race and many a meet! And the potatoes! Hal’s special commission in the forest service had sounded so vague and important: she had thought of him as in vested with governmental dignity. Of course it was a bigger, better spirit, that she granted hastily, but how could he?

As he settled down to his work, each night he must bring his report up to date, she watched him, fine, big, hearty Hal. She loved Hal. She did not need to affirm that stoutly; she could just say it simply. Two years ago, when they were married, he had said, “Some of it may be in the wilds, Grace,” and she had laughed joyously, right in the face of the wilds, with, “What can that matter if I have just you?”

The first year it had been Washington. That she had loved. Then California; that, too, she had liked, for the people of those California ranches played bridge, and—understood. But what a waited her now was neither bridge nor the wilds, but the hopeless in-between of Thursday sewing clubs and Friday literary societies!

“Hal,” she ventured, “is there any chance of our getting back to Washington for this winter?”

He laid down his pencil and looked at her for a minute before he replied quietly, “Yes, dear; I suppose we can go back if we wish; but it would indeed mean a going back—for me.”

“A going back,” she laughed, “from Monte Rhea to Washington?”

“A going back in the work. The chance for me lies in the field.”

“The field” had sounded so fascinating from Washington. In Washington one did not know that it meant bacon, and getting up at uncivilized hours, and having mountain rats invade one’s cabin, and associating with raw, uncouth people, and, oh! just starving for things.

He kept looking at her. “You want to, Grace?”

“Certainly not,” she replied with rather suspicious emphasis, “if it is not best. But I don’t seem to understand this part of the work. I could see it all better from Washington. You had such a nice office there, and it all seemed so dignified and important.”

“And this doesn’t?” he laughed.

“I don’t understand this; I don’t even understand just what it is you are trying to do.”

Sitting on a stool at her feet—it had known soapbox days, that stool—abusing himself and comforting her, he talked to her of the work, face kindling as he got into it. She had seen the poetry of it, too, from Washington. Protecting the streams at their source had seemed to mean something more than experimenting with mud and brush along Rock Creek, riding miles over the country talking with rangers about their tiny streams which surely could be of no great consequence; yet, she could see, see with irritating clearness, that, doubtless, she was all wrong.

He was lost to it for several minutes; Hal had this: work, hope, dreams. Of course, then, it seemed less bad to him.

“And, after all, Monte Rhea is not so bad,” he was saying. “You’re going to find nice people there. Now that teacher girl, high school teacher, I met her again today, riding. She’s crazy to know you. And what do you think, she’s saving her money to go to Paris! I told her you’d be so interested in that.”

“I’ve seen thousands of her there,” she replied, in tone disclaiming the interest. “Thousands of her come every summer; they come with Baedekers and very short skirts and very stout boots, and make things impossible generally; she’s that sort of American.”

“Perhaps,” it came in Hal’s quiet way. “A rather better sort, I should say, than some of the people in the very long gowns and very high heels; too sophisticated for Baedeker; too un-American to be interested in things worth seeing.”

Her silence drew his glance, and that his quick, affectionate, “Now you know what I meant—what I didn’t mean—”

In his arms it was good to cry a little, good to particularize on something to be hurt about, and good to be petted. Hal was away so much, absorbed so much.

He reverted to the teacher girl, commending hopefully, “She’s a graduate of the University of Michigan.”

“I don’t care if she’s a graduate of the University of—Alaska.” Alaska seeming to produce a fresh vein of tears. “She’s impossible! She doesn’t even know that Chaminade is a woman”

His big laugh finally compelled her smile. “So that’s the new test, is it? I must write Billy tonight and find out if he knows. Fancy how humiliating to find I had been chumming all these years with a fellow who—”

“You are willfully failing to see,” she replied, disengaging herself with dignity. “It is not the fact itself, you know that perfectly, but what it indicates in difference of experience. Simply that it shows no meeting ground.”

“Grace dear,” he told her, serious now, “there’s a meeting-ground with every human being. Look for it; find it: you lose if you don’t.”

•    •    •    •

She thought that over after he had returned to his report. It seemed true with him; it was not true with her. People were different. Some could live in Monte Rhea; others could not .

His exclamation broke through her meditations. His hand was in his pocket, on his face a look humorously appealing, a “don’t be too hard on me” look.

“Forgive in advance,” he pleaded.

“Hal” she cried. “Not letters?”

“Letters. Three of them, and from Paris.” He came out with it with the courage of desperation. “Sawyers was in town and got our mail, and I, brute, was so deep in freight cars, and Indians, and things for this report—”

She transcended the things she might have said in saying nothing at all.

“I’m sorry, Grace,” he said, standing there after he had given them. “It was simply beastly of me; that’s a fact.”

“It is a matter of no great moment,” was the response with which she walled herself in, the tone erecting strong fortifications.

She did not look up for his hurt look. His hand reached over toward her hair, but she was opening the letters, oblivious to him. After an irresolute half-moment he turned slowly back to the report.

Hal had gone to bed, tired after his long day in “the field.” She had lowered a drawbridge as she said good night, but she was hurt, and like the sex of Chaminade, it was not the fact itself, but the deductions therefrom, which signified, telling how much things there meant to him, now he failed to grasp how the other things called to her.

Close to her dying fire, all too close to the lamp which seemed to have mistaken the sense to which it was meant to appeal, looking at a postcard of the Rue de la Paix which she had pinned over an especially offensive spot on the dreary brown paper, the call grew clear and sweet. How they had laughed at her the day she bought all those postcards! And they would laugh again—or, no, would they laugh?—could they only know what those little street scenes had meant.

She had known Paris since childhood, when her father had been appointed there; knew its official life, and what was more dear to her, through Fannie and all the dear friends, she knew its art life. It did not seem to matter greatly that she herself had merely “studied art,” but had never grown to the artist. She achieved the life, and that was her art. “Why do you love Paris so?” Hal had once asked. “Doesn’t it ever strike you as a noisy, crowded, abominably managed place?” She had been silent, for it did not seem a thing argument had anything to do with; but, oh, the song in one’s heart when, after long days away, one found one’s self once more a responsive, comprehending drop in that laughing, sighing, dancing, throbbing current of a complex humanity!

She got out her cards. If one were going to be unhappy, one might as well be as happily unhappy as possible. How explain to one who did not see it what one saw? convey to one who did not feel it what one felt? It drew her to Fannie. She returned to the letter, open now to the things which before she had sternly shut out.

•    •    •    •

“I get a whiff of something I do not like,” wrote Fannie. “Now, Grace, isn’t it the Bible itself that says something about losing your life in order to find it? Even so must you sometimes leave your husband in order to return to him. To leave, or not to leave! Is it better to stay beside one’s spouse and grow cross and small for the things one does not have, or is it better to leave, that one may return filled and joyous? To stay, and lose one’s self; or to go, that one may return again, one’s self. I’m playing fast and loose with the world’s literature, but what boot that if I make my point? Boldly now I state it. You need to come to Paris for the winter. You need to quarrel with a cocher. You need to get in a towering rage at a garçon. You need to walk across your own pet bridge of the Seine. You need to stand in line for a bus. You need to spend vingt centimes for violets. You need to put on your best hat and walk up the avenue. You need to be cheated at a lace shop. You need a perfect orgy of music and a debauch of art. You need to go to the Luxembourg and cynically speculate on why the things hung ever were hung, hotly demand why the things not hung were left unhung. You need the elixir of the grand final rush for the Salon, when masterpieces are painted in five cloudy days by procrastinating artists. You need to scold about French plumbing. You need a good look at the Venus de Milo. You need to stand before the Pantheon and meditate upon what your ‘Thinker’ is meditating about. You need to walk down ‘Boul Mich’, speaking virtuously of how disgusting it is, and just loving it all the while! Oh, you know what you need? You know about it all; you know. But what you do not know is that instead of a studio we this year have a studio apartment. What you do not know is that there is the most charming little room. Grace, it has a little balcony, and the little balcony overlooks a convent garden. One sees the nuns walking at evening. Nuns walking inside the wall—dreaming! Femme de ménage walking outside the wall—loving! There you have it! Come for the winter to your Paris of stimulating contradictions. Live once more in your own Paris of irresistible inconsistencies. Drink of this mingling of sad and gay, horrid and lovely, little and big, from which you—who better?—can distil the sense of life. And Hal? In May—(Paris in May! You know! Lilacs, horse-chestnuts, babies in the gardens, new gowns in the Bois, toute le monde gay, love and laughter everywhere)—in May, I say, it will be fitting that Hal come over to draw further inspiration from French forestry. Shocking, the way Hal is neglecting French forestry! You return together. You live happily ever after. You have the money, the eager, waiting friends. Hal has his work and plenty of good sense. Why not take the bigger view? Cable when I am to meet you at Havre.”

•    •    •    •

And after another hour had gone by, after the wind had come up, and the fire had gone out, and the lamp was making sputtering threats, after tears had blurred the violets being pushed across Le Pont au Change, tears more for the Hal she was leaving than for the things which called, she did see it as the bigger view. She must go in order to return; withdraw herself that she might newly give herself; find herself that she might more securely keep herself. Better sanely face it and sensibly meet it than cower away and let it grow big and terrible in the dark. Better Hal be disappointed in a big way than in a succession of little ways; better what seemed an unfeeling thing than a continuance of petty things.

As she made ready for the night, she was all tenderness for Hal. Already it showed itself, the higher view: her decision had swept the germ of petulance and resentment from her heart. Life would give her her own, bring her back to herself, that she might give herself anew and more abundantly. But first she would go to the Fair. Then, tomorrow night, she would tell him. She shrank from it, but clung to the thought that in her very going away there would be new coming together. For an hour she had been sitting on the grandstand beside the “teacher girl”. Hal had brought them together, with one wicked remark about hoping the band would play something from Chaminade. Dear Hal, he was so gay that afternoon; it would be hard—

She put it from her: the Fair first! And now that she knew she was going away (again the bigger view), she found her heart warming to the people around her. They were so kindly a people, though timid. “Wanting to take me in, yet fearing I am a snob, which I am, or have been,” she saw in it.

•    •    •    •

And as they sat together on the hard boards, thrilled in unison over the horrors of the relay race, disputed whether Mrs. Hyde or Mrs. Dossinger should have had the blue ribbon in the Ladies’ Driving Contest, she felt a curious nearness to the teacher girl. She heard of the hopes and plans for Paris: how long she had been dreaming and saving; just why she must go; “the reading up”; the pension at which she would stay. It was a glimpse behind the Baedekers, a glimpse at the struggle and sacrifice through which dreams came true. It was humbling. It bred a strange emotion: the hope that Paris would appreciate and compensate. It swept her from disdain to understanding, and understanding carried her to the borderland of tenderness.

“So I came west,” the teacher girl was concluding, “because salaries are better here and I can make it sooner.” Watching her, getting her, jaw resolutely set for the making it, face lighted with the vision of the thing made—she seemed of a sudden to see her on the Avenue de l’Opera in short skirt and stout boots; she would attack it in just that sturdy way.

“I just wish,” her defending thought shot out to the avenue’s possible smile of superiority, “that you could know her—at the source!”

The phrase came unsought and grew meaningful, inclusive, after its coming, widening as her gaze swept the valley and was drawn to the peaks beyond. Would one’s smile ever be superior if one followed—to the source? In slow sweep she got the crude, queer little western town: the rude cabin homes scattered about the valley, here and there the “fine house”; the potatoes and the wheat, cattle and sheep; schoolhouses, too, and here at the Fair Grounds this widely differing yet curiously unified crowd of men and women in automobiles and farm wagons, on thoroughbreds and cow-ponies, was it not all just that—life at the source?

They were off for the Marathon race; the cheering stirred familiar things, and left a-wondering. Was not the spirit of it all one? International yacht races and the program at the Valley Fair, was it not a common impulse, a common need, from which they sprung? At aviation meet or at county fair, did anything save the setting differ? And might it not be that the spirit did more where the setting could do less?

•    •    •    •

The Merry Widow waltz contributed to that idea. It had seemed an affront when the band began it. She and Fannie had laughed about hearing the Merry Widow round the world, in New York, Paris, and in its own Vienna. Then to hear it so grotesquely given by an absurd little band at a county fair! She looked over toward the “Poultry Show,” and tried not to listen; but, though she might have been able to shut out the strains, she could not close herself to the idea they brought with them. Not how it was played, but the fact that it was there! The Merry Widow waltz in a far mountain valley of Colorado Had the thing itself, in its most brilliant setting, anything one half so colorful to offer?

“Are you ever lonely?” she asked abruptly of the teacher girl.

“Oh, yes,” she laughed in her open, swinging way, “but I take long walks out into the valley; that helps Then, when it gets too bad, I do something to make myself feel a part of things here; ‘get next to’ things, my schoolboys would call it. That’s a sure cure for lonesomeness. And the secret of the fascination of this country, it seems to me, is the way one can do that. Well, like the potatoes. Understanding about the potatoes makes them your potatoes, and how can you fret about your own lonesomeness when you have a real thing like that to sorrow over and hope for? Last night I was blue: my frat girls back home were giving a party, and I had that ‘oh, I’ve just got to be there!’ feeling. You know it?”

“Slightly,” replied Grace quietly, not taking her eyes from the girl’s frank, resolute face.

•    •    •    •

“So I went over to Mrs. Hyde’s. Splendid people! This town is just full of the biggest hearts; and understanding hearts, too. Perhaps it’s because we’re all in the same boat. Scarcely anyone was really reared around here, you know; not a place of ancestral homes; place for homes for descendants, rather. Though precious little complaining; everybody believes too much in things here. Don’t you suppose that’s what’s at the bottom of the spirit of the West? The way people believe in it. A little short on traditions and culture; long on faith and hopes. But about the Hyde’s. Mrs. Hyde said that new gowns, and trips to Denver, and many other things had gone into those potatoes, with the hope, of course, that college educations and other big things would come out of them. She told how Mr. Hyde, a bank cashier, you know, would get up at daylight and go out to the ranch before bank time; and of all the people who didn’t have the bank, neither a position in it nor anything else in it, who had put all they had into the potatoes. Of course you know the whole story—it is a story, isn’t it?—and how they’re pinning their faith now to the committee that went down to Denver first of the week. As I listened, my blues were crowded out. ‘Can’t be a frat girl always,’ I said to myself. ‘Hard luck about the parties, but life’s offering you something bigger right now than parties. It’s offering you a chance to know life, the biggest thing it has to offer anyone. Big mistake to sit around longing for the girls, dear girls though they are, when you have a chance to get next to the men and women who are building up the country!’ So, instead of tearfully wondering who was dancing with whom, I closed the evening wondering if there wasn’t something wrong with a system where the people who did the work and had the faith couldn’t get their product to the market. More sensible, don’t you think? But here, we’re missing something down there!”

Her absorption left Grace alone, alone with thoughts that seemed too big for her. Perhaps that was why, right out there in the middle of the valley, bigger, mountain big, she seemed to see her “Thinker.” He would see it—protecting the streams at their source—and get the pathos and the beauty, the courage and the trust, yes, dignity, behind those lonely little cabin homes all around him. What an irrigation ditch would mean to “The Thinker!” Life at the source. Clear, swift-flowing, ever widening, singing the song of its own possibilities. Hearing that song, must one go away—for “life?”

It brought her to a curious fancy of Paris as a beautifully wrought cup on which was emblazoned in jewels, “This is the cup of life.” Could not anyone find the wine of life in a cup prepared for one, proffered one, as the cup of life? Was not the genius for living rather to find those waters in the pewter jug which one discovered for one’s self as the waters of life? Was she one for whom the message must be all spelled out, gift, triumph, to find what for centuries had been heralded? But to find upon the plains of Colorado—!

•    •    •    •

Looking, she now saw: the valley, the hills, the wheat; yes, potatoes, too; the cattle and the sheep; the man riding across the plain; automobiles packed with land-seekers hurrying across the plain, also; the ditch-digging and the fence-building; the tenderly nurtured women from east and south emptying the ashes and feeding the chickens, and singing and dreaming as they worked; the man working in his neighbor’s field because his neighbor must that day have the men; the young man working from sunrise till dark in the building of hotels, and railroads, and reservoirs, his courage rock-ribbed, fortified with the faith to withstand loneliness, called by the vision of the days of his children’s children. The West!—possibilities wrought in the proportions of mountains—wide, lonely, naked, austere, but calling upon human achievement to grow great enough to take it. That West which spoke in mountain tunneling and sang its song in reclamation of the desert! The source! Yes, source, too, of tomorrow’s poems. She thrilled to that yet-to-be-written poem of tunnel and of reservoir. Leave this for life? Cross the mountains to “find” one’s self?

The teacher girl had her by the arm. “Do you suppose,” she was whispering, “that it could be—”

She was pointing to something coming across the plain; something which at first seemed to have just crawled out of the mountain, but which a moment of scrutiny revealed as a freight train, a long, long freight train.

“Why, there’s no place else for it to be coming to,” cried the girl. “I tell you, it must be!”

It was. The man was trying to say as much through the megaphone; the band struck up a welcoming waltz; hats were in the air, yes, and tears upon the cheeks.

“When you think what it means,” the teacher girl was murmuring. “When you know what it means!”

Hal was beside her, a glowing Hal. She slipped her hand through his arm, and together they stood there watching the long train of empty cars coming across the sunny plain. She drew a little closer to him as she watched, her throat tightening with the thought of how great a thing it was to be together, living, and loving, and understanding together—at the source!

Cheering, then silent, they stood there, the little band of men and women who had “come west.” And in her sense of oneness with them she had, in the measure she had never known before , deeper, richer, a sense of being close upon the warm heart of Life.

Woman’s Home Companion, May 1912

A Boarder of Art

When the wind came up and it turned old Mrs. Achison decided to put the cold ham and baked potatoes off until the next night and make a nice lot of chowder for that night’s supper. How cold-pinched artists who had been out all day painting rocks and boats did love their steaming plate of chowder! Little Miss Conrad, particularly, would love it. “Oh, Mrs. Achison!” she would cry, “you’re having chowder tonight!” And she would put down her “traps,” as she called them, and warm her hands over the kitchen fire and just sniff. It was bad enough for a man to be an artist, Mrs. Achison was thinking, as she came back with the clams Old Man Russell had dug at low tide that very afternoon; it made her heartsick to see a slip of a girl set her heart on being one.

There was very little about artists that Mrs. Hulda Achison did not know. A woman who stopped one day to look at the pictures asked her if she were a lover of art, and she replied that she guessed she was a lover of it; she had been a boarder of it, anyhow, for more than twenty years.

Some of the landladies around Gloucester would tell you that you could not board art and love it too. Soon after the first artists began tramping that moor it became the habit of landladies to demand of the traveler on the threshold, “Are you an artist?” and if that were admitted it usually developed that all the rooms had been engaged. For all too soon had it become known that artists messed paint around on things, and wanted to wash out their handkerchiefs and stockings, and sometimes they found at the last minute that the man they had thought was going to buy the picture that would finish paying the board bill had decided that he did not want it. It was worthwhile holding rooms for the orthodox “summer people,” who went sailing and golfing and bathing in truly stable fashion—and who knew from the start just where the last week’s board money was to come from.

Mrs. Hulda Achison had probably worked harder than any of her neighbors, and certain it was that she had less money in the bank. Nor was this because Mrs. Hulda spent more for hats than her neighbors did. Every winter—in the summer she was too busy to wear a hat anywhere, so she escaped that problem—she would say: “I declare, I just must get me a new hat next winter!” But her annual changes in costume consisted in having a time-tempered feather bobbing, one winter over the left ear, next winter over the right ear, now leaning to the front, and again, as the seasons rolled on, inclining to the rear.

The woman across the way—when the last summer boarder’s trunk had gone through the front gate she went to Boston and came home with a bandbox as huge as any summer boarder’s bandbox could ever hope to be—could tell you, and would be glad to, why it was that Mrs. Hulda did not “make a go of it.” It was just her plagued foolishness about those good-for-nothing artists!

Probably it never would have come about if Mrs. Achison’s two pet cats had not been killed the very summer that Cape Ann was discovered by a wandering band of artists. Just as Mrs. Hulda could not live without air to breathe, even so she could not maintain life without something to mother. Nature had done one of her erratic things in making Mrs. Achison all mother and then giving he nothing for mothering. So she took whatever came to hand. When the artists followed hard upon the death of the cats, she turned to them as naturally as the defrauded hen turns to ducklings. And now for twenty-five years Mrs. Hulda Achison had clucked over American art—and scratched for it! Unhappy would be the man who would try to get out to paint a foggy morning without his overshoes. “Mr. Waterman,” a voice would call after him, “you come straight back and get your rubbers!” And Mr. Waterman would come, meekly mumbling about having forgotten them. And the man who had been out on the rocks all day and came home with a squeaky voice could no more get to bed without that little pill and the steaming glass of lemonade than—oh, well, there is no figure. He just couldn’t, that’s all.

While Mrs. Hulda could not compete with her neighbors in hats, not one of them wielded the power she did. The summer person who as a prospective purchaser came to look at the work of Mrs. Achison’s artists—as they were called around there—might think he came away with the picture he wanted, but it was altogether more likely that he bore with him the one Mrs. Hulda had decided he should have. “Now, Mr. Delaney,” she would say to the artist who was next to herself in command, “Mr. Frederickson’s picture is the one to be sold today. You’ve got a way with you, Mr. Delaney, and I’m looking to you to see he doesn’t come out at the little end of the horn. He has to get clear back to Missouri, and the rest of you have only got railroad fare to pay as far as New York.” “If you like one about as well as another,” this despotic landlady had been known to say to a deliberating buyer, “I wish you’d take this one, ’cause this man has to have his appendix out next month.”

•    •    •    •

She sliced potatoes and onions for the chowder. Mrs. Hulda was carried back on the wings of those onions to days of other onions and other artists, until, when she spied Miss Conrad winding in and out among the rocks of that stretch of moor which began right where the Achison yard stopped, the girl seemed, not an isolated figure, but one of a great procession of artists who had tramped that moor back and forth to where the sea pounded in on the far side of the cape. “Of course you’re cold,” the woman murmured to herself, as the girl, putting down the big bag that held her “traps,” wrung her hands and held them for a minute over her ears. And when she picked up the traps and came trudging on again Mrs. Achison added: “And tired. You poor little thing,” she brooded over her, “you’re just not stout enough to be an artist.”

Usually Miss Conrad crawled under the fence and came up the path to the backdoor; but this time she was going around to the front. Mrs. Hulda was about to open the door and call to her, but when she got a glimpse of the girl’s face she let her go. “Picture didn’t come out right. Plumb discouraged. Thinks she never can do anything nohow.”

But when she heard Miss Conrad hesitate in the hall, then start up the stairs, her nice sense that the girl wanted to be let alone was notable to prevail over her certain knowledge that that girl ought to have her feet in the oven. “Better come out and warmup,” called the landlady cheerily.

The girl obeyed—that was all, and after another minute Mrs. Achison knew that things were about as bad as they could be with Miss Katharine Conrad. It was not the tired lines about the girl’s mouth that told her, nor even the troubled eyes; it was that she didn’t sniff. “Fixin’ chowder; thought you’d all need a good warming up.”

“Why, how nice,” said Miss Conrad politely; and when, after a minute, she made another effort and added, “How nice that will be, Mrs. Achison,” Mrs. Hulda could have cried.

“Get in here and put your feet in the oven, my dear. Nothing like heat right from the oven when you’ve been standing round on cold rocks. Glad you came along just this minute; I want you to watch this chowder while I go out and speak to that Harry Redmond. He’s been up there paintin’ all afternoon. I’ve got too much chowder here for you folks; he can as well as not come in and have some—don’t like seeing things wasted. He’s one of the forlorn ones that boards himself, and they say at the store he just lives on crackers and sardines and fiddlin’ things like that. Do him good to sit down and fight with the rest of you. I’ve noticed that if there’s one thing artists need more’n hot food it’s havin’ other artists round to fight with. Kind of keeps ’em toned-up like.”

Miss Conrad succeeded in laughing a little, and Mrs. Achison threw her shawl over her head and started out to induce Harry Redmond to spare her the pain of seeing things wasted. When an artist who boarded himself was painting anywhere in sight Mrs. Achison was almost sure to find at the last minute that she had made a mistake in her measurements.

When she came back a new sound mingled with crackling of fire and hum of kettle. The feet that had been standing on cold rocks all afternoon still rested on the edge of the oven, but the girl’s slim young body was quivering with sobs.

Mrs. Hulda Achison hung up her shawl without a word. As she passed the girl to get back to the chowder she patted her shoulder—that was all.

The pat freshened the sobs; for several minutes they came tumultuously.

Then Miss Conrad raised her head and wiped her eyes. “I meant to get upstairs first,” she said, turning a sob into a little laugh.

“Now that would have been very foolish of you, my dear,” replied Mrs. Hulda gravely. “Never cry in a cold room. Nothing like having your feet in the oven when you’re in for a good cry.”

As if lured by that the girl put her feet back in the oven and cried anew. Mrs. Hulda merely stirred the fire under the chowder. At last, with another little laugh stolen from a sob, the girl raised her head.

“There now,” commended the landlady, “you’ve had it and you’re the better for it. And tomorrow there’ll be a new day and you’ll begin a new picture; and time’ll come when you’ll have a good laugh over the poor spoiled picture you’re taking so to heart tonight.”

The girl shook her head, her tear-streaked face growing stern. She moved back from the oven, refusing its comfort, too, as she laughed and said: “No, I think I’d better change. Better see now what I can do with the scrubbing-brush.”

The bitterness in it moved Mrs. Hulda to ask simply: “Just what is it, my dear? Could you tell me what’s the trouble?”

The quiet, patient, caring tone—mother tone—made the girl’s chin quiver. “Mrs. MacFarland, you know,” she began unevenly, “was to buy my picture; you know the one—the one the men call my ‘Morning Sunshine.’ They all think it’s the best I’ve done this summer. I was so happy about it—you know how I’ve counted on it. And it wasn’t just the money—though I’ve nothing else in sight. It—” She paused before a feeling difficult to express. Then, looking at the little drab woman across the stove from her, she suddenly exclaimed: “You know, Mrs. Achison. You understand!”

“Yes, my dear,” replied the woman who for more than twenty years had boarded art; “I do understand.”

The girl did not go on. She was pulling at her handkerchief. At last she pulled it in two, then rolled it into a little ball.

“And now she thinks she doesn’t want it?” Mrs. Hulda pressed gently.

“That’s it. She finds she doesn’t want it. You see”—she fell into Mrs. MacFarland’s drawling tone—“she’s going over to Paris. So she’s concluded she won’t buy here now. They have such a feeling for art over there, you know. Such traditions. We are such a commercial people. And then, to be real frank with me, she’s not quite sure about my pictures. They do seem to her unusual—most interesting—but she believes she’d rather wait till they have been recognized by the critics.” Something leaped to the girl’s eyes. “Of course, Mrs. Achison, you see the very great logic and beauty of that. You’ve noticed, I suppose, how ‘the critics’ are just crowding round hereon the rocks—waiting to recognize the pictures as fast as they’re painted!”

She rose and was walking about the kitchen; her cheeks were flaming as she picked up the butcher-knife and began chopping at the meat-board. “Oh, it wouldn’t have got me like this”—she laughed tremulously—“if it hadn’t been for Mr. Trent! He passed in his car as we were talking. Mrs. MacFarland spoke to him—was anxious that I should know who he was, and that she knew him. You know he’s just bought another ‘old master’—ninety thousand, I believe, this time. She thinks his interest in art means so much to America! She thinks he is doing so much for us! The whole thing just struck me as sort of—sort of—”

She did not finish; but this, too, the woman who had boarded art for more than twenty years understood.

Miss Conrad went on talking about Mr. Herbert Trent’s attempts to redeem America from commercialism—all the while chopping at the meat-board.

“So I’m going tomorrow,” she said at last.

“Going where?” the landlady wanted to know.

“Why, to change brushes!” She turned upon her tempestuously. “You don’t seem to realize, Mrs. Achison, that I have no more money to pay my board!”

“Yes, my dear,” replied Mrs. Hulda patiently, “I realize that. And I realize something else—something you don’t seem to realize. I realize that no girl who don’t know where her board’s coming from is going to get out of this house! Now don’t ruin my new meat-board, my dear; let’s just ease up a bit while I tell you a little story. ’Twas just five years ago this very month that an artist sat in front of this very stove—bless you, he had his feet in this very oven—and he said to me: ‘Well, Mrs. Achison,’ he said, ‘I guess stuff’s off.’ ‘What do you mean?’ said I. ‘You know better ’an that. Stuff’s never off.’ All summer long he’d been at it. He’d come in all queer and abstracted; if I didn’t head him off he’d try to start off without his breakfast; and—oh, well! same story; it’s an old one to me, my dear. The folks that had been thinking of buying concluded they’d wait till he was pronounced a fine painter. They were queer-looking, his things; most folks said he didn’t paint it accurate enough—’twas all kind of mixed up. I told him once what they said, thinking it might give him an idea; but he just flew into a rage and said—well, I’ll not repeat it. But this night he wasn’t swearin’—Lord save my wicked soul, I don’t mind their swearin’ half as much as some other things that’s less irreligious—he was just sayin’ that stuff was off and maybe he could get something to do soliciting insurance. And the way he laughed Laughs that aren’t joyful are the saddest things I know of.

“Well, I must say his pictures weren’t the ones I’d have picked out for my parlor, but I just kind of felt something in him, and so I said: ‘I’m tired of your silly talk, Mr. Morrison. You go to bed and get a good night’s rest, and tomorrow we’re going to have a good day—paper says so—and I’ll get you an early breakfast, and put you up a lunch if you say so, though you’d better come home for a hot meal and not ruin your stomach, and you can paint away all day and will come home whistlin’ so as nobody in the house can hear themselves think.” (I’ll just set this chowder back a little.)

“Then he—well, if he’d been a woman he would have had his nice sensible cry, but as it was he choked it back and mumbled something about board, and began again about the insurance—where he ever got that idea I don’t know. That was when I said—and I’m sayin’ it to you now, my dear, as well as to him then—that I didn’t know anything about art myself, but I hadn’t boarded it for twenty years without having a pretty warm spot in my heart for it; and if he was willin’ to go on a while longer doin’ the best he could, and maybe just a mite more accurate—why, I had to get the meals, anyhow, and as there was always something left over—”

“Now, now, my dear, I didn’t mean to get you at it again! This is what I’m comin’ to—it’s a cheerfuller story at the end than it starts out to be—he did keep on, and I can’t say, being an honest woman, that he got much more accurate, but he got terrible excited about what he was doing; and the very next winter some big critic—no, they don’t set round on rocks waitin’, but once in a while they do turn up and put things to rights—got to makin’ a great fuss about his pictures; and now he has a studio on Broadway or Fifth Avenue—I don’t know which, but wherever the real stylish place for studios is.

“Then the next summer he was up here wanting to know how he could pay me back. “Pay me back by tending to them that’s saying ‘Stuff’s off,’” said I; and I though the was going to forget again—about not being a woman, you know—so, just to turn the conversation like, I told him right out he never would have made an insurance agent anyhow—not easy enough in his talk for that. “And while I’d hate to hurt your feelings, my dear, I’d hate most as bad to hire you for a scrubwoman; and your pictures aren’t so much queerer looking than his, so I guess in the long run the paint-brush’ll do better by you than the scrubbing-brush; and as for your leavin’ here till you know what’s ahead I give you warning right now”—little, withered Hulda Achison was fairly majestic as she drew herself up and uttered the dire threat—“I’d hold your trunk!”

•    •    •    •

By means both within and without the pale of the law the trunk had been held. It was still there that day in late November when Mrs. Hulda Achison was engaged in the annual re-trimming of her winter hat. A radical change was this time necessitated because the feather had come in two; so Mrs. Hulda had one piece standing up in front and the other lying down in the back, and she told herself she didn’t know when she had seen it look so stylish. Not even in the privacy of her own consciousness did she relate the fact of not having a new hat even this winter—or at any rate a new feather—with that other fact that the doctor said Miss Conrad must eat plenty of good fresh eggs.

Miss Conrad went out almost every day and painted, and when she was “getting something” she did not seem to know there were such things as board-bills; but in between those times she looked so harassed and unhappy that Mrs. Hulda would often tell herself she ought to give thanks every day of her life for the ease of her own lot.

There were times when the girl would grow desperate about staying there when she could not pay her board, and then Mrs. Hulda would grow so eloquent about being afraid to stay there alone that she could actually feel herself growing timid. After those talks Katharine would gather together her traps and strikeout across the moor “like one possessed”—to follow the landlady’s phrasing.

The reason the bonnet must be fixed that day was because Mrs. Achison wanted to take the last of her chrysanthemums to the minister’s wife, who had been sick; and she was in a hurry about it, for after leaving the minister’s she wanted to walk out to the Point and see if the hens had begun laying at the Reynoldses’. Those fresh eggs the doctor said Katharine should have were pretty hard to get at any price. As she was starting out she caught a glimpse of Katharine—up where she could get a good sweep of the pond. The wind was probably blowing those marshy grasses the way she liked them. She had been much excited about that day—one of those queer days when the sun doesn’t seem to know exactly what to do about shining; days common folks call aggravating, not knowing from one minute to the next whether it’s safe to leave things out on the line. Mrs. Hulda concluded that her boarder was “getting something,” for, from the way she was standing, you’d never guess there was any great hurry about that trip for the eggs. But that was the way artists were, the boarder of art considered.

She returned to thought of the girl, and was drawn from that into a whole web of related thoughts, after she had left the minister’s and was walking out toward the Point. She had not been out that way for a long time. She stood for a minute watching the sun sink behind the bare trees over there on the Magnolia side of the harbor, held by the queer things it was doing to clouds and water and to the sails of the big five-master that was just coming in. In a half-shamefaced way, for she felt that she should be hurrying on to get the eggs, Mrs. Hulda reflected that she was kind of a distant cousin to all those things. You couldn’t board art for twenty-five years without sometimes drawing in your breath a little at those things art was made from.

She met the Reynolds boy, and he said he would run down the lane and see if his mother could let her have the eggs. She stood there waiting for him; it was right at the gate of the great Trent place, for Mrs. Reynolds’s husband was one of the Trent chauffeurs. It was very still as she waited there in the November twilight. The stillness and the beauty, something that breathed from the great sweeps of country and sea, drew her again, more poignantly and more understandingly, back to her artists. They seemed to be around her. She smiled in tender understanding of them: their incompetencies and their enthusiasms; the way, as she thought it, they were at once so much less and so much more than other folks.

Mrs. Hulda Achison believed in art. She told herself that you couldn’t board art without coming to believe in it. She had watched the way it worked—seen what it did to folks. She saw again that light on their faces at times. Art was something that, in a way she couldn’t just figure out, lifted the world up. It brought people close to sunshine and shadow, dying sun and crescent moon—closer to morning, twilight, stillness. She wondered why that was; those things were there anyhow. But the artists seemed to open it up and let folks in. Things she had heard said about that came back to her, bringing thought of this one and that, memories of their hard times and of ridiculous things they had proposed doing in order to hold on. She was glad that she had been able to help them a little. In the peace of the moment was a sense of reward. She seemed taken right into this quiet and beauty. She felt very much at home.

There was a sound of footsteps among the fallen leaves, and she supposed it was the Reynolds boy—she did hope he had the eggs—but as she turned she saw that it was not a boy, but a man—a man walking just inside the iron fence that shutoff the Trent grounds. She knew from her glance that it was Herbert Trent. She had not seen him for a long time, but his picture was in the papers every once in a while—every time he brought home a new old master.

She could feel her heart tightening against him. She had a tense feeling that he hadn’t the right to the twilight, to all those things many a one who had been all but starving at his gates had loved and served. She thought of Frederick Morrison, who was going to be an insurance agent(oh, now he’d buy his pictures! she supposed), of Katharine and the scrubbing-brush, of others she had known for whom the fight had been too much. She’d like to go in and tell him what she thought of him. She just wished she could tell him things she had heard said about him in her house; tell him that though he might be a “lover of art” he was hated by artists. But, as that thought came to her, she changed. It occurred to her that it was very sad that a lover of art should be hated by artists. Maybe he did love art: perhaps it wasn’t just for show—as they thought. If he did—did love it—what a lot he was missing! That thought held her and grew bigger than all others.

Again she heard the rustling of the leaves; he was coming past the gate once more, walking slowly. She watched his face. It did not seem to her as happy as the face of a man who could have everything he wanted ought to be. He never went down to the depths to which they went when they were saying “Stuff’s off”—but did he know anything of the happy heights that were theirs when “getting something”?

It was not in Mrs. Hulda to be afraid of anybody she was sorry for, to shrink from anyone who needed to have things put to rights. Suddenly, with no plan whatsoever, she had walked through the open gate and met him with: “This is a beautiful sunset, isn’t it, Mr. Trent?”

He raised his hat, too astonished for more.

“I just stepped in,” said Mrs. Hulda, “to speak to you a minute about art.”

He looked at her: at the ostrich plume that had come in two and stood right up in the front and lay straight down in the back; at the shabby brown skirt and old black velvet coat somebody had given her years and years before; at the woolen gloves and the tin pail in which she hoped to carry back the eggs for Katharine. He tried to repress the smile that trembled on his lips.

Perhaps he did not wholly succeed, for it was not without dignity that she continued: “You’re a buyer of art, Mr. Trent, and I’m a boarder of it, so maybe we’re not so far apart as you might think to look at me. Neither of us, of course, is of as much account as the real artists; but, as we’re round on the edges, you might say, of the same thing, I thought—while I’m waitin’ to see if the Reynoldses can give me any fresh eggs—that we might have a minute’s conversation.”

He did not smile now; he looked interested as he bowed and murmured: “Certainly, if you wish it.” “But there’s one thing in which we differ, Mr. Trent. You’re a buyer of dead art, and I’m a boarder of that that’s living. I was thinking about that as I watched you from outside there, and the reason I stepped in was that it just seemed to me so kind of pathetic about you.”

He quite failed in repression this time; his start of surprise was all unconcealed.

“Mr. Trent,” she said simply, “I don’t believe you can have any idea of all you’re missing.”

He seemed at a loss for anything to say. “Missing?” he faltered.

“Why, Mr. Trent,” she burst forth, “I wouldn’t change places with you, not for”—she paused, then finished, a little twinkle in her eye—“not for all the winter hats in Boston!”

They laughed together; and after that he asked, simply and earnestly: “Why are you sorry for me?” “I don’t want to be boastful, Mr. Trent. I’m sorry if it sounds that way. But I wouldn’t change places with you because for just this: You’re a buyer of dead art; I’m a friend of that that’s living. All we get from life is what life brings to our hearts. I think it brings more to the heart to be a friend of painters that’s living than to be spending a fortune on what’s left by them that’s dead.” And then the Yankee residing in Mrs. Hulda added: “You could do both, you know.”

Again he laughed a little, but his eyes were grave. “And this—this satisfaction you speak of. In just what does it consist?”

Mrs. Hulda considered and grew troubled. How could she say it? She did not know that it was at all expressive of what she meant when she finally said timidly, for she had a sense of its being a strange thing to becoming from her: “It consists in having the privilege of sharing the joy of the artist.”

The man who was spending a fortune on art looked at the shabby woman and was silent. His silence told her that she had conveyed her meaning; that gave her confidence. She forgot the tin pail which she had been carrying a little consciously since that first glance of his. She remembered only the artists she had known in those twenty-five years she had boarded art. Once more they all seemed around her. She wanted to speak for them. It was too bad, when she had this chance, that she was not one who could say things so they’d make an impression. But there was one thing she could do: she could do the best she could.

“Mr. Trent,” she began quietly, “they say you love beauty and art. You’re spending your money on pictures instead of on race horses and—things worse. I’m glad you are that kind of a man. But, being as you are that kind of man, seems to me it must be there are things you don’t understand. Seems to me you can’t understand that at your very gates are them that—why, that’s fairly willing to lay down their lives—I board art, and I know—because they love beauty and art.” Suddenly her head went up. “Oh, I’m not begging for them, understand! I’m just pointing out your privileges; your chance to have something to do with the art that’s in the making, to be a real part of something. As has many times been said in my house, it’s not right you should have so much to say about it. Who are you, they often say, that so much should depend on you? But as long as it is that way, seems you might help us out of the bad fix we’re in on account of you by—well, by caring a little about living strivings. Being as human life is hard anyhow, seems kind of a pity that they should have to be dead, and such a long time dead, before the fortunes gets to them. Why they say that them you’re buying now—spending enough on to keep all the artists in America!—didn’t know, in their time, where their board was coming from. There’s such a sadness, I think, in things being a hundred years or so too late.”

She stopped; she had a fleeting sense of her bonnet’s being on crooked and of her face being screwed up in a way that made it ugly. But when she glanced up at the man she forgot all about that. His look would not indicate that he was thinking of her bonnet—or even of her ugliness.

“In a hundred years from now, Mr. Trent, you and me will be mingled with the ground. We pass away—rich and poor pass away. That’s why it seems nice to do something while we’re here, have some part in what our own time is up—to do something that leaves us, you might say. It would be nice if a hundred years from now there were them that walked this ground with reverent feet and said: ‘Here lived a man who was our friend. He was our friend because he was a friend to those of us that were around him.’ I declare, Mr. Trent, it does seem we ought to have kind of a friendly feeling to them that’s on earth same time as we are.”

She paused. “There’s the Reynolds boy with my eggs, and I mustn’t keep him waiting after he was so good to oblige me.” She hesitated, but the man did not speak, and she had not the courage to look at him. Perhaps if she had she would have been too overwhelmed to try to say those last things that struggled within her to be said.

“While I was waiting outside your gate, Mr. Trent,” she said at last tremulously, “I had a nice and peaceful feeling. I looked around me at this that is beautiful, and I felt that I had some right to the pleasure of this beauty. I felt that in my putterin’ way I’d helped some of them that understood it, them that makes the world more beautiful to other folks by passin’ on the understanding of it. And that’s why—if you’ll excuse the ways of a plainspoken woman—I felt sorry for you. Maybe it’s a pleasure to own old masters, but I don’t see how it can put the warm, living joy in your heart that grows out of the feeling of having a real part in something. Just ownin’ must be a cold kind of thing; helpin’ is warmer and cheerfuller. I have an idea that if them you’re spending the fortune on now could speak they’d say: ‘At your own gates are artists. Give them their chance. Maybe by giving them their chance you can help make a finer picture than any you could buy!’ Wouldn’t surprise me a mite if they’d say just that. Artists are like that. You see I board art, so I know. If you could know ’em like I do I think you might see ’twas a privilege to be associated with such folks.”

She was edging away, but even now she did not look up at the man’s face. Something about the still, silent figure made her feel like not doing that. “Well, I’ve stumbled along kind of haphazard, but I hope you’ll remember one thing, Mr. Trent: the living may be great as well as the dead—and need just a little more looking after.”

She straightened her bonnet, bowed and left him.

•    •    •    •

The sudden interest of Mr. Herbert Trent in the work of American artists was the big thing that year in the art world. Through his various schemes for the furtherance of the art of his country many new artists of great promise were brought to light. The fresh, fearless quality in the work of Katharine Conrad was one of the joys of that season’s exhibitions.

“How about it?” a friend asked one spring day, as they tramped the woods of the Trent place by the sea. “You never were at all keen about American art. Why the great change of heart?”

The man was silent. “I met a woman,” he said at last.

The friend was all interest—scenting romance, picturing the fascinations of the woman who could work that wonder. “Um—an artist?”

Herbert Trent smiled faintly and shook his head.

But the other man wanted to know about the woman—radiant being that she must be. “Oh, yes!” he pressed; “a—a friend of American art, I suppose.”

Mr. Trent looked at him gravely. “Just that, I should say,” was his answer.

Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct 1912

The Resurrection and the Life

When morning came life was still lingering—that is, if what was left could be called life. It seemed less life than the delay of death in coming; less as if a living man was dying than as though a dead man were breathing. The doctor said there could be only a few hours more.

There was nothing to do in those hours. The time for an attempt at keeping life, even the time for a pretense at that attempt, had passed. All that remained was to sit there in quiet through that mysterious time when life and death touched.

She knew that her mother was worn out, and in any case she preferred being alone with her husband as she waited. It was not that she would be alone with him because those last hours of what could be called life were precious to her, too meaningful for sharing even with her mother. She wanted to be alone because she did not feel what it would be expected she should feel.

It was May, and as the woman who was watching—waiting—looked from the window, she saw that the lilacs just underneath had come out in the night. That soft rain had won them. The raindrops still lingered, and now the sun shone upon wet flowers and leaves. She leaned out for a breath of them. But when it came up to her she drew back, and leaving the window sat down over by the far side of the bed.

She had been married in lilac time—in lilac time twenty-two years before. Suddenly she remembered coming into that very room to take off her wedding dress and put on her traveling clothes. And because everything about that day persisted in her memory, she remembered going to the window and leaning down—as she had so many times through her girlhood—for that breath of the lilacs. And at the heart of that memory lived another: a memory of the things that had been in her heart that day, things that had died the slow, unlovely death the man beside her was dying—died because the man by whom she watched had not let them live.

She tried not to think of that now. It seemed wrong, if not to him, to life, to be thinking those things while life was being conquered. But from where she sat she could see the lilacs blowing in the yard across the street—there were lilacs everywhere in their little town, her “home town,” to which she had come back with her sick husband—and she could hear the birds trilling out their joyousness in May. It was the opened window that made it hard to hold back memories of the time when her heart had been like the things out there; hard, even when he was dying, to free herself from the thought of how he had stilled in her heart that song of joyousness in May.

For a long time she sat there tense, trying, as she watched the man whom she had loved dying, not to think of how similarly disintegrating had been the death of her love for that man, not to see in this blight how blighting had been the death of her feeling for life.

She had been watching his face, watching, compelled by the horror of it, the way she could see death eating its way, when, hearing someone enter, she looked up.

It was her mother with coffee. “Drink this, dear. You must take something.”

She went over to the window, instinctively getting as far as she could from the bed on which lay a body that would never take anything again.

Her mother lingered; noticing chairs being carried out into the yard across the street, observing a good deal of bustle about the place, she asked, more to be saying something to her mother than because she wanted to know: “Why, mother, what’s going on over at the Freemans’?”

Her mother turned away; it was a reluctant voice that carried the reply: “It’s a wedding, Marcia.”

She set down the cup, and her handkerchief went to her mouth as though holding something back. “A—you say a wedding, mother? This morning?”

“Yes, a morning wedding, dear; they’re taking the eleven o’clock train.”

“They? Who? Whose wedding, mother?”

“Why, Helen’s, dear; pretty little Helen Freeman.”

She turned upon her mother. “That baby?”

Sadly her mother shook her head. “They don’t stay babies, Marcia. Helen’s nineteen.”

“Going to be married,” she murmured, “at nineteen?”

“You were only twenty, Marcia,” was the low response.

She had turned from the window and was looking at the bed. Again, as her mother reminded her that she had been only twenty, her handkerchief was over her mouth as if pressing something back.

The man on the bed was picking at the covering. Instinctively she hastened to him, so hard was it to realize, when he could move like that, that there was nothing more to do for him.

Her mother was waiting at the door. “I thought, dear, if—if it came, if anything happened before they go, we would try not to have them know.”

She nodded.

“Helen’s such a dear little thing, and they’re so in love—we don’t want to spoil her wedding.”

She only nodded again, and this time the handkerchief was once more at her mouth, as if pressing something back. Her mother moved a step nearer. “You don’t want me to stay?” For reply she shook her head and turned away.

She went back to her place at the far side of the bed, all the while her hand kerchief pressed against her mouth. She was sitting there so still, afraid to move, as if moving would stir the thoughts—start them—let the things out of her heart, those things that now she must hold back with all her might because she must not spoil little Helen Freeman’s wedding—the little nineteen-year-old girl who was so in love, thought she was going to be so happy. It seemed that far worse than having Helen know there was a death across the street would be letting loose those things that were in her heart.

The dying man’s mouth had fallen open. She wondered if she ought to close it. It looked so terrible that way that it seemed cruel to leave it so. But perhaps if she closed it he could not breathe. Quick tears came in the thought of how helpless one was—how all unguarded against unlovely things—when life was giving way to death.

It made her so sorry for him! She raised him up, carefully wiped his face about the mouth, and, more than that, with one of those swift impulses of her passionate nature she tried to think kind things about him. She wanted to be tender to a man who was dying.

He had never struck her. He had not wasted in drink and gambling the money to give her food and clothing. Think of the men who did that! Indeed, he had been what the world would call a “good husband.” Had she ever, as people said, wanted for anything?

Had she ever—wanted for anything? Had she ever—wanted for anything? It kept saying itself over and over, prying at the very door it had been meant to hold shut. Wanted for anything—wanted for anything?

She heard carriages and motors across the street. Had it begun? Was it over? Married at church and now coming home for the wedding breakfast? She could have seen across by turning her head that way. She did not; her hands were upon her breast—tight—trying to hold things in there. Why, beside her a man was dying—and across the street there was a wedding! All of one’s faith in life—best of one’s feeling—should go to the man here who was dying and the girl over there happy on her wedding morning. But as the laughter from across the street came up to her, laughter of joy in youth that seemed to pass in waves over the bed and then envelop her, she could do nothing but meet the laughter with sobs.

Then another sound penetrated laughter and sobs. Quickly realizing that he was choking, she raised his head and moved it, her hot tears falling upon his face and mingling with the sweat of death that was there.

She was on her knees now, supporting him. It seemed she must hold him up. Death was very close. He would die if she did not hold him up, and the life in her had that deep instinct of life for fighting for every second it can gain from death.

His face had become so misshapen it seemed wrong to look at it. A long time passed while she was looking down at his hand. It kept moving a little—just because for so many years it had been moving, because muscles and nerves were used to moving. She was thinking of death; of how all human hands come to those last purposeless movements. She was thinking of what it must mean to one who loved; mean, after the love and tenderness of a lifetime, to watch the last movements of hands that had caressed and served.

Raising her head at last, she, too, needing breath, she saw that across the street they were having breakfast out on the big porch. Some of them had finished and were out on the lawn. They moved in and out among the lilac bushes, groups of boys and girls, laughing, sunshine falling lavishly upon them.

She again wiped the dying man’s face, and when she looked back after that she saw Helen, the happy little bride. She was standing at the head of the steps, beside her the man she had just married—the way he was looking down at her told who he was. Helen was laughing and calling out to her friends in the yard. Then she looked up to the man beside her. Ah, yes—that look she knew. She had looked that way, she supposed. She had felt that way.

And all the while it was going on! Helen was not the only bride in the world that day. That very day—every day—they were turning those radiant, believing faces to life. She had turned a radiant, believing face to life. She had been sure—as Helen was sure—as they all were sure. Oh, yes, loves failed, they knew. How sad it was, they would say—then quickly turn that glowing, trusting face back to life, smiling out their thankfulness that no such thing could come to them.

It seemed to her that more cruel than death were those wiles of life. The man she was holding choked again, and mechanically, almost unconsciously, she moved his head; but her protecting instinct and her sorrow were with the little bride across the street. She wanted to cry out to her: “But don’t think life’s going to give you what it promises! It just gets you—with promises—then crawls away and leaves you there to starve!”

A force strong as that sweeping the man out from life swept her back to it, back into those days before she had been driven to defending herself by trying to deaden herself, days before she had won any ground in the devastating struggle to bear life by not expecting great things of it. That light on the little bride’s face had touched it to life: the joyous, confident demand upon life, and then the chill which little by little had crept on, much as this chill of death had in the last few hours crept upon the man whom now in a short time it would have claimed. But how strange that the things in her heart she had thought safely dead should be live enough yet for suffering! She flinched now in just the memory of how, stepping out eagerly into love’s country, she had, time after time, been pushed back; memory of how she had stretched out her hands with gifts that were not wanted, were not even seen, and had been left there—shamed—not knowing what to do with those offerings she had borne with so proud a joyousness.

Oh, no, he had never struck her; food and clothing for her body had been provided; the world would call him a good husband. But one thing he had not done. He had not claimed what she had to give him. Unclaimed, it tortured her until it had warped her to that state where life is bearable.

As again she did for him a little service, and saw the sure signs of how close was the moment when there would be nothing more for her hands to do for him, she tried again to do him the deeper service, send with him the kindly thought it seemed each human being must want to take with him from life. Outraged at herself, frantically resolved to turn to him—be kind, she called upon the thought of how there had never been any other woman, how he had been, as they put it, true to her. But out from that broke the thought that it might be easier to think the tender things had it been otherwise: if in some way, at some time, he had been true to life; if he had found something somewhere, given something to someone. He had been true to her for the same reason he had failed her. She was sure she could not be wrong in feeling that the tenderness she called for in vain now would have found its way from some spring in her heart had she been able to feel he had had greater gifts for someone else than he had had for her.

All the while came the laughter from across the street. Helen was out on the green now with her friends; they were gathered round her as she stood before a lilac tree—it seemed to be some happy little ceremony. She had a feeling of their being just an organic part of the May morning. With what pure, unhurt joy in life they laughed!

Of a sudden it seemed to the woman supporting the dying man that the rest of it would not matter if only she could win back from life a feeling of gladness in them. Through the sterile years even her love for love, her faith in joy, had withered. In some way she did not understand he had gone deeper than killing her love for him. He had blighted her whole feeling for life. Something at the center had hardened, so that there had not even been what she felt would have been the more noble rather than the less virtuous part, an impulse to fight to keep alive the faith—hope—that sometime she must find it.

Now the little bride had gone indoors. Getting ready to go away? Leaving the laughing friends—the loving mother—going now to take what life had for her? Turning that glowing, confident face to—what? The tears life has for life fell to the hand life had let go; it seemed to her so sad, so infinitely more sad than death, the way they hoped, the way they dared—their glowing faces, confident steps—over and over again that same old rejoicing in life’s promises, that same world—old tragic trust.

But it was a softer face, a face more tender than tragic which a moment later bent over the man whose breath still came. There had been, and so simply wrought that she knew of no change, a cunning inversion from bitter sorrow that life would not keep the promises to a passionate wish that it might—hope that it would! Her lips were moving; and the prayer was not for the man who was leaving life, nor for herself, defrauded by it, but: “Be good to them, Life—oh, tender with them—knowing so little—asking so much!”

Into that same moment came the realization that these were his last breaths. Should she call her mother? It would seem she should not be alone, yet … She looked away, for in that last moment death was twisting life so ruthlessly, and she saw that it had been as she supposed. Helen had gone in to change her dress; now she was out on the porch, ready to go, the man to whom she turned for love and life beside her, her mother hovering on the other side, an arm about her, and all around her the friends, not laughing now, silenced by the moment. The last sound of life in the dying man’s throat she scarcely heard, held by that look on the happy girl’s face as she walked down to the carriage.

The Smart Set, Sep 1913

Whom Mince Pie Hath Joined Together

She thought it was the concierge to fix the water tap, or she might not have gone to the door, for she was hurrying to finish the miniature that one of the first families of Montana wished made from a daguerreotype. But it proved to be Sam Thomas, looking as prosperous as only an illustrator for the American magazines ever does look in the Latin Quarter.

“Now before you are severe with me about coming here at ten o’clock of a sunshiny morning,” he began, “let me tell you that I came to ask a very special question.”

“If you came to ask me again if I will marry you—”

“I didn’t.”

“ Very well then, and I want to reassure you. You see, I have a thin face. Perhaps, to be quite honorable, when a man begins saying nice things to me I ought to speak up: ‘But I was born that way. I’m not as hungry as I look.’”

She had resumed her work. Her big apron made her look like the girl he had grownup with back in their Indiana town. If only her hair, instead of being coiled around her head, were in two braids down her back. He used to pull it. He’d like to pull it now for that speech she had just made.

“You know,” he mildly suggested, “for that matter, you could marry me without being hungry. Someday. I may go in for art myself, and then certainly you would be very hungry indeed.”

“I can get there by a shorter cut.” She laughed, but the laugh did not gladden his heart.

“Betty,” he began, speaking jocularly as, after their quarrel of the other day, that seemed the only approach left open, “filled as I am with memories of your robust and never-sleeping temper, I confidently expect within the next thirty seconds to have yon plaster bust come into sudden and violent and damaging contact with my little better than plaster head; but tell me”—his voice got away from him a little—“for the sake of the past—you remember, Betty, that we rode in the same wheelbarrow, were licked by the same teachers, swiped cookies from the same cupboard—just tell me, are you ever hungry?”

The girl looked up at him as he sat on the end of her table. In that moment he was again the big boy who lived in the next block, the mean boy who bullied her, the understanding, tenderhearted boy who cried when her puppy died; and because in the days of blindman’s buff she had played fair with him, she had to play fair with him now in simply saying “Yes,” and as simply going on with her work.

For an instant it was as if someone had hit him and he had lost his wind. What saved him was rage. “Well, why under Heaven,” he exploded, “don’t you go home?”

“Why under Heaven,” she pleasantly returned, “don’t prosperous Americans mind their own business?”

“Nonsense! Now look here, Betsey Roberts, you can’t put any of those airs over on me! I—didn’t I cut your hair off when you were three years old? Seems to me that ought to let a fellow in on things. And don’t you call me a ‘prosperous American,’ Betty. I’ve licked fellows for calling me less offensive things than that.”

“Yes, you were the village terror, weren’t you, Sam?” she smiled, making the eyes of the lady of long ago a little bluer.

“Now look here, Betty”—he left the table and moved nearer—“don’t be a fool—that is, don’t be more of a fool than you can help being.” Betty painted on. “This kind of performance is rather silly, you know.”

He succeeded so well in denying his voice to his feeling that it was as if some of the color on Betty’s palette had found its way to two spots just beneath her cheekbones.

“The attitude of the prosperous toward the non-prosperous has always been uninteresting thing to observe,” she remarked, turning the miniature upside down and peering at it as if her real interest lay there. “Now don’t be childish”—with mocking mimicry—“don’t be so stupid as to think you can get along on nothing!” As there was no reply she had to look up, and then she had to say: “I’m sorry.”

“I should think you would be.”

“That’s not the answer.” She wrinkled up her nose in a familiar little grimace. “You always did make one sorry for having been sorry.”

“Well, now see here, Betty”—he briskly attacked the problem anew—“while your starving in the Quarter would make a nice story for the rest of them to tell afterward it would be rather rough on you, don’t you think? I know how you love a dramatic situation. But it doesn’t seem to me you’d get much out of this. Come now, Betty”—in the manner of putting all nonsense aside—“get on your hat and let’s go over and see about passage.”

Betty had let the miniature fall to her lap. “There was an American girl starved to death here last year.” She did not look directly at him, and her voice was curiously hushed.

“Pleasant food for meditation!”

“Yes; but you see meditation isn’t always sufficient food. I can see her grave from my window.” She rose—her whole manner had the hushed quality of her voice—and moved to the alcove fitted up as a kitchen. “See?” From her fourth floor, across roofs that housed the living, they looked down on a corner of Montparnasse Cemetery.

“Nice outlook!” But he was looking, not at the graves off there, but with new keenness at the girl beside him.

“I don’t mind it.” Her arms rested on the sill; there was in her drooping figure a revelation of weariness. “Sometimes I think it’s rather restful. It’s one place where things can’t be any different. At least they aren’t wondering what to do next. Some kind French people, who didn’t happen to need it, gave her the grave. Right behind that whitish tree—”

“Oh, cut it out, Betty’” he cried. “What’s the matter with you? Move someplace where you can look out at live ones!”

But she was so strange—as if he were not reaching her at all. “It rained the day they buried her. They tell about it at teas. She was from Kansas. They think it was so silly of her.”

“It was silly! She should have gone to someone.”

She smiled a slow smile. “Just what they all say, all you who sell your stuff. I often wonder just what people she did go to; just what things she may have tried before She interests me—because she was so silly, I suppose. I sometimes sit here patching together her childish, stupid story—” She broke off with a confused laugh, as if having come to herself.

Taking her arm he led her out to the other room. There he said quietly: “Come, Betty, get on your hat.”

But just that quickly she had shut herself in again. “Off for Indiana?” she scoffed. “How alluring The other day a girl came up here and cried because she was homesick. She wanted to see the old well. I told her that after she’d been there a month the only use she’d have for the dear old well would be to throw herself into it!”

•    •    •    •

A long time Mr. Sam Thomas sat before a fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens and raged and meditated and grieved. It seemed a deadlock. When Betty had realized how she had distressed him she had grown contrite enough to show the nice soup she was making, tell of the money she was to have for the “fool miniature,” explain how she had been a little blue and this was just a hangover from past blueness. She had poked all sorts of fun at the way she had been talking, but it was that hard-shelled gaiety that opens to nothing else. The way between them seemed blocked.

He loved Betty. Why he had always loved Betty—even when she got stubborn and mean and “acted like a fool.” Well, he had been a fool too. He had been a fool that day in New York when he put his fears about her going to Paris in such a way as to hurt her pride. And then ever since she was three years old he had so loved to tease her that it got him to all sorts of places he had never set out for. Betty was the same way herself. Between them he never knew just how they had got where they were. The other day he was telling her that he loved her; and first thing he knew they were in a fearful row about how it was nobody’s business except her own what she ate, and she was jibingly thanking him for the organization of the Betsey Roberts Relief Expedition. Now it would be like her to starve just to spite him!

He sat there glaring at a statue of a stalwart matron who had had her own troubles in days when she was not stone, and gloomily reiterated that it was a horrible mess. He did not like the shine of Betty’s eyes. Those vivid red spots came too easily to her cheeks. It never used to be so easy to get the bones of Betty’s dear face. He sat there, torturing himself with thoughts of what it would take to do that, hating himself for having been so jubilant at seeing her on the day of his arrival as to fail to see that she was not her self. He had no use for a world that made it hard for finely organized Betty and easier for his clumsy self. He gave the lady safe in stone a parting glare, telling himself that of course he couldn’t leave Paris till something was done.

At luncheon with a friend an idea came to him. “Say, Bill,” he broke out, “ever have your miniature painted?”

“Nope,” Bill replied discouragingly.

“Well, don’t you want your miniature painted?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t you think your wife would like to have it?”

“Nope.”

“Why wouldn’t she? Wives always want their husbands’ miniatures. They put ’em on their writing-desks. You can have it framed and take it to her for a present.”

“Don’t think she’d like it.”

“Why wouldn’t she like it? I tell you, old man, women like those little attentions. First thing you know, Bill, you’ll be losing your wife’s affections.”

“Guess not,” comfortably answered Bill.

“Well, now look here, Bill, this is something I particularly want you to do. Why I’d like a miniature of you, Bill. You can give it to me.”

No matter what it might have spoiled, Sam could not have helped laughing there. Bill was large, and his face was round and red. But his heart was kind. When he grasped that he must have his miniature painted because there was someone who should be painting it he admitted that perhaps it would be a nice little attention to show his wife.

Next morning, however, he got what Sam scornfully called “cold feet.” He said he didn’t have the nerve to tell the young lady he wanted a miniature. How would he feel, sitting there before her, knowing what she must bethinking of him for wanting to be compressed into a miniature? But Sam, earnestly if not tactfully, said he could lay it all on his wife. The young lady would know, by herself, that women were queer. She wouldn’t hold it against him. And he was not to let wild horses drag it out of him that he had ever heard of Sam Thomas. Bill had heard of her at a tea where he asked about American miniaturists in Paris; they had told him of several, and she was one of them.

A few hours later Bill returned with the mournful story that he guessed the young lady didn’t like his looks; further, she was “on.” She thought it very strange the people should have given him her name. She was not well known. People did not tell other people about her.

“Little fool!” groaned Sam.

“She was sure they must have meant Miss Somebody-or-Other across the street. Miss Somebody-or-Other had a reputation. I replied that yes, I knew she had, but I didn’t like her reputation—that was, I didn’t like her work. She said that showed I knew nothing about it; it was beautiful work. I said I had personal reasons for not wanting to go across the street. That was bad work, for she came back with,‘Yes, and I guess personal reasons have something to do with your coming here!’ But she worked on for about half an hour—say, she does look sick; think she’s got a fever—then she threw the thing under the table and said it was ridiculous for me to want a miniature, that I was not of the miniature type and ought to be done big. I said: ‘Alright, then, the bigger the better.’ She began something about a fellow down the street. I said I wanted her to do it; and then her cheeks got as red as fire and she opened the door and blazed out: ‘better go back and talk it over with your friend Mr. Sam Thomas!’”

•    •    •    •

Miss Betsey Roberts—her name was not Elizabeth; she had been named for an estimable Aunt Betsey, who, after all, left her money to the Foreign Mission Board—spent an emotionally varied half-hour after the sheepish exit of Sam’s friend Bill. Oh, Sam thought he was very clever! She smiled at having been cleverer. Then the smile got away from her and grew tender. Well, it would do him good! He needn’t have been so sure what was going to happen; and he needn’t think she was going to be married just to be fed, either. Was it very nice the way he had love and nourishing food all mixed up in his mind? That made her think of the soup and she went out and stirred it. There were carrots in it this time, and rice; she had rung all known changes on the benevolent soupbone.

She would eat some of it and then put the last touches to that silly miniature she was to take over that afternoon and get two hundred francs for. That would buy a number of soupbones; and eggs she would have now too. She would have another chance at real work, and suddenly she knew why she wanted to do real work more than she had ever wanted it before. Then she could marry Sam. Was she going to have it hanging to the mind of either of them that she married him because she couldn’t do anything else? So, smiling, she must do something else in a hurry.

She rode over the river atop the bus. It was November, but not too cold for the top of the bus. As she handed the man her ten-centime piece she counted her money: three more such pieces and a two-franc piece—forty-six cents. She smiled in considering how much more she would have coming back. A chance for real work! She had been just horrid So ridiculously touchy! She would be nice now. It was being “down and out” that made people disagreeably touchy.

Walking down the Champs Elysées to the hotel where these people lived she wished Sam was with her; the Champs was so gay and beautiful, the day so bright and crisp.

And when she left the hotel and walked slowly on she wanted Sam even more. She had the same three coppers and two-franc piece in her pocketbook. The only thing she had when she quitted the hotel that she had not when she entered it was a note. It said that Miss Willard and her mother had gone on to Vienna with some friends. They would stop in Paris on their way back a couple of months later, and would arrange about the miniature then. Sorry, but terribly hurried; no time to take the matter up then.

For an hour she sat on one of the benches bordering the beautiful street. She sat very still; even rage and disappointment stilled before this other thing. She was afraid. She had tried too long not to be afraid. Too many nights she had got up and looked out where that other girl lay. So she was sitting very still, waiting for it to pass.

Suddenly she got up and started for the American Express Company’s rooms, where there were always a number of Americans reading the papers and writing letters and meeting friends; a place where things seemed moving on all right, where no one was afraid. Just then she could not have gone home, where she would have had to see how little she had to eat, would have had to look out at that other girl who had had nothing to eat. A long time she lingered, watching her countrywomen. She supposed she was the only woman in those rooms who had ever shrunk from breaking an egg because after she had used it she would have no egg. And yet the other women would not have singled Betty out as ever having been terrified at the sound of a breaking egg shell. Some of her clothes were much worn, but the impression would be that she happened to be wearing her old clothes that day. Her hat she had made herself, but wore it as if it had come from a smart place. Just the way her neckpiece was fastened suggested good-looking clothes hanging up in a closet at home.

A woman who had that day taken some of her good-looking clothes from the closet—clothes skillfully designed to frustrate middle-aged stoutness—was drawn to Betty as a “nice girl.” They chanced to be sitting near each other and a little apart from the others. It crossed the woman’s mind that the girl had been sick and was overtired just then, and, perhaps unconsciously attracted by a sense of some common thing in their moods, she drew her chair nearer to ask: “My dear young lady, you don’t happen to know, do you, where I could get a mince pie?”

Betty stared—for that was voice for the things she was feeling—and then began to laugh. Why there were diamond rings on the woman’s fingers. Didn’t she know that she could pawn them? Finally she stammered out an apology for having laughed. “I suppose it does seem funny.” The woman spoke as if things that seemed funny were far and forever removed from her. She was looking off at something.

With a start Betty knew what she was doing. She was seeing things that other people were not seeing. She was alone with something that terror shaped for her. Oh—but that wouldn’t do. Betty was desperately casting around in her mind. Then, remembering, light broke over her face, and, “Why, I’ll make you a mince pie!” she exclaimed.

The face that had seemed locked by misery broke into varying emotions. “Why—would you?” she gasped. “Could you?”

Betty told of mince pies that she had assisted to make; assured her that she would love to make one for her.

Then, drawing her chair still nearer, turning her back on the rest of the room because the tears were too close, the woman told why she must have the mince pie. Her husband was sick. He wanted a mince pie. It was on his mind. She just had to have one for him.

Betty said she feared that mince pie was not good for the sick.

For a moment her companion did not reply; her face was turned away, as if even a girl who would make a mince pie for her was not to see what was there. When she turned back, before she spoke, Betty knew what she was going to say. “The doctor says it doesn’t make much difference,” were her tremulous words.

Betty’s hand went out to the hand that lay on the arm of the wicker chair—a hand cold and shaking despite the diamond rings that could so easily have been pawned. For several minutes the two women sat there silently.

After that the woman told her story: Of leaving Chicago with her husband six months before for a long rest after he had overworked in business; of the long and profitless wandering about trying different cures; of coming to Paris two weeks before—wanting to go home—the longing of both of them for familiar things, for friends; then of his strong will breaking—no longer able to get out of bed—sick there at the hotel; of the kind English doctor who told her two days ago not to try to take him home; of how their son’s wife was going to have a baby, and so the son, Charlie, could not come; but she had cabled Mr. Harvey’s (her husband’s) partner, and he was starting, but it would be a week. The hotel did not want them there any longer, but the woman had begged to be allowed to remain until Mr. Harvey’s partner came; then she supposed it must be a hospital, which he hated. “You know,” she said, “how hotels are. They’re so afraid—” She halted, not putting into words what it was they were afraid of.

She went on to tell other things: their youth—early married life—his goodness to her—things they had gone through together—their prosperity, for which, it seemed to her now, this was the price. “If we were only home!” It was a cry from sorrow borne alone, the cry of grief in loneliness. “Why I haven’t a friend in Paris!” The tears had come and she turned away.

At a touch on her arm she turned back. The girl’s eyes were swimming, but she was smiling, too, as she said: “Why yes, you have.”

Again the woe that the woman’s face had stiffened to broke into understanding, and, touched, she nodded, dried her eyes, took a powder paper from her bag and wiped her tear streaked face as if getting ready to take up life again. “You’ve no idea,” she said, and her voice, too, was as if it had been newly touched up for meeting the world, “what it will mean to have something brought in.” She laughed a little in saying: “I don’t suppose you can possibly know what it will mean to have something we don’t pay for.” She was adjusting her veil and did not see Betty’s face just then, nor the tightening of Betty’s hand around the little purse she held. “We’ll have it for Thanksgiving,” she went on, and seemed to be taking a faint pleasure in planning it. “That will be day after tomorrow, won’t it? My dear, you’ll come and eat some of it with us, won’t you? It’s queer about the pie. It isn’t that he really craves it for eating. He wants to see it to watch someone eating it. It’s just that his mind has fixed on that.” She resolutely controlled herself to say: “It represents old things—home things.”

Betty understandingly nodded. They had risen and were walking toward the stairway. “So you come with your pie and we’ll have Thanksgiving dinner together. I can get a turkey at the hotel. Father will enjoy seeing it—anyway.”

They stood together for a moment before parting, as various other women had been standing there to get her making some plan. “It will be nice to have this little touch of home before we—leave the hotel.” Quickly taking refuge in the manner of those other women, smiling and nodding goodbye, she turned away.

•    •    •    •

Betty walked slowly down the Avenue de l’Opera; she was taking stock of her larder at home. It did not take long. She shook her purse and the coins rattled faintly. Mince pie? It meant meat, suet, apples, raisins, currants, spices, to say nothing of the cider. Her walk slowed until she stood stock-still. Then her puckered face relaxed to glad relief, smiling at the beautiful simpleness of it. Why she would borrow it from Sam! Of course!

She was all but breathless as she hurried into Sam’s hotel. While the clerk was finding out whether he was in his room or not she spied him across the lobby, looking with profound gloom at a magnificent kimono on sale there.

“Sam!’” she cried, while yet some little way off. “I’m so glad I found you. I want to borrow some money!”

Two men standing by moved discreetly away. Sam’s impulse to kill them was blunted by bewilderment. Bewildered? He was dumfounded. After all his delicate plotting But wasn’t that just like Betty? Grimly amused, almost overwhelmingly relieved and very deeply happy, he remained quite matter of course as he asked Betty how much she’d take.

She stood there in perplexity. “ Now—I wonder.” She raised considering eyes to his. “It takes a great many different things for mincemeat.”

“Why—so it does,” he lamely agreed.

“And I think I’d like some cranberries.” She sank into deeper perplexity. “I’ll have to borrow an oven from somewhere.”

“I don’t seem to have an oven anywhere about me,” replied Sam, feeling in his pockets. She continued to stand in contemplation.

“Giving a Thanksgiving party, Betty?” he ventured.

She nodded.

“I invited?”

She shook her head. “Oh—very well,” he replied formally.

She came out after a minute with the explanation: “I’m cooking it for a man.”

“Oh—I see; very nice.” His tone said that he did not see and he did not think it nice.

He was thinking she was none too jubilant over this fellow she was to make the pie for, when she looked up at him and said: “He’s dying.”

Bewildered, he could not for the life of him resist: “You mean, Betty, he will be dying.”

She looked at him reproachfully. “It’s not funny, Sam. He is dying. They’re from Chicago. His wife is here alone with him. I’m the only friend she has in Paris.” She filled up like a child about to cry, as she finished: “He wants a mince pie.” Late that night Sam sat in Betty’s tiny kitchen, wearing one of her all-over aprons, in his lap a huge chopping-bowl borrowed from the concierge, chopping with tireless fervor.

Suddenly Betty sank down on the floor, back to the wall, covered her face with her hands and laughed. “Oh, Sam!’” she finally gasped, wiping her eyes; “you do look so funny—your mouth set, just glaring down into that stuff; if you could know how funny you look!” Long-suffering Sam reached under the voluminous apron, pulled forth a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “I am glad,” he said, “to have afforded amusement. And now, having done double duty, I shall have a smoke.”

He continued to hold the bowl, balancing the chopper nicely on the edge of it. And so they sat and talked for a longtime, just as they had done many times back home in the kitchen where Betty had learned to cook. It swept them back to those days; and after he had gone Betty kept smiling as she put things away for the night. It was like it used to be; somehow she felt as she used to feel. From the minute they left Sam’s hotel and began skirmishing around together for things for mincemeat, it seemed, all of itself, to be just like it used to be. She went to sleep that night thinking, not that she was down and out, but that she had an awful lot to do on the morrow. Well, Sam would help her. She was smiling as she fell asleep.

They borrowed an oven from the concierge, and forth to milkwoman and breadwoman and neighbor went the strange tales of how an American gentleman was very malade, and how the always agreeable American demoiselle was baking for him a huge tarte—oh, a very, very big tarte! A sick Frenchman would instantly die of tasting such a tarte. But the Americans—so different! Were they not always droll?

•    •    •    •

It was when dining at Lavenue’s the next night that Betty suddenly exclaimed: “Sam, I can get you in at the party, after all! What he really wants is to watch somebody eat the pie.” Then Betty snickered.

Sam pushed back the sole to which he had been paying attentions no chef could resent. “The fact is I don’t care at all for mince pie,” he said, with his youthful huffiness when teased. He added loftily: “It always gives me a pain.”

But he went, manfully carrying the pie. At the last minute it took all the courage he could muster not to get out of it. After he had been in the room five minutes he was glad that he had not got out of it, not that it was easier than he had thought, but because it was so much harder. He could sit by the bed and talk with the poor chap who was not going to get well; it was the woman hovering around the bed, the woman who knew and went on smiling, who made him wonder how that mince pie was to get past his throat.

But the pie did get past his throat. Indeed it was the enthusiastic eating of Mr. Thomas that saved the party. It was early evident that it would need saving. The sick man, now that he had it, seemed too weak to interest himself in the mince pie. Mrs. Harvey would exclaim, “just see, Father, such a beautiful, homey pie!” and he would nod, smile a little, say something gracious to Betty about having made it; and then such a tired look would steal over his face!

Mrs. Harvey and the English nurse and Sam and Betty sat down to Thanksgiving dinner. They talked with commendable vivacity of good, old-time Thanksgivings, the old-fashioned creaking table. Several times Mr. Harvey began, “Do you remember, Dolly?” but each time got too tired to finish the story. He took one bite of turkey and said it wouldn’t have seemed like Thanksgiving without turkey. The wisp of a piece of mince pie the nurse grudgingly put on his plate he said he would eat “after a while.” He told Betty he could tell by the smell that it was a wonderful pie, that the man who got her would be the lucky fellow, and if the lucky fellow should be such a fool as not to appreciate her she could always make her fortune out of mince pie. Mrs. Harvey and Betty played with their pie, concerned with the effort not to drop tears into it; the English nurse ate hers as one eats mere food; but Sam ate his as only the greedy American boy can eat mince pie: with “ums” and that frank disregard of all irrelevant conversation which in America characterizes the eating of mince pie by those whose stomachs are yet young. When Mrs. Harvey suggested a second piece and he hesitated, with, “Well, now, if you think you can spare it—” the sick man for the first time laughed aloud. It was while Sam was beaming over that second piece that Mr. Harvey said: “Dolly, it makes me think of Charlie.”

Mrs. Harvey replied: “Yes, doesn’t it make you think of Charlie?”

And it seemed to Betty that she had never known anything more brave than the lightness of that tone.

When Sam and Betty had risen to leave there was a final joke about Sam’s three pieces of pie. “Well, now, maybe you think,” he boasted, “that I couldn’t have eaten another one.” Laughing, Mrs. Harvey pushed toward him the plate on which one piece remained. “Oh, no, Mrs. Harvey,” he remonstrated in the good old manner of one open to conviction; “why I wouldn’t take your last piece.”

“Dolly,” came the voice from the bed, “you let him have it. The nice girl will make you another one.”

“Well, of course, if Betty will make another one—”

Sam picked the pie up in his hand and went over to the foot of the bed. “This is the way we used to do it, isn’t it?” he grinned at Mr. Harvey, and began cramming it down.

The man turned to his wife, a real twinkle in his eye. “Dolly, that’s the way we fellows do when we swipe ’em.” It was the first time he had really seemed to be one of them. Smiling, he said lingeringly: “Well—well; it doesn’t seem like Europe. Seems like back home—and a long time ago.”

Still smiling, his eyes closed; and Betty and Sam stole away, Mrs. Harvey following them to the lift.

She thanked Betty, but she broke down in thanking Sam.

The two did not speak as they left the hotel. Sam moved toward the cabs waiting outside. Betty clutched his arm. “Get a closed one, Sam,” she whispered, “so I can—cry.”

But she did not immediately cry; she only remained very still and silent as they rode across the Seine. The tired look of the man life was letting go, the woman who because she loved could smile when her heart was breaking—that look in upon reality was melting from Betty’s heart all that was not real until at last, impetuously turning to Sam, hands held out, she sobbed: “Oh, Sam—as you stood there—just stuffing down that pie—I loved you so! I loved you so!”

•    •    •    •

It was some minutes afterward—after those first moments into which words do not intrude—that Sam asked: “Betty, darling, you feel sure it means you do care for me? You know, dearest, there may be moments when I shall not be stuffing down mince pie.”

Laughing, she caught his hand. “Sam! it’s you, isn’t it? I’m so glad I don’t lose you.” Her face seemed to assure him that it was not alone the eating of mince pie which endeared him to her.

After they had rumbled a long way down the Rue de Bac she raised her head from the place where it seemed to think it belonged, to say—the dear, familiar girl living there in the new wonderful girl: “You see, Sam, I can marry you now because, if I don’t make painting go—I’ll keep on, of course; but if I do fall down with that, did you hear, Sam, what he said about my fortune in mince pie?”

Ladies’ Home Journal, Nov 1913

The Rules of the Institution

She could not decide what to wear. Never having known such an occasion, or anyone who had known a like occasion, how could she tell? She decided against the gown she was wearing, in which she had poured at her sister-in-law’s tea that afternoon, as possibly seeming to suggest her own blessings. But after she was dressed in plain shirt-waist and skirt as most in keeping, she took them off as too significant in their plainness. She hated the way she had grown self-conscious about it, and saying to herself, “I’ll wear just what I would if going to spend the evening with any of the girls I know,” put on a simple blue silk frock of which she herself was particularly fond.

Her mother came in and looked her over doubtfully. “Going to wear that? Well, I don’t know; I was thinking something plain—not to make her feel the difference. And still, as someone was saying the other day, perhaps the poor need to see the nice things we have. I suppose it is one way of giving them pleasure.”

Judith had flushed. “Mother, don’t look at it that way! I don’t want to get it in my mind that way. I’m simply going to make a call—going to see a girl and have a little talk with her.”

“Well, that’s very nice of you. That is the democratic way, I suppose. And still, when you know what’s underneath it—”

“But I’m trying to forget what’s underneath it,” answered Judith, brightly.

The brightness was not convincing, for her mother remonstrated: “I don’t think they should have asked you to do it. I just hate to have you go—a young girl like you, and all alone.”

“But that was the point,” said Judith, with deft little twists at the blue dress—“my being near this girl’s age. Mrs. Emmons proposed it—though it was her husband’s idea, she said. That surprised me. I didn’t suppose he had any ideas.”

“Well, really, my dear,” retorted Mrs. Brunswick with that asperity which edges the defense of a contemporary to a critical younger generation, “I don’t know why you should say that. I went all through the high school with Charlie Emmons, and I can assure you he had a great many ideas.”

“Did he? He seems such a—booster,” laughed Judith.

“Well, he wasn’t born a booster. And, for that matter, he didn’t want to go into business. His folks forced that on him—and mighty disappointed he was for a while. Probably he’s all over it now; people do get over things,” was her comfortable conclusion.

“What did he want to be?” inquired Judith, not that she cared particularly about knowing, but that she might hold her mind from the thing before her.

“Oh, I don’t know exactly; go on studying, I believe. Write, maybe. Anyway, he loved books.”

Judith was silent for a moment. Then, “I hadn’t known that,” she said, simply, as if wanting to do justice where she had been doing injustice. Something about it was holding her mind, for her mother had to ask twice,

“Going to wear your black hat?”

Mrs. Brunswick followed her daughter downstairs, continuing to deplore her errand. “Now my dear,”—voice and manner curiously sharpened in saying it—“if she says anything horrid to you, just get right up and leave!”

“Oh no, mother,” laughed the girl. “That isn’t the idea.”

“Judith,” her mother commanded, “I forbid you to stay there if she is—unpleasant to you. Simply tell her that she must keep the rules of the institution, or leave. It’s simple enough, I’m sure.”

Her brother sauntered out from the living-room. “Off to see the erring daughter?”

She turned sharply. “Fred, I don’t think that’s a very nice way to speak of a girl!”

“No, Fred,” admonished his mother. “It was not—respectful.”

“You would have put it stronger than that if it had been one of the girls of our crowd, mother,” said Judith, abruptly turning away.

Her mother followed to the door, patting her arm. “There, there, dear, you’re a little upset, and no wonder. Well, Henry’s here with the car.”

Judith drew back. “Mother! I don’t want the car. I don’t want to go there in an automobile!”

“Nonsense! Why, what nonsense! She probably knows you have an automobile. Don’t get silly notions. Henry, you are to take Miss Judith to Severns Hall. The home for working-girls on High Street,” she added, as light did not break over Henry’s face. After the motor had started down the driveway she called, “Just tell her she’s got to keep the rules!”

The thing had grown intolerable to Judith: her brother’s flippant phrase, her mother’s attitude, forced it upon her in the very way she had tried not to think of it. Reprimanding a girl for staying out late at night! She stayed out late at night herself. How utterly foolish she would feel, sitting there talking goody-goody talk to that other girl. Drawing up before this “working-girls’ home” in an automobile, and tripping in and laying down the law to a girl who worked for her living!

“Henry,” she suddenly called, “let me out here. Yes, right here. And you needn’t come for me. I have another arrangement for getting home.” As she slammed the door of the car she took a vicious satisfaction in the consciousness that certainly Henry would think it queer.

She gained a measure of composure in walking slowly through the soft April night. There was no use fussing about it now; she would be as pleasant as she could with this girl—just as natural and nice about it as she knew how to be. She would simply speak of how, in a place like that, there had to be rules; how, if one broke them, another would; of how life had to be arranged for the greatest good to the greatest number. She took heart in repeating “the greatest good to the greatest number.”

But her few minutes in the reception room with the matron disheartened her again. The woman’s official motherliness irritated her. She was too self-conscious in the delicacy with which she spoke of the errand on which Miss Brunswick had come. Judith hated the atmosphere of conspiracy, the assumption of superiority, into which she was taken.

“I do hope,” Mrs. Hughes murmured, as Judith rose to go to the girl’s room, “that you will not find her disagreeable.”

“Why, that hardly seems likely,” was Judith’s rather cool response.

The matron shook her head. “I think I should warn you that you may find it harder than you think. I have tried to get Mary’s confidence, but—” She paused, shaking her head. “I am very much afraid there is something in her life we do not understand. There’s something queer about her.”

With this, after she had been in the girl’s room five minutes, Judith was in private agreement. And it was true that it was harder than she had thought. The moment the girl looked at her she wanted to run away; that was not because of rudeness, or any tangible offense, but because something in this girl made her own nicely laid little plans fall back as inadequate. She tried to be pleasant; she was conscious of being very pleasant indeed, and of being at the same time rather futile and absurd as she talked, for example, of spring’s having come.

It became the more difficult to go on because a gleam in Mary Graham’s black eyes suggested an amused understanding of her visitor’s predicament, a vexing appreciation of the situation.

“I came to talk with you about something, Miss Graham,” she said, with dignity.

The girl nodded—for all the world as if discreetly amused.

Judith, doing her best to rise out of her ruffled feelings, stated the case with gentleness. In a place of that sort there must be rules. One of the rules—and considering the greatest good to the greatest number it seemed a wise one—was that the girls living in the house must be in at nine o’clock at night—unless they had stated in advance that they would be out beyond that hour, telling why. To be sure—she hastened to add, Mary Graham having raised her eyes from the tassel on her visitor’s dress to her face and then lowered them again—sometimes things arose one had not known of in advance; certainly that might happen, and, if explained, would be met with understanding, she was certain. But where it happened continuously, and was not explained, even when explanation was requested, it seemed a willful violation of the regulations.

She paused, but the girl to whom she had been speaking did not reply. As if there was nothing to reply to! She did not know why she, who had come with the kindliest intentions in the world, should in some intangible way—there was the grievance—be made to feel on the defensive and ridiculous. Her voice was less gentle as she said,

“If one lives in an institution one must expect to keep its rules.”

Mary Graham looked at her then as if that were something really to meet. Her interested gaze was a penetrating one. “I suppose so,” she said, as if weighing it. “Well”—her eyes left Judith and wandered around the room—a plain but attractive room. Her glance lingered for an instant on the white bed. Then she said, quietly, “I’ll leave.”

It startled from Judith a quick, “Oh, not that!”

The girl’s eyes were lowered again and she did not raise them as she repeated, “I’ll leave.” After a moment she looked up at Judith with a glance that seemed to be inquiring why she remained.

“Why, not that,” faltered Judith, but did not know how to go on. It was not easy to talk when one had the sense of talking only to the outside of a person. Yet she could not bear to go. Nor was it her pride alone which rose against her going like that. Something in the girl strangely drew her. She wanted to reach the things locked in.

“You haven’t liked it here?” she asked, timidly.

Again the girl raised her eyes, and, as if sensitive to change, did not immediately lower them. “Why, yes, I’ve liked it here—in most ways,” she said. She appeared to forget Judith and to be brooding over her own situation; the heavy brows drawn, her face was almost menacingly somber. After a moment there escaped from her a violent, “I hate it downtown!”

Immediately she drew back into her retreat, so far within it that Judith could sit watching her, fascinated by that smoldering quality, drawn by something that in a rude sense seemed power. She observed details about her—those little things that often point the way. There was no working-girl’s finery, but neither was there anything that seemed contrived in her plainness; cheap white shirt-waist, black serge skirt—evidently her interest was not in clothes. She had a great deal of black hair which was done low and uncaringly. Her color was not good and her features were too heavy for beauty. Judith felt that she would be quite different if what smoldered within blazed through. She wanted to know more of her—more than there seemed any chance of her knowing. She was about twenty, Mrs. Emmons had said, and worked in the corset-factory, where she was skillful and had a good position—as those positions went, she had hazily added. Yet she was not a success as a worker, Judith had been told; she had lost several positions through what seemed shiftlessness—staying away and being late. “There seems something unruly about her,” Mrs. Emmons had said; “not,” she had charitably added, “that you can put your finger on anything wrong.” .

“But if you like it here better than downtown,” Judith ventured after a moment, “why do you change?”

The girl raised sullen eyes and replied with a short, disagreeable laugh. “Forgot what you just said?”

Judith flushed, but replied, quietly: “I didn’t say leave. I meant stay here and keep the rules.”

“Oh yes, stay here and keep the rules!” she mocked. “It’s easy enough, isn’t it?”

“The others do,” said Judith.

“The ‘others’!” she scoffed, adding, under her breath, “Don’t talk to me about the ‘others.’”

There was a pause, and then Judith, nervously, somehow feeling herself to be speaking as a child speaks, began to say how Mrs. Hughes was reasonable, and if once in a while something came up one had not known of in advance—

“You always know, when you start out anywhere, how long you’re going to be gone?” came the savage interruption.

“No,” honestly replied Judith. After a minute she forced herself to say, “And yet, if there are, as you implied, advantages in living here, might it not be worth while to give in on that point and—”

Again she was interrupted; not at first by words, but by the blaze of passion in the girl’s eyes.

“‘Give in’!” she cried. “‘Give in’!—that’s just it. That’s all there is to life—this ‘give in,’ and ‘give in’ and ‘give in.’ What’s left? That’s what I’d like you to tell me! That’s what I want to know before I ‘give in’ any more!”

Judith, staggered, could not reply, and the girl, powerless to hold back what had been loosened, broke out again: “I tell you I’m tired of giving in! It’s nothing but ‘give in.’ Why”—her eyes narrowed as she shot this through the tumult of her feeling—“the whole thing’s an institution, and you’re to keep the rules of that institution, and to do that you give in, till after a while you aren’t there. I tell you I know! You go!” A little cry escaped from Judith Brunswick, sitting far forward in her chair. “Why—I know that,” she gasped. “Why—I know that!”

“I’ll tell you where I go at night sometimes.” The other girl tossed her head, as if defending her inmost stronghold. “I’ll tell you where I was the other night when I came in after eleven and Mrs. Hughes said she would have to ‘speak to the ladies.’ I wasn’t at a dance-hall;” she laughed, mockingly. “Though I would have been,” she threw in darkly, “if I’d wanted to be. I wasn’t with a man at all. I—” she halted, then said, so simply that it was moving, “I don’t know any man I’d care about being with. I was by myself. I took a walk. I was trying”—the defiance had fallen from her, leaving her quite exposed—“trying to get back to myself; back—” There was a break in her voice, but her eyes went on.

“I walked a long way up the river; up to a place I know, where you can see far things. It was moonlight. I sat on a hill a long time, not thinking about what time it was. I was—” Again she broke off, shook herself as if in disgust at her poor powers, then demanded, with a little laugh at once wistful and hard, “When you’re educated, can you tell things?”

But Judith’s reply was checked by the new feeling that flamed in the girl’s face. “Do you ever feel it?” she cried. “That life’s rushing past you?—rushing right past you? Do you ever want to reach out with your two hands and take it?” She was leaning forward, clenching her hands as if seizing upon something. “Do you ever feel that something’s swinging shut? Something that won’t open again? Like something in you had been beaten back?—something really you, beaten back till it doesn’t often move any more? Oh, I try to make myself a wooden thing! But there come those times when you know—and then—then—” She came to a stop. “Then the wooden thing gets smashed a little,” was all she could say, and tried to laugh.

After a moment she looked up at Judith to say, “I’ll tell you what I was doing the other night. I was thinking about God.”

She laughed, partly in embarrassment, and sat there tilting one foot on the tip of the other. Then, as if not quite sure of Judith, after all, she added, defensively, “Not like church.”

Judith only nodded, but her eyes reassured that in Mary Graham which had never before ventured from its fastness. Freed now, it swept up and possessed her; hushed before it, she sat there marveling. Then, not wanting to lose this first touch with another human soul, she said, timidly,

“The other night—up the river there, I—I was wondering.” She was as if bathed in mystery when she slowly repeated, in a voice touched at once with the pain and the glory, “I was wondering.”

At three o’clock that next afternoon Judith Brunswick was to report to the house committee of the Woman’s Club on the case of Mary Graham—what she had been able to “do” with her. What had she been able to “do”? It was not until after she had said good night to the matron whose deference did not conceal her disappointment in not being confided in, had closed the door of Severns Hall behind her, and was out in the fragrant night that she thought of the house committee and how she had failed it.

When she got home she had been relieved to find that her mother was at a neighbor’s. She could put off her brother, who teasingly inquired, “Find out all you wanted to know about the unfortunate sister?” She went up to her room, wanting to be alone with what she had found out about Judith Brunswick. A whole new world was opening from the fact that the very thing that pressed against the surface of her own life was there—more powerful, more passionate in the life of Mary Graham. It was the same revolt against the eating in of custom, against the closing down of routine around one; the same outreaching from grooves of living one had been forced into, that same flutter of the soul against the “giving in.”

For two years Judith Brunswick had been home from college; they were two years of giving in. This was what Mary Graham shot home to her now: “Give in—give in—give in! What’s left?”

She stood before the bookcase, running her hand across the backs of the books. They were the books she had brought home from school. She had liked having them in her room; often before going to bed she would take one of them and read awhile, perhaps less for the things read than for the moment’s touch with things that seemed slipping from her. Sinking to the low chair before the shelves, she sat there for a long time.

She had come home from school with that fine sense of life as not a fixed thing, but a thing of continuously unfolding possibilities; conscious of herself as alive and the world as wonderful, eager to be a living part of the fecund age she had a sense of living in. Life was a thing to do with to one’s utmost. She was going to “do something.”

Then she got home, where things were all shaped ahead and she was expected to form herself into a pattern that had been made for her. She was the daughter of a well-to-do man of a middle Western town. It was no part of her plan to shut herself in with the money her father had made. That money might express her father; it in no sense expressed her. She would form her own place, and in her own way.

Looking back to it now, it was both interesting and terrible to her to see how one little thread and then another had been thrown around her, drawing her into the pattern formed for Judith Brunswick, “society girl” in that town. Her married sister was deep in society; so was her sister-in-law, and so were all the girls she knew. It had been: “But of course you’re coming to my tea?”—“But, Judith, why wouldn’t you go?” “Just because you’ve gone to college, are you such a ‘high-brow’ that you have to cut us all?”—until she could fairly feel herself fitting into the pattern formed for her. She had wondered at times, longingly thinking of her college friends, if it was because all of them had been out of the places formed for them that they had seemed so much more individual and alive than girls she knew in this other way. Mary Graham had said it: something had been swinging shut, something that might not open again; life was going past her; she was not reaching out and taking it. She had made poor little attempts—such as joining the Woman’s Club. Even that laid her open to the taunt “high-brow”—the way her young social set dismissed all things it had neither brain to cope with nor spirit to aspire to. She grew more and more sensitive about revealing her dissatisfaction when it seemed she could not even define, much less attain, the things she did want, until at last, unable to see the path, she grew timid in asserting her wish to get there. She had no sense of movement now, only a going round and round in one small place. And that place claimed a toll from her spirit: powers unused becoming enfeebled, enthusiasms unclaimed growing dimmed, things unattained becoming less real. The very doing of things gave them a hold on her. She grew disgusted with herself, and that sullened her spirit; distrustful of herself, and that was weakening. It seemed she had not been worth anything else, after all, or she would not have been caught like that. She saw the absurd side of her predicament, and that was quenching. “Poor girl—her family don’t understand her! A prisoner in one of the finest houses in town! Forced to wear stunning clothes and spend her time enjoying herself!”—so would go the town’s laugh for it.

And now this Mary Graham had brought things to life again! The old sense of the wonder and the imperativeness of life broke through. Once more life challenged her and the old sense of power surged up to meet the challenge. She had known there was a fight; through Mary Graham it was made real to her that it was a fight for freeing life. She laughed at herself for having felt “sensitive” about her dissatisfaction with life gone stale. Not ridiculous because wanting something she did not have, but ridiculous because not getting that something! Her mind shot out into this plan and that; she would go to the city—study, work, look up some of the girls who had gone on, get her bearings. She would find her own. Well, Mary Graham was her own. She would reach her—would break through the separate crusts place and custom had formed about them. And Mary Graham must find her own; Mary Graham must find her place. She glowed with thoughts of what the girl might come to mean if her passion were directed to that new feeling in the world that would free life from the rules of the institution.

The next afternoon, while getting ready for the meeting, she realized that the things she had been feeling would not be easy to put into a report to the house committee. And when finally sitting with the four women who, with her self, comprised that committee, she was newly and horribly conscious of how hard it would be to say the only things she had to offer. Perhaps it was just part of what she scornfully called her spinelessness (her friends would call it her sweet nature)—but other people did complicate things so! It was so much easier to be fine and fearless by yourself than with people who assumed you were like them. If only one could be at all sure of “putting it over”—not having one’s feelings go sprawling about in ridiculous forms of expression. The very cut of Mrs. Emmons’s new spring suit seemed to seal one in—so confident and serene it was. And the aigrettes on Mrs. Van Camp’s hat and the way that appallingly efficient little lady held her handbag beat back all things one could not put into exact terms. Then there was Miss Hewitt, who worked with her mother in the church guild and whom her mother called a “lovely woman.” And the fourth member, Mrs. Stephens, made it no easier, for Judith had been assured Mrs. Stephens had a delicious sense of humor, and what she knew of her made her feel it was not the humor to break out into understanding, but the kind that stays within and settles to self-satisfaction. They were not women to whom it would be easy to talk of Mary Graham—or Judith Brunswick.

As she listened to other reports about the Home their complacency became an irritant to her own uncertainty. They did not find life complex—perplexing. They seemed so sure of themselves; an assumption of their own superiority was apparently the groundwork of their endeavors. There shot into her mind a wicked little desire to see that ground-work shaken. She had not known what she was going to say, and now, as she listened to Mrs. Van Camp’s perfect little plan for making something move on in just the way it should go, she saw that she could “give them a jolt.”

Mrs. Emmons said Miss Brunswick would tell them of the girl at the Home who had been so unruly.

Judith leaned forward in her most engaging manner. “Mary Graham can’t very well keep that rule,” she said. “You see, when she goes out she can’t tell just when she may care to come in. After all,” she added in a warm, cordial voice, “how can one?”

Mrs. Emmons dropped her handkerchief; Judith stooped and returned it to her with a smiling nod. All were staring at her. Mrs. Van Camp’s mouth had fallen a little open. Then it shut up tight and she straightened. “But—but, my dear Miss Judith,” Mrs. Emmons finally gasped; “but—when—”

“When one lives in an institution,” cut in the incisive voice of Mrs. Van Camp, “one must keep the rules of that institution.”

Judith turned to her, sweet! earnest. “That’s just what I thought before I talked with her. But you see I came to see it was not good for her soul to keep the rules of the institution.” She leaned back in her chair, nodding a little, as if she had cleared that up.

“Well, we can’t help it about her soul,” sharply began Mrs. Van Camp, but, at a movement from the chairman, stopped.

“Her soul,” gently corrected Mrs. Emmons, “is just what we care most about. But will you please make clear to us, dear Miss Judith, how there can possibly be any harm to her soul in keeping the rules of that institution?”

“She takes walks at night.” said Judith, and saying it swept her back to her deep feeling for the thing itself until she forgot her use of it as a spiritual bomb. “She does this that she may find herself; that life may not completely shut her in. It is the life in her breaking through. The other night she walked a long way up the river and sat where she could see far things.” She hesitated, then finished, even more quietly, “She was thinking about God.”

“I don’t believe it!” came the quick retort from Mrs. Van Camp.

Mrs. Emmons cleared her throat. “We shouldn’t say that we do not believe it, perhaps,” she began, uncertainly. She looked at Judith, helplessly and in appeal. “It does seem—most unusual.”

Mrs. Stephens’s sense of humor was not illumining to the discussion that followed, satisfying itself in amusement at the humorlessness of her fellow-members. Miss Hewitt looked frightened and pained; and yet there was one moment when Judith looked at her, as she was looking out of the window, which made her suspect that something buried under the years that made her a “lovely woman” stirred. Nothing remained buried, however, in the breast of Mrs. Van Camp. In the first place, she briskly and capably attacked it; it was not safe. Why, the girl might be arrested! It would give the Hall a queer name. Even if she did go out to think about God the rules could not be suspended. It would just make an opening for other girls to get out to a dance-hall. Why couldn’t she think about God in the house? Or there was the yard—a nice yard. Where did she go to church? Her minister should look into it. She should not be encouraged in such queer things—it would take her mind from her work. Mrs. Emmons was more mild, but no less perturbed. It was deeply disconcerting not to be able to condemn a thing that led to the breaking of a rule.

Judith felt her antagonism against them rising. They stood for the things holding her in—things that held everyone in. They arranged an order; that order must be subscribed to. They made rules; those rules must be kept. There was no sympathy with a thing that broke into things as they had planned them. Why should one wish to do a thing that was not customary?

“You think it altogether absurd?” Judith asked, her voice sharp-edged. “Quite absurd, you think, that she should not find her life satisfying?—should want more from it than she is getting?”

Mrs. Emmons murmured something about pleasures and classes for the working-girls.

Judith shook her head; she knew that she could not make it plain; she was not considering that, but was being drawn back to Mary Graham—a living soul beating against the things that shut her in. Sitting here with these women she had a sharpened sense of what those things were. It was as if there was represented here the whole order that locked one away from life. And with that came anew the sense of the wonder and the preciousness of life—life that could persist through so much, bear so much, and go on wanting. She spoke from out this feeling when she murmured, “The other night—up the river there—she was wondering.”

Her face was so puzzling, her voice so strange, that there was a moment’s silence before Mrs. Van Camp demanded, “What about?”

Judith was to have gone to a tea after the committee meeting. She did not want to go; neither did she want to go home. She took a car to the outskirts of town and walked a long way up the river road, climbing a hill. She was sure this was the hill from which Mary Graham had seen far things.

But she kept turning from the far things of that open country to the town that also was there. She could see the house she lived in; she could see the factory where Mary Graham worked. Those things were there. They were. A long time she sat looking back at that town, and something in its fixity was quelling. It seemed that she, and Mary Graham, and all the other people there, had been caught by that town. It made her wonder if she hadn’t been unfair to those clubwomen. What, after all, did she expect them to do? That was the way things were. Things were already built up, just as that town was built up—fixed. Precious life had been caught in that building, but was there escape from things so powerful in their fixity? As she continued to look, there forced itself upon her a sense of how all things were related. That relation of things was what towns expressed. It was no small thing, after all, to disturb the lives of a number of other people, people who loved her and whom she loved. It seemed that affection and obligation were agents holding one to one’s place, as if they had some subtle cohesive power that interlay and held together the material things making that town. It was not so simple. It was not simple at all. Walking slowly back down the river road, it was hard to put down the questioning whether she was not held by things stronger than herself.

She stepped aside for an automobile to pass. Realizing that she knew the man rushing by in it, she bowed, but it was not until after he was past that she wondered if it was not Mrs. Emmons’s husband. The car had come to a crunching stop and there were hurrying footsteps. She was considering whether to turn, when her name was called and she looked back to see that it was indeed Charlie Emmons, as her mother called him—he who had suggested that Judith be sent to see Mary Graham.

“I beg pardon, Miss Brunswick,” he was saying. “Hope I didn’t startle you, but I was so interested in that meeting of yours this afternoon—about that girl. I met my wife and took her home in the car; she was telling me about it—some of the things the girl said to you. I don’t know why I should be so interested,” he laughed, after an instant’s pause in which Judith had not known just what to say, “but something about it does interest me. Maybe because I used to have somewhat the same feeling myself—when I was young.”

He laughed, embarrassed at the confession, and some quality in that embarrassment made it easy for Judith, once into it, to tell of Mary Graham. He kept nodding, as if understanding. His face looked as though he did under stand. “Well,” he said, “it’s a feeling that comes to some of us—when we are young.” He laughed again, and was looking off at the river.

“But we get over it,” he said, coming back, and speaking in a voice nearer his usual brisk businesslike tone. “We have to play the game, you know—and, yes, we do have to keep the rules.”

As much as anything else it was the change in him in saying it that summoned everything in her to resist it now—that same thing to which she herself had been close just a little while before.

“Even though it might be the finest thing in us tried to break through?” she asked, the fighting edge to her voice.

“Oh—the finest thing in us….” he muttered, and was again looking off at the river.

She watched him. Here was one who had given in, overcome by things that were fixed; held, perhaps, in the mesh of affection. And now he was something different; something made by the things he had given in to.

Sharply it came to her that that was the price paid for the giving in. One changed; some things died down, other things developed, until the balance was different. One’s quality changed. She knew that, for she had begun to change in just two years. One settled down into the feeling that one couldn’t do any differently and wrested a certain mournful satisfaction from the sadness of surrender. She straightened for combat, throwing off the drugging effect of those false satisfactions.

“No,” he came back to her again, “we have to play the game, and to play the game we have to keep the rules.”

As he said it she knew with simple certitude that it was not so. She knew it for the great human error and weakness; knew that it was wickedly wasteful, fairly unholy in its blundering tampering with life. It took life. Was that not enough to say against it? And life was more valuable than anything that would shut life in—yes, and stronger than built-up things that held it in! Why, she owed no allegiance to an order that held life in chains! As she saw the live things falling back in this man, and the things of custom once more shutting down around him, she knew her own way out. In the fight for freeing Mary Graham she would free herself.

He said again, putting down something stubbornly insurgent in himself, “You see, we do have to keep the rules.”

And something in her, freed by saying it, leaped up and made her strong as she looked at him and triumphantly answered, “I don’t have to!”

Harper’s Magazine, Jan 1914

Looking After Clara

When you opened the door which bore the lettering, “Bureau of Statistics of the Allied Societies for Social Betterment of the City of Boston,” and Mr. Stephen Blatchford turned in his chair and looked at you, you felt that the figures you were about to receive would be both accurate and important. Nor was this alone because young Mr. Blatchford wore tortoise-rimmed glasses. Efficiency and responsibility also breathed from the chair in which he revolved. Mr. Blatchford was one of those persons who are constantly thanking Heaven that they have a sense of humor, and as he said it you had the feeling that he would the next instant turn to “Sense of Humor” in the card index. He was an utterly worthy young man, and there seemed every chance that he would receive the headship of the “Bureau of Statistics” when his chief, Mr. Snow, left the following month to assume the editorship of “The Social Good.”

But this morning, after the second mail came in, Mr. Blatchford was guilty of a little dallying over the “Unmarried Women” table which he was revising. The second mail had brought a letter from Miss Dorothy Ainsley, the southern girl he had met during his vacation at Gloucester.

Mr. Blatchford, speaking from the depth of his social researches, had always maintained that a man should marry. It was not until he heard the soft voice of Dorothy Ainsley that the idea seemed related to something other than social responsibility. When they were sailing, and the breeze fluttered her brown hair before her brown eyes, young Mr. Blatchford had had a disturbing sense of himself as something more than a member of society.

He had written her two letters, drawing a painstakingly humorous picture of himself as immersed in dry figures—with a little side-note questioning his figure of speech—and expressing longing to be back in the “bully outdoors” of Gloucester. In reply had come only a picture postcard of the harbor, saying, “Lingering on here for a time longer.” Now came the letter saying Miss Ainsley would get in that day at noon; she trusted that she did not presume too greatly upon their friendship in asking him to meet her at the North Station; this, she boldly confessed, that she might still further presume upon their friendship in a very great favor she was going to ask of him. She concluded: “There is no one else of whom I cared to ask it.”

Mr. Blatchford dwelt upon this, as, arrayed in the new autumn overcoat which he wore with a gratifying sense of its impressiveness, he waited before the iron gate: No one else of whom she cared to ask it! And she knew Bob Graham, a Boston fellow. She had been more with Graham than with him; but it was not to Graham she turned now! Of course he would see much of her in the few days she had said she would be in Boston and vicinity. He was just a little sorry that it came at the time Mr. Hennesey wanted to go over things with him. It was Mr. Hennesey who would have the deciding voice as to the place left vacant by Mr. Snow’s assuming editorship of “The Social Good.” But then, should there be a time when he could not keep an engagement with her, she would understand. Might it not be that, as things developed, she herself would be greatly interested in those very meetings with Mr. Hennesey? Such, together with a warm feeling of self—congratulation in having just the day before received his new overcoat, were Mr. Blatchford’s roseate considerations as the Gloucester train neared Boston.

An hour later, as they were finishing luncheon in the staid dining room he had taken her to—having gently turned her from the frivolous basement cafe of her suggestion, with the protecting remark that he did not believe he cared to take her there—he asked that he now hear of the little favor she was going to do him the honor to ask of him.

“Uh, do you know,” Miss Ainsley began meaningly in her caressing southern voice, “now that I come right to it, I fear it would be asking too much?”

“I think not,” said Mr. Blatchford, looking into her brown eyes as a Strong man looks.

So, leaning confidingly across the table, Miss Dorothy told him. She was on her way home to Virginia; but a dear friend was in school out at Wellesley; she could not go through without a little visit with Stella. So, that afternoon, after a little shopping, she would go out to Wellesley, there to remain a couple of days, then come in and take the boat for New York. But there was one thing that greatly troubled her; her brown eyes beautifully clouded in the thought of it. She paused, looking over at Mr. Blatchford in timid appeal. “I wonder,” she said, tremulous, troubled and yet trusting, “if you would—look after Clara?”

“Look after Clara?” uncertainly murmured the efficient Mr. Blatchford. She nodded, soft eyes all the while timidly, trustingly imploring.

“But who,” inquired the bewildered and reddening young man, “is Clara?”

She looked surprised. “Oh! Why, didn’t I have Clara when you were there?”

“I do not recall—Clara,” said Mr. Blatchford.

“Why, Clara,” confided the lovely Dorothy, “is my cat.” And then, as she looked into the face of young Mr. Blatchford, she threw back her head and laughed.

Mr. Blatchford, who felt momentarily affronted, pulled himself back to the fact that—Heaven be thanked!—he had a sense of humor. He laughed too—less lightly, but efficiently.

“I knew you had a sense of humor!” Dorothy cried in triumphant gratitude. “It just helps one through everything, doesn’t it?”

“It certainly does!” vigorously agreed Mr. Blatchford.

He was never more desperately in earnest about his sense of humor than when he entered the express office where they would unbox Clara and deliver her into his keeping. He had pictured a soft, fuzzy, frolicsome kitten, probably Angora: such a cat might constitute one of the feminine foibles of a Dorothy Ainsley. Picture then the astonishment with which be peered through the slats at just such a cat as the alleys of Boston abounded in—the undistinguished, mottled gray, not kitten, not fine, big cat—for all the world just another one of those animals which constitute one of the problems of a humane municipality.

Sense of humor ebbed; face reddened; back grew stiff. But Dorothy was cooing: “Nicest Clara! Nicest Clara! Was her lonesome? Oh, was her scared?” She turned to him, sweetly grave. “I realize,” she said, “that Clara at first may not seem an especially attractive cat. But, you see, it’s her—ways.”

“There was no one else I was Willing to trust her to,” she murmured while Mr. Blatchford was engaged with his first attempt at adjusting himself to Clara’s “ways,” Clara seeking escape from his arms by way of his neck. He had suggested taking her home in the box she had arrived in, but Dorothy could not bring herself to the idea of again shutting Clara up in a box. Poor dear Clara was frightened, but if he petted her there would be no trouble. Why couldn’t he just tuck her under his overcoat? The very thing! Clara would snuggle under it—oh, just as cunning!

A more painfully disturbed young man never descended into the subway at Scollay Square. His slightly loosened coat was covering Clara; but Clara was squirming about, so he must keep one arm planted firmly against her, the other hand from time to time making hurried passes at his overcoat. To get out his nickel he had to hold Clara so tight that he heard a distinct spit and felt a clawing within him. To soothe her as he threw out his nickel he murmured, “Nicest Clara!”—dulcetly repeating, “Nicest Clara!” Then he chanced to look up at the feminine person within the cage. She was the picture of affronted virtue. As he stumbled on, appearing to be clasping himself to his own breast, he caught: “Those fresh guys!”

Waiting for bis car, arm planted firmly across the breast of his bulging coat, he looked up to see a policeman regarding him. It was the first time a policeman had ever evinced official interest in Mr. Blatchford. He tried to lose himself in the crowd, then realized that that was the worst thing he could have done. Well he wasn’t used to being taken for a criminal, he somewhat bitterly reflected, giving Clara a left-arm pressure which made it necessary that he instantly murmur, “Nicest Clara!” The woman crowded close to him edged away. He saw her looking back nervously.

Mr. Blatchford distinctly did not like the position in which he found himself. He had always moved freely and frankly among his fellow men. He had never been called a “fresh guy,” nor suspiciously eyed by a policeman, nor edged away from by women. He had always stood—firm and not unimportant—among those enlightened and upright members of the community who are keenly alive to their responsibilities toward persons to be eyed with suspicion and edged away from. Now he sat as far as possible from his fellow passengers, stick between knees, left arm across his breast, right hand pressed, it would seem, over his heart. Occasionally, crimson face rigid, he patted his heart, as though he were attached to that organ.

Gloomily he looked into the immediate future. What was he going to say to Mrs. Lily, his landlady? What would they all think of him—bringing a cat home? He hated to think of all the silly things Charlie Morse, his roommate, would say, though Charlie was his great hope; he had recently sprained his ankle and had to stay at home. That was almost providential. Of course he would look after Clara.

Mr. Blatchford looked up to see that a woman sitting not far away, facing him, was staring. He shifted his position a little; so did Clara. She squirmed around as if preparatory to settling down. The woman had spoken to another woman and both were staring. Clara had chosen a place just over his stomach. He folded his arms over it and tried to look loftily unknowing; but he was conscious of the moving of his arms. Those vulgar women seemed to be going into hysterics! They had their handkerchiefs out and were laughing into them. They were saying things to each other and went into new convulsions at the things they said. It was disgusting. What was so funny? he’d like to know. Clara continued to squirm about and every time she moved there were renewed gasps of laughter.

The car came to a stop—not his stop; but, as sedately as circumstances permitted, he rose to leave.

This was intolerable. Those vulgar women had made him feel most uncomfortable; he knew that his face had been flaming as he left the car. Even now, as he turned toward his boardinghouse in St. James Avenue, the breast to which he pressed Clara was a tumultuous one. Why could not the young women of Wellesley College have looked after Clara quite as well as he? Did they have any more to do than he did? That very instant he should be at his desk, completing that “Unmarried Women” table. And what was he going to do with Clara when he got home? What would Mrs. Lily say? As he rounded the corner of St. James Avenue Mr. Blatchford was thinking of all that man has endured for woman.

He felt it was not just the moment for revealing Clara to Mrs. Lily. He could carry the situation better when he had himself a little more in hand; so with great difficulty he let himself in, softly cooing a final, “Nicest Clara!” as the key turned, and, with glances of fear to right and left, he stole stealthily up the stairs he had never before ascended with anything but manly tread.

He gained his room unseen. He addressed no word to his roommate, sitting there in the Morris chair, reading. Unfastening his overcoat he let Clara spring to the floor. He then sat down in weary and bitter silence.

Clara began at once on the usual feline tour of investigation. “Thought it would be nice to have a cat, did you, Steve?” mildly observed Charlie, his blue eyes dancing.

“Nice to have a cat! ” bitterly murmured Mr. Blatchford. Then brusquely he explained: He was keeping her for a friend, a young lady; they would have to keep her several days; young lady very attached to her; she had come to their cottage in Gloucester; couldn’t bear to abandon her; taking her home to Virginia.

“Awfully kindhearted girl,” said Charlie.

Mr. Blatchford, who was trying to pull his new overcoat back into shape, vouchsafed no reply. About to depart he said shortly: “Well, it’s a lucky thing that you’re staying at home.”

“Act of Providence,” murmured Charlie,

Mr. Blatchford stood with his hand on the knob. “You’ll look after her for me, Charlie?” he asked in humble appeal.

“Sure,” cheerfully replied Charlie. “I like cats all right; she’ll be company for me.” He reached over and deftly pulled Clara to his lap. “Nice pussy,” he soothed, stroking her. “What’s her name, Steve?” he asked.

“Clara,” briefly replied Mr. Blatchford.

“Cl—ara!” ejaculated Charlie. “How’d they happen to name her Clara?”

“How should I know?” sharply retorted Mr. Blatchford.

“I think she’s hungry,” said Charlie. “Better ask Lily-white for some milk.”

Mr. Blatchford moved uneasily. “I—I—haven’t mentioned her being here yet,” he said.

“I see,” said Charlie in his mild way that was sometimes perturbing.

It ended with Mr. Blatchford being sent to Boylston Street for milk. The first dairy place he went to had none. With set teeth he strode to another. Late to his work! Mr. Hennesey might come in! Nice thing to tell him he had been out getting milk for a cat! On his way home he spilled milk on his overcoat. It gave him a feeling of acute resentment toward the whole of Wellesley College.

And then Mr. Stephen Blatchford eagerly turned a worn face toward that seat of decorum, the Bureau of Statistics of the Allied Societies for Social Betterment of the City of Boston. He returned that night to find a newspaper clipping, “Care of the Cat—How to Keep Your Pet Healthy and Happy,” pinned on the inside of the door.

“Did you ever know anything more fortunate,” Charlie began brightly, “than my running across that in today’s paper? I’ve read the newspapers all my life, and this is the first time I ever remember coming across an article on the care of the cat. Sort of weird, don’t you think?”

Mr. Blatchford was examining the milk spots on the overcoat he had just taken off, and made no reply. Clara came rubbing against his legs, swaying toward him in ingratiating cat fashion, flourishing her tail and purring as if they were on the best of terms.

“It says,” remarked Charlie, “that you want to cultivate their love for open-air exercise.”

Mr. Blatchford’s face set to grimmer lines, but again he made no reply.

“And, if there’s lettuce for dinner, I think you’d better try and pass a leaf into your pocket.” Charlie hobbled to the door, and from the clipping solemnly read: “Occasionally chop a lettuce leaf and mix it with chopped raw meat to keep their digestive systems in good order.”

“I am glad you find this amusing, Charlie,” said Mr. Blatchford with the cold forbearance of a superior person.

As the evening progressed Mr. Blatchford himself was finding it less and less amusing. He had not enjoyed his dinner. He was not enough at home in the surreptitious to be happy in the smuggling in of a cat. Nor had he ever sufficiently indulged in disorderly conduct to face with equanimity the prospect of that infringement upon dignity likely to ensue from the discovery of Clara. He had never at anytime been a young man given to doing questionable things. He had led an orderly life. Until this unfortunate episode there had never been a time when he could not look all the world in the face. Now he could not look Mrs. Lily in the face. He had gone down before dinner intending to tell her, but found her in conversation with Miss Earle, the “Care-of-the-Scalp” lady. So he had eaten his dinner in guilty and miserable silence, ears wretchedly alert for cat noises from above.

And all through the evening, every time he started to tell Mrs. Lily, there was some reason for not doing it. Charlie, on the other hand, reveled in the concealment; he would hear someone coming, make a lurch for Clara—greatly imperiling his sprained ankle—and smother her in cushions while he talked with open countenance to the maid, or whoever it might be, at the door. The atmosphere that Charlie threw around it grew more and more distasteful to the honorable Mr. Blatchford. And his thoughts were not happy ones. He was not spending the evening with Dorothy Ainsley; he was at home looking after Dorothy Ainsley’s cat. And what evening was he to spend with her? He could not see that there was going to be an evening. She had taken his office telephone number—that she might call up to inquire for Clara. He was to meet her for tea on the day of her departure—that he might deliver Clara. He considered again that there was no one else of whom she cared to ask it. But—ask what? With gloomy eye he watched Clara rolling on her back, twisting herself into meaningless feline shapes. An ugly doubt was trying to get into his mind. He banished it in the memory of her soft eyes as she asked this of him, the color fluttering in her cheeks, her tender, laughing mouth. She had come to him in her difficulty. He would not fail her and she would come to him again—for something different. His was not the only love that had been put to a great test. Mr. Blatchford dreamed of days to come.

Meanwhile his roommate had hobbled out for a visit in another room, and presently Mr. Blatchford decided that he was very tired and was going to bed. He was about to lose the cares of the day in sleep when his ears were outraged by a shriek that brought him instantly to the floor. Again it came and again, a piercing, frantic, feminine shriek of terror. Pulling his bathrobe about him he rushed into the hall. Others were rushing into the hall, fully clad, clad in bathrobes, lesserly clad. Mrs. Lily was crying: “Oh , what is it?—where?—what?”

From the bathroom came a piercing series of “Cat! Cat! Cat!”

Mr. Blatchford longed to be transported into another world.

Mrs. Lily was speaking against the bathroom door. “It couldn’t be a cat, Miss Earle. There is no cat.”

“There is a cat!” screamed the indignant as well as distracted inmate of the bathroom. “She has the cat fear,” murmured a young woman to Mr. Blatchford. “It’s just terrible. I’ve often chased them away from her on the street and places. They affect her something awful, like rats do me.”

“She’s climbing into the tub! Go ’way! ’Way!” There was a splashing of water, evidently used as a weapon against Clara.

Mrs. Lily looked around at her informally clad guests. “Did anyone bring a cat into this house?” she demanded.

Stephen Blatchford’s throat was dry; his hands were cold; so were his bare feet. There was an instant of faltering; then he chanced to look up and meet the eye of his roommate. He was gathering himself together for a manly “I did!” when all proving of manhood was deferred by a series of shrieks.

“She won’t get into the tub, Miss Earle,” soothed the distraught landlady, who was trying to see through the keyhole. “They never get in water. And she really won’t hurt you a bit. It’s just that you think she will. Now if you can just bring yourself to get out and unbolt the door—”

“She’s between me and the door,” sobbed the lady in the tub.

“Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!” began Charlie Morse.

“This is not funny, Mr. Morse,” snapped Mrs. Lily.

“No, indeed,” said Charlie; “I should say not. I thought maybe we could induce her to climb up over the transom.”

Then through the chaos came a voice of command—the firm voice of a strong man, a voice to inspire confidence in any truly feminine person, dispelling weak terrors. “Miss Earle,” commanded Mr. Blatchford, “simply get out of that tub, walk to the door, unbolt it and allow Mrs. Lily to take the cat out.”

“I tell you I have the cat Fear,” sobbed the weak woman. “Dr. Weir Mitchell wrote about it!”

“We can’t help it if he did!” thundered Mr. Blatchford. “Simply—”

But new resources were at his command. He went nearer the door and yelled through the crack: “Where’s your sense of humor?”

At the suggestion of a sense of humor the lady abandoned herself to complete hysterics.

“Something must be done at once!” cried Mrs. Lily.

The door was whittled—Clara mewing nervously the while—and the bolt slipped from without. A friend went in to minister to Miss Earle—and out walked Clara.

Mrs. Lily seized her by the neck and held her accusingly aloft. “Who brought this cat into my house?” she demanded in fearful tones.

Mr. Blatchford tried to get his feet under cover. “I did,” he said, looking as manly as a bathrobe will permit.

Mrs. Lily dropped the cat. “You?” She could only repeat: “You?”

“I will endeavor,” said the utterly miserable young man, “to explain.”

•    •    •    •

The next morning a fresh, sweet young voice called the “Bureau of Statistics” from Wellesley College: “She’s all right? And does she seem happy?”

Mr. Blatchford replied that he thought Clara was reasonably happy.

“And you’re sure she’s not a bit of trouble?”

He did not instantly reply. He had raised a weary hand to an aching head. “Oh, that’s all right!” he said in a voice a little bedraggled.

Miss Ainsley went on to speak warmly of how she appreciated it, what it meant to her, how there was no one else of whom she would have cared to ask it.

Mr. Blatchford then asked if she would come in that night and go to dinner and the theater with him.

She deeply regretted that it would be impossible; but they were going to meet for tea next day—weren’t they?—he bringing Clara, and then she would try to tell him how she appreciated all he had done.

That evening Clara was nervous. Perhaps she felt that her position in that household was not all a cat could ask; she mewed at the closed door; she kept walking about the room, switching her tail; she jumped up in the window and peered through the screen down the fire escape. She did not settle down and purr that evening.

Nor did Mr. Blatchford settle down and purr. Again he was not spending the evening with Dorothy Ainsley; he was at home looking after Dorothy Ainsley’s cat. And his position in the household had entirely changed. There were frowns for him now—and titters. Never before had he been treated like an offender or like a ridiculous person. He had had to humble himself before the landlady, who had always treated him with deference; had been compelled to plead and promise. And for what? That he be permitted to keep a cat! Everybody in the house knew that he was keeping a cat! Memories of the night before, when he had stood there in his bathrobe explaining, embittered his soul. And now it was, “How’s the cat?” “What’s her name?” “Where’d she come from?” “Like cats?” until it seemed, if they went on talking about cats, that he would take leave of his senses.

In the dead of night, awakened from a sound sleep, he sat up in bed. What was that noise? Was someone trying to get into the room? Then returning consciousness made known to him that far worse than someone getting into the room would be someone getting out of it. Instantly acute he switched on the light. What had awakened him was the sound of a falling screen—and there was no cat in the room!

Mr. Blatchford crept out on the fire escape and softly called: “Kitty, kitty, kitty!” Then: “Clara, Clara, Clara!” He peered up and down the alley. He thought a half block away he saw two cats. More loudly he called: “Clara, Clara, Clara!”

A window across the alley went up. Hastily Mr. Blatchford drew back into his room. Then back he stole to the fire escape. Again a little way down the alley he saw two cats. He was afraid to call again. He went back into the room and looked at his watch. Three o’clock! He would go back to bed—and when he met Dorothy Ainsley for tea next day!

He got into some clothes; down the fire escape he crept, through the alley he stole, like the abandoned character it seemed he had come to be. He drew near the two cats, softly calling, “Clara, Clara, Clara!” He thought the one nearest him was swishing her tail in a familiar way, but when he was right upon them both fled—through that alley, down a deserted street, into another alley. There again he called: “Clara, Clara, Clara!”

“Clara’s not here, my boy,” said a deep voice, “and a young man in your plight better get home fast as he can.”

A policeman!

“I am hunting my cat,” said Mr. Blatchford, with what dignity he could command.

“Oh, yes, I know; but better let the kitty alone now and be getting home, or I’ll have to give you a lift.”

Mr. Blatchford turned away. He would prowl through no more alleys. He did not have his key; he returned as he had gone forth—by way of the back fence. He feared another policeman. He tore his clothes getting over the fence. He crouched at the foot of the fire escape, fearing to ascend. Little had he ever dreamed that he would he slinking up a fire escape while a city slept!

He climbed back into his room. He went to bed, but not to sleep. He heard cat cries and went out again and called: “Clara, Clara!”

A window on the floor below went up!

At daylight he went out again and began looking for Clara. He looked down alleys; he peered over back fences; he called, “Clara, Clara!” whenever he heard a cat.

To what part of Boston would Clara go? Would she prefer the business or the residence district? Had she retreated to the Back Bay region, or was she roaming Boston Common? Once he thought he saw her sitting on the steps of the library; he pursued the wrong cat around Castle Square.

He went home to breakfast footsore and full of rage. News that his cat had escaped had spread through the boardinghouse, and he was pressed with inquiries, condolences, jokes. He ate hastily and went forth again to look for Clara. The time came when he must go to his work; indeed he was already late for his work.

In an alley, half a block from where he lived, were two small boys. They gave him an idea. He told them he had lost a cat: a gray cat; a medium-sized, gray cat. He must have her by noon. She must be somewhere in that neighborhood. Here was a quarter for each of them, and if they had her when he returned at noon each of them should have half a dollar.

It was arranged that at one o’clock they should be waiting for him in the shed door where they then stood.

And then a disheveled Mr. Blatchford turned a harassed face toward the Bureau of Statistics of the Allied Societies for Social Betterment of the City of Boston, there to arrive three-quarters of an hour late and find Mr. Hennesey, he who held promotion in the hollow of his hand, impatiently twirling in the revolving chair.

“I—I’m just a little late this morning,” said Mr. Blatchford in a high, nervous voice.

“So I see,” dryly replied this chief of his chief.

Mr. Blatchford was suddenly conscious of unclean hands, dusty shoes, straws hanging to his trousers. He passed a fidgety hand over his ill-brushed hair. He was not sure that his face was clean. A swift glance at a mirror showed bloodshot eyes.

“I—I was up late last night—that is, I mean to say—my sleep was rather broken in on—’” He mumbled off into nothingness.

How could he explain that he had been roaming the alleys of Boston, looking for a cat?

At a little before one o’clock he was at the alley shed appointed for the rendezvous.

One of the boys awaited him outside. “Guess we’ve got her here, mister. Found a lot of medium—sized gray cats. Got seventeen in here.”

“Seventeen!” gasped Mr. Blatchford.

“Yep,” said the proud youth. “Hunted all morning. Got seventeen.”

Mr. Blatchford staggered within. The world swam—with cats; cats mewing, cats growling; cats walking around with switching tails; cats with humped backs; fighting cats, loving cats, mouse—hunting cats; cats frightened, cats resentful, cats contented; a cat rubbed against him and purred; a cat backed away from him and spit; all known cat emotions seethed within that shed. Mr. Blatchford raised a hand to a reeling head.

“We had an awful time getting some of them,” said the gratified collector, exhibiting scratched hands. “Two that we had the women made us give back. There’s a woman in that house says she’s going to call the Humane Society.” Mr. Blatchford leaned back against the shed door. The Humane Society! One of the Allied Societies for Social Betterment!

“I hadn’t meant you to bring more than one,” was his prostrate murmur.

“Yes,” cried the youth, “but which one? There’s more ’an one medium-sized, gray cat in this part of town.”

“So I see,” was all that Mr. Blatchford could say.

He looked about. As the boy said: Which one? Within that shed—doubtless—was Clara. Clara must be one of those seventeen medium-sized, gray cats. He called: “Clara, Clara, Clara!” Some came nearer; some drew farther away; glad recognition o’erspread no face. One moment he thought none of them was Clara; the next instant all were Clara—the shed was filled with Clara become seventeen. He could not transport these seventeen cats to the tea room where he would meet Dorothy Ainsley; he could not invite Dorothy Ainsley to an alley shed to inspect seventeen fighting, misbehaving cats. His tongue grew large and dry.

He must pull himself together and meet the situation. He would attack it by a process of elimination. He inspected a cat trying to climb the wall. It had a yellow streak down its hack. He drew a real breath; perhaps many of them on examination would have something that marked them as not Clara.

“This cat can he thrown out,” he said to the boy.

The cat who was not Clara had gained a high beam. “How?” asked the boy.

Sweat broke out on the brow of Mr. Blatchford. A collection of cats was indeed no simple thing to deal with. Another cat had a white Foot; he himself bravely got her by the neck and threw her out. Then panic seized him. Didn’t Clara have a white foot? Did she? Didn’t she? White foot? Gray foot? His brain reeled. Another face was too white; another had a black circle around her eye; one had a yellow undertone; one was too light; one too dark—at least he thought so. Was Clara light?—dark? Bigger than this cat?—smaller than this one? Was her tail striped like this?

By the process of elimination the cats had been reduced to five. Some of the rejected had been evicted; others crouched in corners with glaring eyes. There was one cat who, to his dazed brain, seemed to be Clara. She allowed him to pick her up. He decided to take her over and show her to Charlie; Charlie, bringing to it a fresh mind, might know whether or not it was Clara.

Charlie thought it was; then he doubted. It seemed Clara, yet it didn’t.

Humbly Mr. Blatchford waited on Charlie’s decision. Charlie wished that his foot would permit him to go over and view all the cats. He could not go to the cats; couldn’t the cats come to him?

Mr. Blatchford hastened back to the shed. He selected two others. One he put in a gunnysack which the small boy had found useful in making the collection, the other he bore in his arms.

Mrs. Lily saw him through the window. She met him in the hall with blazing eyes. “This has gone far enough, Mr. Blatchford! I finally give in that you may keep one cat; now you come into my house with armfuls of cats!”

“It’s only temporary,” stammered Mr. Blatchford. “I—I shall not go on doing it,” he assured her humbly. “I’m having great difficulties, Mrs. Lily.”

The cat in the sack grew unpleasant, and also Mr. Blatchford feared for his own emotion. He hastened up to his room.

Charlie, upon seeing the other cats, was convinced that the first one was Clara. She had been acting like Clara, he said; she walked to the same places in the room; she rubbed her back against the wall just like Clara. The more he looked at the other two the more it assured him that the first one was Clara.

Charlie evidently saw that it was no time for levity. He was a true friend in the tenseness with which he met the situation. And his confidence that it was Clara who had been selected was calming to the well-nigh distracted Mr. Blatchford. He breathed again. He saw light ahead. Natural things were emerging from a swimming world of cats.

He bore the rejected cats out of the house and set them loose, Mrs. Lily watching from the window. He was even so heartened that he was not greatly distraught when the frightened small boy said the woman next door had sent for the police. After his recent experiences sending for the police seemed a small matter.

He had tea with the girl to whom he wished to Offer his hand and heart; there seemed no opportunity for offering them then, but she was to be in New York in the winter. He said that he had been intending to go to New York himself; they would see each other there. Mr. Blatchford saw the future opening out from that. In the glow of her presence the terrors of the immediate past fell away. All of that was over now, and happiness banished the last faint doubt.

Clara was waiting at the checkroom in the South Station in the superior box he and Charlie had made for her. He would at this moment say nothing of the horrors he had endured for love’s sake. Sometime he would tell her and he could fancy her eyes deepening in new love.

She spoke gently—was it not tenderly?—of what he had done for her. Her smile for him, as they stood before the check window, was sweet beyond his dreams.

Box in his hand, they stepped back to a bench.

“Nicest Clara!” the girl was cooing to the cat behind the slats. “Was Clara scared? Was her?” She poked a playful finger through the slats. Swiftly she withdrew it—scratched.

Amazed, she looked through the slats, saying Clara must be terribly frightened. She bent closer. She peered. She looked up at Mr. Blatchford. She looked back in the box.

“This—is—not—my—cat!” she said in terrible tones.

The miserable man stood there limp, speechless.

White, angry face, blazing eyes, she stood before him. “Is this a joke,” she choked, “or an insult?”

He tried to say that it was neither.

“And where is Clara?” she cried. “Where is she?”

Fifteen minutes later he slunk out of the station, abandoning a boxed cat. The girl who had kindled love in his breast had as cruelly abandoned him. She made it plain that she never wished to look upon his face again. Certainly it wasn’t very much she had asked of him! She had supposed that he was one of those methodical, reliable persons, just the person to be entrusted with the care of a cat!

His explanations only kindled new rage against him. In his attempt at self—defense he made an unfortunate remark about Clara’s disposition to go forth into alleys. He was told that Clara had never been that kind of a cat when she was with her.

Two hours later he opened the door of his boardinghouse. In those two hours he had been walking about, seeking command, seeking healing. He had stopped at the office, hoping for solace in work, and Mr. Snow had gently asked him if he drank. Mr. Hennesey feared that he drank. Because of that Mr. Hennesey was inclined to put a woman in the place to be left vacant by Mr. Snow’s resignation.

After that he had again gone forth into the streets, his cup of bitterness running over.

When he stepped into the hall at his boardinghouse Mrs. Lily came forward and addressed him in frigid tones: “A lady has been waiting here for an hour to see you, Mr. Blatchford.”

“I want my cat!” snapped a shrill voice right behind her. “Young man, I want my cat!”

He at last escaped from her tongue-lashing, her threats. But he had an awful feeling that he was about to be sprung upon by sixteen other women each demanding that he instantly produce a cat.

He made his way past Mrs. Lily, past Miss Earle, whose repressed triumph was more bitter than the hard things just said about his accumulation of cats.

He reached his room. He was glad to find Charlie not there. He could bear nothing more. He leaned back against the door too prostrated to advance. His wild eye roamed the room. At the window off the fire escape it became fixed—it became glassy.

Sitting just outside the window, confidently waiting to he received—was Clara!

Ladies’ Home Journal, Aug 1914

The Manager of Crystal Sulphur Springs

The array of turnouts awaiting the noon train seemed testifying to the prosperity of Freeport. It was an array calculated to make the transcontinental traveler, looking languidly from his window, stroll out and ask the porter, “What town is this?” Glossy limousines panted in the proud new concrete causeway recently built for the overhead tracks, and the very baggage-wagons somehow suggested a Boosters’ Committee a few blocks away.

The jaded pair of bony farm-horses which turned in there a couple of minutes before train-time seemed to know they bore an equipment which would not serve the Boosters’ Committee as the “Golden State Limited” went through. They bore what in its brilliant past had been called a closed carriage. Once it had carried the society of the town to weddings and parties; when too scuffed for festivity it had a long time of somberly taking its place in the funeral procession. But that day, too, passed, and then it came to be called a hack, and met trains for a third-rate hotel until it occurred to the management that the hack perhaps kept away more people than it brought, when once more it was deposed, this time to be sold for the office it now filled. It filled that office limpingly, wheezing as the aged wheeze.

The young boy driving it surveyed the backed-up line diffidently. How could he ask any of them to move over and make room for the hack from the Poor farm? A woman opened the door and peered out, anxiously. “No room here, Johnnie?”

But the driver of the proud new bus from the Hotel Freeport hastened to make it plain that he was not one to crowd out the lowly. “Room enough, Mrs. Peters,” he called. “Back right in here, John. Them expressmen don’t need the earth,” he added, with a dark look for menials from a rival hostelry.

“Expectin’ someone for the Farm?” he asked, sociably, as the woman alighted.

She nodded, shaking out her skirts and moving as if cramped by long sitting. Then she looked up and said, in the manner of one telling no ordinary thing, “Expectin’ someone who never expected to end his days at that place. Well, no,” she hastened to amend, with a growlingly significant manner, “never expected to end ’em in the poorhouse, is what I mean.” Then, “It’s Mr. Groves—it’s Bert Groves that’s coming,” she said, looking at him to see if he got all that it meant.

His long, low whistle told that he got some of it, at any rate. “So that’s what those fellows I heard talking at the hotel last night—” He did not finish it, but said, instead, “Why, my father knew him well!” He repeated it, as if it were one of the important features of the whole thing. “Drove him time and time again. And to that same place that boy’ll be driving him to now.” He stood there darkly surveying the new bus from the Hotel Freeport, as if contemplating the possible fate of even the driver of that. “Wasn’t there nobody to do for him where he went?” he asked, in a tone of incredulity.

She shook her head, but just then a whistle sounded, and, “There she comes!” broke in the bus-man, stepping forward quickly, all alert for his own job. But the woman stepped back and stood waiting beside the rusty hack, as if depending upon it to identify her with an institution the Boosters’ Committee had not yet reached.

She might not have been so sure it was he—it was about thirty years since she had seen Bert Groves, and he was an old man now—if he had not been straightening the lapel of his coat as they got off the train. Bert Groves always was one to put up the best front.

She had a few hurried words with the man who had brought him—a kindly man going through, who had consented to act as traveling companion. While they talked, Mr. Groves stood a little apart, uncertainly watching the talking, laughing people getting into the shiny equipments. She wondered if he knew what town it was.

The man who had brought him spoke of that. “Pretty—” He tapped his own head. “Oh, not really gone, you know, but doesn’t get things straight. He’ll know a thing one minute, and not know it the next. But you needn’t worry about him being hard to look after. He’s been handed around too much for that.” The conductor called, “All aboard!”’ and, taking a hasty leave of the man who was not going on, he turned back to the train.

The old man stood looking after him, as if not wanting to be left. But he took only a step, then stood there uncertainly.

She touched his arm. “This way for us,” she said, kindly, then stood at the door of the sagging old hack, waiting for him to get in. He looked in at the lumpy, leaky upholstery, then stepped back and surveyed a motor-car nearby, took an uncertain step toward it. “In here, Mr. Groves,” said the wife of the superintendent of the Poor-farm, not unkindly, but firmly.

She saw at once that what the kindly man had said was true. He would not be one to give trouble. He had been “had” too much for that. He moved uneasily on the unfriendly springs, but as if trying to conceal the fact that he was moving. She saw him looking covertly at her. Several times his lips started to move, and then he would not say anything. But at length he asked, in a whisper, as if afraid of what he was doing, “Where am I going now?”

Mrs. Peters claimed she got along in her office, and helped other people get along, by making the best of things. Making the best of things was her great phrase. As she looked into the troubled face of this broken, helpless old man—this meek old man—and remembered the Bert Groves she had known, she had—if nothing else—to help herself out of it by answering: “Why, you’re going home, Mr. Groves! To the old Groves place,” she added, as he looked quite blank. After an instant’s hesitation she finished, “To the Springs—to Crystal Sulphur Springs.”

It was as if she had flicked something before his eyes; then he moved so restlessly, there was such a strange, excited look in his eyes, that she went on in a matter-of-fact, soothing voice: “See? This is Freeport we’re going through now. In a little bit we’ll turn down the river road—to the Springs.”

He looked from the window, turned and looked at her, then edged a little away from her. He would steal covert glances out at the town, back to her. But he soon closed his eyes as if too tired to bother more about it—as if it had passed.

She sat there wondering just what it had meant to him, wondering how he would “take it” when they turned in at the old place. She was fluttered, more than a little awed, by her own part in so strange a thing. She sat there trying to realize it, telling herself she didn’t realize it. “If this can happen,” she said to herself, “anything can happen!” Riding along with Bert Groves now, her mind went back to the times she had seen him on that very road. The Groves place was the big farm of the neighbor hood, and her father a small farmer nearby. He worked for the Groveses part of the time. They were not like other farmers, for they were more city folks than country people, having a house in town and only living in the country a part of the year. One of the first things she could remember was watching Bert Groves ride past the house. He had a fine horse and rode down from town a great deal. From her father’s farm she could see the Groves place. She was fascinated by their comings and goings. They had a great deal of company down from town; her mother, who would sometimes go over there and work, would report on the gay doings.

Bert Groves was in the real-estate business in town; his brother Edward was a doctor; the father ran the farm. And then one day when they were boring for oil—oil was suspected in the neighborhood, and Bert Groves, always one to take up with a new thing, always believing in things, insisted that they try for it on the Groves place—they found, not oil, but the “Crystal Sulphur Spring,” a strong artesian well of sulphur water. It startled everyone to find it there, and, as the town said, it set Bert Groves crazy. What Crystal Sulphur Water did to his imagination made life a different thing for the whole Groves family. Emma Peters—then Emma Haines, a girl of about sixteen—remembered very clearly the talk of those days. There were excited people who believed it was true that Bert Groves was going to make the fortune of the entire neighborhood, and there were plenty of skeptics to scoff at the believers.

The first thing he started was a bottling-works. He was going to ship Crystal Sulphur Water to the farthest bounds of the country. All the thing needed, she remembered him emphatically saying when he stopped at their place one day to get her father to come over and work, was pushing.

So he proceeded to give his time to pushing it. It was said that he spent the whole year’s crop in advertising. She remembered her father and another farmer sitting before their kitchen stove and laughing over a pamphlet that told the story of the final discovery of the spring of eternal youth. They said, “The old man’d better look out.”

But the previous stir was as nothing to the excitement there was the day it was told that Bert Groves and his brother, the doctor, were going to turn the Groves place into a kind of hospital, a place for people to come and rest and build up on Crystal Sulphur Water—a sanitarium, they called it. People got together and contributed what they had heard. Why, there was to be a lower and upper veranda round the whole house! That had its brief day, but paled before the later knowledge that there would be a fountain right in the middle of the house!

Old man Groves died during the commotion of the remodeling. People said it was just as well; later they declared it was Providence. Bert had talked him over, and he died believing.

The father’s death sobered Bert, they said, but he went right ahead like what they called “a house afire.” She stole a glance at the old man beside her and tried to realize that this was the man who had kept everybody on the move that summer they made the Groves place into a sanitarium. Her father was working there, so she would be back and forth on errands. She would loiter around all she could, thrilled by the excitement. And everlastingly Bert Groves was telling men a thing could be done when they were saying it couldn’t; he was behind everyone, making things move, keeping everybody livened-up. Her father would come home and say, “That boy may be crazy—but he’s a wonder, just the same.”

And then the next spring there was a grand opening—all the town people down and dancing—gay carryings-on. And Bert Groves was behind everything that night, too, beaming on everybody, his face shining as he showed people around, a spring in his step, and his voice so glad and sure.

Emma Haines was engaged to work at the Springs as a chambermaid. There were a number of chambermaids, and for the most part they spent their time keeping empty rooms freshened up. “Oh, you’ll be busy enough later on,” Mr. Groves would call as he passed a group of them loitering in the halls because there was nothing else for them to do. She wondered just how long he kept on thinking that. Most of the people there were friends of the Groveses, but there were a few sick or tired-out people who had read the pamphlets and really came to drink the water. Mr. Groves would beam upon them as they sat round the fountain. “And how are you feeling this morning?” he would ask in a courtly way as they came down to breakfast.

But the house did not fill up, and they let some of the help go, the manager assuring them they’d want them all back a little later. But the beaming look began to fade, his eyes to look pulled together in a worried way; there were times when he spoke sharply to the help, though it took only the arrival of a new patient to make him beam again. “Why, you can’t expect the thing to start off all in a minute!” she remembered him saying jubilantly one night when two patients arrived after a long period of no arrivals.

They said afterward that the wonder was it lasted as long as it did, that Bert Groves had about hypnotized folks or it couldn’t have been done. But there came a day when he could no longer hypnotize anybody into lending more money for Crystal Sulphur Springs. Of course, the place had been mortgaged at the first, money borrowed right along. The crash came. Crystal Sulphur Springs was closed. The Groveses had lost everything.

She was there the last night it was open. After the reduction of help she did various things, and she waited at Mr. Groves’s table that night, though, as a matter of fact, it was the only table in the dining-room. But there were two guests at it, and he went on talking to them in that pleasant, courtly way he had with the guests. But when she passed things she noticed how awkward he was about helping himself, and when he laughed it was hard to keep her place by the table—she wanted so to run away.

After that they did not see Bert Groves on the road between town and the farm any more. For a little while he went on with his real-estate business in town, but she heard a man tell her father that deals couldn’t be swung without any money to draw on, and that Groves wasn’t making a living—that he had lost his snap, anyway. In town one day she passed him on the street. He did not see her, for he was looking straight ahead, his face drawn, driven looking. She turned and looked after him, and what made her feel the worst was that she could see he was trying to walk in the old way.

He went away from Freeport soon after that; people said they guessed he’d rather be a poor man in some other town. One of the farmers who went to the state capital saw him a couple of years later behind the cigar-stand of a farmer’s hotel. He said Bert looked as if he wanted to drop behind the counter when he spoke to him, but he pulled him self together and they had quite a talk. Groves said then that all the thing had needed was pushing; the trouble was the hadn’t given him time to push it.

Then they heard nothing about him for a long time. Edward Groves, whose practice had been hurt by the sanitarium craze, died about ten years later. There was no near relative left. Things changed; no one seemed to hear from Bert Groves. The place for a long time was a white elephant on the hands of the creditors. They rented the farm, but who wanted that great building which Bert Groves had believed was going to be crowded with people coming from far and near to drink Crystal Sulphur Water? A woman tried it for summer boarders, but Bert Groves’s hopes had been too high; it was on too big a scale. For years it stood there deserted; and so, when with the growth of the town “The Farm” as well as other things needed bigger quarters, the Groves place was eagerly offered for consideration. It was run down; it could be had very cheap. And so at last a use was found for the sanitarium.

And so, too, it came about that Emma Haines went back to work at the old Groves place. She had married Henry Peters, who from working the farm at “The Farm” managed to get the place of superintendent. Twenty-five years elapsed from the time she waited on Bert Groves’s table that last night the sanitarium was open until she went there as wife of the superintendent of the Poor-farm. She had seen queer things in what she called “our business,” but one day Henry came into the kitchen with a scared sort of look and said:

“Who do you suppose is coming here?” He sat down weakly as he said it, and sat staring at her, his mouth a little open.

“For the land’s sake,” she had replied, flurried with something she was doing, “how do I know who’s coming here?”

“Bert Groves is coming here,” he told her, and she dropped the cup she was measuring with, and stood staring at him.

He had to tell her all he knew about it before she would believe there was any truth in it, though he didn’t know a great deal—just that the commissioners had had a letter from the wife of a cousin of the Groveses, from Simpson County, in the west of the state. She said she had “had” him for two years and could have him no longer. She was poor herself, and he was getting in his dotage. It wasn’t as if she were a blood relation. There was nobody left who was a blood relation who could have him. So the county he came from would have to do for him. Emma Peters and her husband had a very late supper that night; for a long time they could do nothing but sit there gaping at each other.

They had wondered with something akin to bated breath how he would “take it.” At first there was no way of telling how he was taking it. Mrs. Peters was not able to “make out” his look when they turned in at the old Groves place, could not make up her mind just what it was made him look frightened in so strange a way. It gave her what she called the creeps to see him staring up at the house he had remodeled thirty years before. And then before they reached the house he stopped looking from the window; when they pulled up at the side door he was looking straight down at his feet, hands clasped on his stick, so strangely still. She had to say, “Come, Mr. Groves; we’re here.” And when they went in the house he did not look around at all, but was all the while so still in that queer way. Mrs. Peters told Henry she couldn’t make it out; she didn’t know whether he knew—and that was why he was like that—or whether he didn’t really know, and yet, in a way, did. “I think it’s kind of working on him,” was the nearest she came to a decision.

The first time she saw him in the dining-room she felt, she said, as if her knees were going to let her drop. It was the same dining-room in which she had waited on him as manager of Crystal Sulphur Springs. Now he sat at a long table with the other men “inmates”; when he looked up he seemed only to look a very little way, all the time so still in that way that made her feel “queer.” The men who were not able to work about the farm sat a good deal on the big porch which Bert Groves had designed for the guests of the Springs.

“Out here is a nice place to sit, Mr. Groves,” she had cheerily said to him the second day when she found him in a somber place back of the stairs. She took him out to a chair. After that he sat always in that same chair, as if he had been told to sit there. But every time he sat down he edged it a little away. “Too good for the other boarders,” she heard Joe Minor laugh in a rough way.

But after the first week or so he began to steal covert, frightened glances around. She would catch him looking at things—looking in a dazed, troubled way. One day she came upon him rubbing his foot in an annoyed way over a broken board in the porch floor; he even began to venture away from the chair where he had seemed to think he had to sit. One day she saw him down in the yard, walking round and round on a little rise of ground. She could not make out what he was doing until it suddenly came to her that on that piece of ground there had once been, in crushed stone, the words, “Crystal Sulphur Springs.” She stood and watched him rubbing his foot around on the not very-well-cared-for grass. The stone had long before been taken up and used on the road running round the house. But some traces of it apparently remained, for she saw him pick up something and stand staring at it. Then he turned and stared up at the house. One big wing of it had been entirely taken away, sold years before to a prosperous farmer; there were other changes, and a general run-downness. It had been fresh-painted the day Bert Groves opened the sanitarium; it was a long way from fresh-painted now. A little while after she had watched him thus staring up at the house, she came upon him in the chair where she had suggested he sit. He was almost crouched there, and looked covertly out of the corner of his eyes when he heard her footsteps. He looked very old and frightened—and something more than that, something she couldn’t find words for. She spoke pleasantly to him, and stood there hesitatingly. She wished she could help him; she wished she knew where he was, as she thought it, so she would know how to help him.

After that it became a common sight to see him about the place, looking for things that used to be there. One day she saw him hobbling round and round the chicken-yard. Then it came to her that there used to be a grape-arbor where the chicken-yard was now. The guests of the sanitarium were to have sat out there. And always after those things he would go back to that same chair and sit there very still. In the dining-room she would see him stealing puzzled, troubled looks at the others.

In the large hall before the dining-room there had once been the wonder of half the county—the fountain. Now that hall had been partitioned off for the superintendent’s own quarters. One day she came upon Mr. Groves in the straight hall that replaced the big, open place, staring at the partitions. This time he stepped up to her and spoke.

“Where’s the fountain?” he asked, in an excited, tremulous voice.

“Why—why, they had to take it out, Mr. Groves,” she faltered.

“Nobody had any business to take it out!” he cried, angrily, pounding his stick on the floor. He was trembling and his cheeks were flushed. And then of a sudden his face went colorless; he stumbled, and she thought he was about to fall. She helped him into her own rooms and hastily got a stimulant for him. The man who brought him to Freeport had told her of “attacks,” of a very much weakened heart that must at times have immediate stimulant. That was not a strange thing to the people who ran the poorhouse; many of the old people were like that.

He was soon sitting out in his chair again, looking weak and yet somehow different, not still in that same queer way. The next day he came up to her as she was out feeding the chickens.

“Things are run down,” he began, abruptly, jerking his head toward the house. “That’s why we don’t get a better class of people.”

She was aghast, but it was her policy of making the best of things that made her answer, soothingly, “Why, maybe that’s so, Mr. Groves.”

“Of course it’s so!” he cried, with an energy that, burning there in his frailness, made her want to cry. He hobbled away, muttering, “I’m going to discharge half the people round this place!”

That was the beginning of it—of things that soon caused everyone, not only the Farm, but the town, to know that Bert Groves did not know he was an inmate of the poorhouse, but thought he was manager of Crystal Sulphur Springs. There were people who laughed about it and people who were disposed to cry, but everyone who heard wanted to hear more. Never had the Poor-farm been so much on the public tongue as in those days of telling the story of how old Mr. Groves believed he was still running the sanitarium. The “inmates” were glad of the new excitement, of the new interest in the place, and it was easy enough to get them to tell the tale of all that went on. Perhaps it was wanting to have a tale to tell which, quite as much as kindness, made them keep up the pretense. Perhaps most of all it was the love of everyone for “play-acting” that made them humor the old man in thinking he was still running the place he used to run. There were tales of how some of the number wanted to “tell,” kept threatening to tell, and how the others in turn threatened them with what would happen if they did tell. Perhaps, if they had, it would not have mattered as much as they thought, for “The Manager” was, after all, pretty well protected by that almost drawn veil which, for the most part, shut out things as they were. Had Joe Minor really said: “Don’t be a fool, or don’t expect us to be fools any longer. This is the poorhouse, and you’re one of the paupers, like the rest of us—no better, no worse. You ain’t running a hotel. Your hotel went busted long ago. You’re on the county now”—had he said it, it is probable he would only have troubled the waning mind for a little while, not likely he would have brought it really out into the hard light of facts. Doubtless Mr. Groves would only have gone to Mrs. Peters, as he did when things displeased him, and said: “I tell you we’ve got to get things in better shape. Then we’ll get a better class of people,” and she, making the best of things, would have answered: “That’s so, Mr. Groves. We must do that as soon as we can get around to it.” Something like that would satisfy him, for he never pushed anything very far; he would forget the next hour what he had proposed the hour before. The very cloudiness, fitfulness, of his mind safeguarded him. Often when the inmates were coming downstairs in the morning Bert Groves would be there at the foot, bowing and smiling to them, and asking, solicitously, “And how are you feeling this morning?”—and some of them would say, heartily, “Feeling fine, Mr. Groves,” with a wink for someone nearby, and others would look sheepish, and some would grin, and some would grunt. “Might as well let him think so,” was the feeling of most of them, adopting the good-humored attitude of Superintendent Peters. “What harm does it do?”

One day he said to Mrs. Peters: “I think I’ll move into my old room. I don’t want him”—jerking an elbow toward the old man with whom he shared a room—“in my room any longer.”

“Well, now, Mr. Groves,” she said, “if you could just let it go on that way awhile longer. We really haven’t got a room for him—and it wouldn’t look well to send one of the patients away, would it?” He was content, going away and sitting down by himself, dozing and ruminating in that thin, fitful shaft of light left to his brain, perhaps getting up to tell a man coming with coal where to put it, not long disturbed if the superintendent told him to put it somewhere else.

The “Crystal Sulphur Water” was still piped to a place outside the house, and every day he could be seen going over to get his drink of it, frequently carrying a glassful to someone else, saying, in a cracked voice, but with something of his old manner, “Don’t forget that you’re here to drink Crystal Sulphur Water.” And the person, as the case happened to be, would reply volubly, leading him on to talk more, or good-humoredly take the water with a thank-you, or snicker, or maybe say, “What you givin’ us?”—in which case he would go to Mrs. Peters and talk of ways of getting a better class of people.

It went on that way for two years. People would come down from town to see him. There were a few, very few, of his old friends left, and a number who as younger people had known him slightly, and he would receive them in a courtly way, tell of improvements he was going to make, show them around the place, ask them to stay to dinner. By this time the inmates, instead of calling the place “The Farm,” called it the sanitarium—giving the word various inflections; their little jokes about the good that Crystal Sulphur Water was doing them, and how soon they thought they would be able to get away, enlivened life for them. And all the while the old man—he was over seventy-five now grew more feeble; the times were increasingly frequent when someone had to run fast for the drops that would persuade his heart to go on beating.

And then the Boosters’ Committee, or at least the spirit of boosting, at last struck the Poor-farm. There were more people than Bert Groves who talked about things being run down. Superintendent Peters’s easygoing “What harm does it do?” with which he humored Bert Groves in the idea that he was running the place, was his policy, it seemed, about too many other things. It was a time when a great deal was being said about efficiency, and the discovery was made that Hen Peters didn’t so much as know the meaning of the word efficiency. And so the upshot of it was that the Peterses were to be succeeded by a man with very efficient looking red hair—a brisk, shrewd, decisive man. The Peterses would go back to farming.

One sunny afternoon in very late fall Mrs. Peters, after a hard day’s work in the house getting things in shape to leave—the new superintendent was to come the following week—walked out across the yard, slowly pushing her feet through fallen leaves. She had come out for what she called a breath, but she walked on over to the far side of the yard—just this side of the pastureland—and stood looking at some fruit trees that had been set out a little while before. Despite her protestations that she did not mind leaving, that it was a thankless job, and anybody who wanted to be saddled with it was welcome to it, she was making a number of little pilgrimages in these days. And as she sat now on a bench by the new fruit trees which she herself had helped set out, old Mr. Groves came hobbling across the yard and joined her. He was bent, and trembled as he moved; it was strange how, being like that, he could still seem Bert Groves.

“I’m going to have a lot more of these put out,” he began in a shrill, quavering voice. “There’s no reason why they shouldn’t run all up this line.” He pointed along where he meant, then sank to a seat and sat there breathing with difficulty, as if he had moved too fast.

“Why, that will be nice, Mr. Groves,” she said in her humoring tone.

He fell into the quiescence of age, but after a minute roused to say: “Oh yes—and I’ve got a lot of other plans. A lot of things I’m going to get right at in the spring.”

“That will be nice,” she repeated, a little break in her voice, for she wondered how things would be with Mr. Groves by spring.

The new superintendent said he was not going to have any such fooling after he took the place. There was to be an end to special privileges; there would be rules and regulations, and people would keep them—old man Groves as well as the rest. It was a scandal the way everybody had pampered that old man in thinking he was running the place! It interfered with discipline. First time he gave an order he would be told that he wasn’t giving orders there now.

And so Emma Peters sat there, sadly wondering how it would be with Mr. Groves by spring.

She thought of the day she went to the train to meet him. He was more feeble now than then, and yet in those two years of what the incoming superintendent called “tomfoolery” he had in another sense come back to himself. He no longer looked around in that covert, frightened way. Feeble though he was, he would give an order quite briskly. And, as the deposed, too easygoing superintendent would say, “What harm did it do?” when all he cared about was giving the order, forgetting it almost as soon as it was given. But the power to give orders had somehow brought him back to his own. In the two years he had emerged from that meekness that told the story of those years of being “had.” And now? Now, at the very last, was the comfort that delusion had given him to be taken from him? Even though the truth did not actually come home to him, it would distress him, spoil the poor little peace in which he rested, send him back to that crushing sense of dependence. What would he think had happened? To whom would he turn? Where, she wondered, sudden tears blinding her, would he think she was? It was the thing that made it hardest to go. She wished, for the little time that was left, she could be there to shield him, just to continue to say, “Yes, Mr. Groves.” What harm did it do? she thought with a rush of resentment against this man with the red hair whom they talked about as being so “efficient”—whatever they meant by that! Why not, as she had always said, just make the best of things?

The old man beside her again broke out in his rumination. “Well,” he said, in that quavering voice, and nodding toward the house, “the old place has seen a good deal.”

“It has, Mr. Groves, hasn’t it?” she agreed. “Yes—yes, seen a good deal.” Then, after a pause, looking at her, “Why, I was born in that house,” he said, as if telling it to her for the first time.

She nodded.

“Yes, born right there in that house. My grandfather was living there then—and my father and mother—and Ed.” He sat nodding over it.

But again he roused himself. “Yes, and if it hadn’t been for me—” He nodded wisely, leaving it unfinished. “Why, do you know,” and he made a little move as if to nudge her, “my father didn’t want to make the place into Crystal Sulphur Springs!”

“Now, is that so?” she murmured.

“Well, ’tis,” he chuckled. “Why, I had to talk—and talk—and talk—” He stretched his legs, as if wearied beyond endurance just to think of how he had had to talk.

Then he sank back, and when once more he roused, it was as if less of him came, as if a little more of him had been claimed. He made a feeble motion as if with the idea of nudging her, and with a chuckle whispered: “And my brother, Ed—he wasn’t for it first, either. Well, he wasn’t,” he affirmed, noddingly, and sat there feebly chuckling at the joke on Edward.

And she sat there thinking of the whole story: of that house when it used to be the Groves place, the gay doings, Bert Groves riding his fine horse down the river road; thinking of Crystal Sulphur Water, of Bert Groves when he was like “a house afire,” of the way he had been able to make people believe in things. Her eyes were misty again, thinking of the strangeness of life, of the hard things people had to meet. There was a wonderful sunset; the color flamed through the bare trees. It was for Emma Haines Peters one of those moments which come to all sensitive human beings of a certain mellowing sense of the whole wonder of life.

When she felt the chill of night and rose to her feet her voice was gentle as she said, “Guess we’d better be gettin’ in, Mr. Groves.”

He looked up at her, his eyes a little glassy; he started to get up, but fell back to his seat. “The drops!” she said, under her breath, and wheeled as if to run, as if to call to some men raking leaves up near the house. And then she did not run, did not call. She stood there still—stood mute, held.

He was gasping; she knew that his head was sinking to his chest. She had seen it before; she knew what had to be done—what must be done in a hurry. She tried to move, but something in her would not let her move. Before her was a picture—the picture of what would happen the first time Mr. Groves walked into the dining-room and told the new management what to have for supper. And so she stood there with her back to the gasping old man, stood there as if locked, looking off at the men—their backs to her—raking leaves up near the house, looking at the wonderful sunset streaming through the bare trees. Even after there was silence—complete silence—behind her, she still stood there, hands clenched, looking at the color flaming through the dark branches. And then at last she moved—found she could move—and her lips moved then, too. “But it’s better,” she breathed, with passion. As if imploring something off there in the color that flooded the old Groves place, she breathed again, “Wasn’t it better?”

Harper’s Magazine, Jul 1915

Agnes of Cape’s End

A COMPLETE NOVEL IN MINIATURE

I
The Beautiful Portuguese

When people ask me why I now spend my summers in the White Mountains, I say that Cape’s End was giving me rheumatism. A little house so close upon the sea that the winter tides each year damage the bulkhead might give one rheumatism, I should think, and I have not felt like telling the story of why I could no longer sleep in that bedroom which the sound of the sea filled at night.

The story of that is the story of Agnes Andrado, daughter of the Portuguese fisherman we lived next door to through seventeen years. When first I saw Agnes she was just one of those lovely Portuguese children who make it a delight to wander down the street and through the lanes of Cape’s End. Their being there is one of those contributions the sea is always making to the romance of life. You may know that story of the coming of the dark-skinned fishermen from the Azores, staying, and writing back to “The Islands” for families, sweethearts, friends; building up a new life on a distant shore; mingling with the New Englanders, themselves the result of a farther back wandering but now seeming inherent to the soil.

It was when Agnes was thirteen that I saw her as superbly unique. I got it with a shock because I had not seen her the year before, for we had spent that year in Paris. I remember our happy hurrying away from the station, the eagerness with which we followed the twisting street by the sea “down along” toward our own little white house. Then as we neared the Andrados’ a girl came running out the front door and down to the gate. There she stood, turning up the collar of her dark red sweater; I can see her just as plainly now, the way the wind blew her skirt out toward us. Then, recognizing us, she was all alight and came running to us.

“Why, Agnes! How you’ve grown,” was the silly thing I finally said. “How you’ve flamed!” was what had left me without words.

You would think that, after that, I would be prepared for her; but I never met her, I do not mean from year to year, but on the street day by day, without that little shock. It was strange how she could flame like that and yet not be violent; you never felt her beauty as flagrant. Perhaps that was because there was laughter in her eyes, or because of the sweetness of her mouth. Gladness always made her lips part a little and the color surge to her cheeks and her eyes deepen and glow.

It was the veering between tomboyishness and dreaming young womanhood which made her interesting to me through the next few years. But there came a spring when I returned to find that Agnes had left her border country behind.

We got in at night that time and I had not seen the Andrados. Next morning I started for a walk. I gloried in the sound and the freshness of the ocean after a winter of elevated trains and subways. And just as I turned a little bend in the street I saw that down there the mist had parted and let out—a Lady of the Mist. I assumed from her bearing that she was some stranger. Then she had come nearer; she was smiling—and I saw that she was Agnes Andrado.

The long jacket of her gray suit was close-fitted, disclosing those long, slow curves of her lovely body. But the arresting thing was the way she moved,—the proud grace of her, the suppleness of her strength,—lithe, buoyant, so light and so firm. What innumerable women in high places would give to move like that!

II
Lieut. Weston, U.S.N.

One day my friend Bartley Weston, who had come in the day before with his ship—the fleet was at Cape’s End that summer—was confronted with Agnes. Bartley Weston had once wanted to marry me, and as time went on seemed to cherish a particularly friendly feeling toward me—I daresay because I saved him from marrying, for a bachelor in the navy gets on very well.

This afternoon he was talking in that flattering manner of intense absorption to an artist girl who had come in.

For a moment it slipped my mind that I had asked Agnes to come over for tea—I had wanted to startle the painter girl with her. I had not heard anyone coming in, and the first I knew of someone standing in the door was when I saw Bartley’s stare and the flush that spread upward from his neck.

I remember that the middy blouse Agnes wore that day—she was one of the few town girls who adopted them from us—had one of those big blue collars, and a blue lacing that left the throat exposed, giving the full line of her slim, firm neck which so superbly bore the small, beautiful head. She was a little timid as she stood there waiting to be welcomed.

Well, from the very first, Bartley simply lost his head! He got out of the pattern, all right. Gone was that flattering manner of complete absorption; he was confused and abrupt and fidgety. Not so Agnes! Quiet, serene, the sunshine finding copper glints in the luxuriant hair piled high on her head, the wind blowing little wisps across the rich dark red of her cheek, a dreamy little smile would play on her lips as she looked out over the harbor.

I knew perfectly well that Bartley would be back next day; and he got there when Agnes and I were swimming. As he came down the steep steps to the beach Agnes was lying out on a raft she had just gained, full length in the sun, an arm curled round her head and one hand dabbling in the water. She swam toward us over-arm fashion—long, slow, telling strokes, her rounded wet arms glistening in the sunshine, her finely formed little chin lifted just out of the water, that rather serious smile hovering on her lips. We watched her run up the steps of their house, halt a minute for a joke with her father, who was cleaning the chicken yard, then disappear in the woodshed, where she had arranged a dressing-room.

Once he had me alone, Bartley broke out with his demands. Who was she? Where had she come from? What—well, what about her?

We were in the usual place on my upper porch. I’m afraid there was a little malice in the satisfaction I took in looking at this man of the navy and then pointing to the fisherman’s cottage next door.

“She lives there,” I said.

“Yes, yes!” he answered impatiently, “so I gathered—staying there for the summer. But—Well, who is she?” he laughed.

Mrs. Andrado had come out of the house and was taking some clothes down from the line—sleeves rolled up, apron flapping. I nodded toward her. “That’s Mama,” I quietly replied.

Bartley’s stare at me was rather comical. “Why— Is it?” he said, in such a feeble tone that we both laughed.

And then, mildly, I told him about Agnes. She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of those Portuguese fisher people. Her father and mother had come from the Azores in their youth. Her mother had gone to school in The Islands and could read and write; her father could not.

III
The Call of Race

I looked at Bartley, and I liked him better then than I had ever liked him, liked him for the gallant little smile with the quizzical twist. After a minute he said, a distinct edge to his voice: “You can’t claim that it accounts for her, can you?”

I could not. Bartley broke another pause with the brusque demand: “Where did she get it?”

“Oh, that’s just one of life’s little surprises,” I laughed. “It isn’t all as cut and dried as you think.”

But in the next six weeks I myself came to find that it wasn’t as cut and dried as I had thought. For Bartley did not stay away. He came with constant proposals of things for the three of us to do—swimming, sailing, tramps over to the sand dunes on the other side of the Cape. He entertained us on board his ship.

That afternoon was one of life’s little surprises for me! “Where did she get it?” I put to myself, watching Agnes chatting with the captain commanding that ship. Though perhaps it was no mystery, no sport, as a biological friend of mine would say, but only that she was the lovely flower of a long line of gentle-natured folk. And then, of course she knew that she had beauty; and how that must back one up! I saw her pointing out to the captain the house where she lived, telling him, in answer to his question, that her name was not Spanish but Portuguese, that her father and mother had come from The Islands. She pointed to the “Little Queen,” a fishing schooner at anchor near the battleship, and said that her brother would go out in that the next afternoon.

They talked of a fisherman’s life, and Agnes told of how, when she was a little girl, her eldest brother had been drowned. Her eyes deepened and grew dewy in recounting it and there were catches in her low, rich voice. There was a pause when she looked off across the water to the sand dunes and the tip of a sail that could be seen on the other side of the narrow neck of land which made the harbor as if, from that battleship, she was brooding over all the fishing craft, her craft, in the waters round about there. Then she pulled herself back and turned with a bright inclusive smile to the man by her side.

I do not know why I had so little concerned myself with ideas of what it was to come to, perhaps I was too absorbed in the adventure of it as it was going along. It was a couple of nights later that Bartley came to me and told me he wanted to marry Agnes.

As he watched my attempts at rallying, Bartley remarked that life was less cut and dried than I had thought.

Two days later they were engaged and I, apparently, was the only one left gasping for breath. My husband said it was one of the things he had been looking for, and very much to be deplored. Bartley was what you might call grimly radiant, Agnes attractively excited and the Andrados curiously subdued, but consenting.

I got my breath, and then my imagination turned loose on it! I loved to think of the girl whose people had come in fishing boats from the Azores marrying a man who might one day command a battleship of our navy, that mingling of crafts, of peoples, somehow opening my mind to the whole of the romance and variety and adventure of life. And it was the sea had brought this about; the sea was always doing startling things with human destinies, opening out from the fixity of the land.

Bartley himself was doing very well with “Mama” and “Pa.” There had been a terrible receiving of him in the front room, but after that things eased up and they were all more or less themselves. Bartley’s mother and sister were in Europe, and he said he was not going to write to them until nearer the time. I was thankful we did not have to manage having them there for the wedding! Bartley assured me, how ever, that he would make it “all right” with them.

Poor Bartley!—he would have been willing to attempt to readjust the affairs of both land and sea had that been necessary to his having Agnes. Sometimes, watching him looking at her, I would grimly reflect that he hadn’t looked at me that way. But I had only to look at Agnes myself to be sympathetic with the added ardor. It wasn’t in my heart to blame him for being unhappy when she wasn’t in sight.

Of course Agnes was fluttered about being engaged—her prospects, Bartley’s being so much in love with her. That enhanced her beauty, though not so much as the plaintiveness with which she would speak of leaving Mama. Her feeling about leaving home made her mouth sensitive, her eyes broodingly tender. I one day dressed her up in an evening gown I had with me, a soft ivory satin. I was called downstairs, and when I came back Agnes, still wearing the dress which had made her future real to me, was standing at the window looking over toward home. Her mother was to be seen moving about in the kitchen. When Agnes lifted her eyes to me the tears brimmed from them.

One day when I went over to the Andrados I found Agnes in gay raillery with her brother and a big, good-looking fellow who was introduced as “our friend Mr. Ventura.” They called him Tony. I learned that Tony was a Cape’s End boy who was just back from long wanderings; he had been a fisherman on the Grand Banks, and had come down on a cruise from there to Gloucester, thence down the Cape to “see everybody.” He did not look pure Portuguese, and later Agnes told me his mother was a New Englander. He had the slow movements and gentle voice attractive in a powerfully built man, a slow, fascinating smile that lighted his whole face, and he looked at you out of nice gray eyes. I stayed there for some time, listening to his story of the big storm on the trip down from the Banks.

Next morning I saw him again. He and Agnes were out on the platform of the bulkhead trying to persuade the puppy to sit on his hind legs. I had not heard Agnes laugh so much for a long time; it was as it had been when she was a little girl.

That evening Bartley was submerged in tender gloom. His ship was ordered to Newport. He had been fearing it, but he endured all the lover’s agony at having to leave Agnes. They were to be married in two months. Before morning the ship which had for two months lain out there in the harbor would be gone. Agnes was subdued, but Bartley apparently hungered for a greater display of unhappiness, for I heard him wistfully asking, as the ship’s bells came to us across the water, if she would be sorry not to hear those bells tomorrow. She said of course she would, affirmed it stoutly.

But the next day I met her walking down from town with Antone Ventura, and I must say she looked far from woeful.

I saw her before she did me, and I had a fancy that with seeing me her face shadowed, though quickly she brightened again in affectionate greeting.

In the next two weeks I often saw her with Tony Ventura. That was not strange, for he was much at the Andrados’, a friend of them all. But Agnes was strange with me, restless. I tried to put it down to girl queerness about getting married, telling myself that this meant so much more than the usual changes; but sometimes when I began to talk of Bartley, of her marriage, her eyes would stop me; there were times of letting something go into them that she kept well out of words.

Once when I was jesting with her about the navy her face was the strangest I have ever seen—she was smiling and her eyes were going the other way from the smile.

An hour or two later I saw her walking along the beach with Tony Ventura. He had a rather slouching walk, but somehow even that was attractive in this big, good-looking fellow. He stopped and threw a stone that skimmed the water, then turned to Agnes with that slow smile which lighted his face.

As they walked on, Agnes’s step was buoyant, her head well up in that superb way she carried it.

I began to worry, and then one evening I stopped to speak to Mrs. Andrado about buying a chicken, just after I had stepped in from the front the door at the back opened and there was Agnes—an Agnes I had never seen, glowing, vibrating, lips all tremulous, eyes shining. Why, I knew as well as I’ve ever known anything in this world that Agnes had just been kissed! A woman who didn’t know that wouldn’t be a true woman.

Next morning Agnes—white, miserable, defiant-faced—came over and told me she wanted to “get out of” her engagement to Bartley.

I remember that it was in my bedroom. I sat down on the bed, sat there looking dumbly at Agnes, just as I had sat looking dumbly at Bartley when he told me he wanted to marry her.

And she wanted to “get out of” marrying Bartley Weston that she might marry Tony Ventura. Tony was to have the job of “spare hand,” that is, first mate, with Captain Pitney. Tony was not going away again.

Agnes broke down and cried. Wouldn’t I help her get out of it? I had always been so good to her. Oh, she was so sorry! And especially as it put me to all this trouble, made me feel bad. She was sorry for Bartley, too. Yes, she knew that he loved her. But she didn’t love him. She had thought at first she did, but now that she loved Tony and knew what it was, she knew she had never loved him at all. It was just that she was pleased at his loving her, and had thought it would be nice to marry into the navy.

I told her, rather crisply, that it was nice to marry into the navy. I spoke of going about the world, the opportunities, the social position. And her answer to that was this, spoken in utter simplicity: “Why, I know it would be nice, Mrs. Oliver. I’m sure it would be. But don’t you see how it is? I don’t love Bartley—and I do love Tony.”

IV
Agnes and Tony

And so it was that Agnes got out of marrying into the navy.

I thought of her much during the winter—of how she was not one of the women of the navy at Old Point Comfort, but one of the fishermen’s wives at Cape’s End, doing her own work in a tiny house on the sea.

When I saw her the next May, it struck to the death all secret disappointment and commiseration. Seeing her, what she had let go shrunk to a paltry and colorless thing. Her whole being exhaled the triumph of passionate love. I made humble readjustment of my ideas.

She and Tony had the little house on the other side of the Andrados’; it was closer upon the beach than theirs, so I could see across them to her, could see her garden, bright with nasturtiums and sweetpeas.

I would not have seen so much of Agnes that year had it not been that Tony was much of the time at sea. And it was perhaps because of the way their life was arranged—the constant going away, the week at sea, then the homecoming and the few radiant days together before again there must be that pull of parting—perhaps because of that I not only saw much of Agnes, but came to be swayed by her. I do not suppose she would have deepened like that had love brought her no pain. Certainly, I felt in them something more than the usual happiness in love of the fortunately mated young couple. It was as if the sea charged it with sterner quality.

Almost always after Tony’s leaving Agnes would come over to our house. Many times we have sat together on my upper porch and watched the sails of The Mary go up, have watched her round the Point and disappear. Agnes would look as long as she could see, then sit quietly with me, her face sweetly serious, her lips often parted in a dreaming little smile reminiscent of Tony’s goodbye to her. In those days when she was alone memories and anticipations made about her an aura of love. I seldom failed to go in there on the days she was expecting Tony back; I did not like to miss seeing her on those days. Once I did not get away in time—I hadn’t meant, of course, to be so inconsiderate. But it didn’t matter, for he never saw me at all. But I saw Agnes’s face before it was buried in his embrace, before I could slip away I heard her lovely, lilting little “Tony!” her passionate, choking, laughing “Tony!”

V
The Relentless Sea

It happened in November. I had never known so stormy a fall. And yet I was staying on there alone. A month before my husband had gone in town to open his studio. Night after night the boom of the sea filled my bedroom. Like the feeling that reached me through Agnes, it was as a sense of the power and the wonder of life washing in upon the little playhouse of my own existence.

Of course Agnes, like all the other fishermen’s wives, would worry when her man was out in rough weather. And yet the wonder is, not that there are sleepless nights but that there can be so many nights of sleep. I suppose it is because they are children of the sea, accept it as we accept the life that is ours. But they lose youth sooner than we do.

The afternoon preceding that night which so long as men—and women—now living live will not be forgotten in Cape’s End, Agnes came over to our house about four o’clock. I had a hard time getting the door shut after letting her in.

“This is the worst yet, isn’t it?” she said with a nervous little laugh, hastily drawing up a chair and holding out her hands to my fire.

“It is quite a wind,” said I cheerfully.

“Tony’ll get in tomorrow,” she said, “and then that’s the last for this season.” She sighed heavily, with a deep relief, and sat, palms framing her face, staring into the driftwood fire. “Pretty,” she said at last, pointing to a line of pure blue quivering round a rift in a log. “Is this some of the wood you had hauled from the back shore?” she asked.

I only nodded. With night falling on a sea like this, one did not care to talk of driftwood.

“Let’s make some chowder for supper, Agnes,” I proposed briskly. She had begun walking up and down the room, biting at the tips of her fingers.

I had thought I could tell of that night. I find that I cannot.

In the morning I went with Mr. Andrado to our nearby grocery store, where there was a telephone, where perhaps we could get some news from the life-saving stations. Mr. Andrado did not speak to me, did not look to right or left. The night had left us dumb.

It had left them all dumb; it was a stilled little band standing around in the store. The grocer, it seems, had just turned from the telephone. “There’s two vessels—that they know of,” he said in a lifeless voice to Mr. Andrado. “One’s aground on Peaked Hill Bars. The other’s blowin’ in to Highland. They don’t know what they are. They’re signalin’ the men to stay aboard their vessels—long as they can. They’re ’fraid they’ll go crazy and try to make it in their dories.” He stopped, but no one spoke. Then he added: “They say us over here can’t get any idea what the sea is out there.”

By noon we heard that the life-savers had succeeded in shooting the line to the vessel pounding herself to pieces on Peaked Hill Bars and were getting the men off in the breeches buoy. That vessel was The Peerless. But all efforts to reach the vessel off Highland Light had failed. And then about an hour later we had word—hopelessly authentic word—that the foundering vessel out of reach at Highland was The Mary. A man washed ashore was of The Mary’s crew.

In the early dusk, as I was trying to prepare something that Agnes might eat, heard a sound that made the pan fall from my hands. Running into the front room I saw Agnes staring across the street. They were bringing Joe Dutra home. They were carrying him in.

I do not know how it was I had the strength to catch her as she fell.

After that she was frozen—horror-frozen. We would put her to bed, but she would get up, would sit on the edge of a chair, hands clenched—horror-frozen. I know no other way of putting it.

And because, after the way of mothers, Mrs. Andrado had to do something, she came into the bedroom a couple of hours later.

She began: “Darling, you must eat. Here now. See? Mama has fixed a nice little piece of fish for you—”

But she got no further, for, with a sound more animal than human, Agnes sprang at her, and crying “Fish!” seized the thing from the plate and threw it in her mother’s face, crying over and over again: “Fish! Fish!”

I suppose in her violence she hurt herself, for a little later we knew that the baby which should not be born for two months was going to be born at once.

And the baby was born about midnight, born as the sea began to abate and the wind to subside. Agnes’s little baby was a boy, and he lived three hours. It was I who held him most of the time, held him there by the fire while we did all the vain things in an attempt to keep him alive. In the morning the doctor and priest took him away.

VI
The Miracle

I went out of doors … I crouched there at the side of the bulkhead and babbled to the sea. I commanded the sea to bring Tony back.

And then I knew I could not go on like that; and I got up and started to walk along the road toward Highland Light. I have no idea how far I went, but after a time I knew that a wagon was coming toward me. It was a blue wagon, one of those blue cart-like wagons the life-savers use, and in it were two men in oilskins. That one leaning out toward me!… It was Antone Ventura!

It seemed a long time afterward that I could distinguish Tony asking: “Is Agnes done up, too?” and I heard as something a long way off, and amid the thunder of the waters, the story he was telling: How two of them—he and this other man—had “stayed aboard her.” He told how they tried to persuade the others that even that rolling and pounding and slow going to pieces was better than a dory in such a sea. But there came a time, he said, when those poor fellows simply had to get off that vessel. He told of the launching of the dories, of what they saw happen. He mentioned, though as I remember it very briefly, the night he and this other man spent alone on the vessel. Then at much greater length he told of how the life-savers got them off at daybreak, just as The Mary was indeed pounding into pieces.

Two days later I went in to bid Agnes goodbye. I was leaving Cape’s End. I could not go before that because I could not get out of bed; but, once out of bed, I could not stay any longer. I could not stand the sound of the sea.

I found Agnes in bed, very pale and large-eyed, but serene. Her eyes would follow Tony about. She was eating a piece of fish.

I had that morning received a letter which took me a long way back, into another world. “Agnes,” I said, “who do you suppose is going to be married?”

She shook her head with an interested but languid little smile.

“Bartley Weston,” I told her. Her face lighted up then. “He is?” she responded animatedly.

“He’s going to marry a Baltimore society girl,” I added.

“Now, isn’t that nice!” said Agnes with warmth. “I do hope he’ll be awfully happy. Bartley was a nice fellow, wasn’t he?” But her eyes were following Tony as he carried potatoes from the sink to the stove.

The American Magazine, Sep 1915

Unveiling Brenda

Given an instructor in English who has the profile of a Greek god—and has had it for only twenty-six years—and given at his feet coeds aspiring to write, does the night the day that the most colorful things of the school year will not be of a strictly academic nature? There was a crabbed old regent from downstate who dropped in early in the term to look things over—as crabbed regents do—and, after his eyes had rested for some forty seconds upon the beautiful countenance of Peyton Root, he said he feared this was not going to be as serious a year in the life of the university as one who had its true interests at heart could wish. The year before, Miss Stanton—fifty-two, and as serious as the crabbiest could wish—had taught English 13, and this theme course never at any time embarrassed the capacity of the classroom. But after the faculty reception in opening week, at which function the social graces of Miss Stanton’s successor had excellent opportunity for liberation, it was amazing how many earnest students—largely of the militant sex—felt the year must mark an advance in their writing of the mother tongue. The second week English 13 changed quarters with Medieval History, and from that airy room looked out across the sloping campus to the river which wound through the plenteous farm country of the great Middle Western state of—well, as Peyton Root is a nephew of the governor, and it is not desirable to embarrass those in high station, let us say the great state of Ioda.

Peyton Root was other things than nephew of the governor. He was Mr. Root of Harvard and Heidelberg; he was Peyton Root of Des Champs—proud capital of the fecund state, a city which boasted as giddy a social life as ever scandalized a metropolis. “Peyton Root!” breathed one of the Des Champs girls. “Why, my dear, do you know who he is?” “It is not often,” solemnly wrote an influential regent, “that a university has so great an opportunity.” So great an opportunity, he meant, as to be able to get for the piteous sum the plenteous state paid its instructors one who had absorbed practically all which the greatest halls of learning had within them for absorption; one who, the influential regent expatiated, would also bring to the university the fruits of a rich social experience such as—this most tactfully put—certain other instructors were not able to contribute.

Instructor Root himself would have selected quite other things as his real contribution. Mr. Root took his soul more seriously than he did his social position or his degrees. The reason he secretly despised the U. of I. was not because it was “jay,” but because it was unsensitive. He wasn’t “stuck on himself,” as an unsensitive freshman put it, because he was handsome, but because—if you really must know—he had what in the secret recesses of his consciousness he thought of as a beautiful, sensitive soul. Please do not put him down for a jackass. He really wasn’t, at all. He was a nice, lovable fellow, who laughed a lot in spite of the fact that he took Walter Pater very hard.

Now it was the third week, and four o’clock in the afternoon. The lads and lassies of English 13 were giggling in the corridor; their instructor sat at his desk frowning over the themes the had just handed in. How could youth be so stupid?—so banal! “What My Books Mean to Me.” Good heavens!—that was from Ina Gilson, daughter of the influential regent, and—worse yet—the girl with the sunny hair whom he had danced with just the night before. He would like to suggest to Miss Gilson that she next write on, “What My Toes Mean to Me.” Her toes really must mean something—dancing like that. He was about to chuck all the themes into his portfolio and start for home when his eyes fell upon a blotted page in a rather childish hand, and he was startled by the heading, “On the Pain of Teaching Dolts.”

He read it through; he’d started to smile—he’d frowned. He colored; he chuckled. “There is an acute anguish in teaching dolts,” he read. “One gives one’s best—and leaves them dolts. Dolts will be dolts. Why should a noble soul unveil itself to dolts? ’Tis hard, and yet the pain is not without its edge of ecstasy. Is giving less because it leaves the giver dumb? All is not beautiful—but beauty lives. The God who gave us many dolts gave a few noble souls.”

A girl had written it! There was a girl in his class who actually had the face to write this thing and sign it and hand it in! Brenda Munroe. Never heard of her. Munroe—Munroe; he fairly agonized in the effort to recall a student by the name of Munroe. He forgot all about his engagement to play tennis, and sat there telling himself he didn’t care a hang who Brenda Munroe was. Munroe?—Munroe? Brenda. Queer name. He again read, “On the Pain of Teaching Dolts.” Certainly he had not acted like that!

That night he had dinner with Mrs. Shields—wife of the head of his department, a woman wiser in the ways of the world than most of the faculty wives. Ina Gilson was there. It appeared that Mrs. Shields was much attached to this daughter of the influential regent. She was also attached to the idea of making her husband president of the university. After dinner he very casually asked Ina, “Oh, by the way, is there anybody named Munroe in our theme class?”

“Why, yes,” replied Ina; “there’s Brenda.”

Her blue eyes were upon him in inquiry, so he lightly asked, “What’s Brenda like?”

“Poor Brenda,” murmured Ina—and just then they were interrupted.

Poor Brenda? Why poor? He didn’t see why anybody as brazen as that need be poor. Very well fitted indeed, he should say, for coping with the world in which she found herself. He took Ina home and was particularly nice to her; after all, she was a lady. But after he had left her at her sorority house and was cutting across the campus to his own apartment—a studio-like affair which he had astounded university circles by fitting up over a tailor-shop—a sentence from Ina’s theme hit him square in the face. “It is indeed impossible,” Ina had written, “for me to tell all that my books mean to me.” He went home and re-read poor Brenda’s theme—and he laughed. But after he was in bed he tossed about and couldn’t go to sleep. He had not acted like that! A very business-like instructor entered the classroom of English 13 next afternoon. He was distinctly curt as for the first time that term he called the roll. As in quick staccato he progressed through J’s and K’s and L’s, students sat up straighter, stopped rolling lead-pencils and twisting paper. “James Milligan?”—and then, “Brenda Munroe?” called the brisk instructor—and looked up. There came a “Here,” but he didn’t locate it. “Miss Munroe?” he repeated, incisively, and an equally incisive “Present” was returned from the rear of the left wing.

He spoke of the mediocrity of all the themes; he discoursed loftily upon the cheapness of trying to pass off impertinence for ideas. He could see that on the rim of that left wing there were brown braids above a green waist, and across the area of moving heads two curiously grave eyes fixed him steadily. He found himself flushing under that speculative look, and telling himself he wasn’t going to have any ridiculous thing lurking beneath the surface, “Just a moment, please, Miss Munroe,” he said, as the class was leaving. The girl in the green waist—it turned out to be a whole green dress—sat down on a front seat. He was irritated by Ina Gilson’s look of surprise as she passed out.

“I would be interested in knowing what governed your selection of a subject.”

She looked up in a startled way that lighted her whole face. He found a peculiar satisfaction in noting that she didn’t have a very good nose. It wasn’t perfectly straight—Mr. Root himself had an amazingly straight nose. But there was none of that satisfaction to be had from her eyes. They were queer eyes—lights in them like the sun on old copper. She was looking at him now in an earnest, troubled way, brows knitted. But he had an uncomfortable feeling of an imp trying to break loose in those grave eyes.

“I thought we were to write of the things that interested us,” she said, in a perplexed voice.

“Why, certainly!” he snapped. He couldn’t very well say, “Why did it interest you?”

“I thought,” she went on, as if wanting to be put right if wrong, “that we were just to write of what was in our minds.”

“Certainly,” he said, stiffly.

“I suppose, then—it shouldn’t have been in my mind?”

“I think you must know,” he began, huffily, but checked himself and said, with dignity, “That is all, Miss Munroe.”

She got up. “I will try to write with more restraint,” she said.

“I never said I wanted restraint!” he retorted, heatedly.

She took a step or two. “I will try to write more conventionally,” she murmured, contritely—and passed out before he could say anything.

She left him fuming. He—Peyton Root—put in the position of wanting one of his students to write more conventionally!

He met Ina Gilson and walked through the campus with her. “I’m so glad you’re taking an interest in Brenda,” she said, gently.

“I’m not taking an interest in her,” he replied, peevishly.

“I beg pardon,” murmured Ina.

He colored. “I had something to say to her about her theme,” he explained.

“But that was what I meant,” said Ina, with patient sweetness. “A little special interest will mean so much to Brenda.”

“I don’t know that there’s any special interest,” he muttered. Irritated, he said brusquely to this author of “What My Books Mean to Me,” “She writes more interestingly than the rest of the class.”

“I suppose she would,” murmured Ina.

He gave her a sharp look. Now what did she mean by that? It was in the “Poor Brenda” tone. But she was talking football and he didn’t want to turn her back—thus fostering the idea of “special interest.”

That evening was again disturbed by this Brenda Munroe. He had not acted in accordance with his ideal as a teacher. He had found a spark and, instead of breathing upon it, he had put it out—because it was a gibe at himself. He tried to read Santayana, but was too distressed by the idea that Brenda Munroe might think he had no sense of humor.

At four o’clock next afternoon he impatiently turned over the newly received themes until he came to that queer, childish little hand. He read it through with a puzzled look, then re-read it with a smile. It was as prim and immature as the handwriting that set it down. It was on “Trees.” “Trees,” wrote Brenda, “are an inestimable blessing to the human race.” She enumerated the utilitarian and the esthetic reasons which indebted us to trees. It might have come from the author of “What My Books Mean to Me.” Across this the cultured young instructor blue-penciled: “Cut it out. Be yourself.”

Then he went over to have tea with Mrs. Shields, and boldly asked her who Brenda Munroe was. “What do you want to know for?” inquired this breezy lady, tantalizingly. He said that naturally he was interested in knowing about his students. “Then,” said Mrs. Shields, “I will begin by telling you about Abigail Sears.” After exhausting Abigail she began on Jimmie McGuire, saying she could see it was absolutely essential he know about all his students. And so she forced from him the admission that the student he particularly wanted to know about was Brenda Munroe. “She’s original,” he explained.

“Too original for university circles,” replied the wife of his chief.

“Now what do you mean by that?” demanded the young man.

“She doesn’t fit in,” said the U. of I.’s social leader. “There’s a reason.”

“What reason?” impatiently pressed Peyton Root.

“Oh—” said Mrs. Shields, vaguely, and fussed with the tea things. “Her father’s a milkman,” she observed, and it might or might not be related to what went just before.

Peyton Root set down his cup. “Well, is this such a bourgeois place that a girl—a clever girl—an attractive girl—Good heavens!” he exploded, “what standards! What’s the difference between a milkman and a wholesale grocer?”—the latter was the occupation of fair Ina’s father, influential regent.

Instead of telling him the difference between a milkman and a wholesale grocer, Mrs. Shields observed, “Ina has lovely hair, hasn’t she?”

“Is Brenda left out?” he demanded, waving aside Ina’s hair.

“She doesn’t go about it right to get in. She would have made a sorority all right, but just at the critical moment she handed in to the Iodian a silly little skit which the editor was unwise enough to print—‘Suppose They Left Me Out!’—the tenor of which was that she might as well seek death then and there. Needless to add, she didn’t get in.”

“How corking!” cried he. “Why, the girl’s a rebel!”

“Naturally,” murmured the social leader.

“Oh, I suppose there have been milkmen’s daughters who haven’t been rebels,” observed the delighted young instructor.

“Oh—milkmen’s daughters,” murmured Mrs. Shields.

He looked at her inquiringly. She seemed about to say something—but didn’t.

“I am surprised,” he bantered, “at your attitude toward milk—beautiful, wholesome, indispensable milk!”

“I confess I don’t care for the girl,” she said shortly, and added, in that vein which made him like her: “This university’s no place for a rebel. Just take my word for that,” she finished, dryly—“needn’t try to find it out for yourself.”

But the talk had fired all the rebel that was in him. He read Nietzsche till 2 a.m., and next day told his American literature class that American literature was a toddy with the stick [alcohol] left out. This a student reporter sent to his Des Champs paper, where it made the front page. Mr. Root was advised by his chief of department to be less epigrammatic and more reverent. The crabbed old regent from down-state wrote up saying that the University of Ioda was maintained by the taxpayers of that state for the purpose of training Americans, and that the way to do it was not to teach them to despise their own literature. The secretary of the prohibitionists wrote in, deploring the content of the figure of speech; a newspaper paragrapher said that possibly the stick had not been left out of the toddy young Mr. Root had before entering the classroom; and the influential regent—fair Ina’s father—wrote that while he hoped they would one day sit over a toddy themselves, he did feel that all reference to these questionable things must be kept from the classroom. And as to American literature, why not speak of that which was worthy, and not too much emphasize the shortcomings? He, as a true American, would greatly prefer this course, and he felt he voiced the sentiment of many other patriotic taxpayers.

But Instructor Root was not greatly perturbed—instructors with incomes can afford their little fling in rebellion—and Brenda Munroe, who was in “Am. Lit.” as well as English 13, had taken to smiling at him, and it was amazing what a long way that went in his general feeling of well-being.

But for a young man who brought to the university the fruit of a rich social experience, he was finding it singularly hard to advance his acquaintance wit the milkman’s daughter. She wasn’t at the places where acquaintances are advanced. And while there was between them a delightful little classroom understanding, as between two lively souls in a world of dolts, it didn’t seem to have any tendrils out into the wide world beyond the classroom. This Instructor Root one day decided was a state of things which had existed long enough.

So when he was in the grocery-store buying some apples, he suddenly demanded of the clerk, “Do you know where a milkman named Munroe lives?”

“Joe!” the clerk bawled out to the driver at the curb, “know where a milk man named Munroe lives?”

Some of the college boys were going by; one of them stopped and respectfully told his teacher that a milkman named Munroe lived about a mile out on the Duck Creek road.

Red in the face, Mr. Root grabbed his bag and strode away, so upset he told himself he didn’t care where the devil a milkman named Munroe lived. He went home and looked over the themes, and he wrote upon Brenda’s: “Too loosely constructed. Watch your English. Only the writer who has mastered it has any right to take liberties.”

Then he wished he hadn’t written it, and tried to rub it off, making a fearful smudge. For ten minutes he sat looking at the smeary theme in deep discontent. Then he started for the Duck Creek road.

He had no business to be doing anything of the sort. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and he was going home to Des Champs. He ought to go and see Mrs. Shields, who wanted him to do something in town for her. This was playing off. For that—or some other reason—he was much keyed up by what he was doing. It was one of those bully days of late fall. He liked the day. He liked the world.

After he had gone what he thought was about a mile, he was on the watch, looking for a place with a lot of cows and a girl with brown braids wound round her head. A fat, yellow dog with a corkscrew tail who was sitting by the roadside accosted him agitatedly.

“Hello, Apollo!” replied Mr. Root. “Know where a milkman named Munroe lives?”

A man with a spade in his hand stepped out from behind some trees. “I am a milkman named Munroe,” said he.

Nothing in Peyton Root’s social experience told him what to say next. So he had to invent something. It was, “Oh, I—was thinking of buying a cow.”

The milkman named Munroe looked the young man up and down. “That so?” he said, in surprise.

“I heard,” lied Instructor Root, “that you had a cow for sale.”

Milkman Munroe leaned his spade against the tree. “Well,” said he, “I have.”

The young man who had announced his quest for a cow was silent.

“Want to come up and look at her?” suggested the milkman.

A cow! But he looked at the dingy brown house set well back from the road. He thought he could see someone moving about in there. He said he’d like to see the cow.

So Mr. Munroe picked up his spade. “Comin’ along, Scraps?” he said to the dog.

Scraps, too, appeared to be dealing with a conflict, but decided for staying by the road. “He’s waiting for my daughter,” said Brenda’s father. “You can’t budge him till he spots her down the road.”

At this it suddenly occurred to Mr. Root that the cow was for a friend, and he might as well wait till his friend was with him. Milkman Munroe grew a little peevish, and went back to digging.

Instructor Root wanted to wait with Scraps for the person Scraps was waiting for, but he felt he had made no hit with that person’s father and had better move on. Perhaps he would meet her; he went over the conversation that would take place if he did meet her, but it was one of those brilliant conversations doomed to remain in the land of the spirit.

Back in town he met his friend Billy Enright from Des Champs. Billy and his big car were in front of the building which domiciled the tailor and Mr. Root.

“Hello there, Peyt!” called Billy. “Been lookin’ all over for you. We’ve come to take you home. Goin’ to drive home by moonlight.”

Peyt brightened. Fact is, he was glad to see Billy. Intellectually, Billy simply wasn’t there, as Peyton in an expansive moment had explained to him, but, as he had further made clear, he liked him, anyhow. They met on a gay-young-blade basis, and Billy secretly scorned Peyton for what he was that Billy wasn’t, quite as much as he himself was scorned for not being that thing. He was now explaining that there was a “whole bunch” had come to take Peyt home. They were over at Mrs. Shields’s. Mrs. Shields couldn’t understand where he was—she’d been expecting him there. He wound up with, “Where can we get a drink?”

“We can’t,” said Peyt.

Billy looked pained. “I know where we could get a drink of milk,” his friend observed.

For the instant Billy was speechless. Then, “Milk?” he breathed in such an outraged tone, with such a “I-ask-for-bread-and-you-give-me-a-stone” look, that Peyton went on:

“Milk, Billy, is very nourishing. It is simple. It is beautiful. It is good.”

Billy’s face was all screwed up.

“Say, Billy,” Peyton burst out, animatedly—“tell you what! Why don’t you buy a cow?”

Billy now grinned sheepishly for not having at once perceived the joke.

“I mean it!” pursued his friend. “Never have I been more serious than at this instant. I was just looking for a friend who would buy a cow. I’ve been out seeing about it. I’ve got the cow all engaged—all I need is the friend. You can well afford to buy a cow, Billy, and it will—it will give you an interest in life. Come on! Let’s run out there now!” His eyes were dancing. He had stepped into the car.

Just then a gay crowd turned the corner, and, “Here they are!” called a girl’s voice.

“We’ve come not a minute too soon,” darkly pronounced Billy. “Peyt has about gone off his head in this God-forsaken place. I ask him for a drink and he talks about milk. Says it’s nourishing. Wants me to buy a cow. He says he’s been out looking at the cow. He was insisting we shake you all now and go back to the cow. That’s why he didn’t come to your house,” he told Mrs. Shields.

Peyton looked up to find that lady’s eyes upon him in a very queer way. “I see,” said she.

It seemed the cow had only led him into a blind alley, but the alley was not totally blind, after all, for a few weeks after Thanksgiving Brenda handed in a theme entitled:

ON THE PLEASURE OF
BUYING A COW FOR A FRIEND

One should have every possible experience, not overlooking the experience of buying a cow for a friend. To be sure, one may have no friend, but one must not be so easily cut off from experience as to let this stand in the way. It is beautiful to buy a cow for a friend. One dwells upon what the cow is going to mean to the friend. Will she kick? Does she hook? There is splendid adventure in it, for little does one know whether one’s friend will love one more or less after the cow has come into his life. In buying a cow one always wonders why the other person is selling the cow. There is infinite field for speculation here. But the timid soul halts midway in the robust experience of buying a cow for a friend.

“Well, I’ll be darned!” was the low-breathed comment of the instructor upon this effort. He arose and started for the library. He told himself he was now going to take the bull by the horns—perhaps the cow suggested the figure. Timid soul? Timid soul—nothing! He had at other times seen Brenda Munroe sitting in the library after class. He would go up to her now and say, “How did you know it was I?” Or he would say, “Does she hook?” or, “Well, why does he want to sell her?” He would say something. One would think he had been raised in the backwoods—or in a monastery.

But how say something to a girl who wasn’t there? He looked the library through in high expectation; he looked it through in determination which petered out to disappointment; he looked it through in the sulks. Sulking, he went and stood by a window, and from that window he saw Brenda Munroe crossing the campus in the direction of the Duck Creek road. She was not alone. With her was a boy—Harry Baker, who lived out in the country somewhere, doubtless on the Duck Creek road. Undoubtedly, Instructor Root reflected, with a pang for which he did not try to account, they were boy and girl sweethearts. They stood still looking at something. Ah!—a kodak. Baker—a stupid fellow, a jay—was taking her picture. She was laughing. Then he gave the kodak back to her and she took his picture. Silly performance. He intensely disliked that kodak.

He met Mrs. Shields and she asked him where he was keeping his cows. He didn’t think it at all funny, and made it plain to her he didn’t. He sat up very late writing a poem about love. It dealt with disappointed love and the consolations of the spirit. Next day he was very sleepy. And, being sleepy, he yawned. He yawned in class, having leisure to do so because he had put them to writing during the hour; they were writing against time—as they would have to do on a newspaper. Interesting experiment—especially valuable to sleepy instructors. He made decent attempts at suppressing his yawns, but sometimes they got the start of him. He noticed that Brenda Munroe had come down to the dictionary-stand at the front of the room. He was seeking for something clever to write upon the margin of “On the Pleasure of Buying a Cow for a Friend,” but the effort was too much for him. He yawned. It was an awful yawn—a writhing, twisting, tortuous yawn. It was holding the apex of its tremendous up-curve when something turned his eyes to the dictionary. On the dictionary sat a little black box. Upon the box moved the hand of Brenda Munroe. A picture of him with his mouth sprawled open like that!

In a quick wave of anger: “Miss Munroe,” he said, “you may bring that here!”

The class sat at attention. The girl at the dictionary did not move.

Anger mounted with the realization of the position he was in. “I think you heard me, Miss Munroe,” he said, icily.

A queer little smile on her lips, she walked slowly to the desk and handed him the camera. That smile haunted him all through the Christmas holidays. It was a mocking smile—a maddeningly understanding little smile. And something else haunted him—the look in her eyes when she handed over the little black box—the look in a child’s eyes when you take a toy away. Perhaps she didn’t have very much to amuse herself with; doubtless she loved her little kodak. He Wished he had been a better sport, but it is hard to be a good sport at the very instant a girl who peculiarly interests you has snapped you with your face all distorted by a sprawling yawn. And if you haven’t been one on the dot, it is hard to know how to slide into being one later. So you retire into professional dignity.

Not knowing how to make a graceful return, he took the kodak home and through the gay two weeks he thought a great deal about that little black box and its owner. He considered the grave ethical problem of whether it would be honorable to have the films developed. Could developing another person’s films be classed with reading another person’s letters? Curiosity settled this question in ethics, as it has many another, and—also far from unprecedented—he persuaded himself that what he wanted to do was the decent thing to do. To develop the films before returning the kodak would be in the nature of a light little apology. And he would show that he was, after all, a good sport by not suppressing the one of himself.

But this became a terrible test. The picture was a complete success—the acme of ridiculousness. Peyton Root looked long and ruefully at that picture. Not a bit did he like the idea of Brenda Munroe looking at it; but still less did he like the idea of that speculative look in her eyes as she contemplated the absence of it. He was on the rack of indecision. He went about to all the parties with Isabel Stephens—Des Champs reigning girl. But the night he came home from the Christmas-eve dance he sat a long time over the fire in his upstairs library, thinking, not of Isabel Stephens, but of the milkman’s daughter. He looked over the other pictures the kodak yielded. There were two of the fat, yellow dog with the corkscrew tail. In one he blissfully gnawed a bone; in the other he was looking up at someone, quivering with happy excitement. The purloiner of the picture was pretty certain it was not Milkman Munroe Scraps was looking up at. The longer he looked, the stronger became his desire to be sharing Scraps’s experience. He thought back to the party that night, and told himself that Brenda Munroe somehow made other girls like that toddy with the unfortunate omission. He wrote a poem on the brutalities of confiscation, and mailed it to Brenda with her pictures and kodak, keeping out a copy of the one of herself, and burning the film of that stupid jay of a Baker—who would want such a picture as that?

That she had forgiven him was early a parent by her re-opening fire through the themes. Through English 13 she attacked his teaching of “Am. Lit.” Not being interested by American literature, he had used it as little more than a peg on which to hang such things as did interest him. Hence this:

THE OBLIQUE METHOD

Great are the opportunities afforded by the teaching of American literature, for one can consider everything that American literature is not—a field practically inexhaustible. Greek literature—the road to learning American literature does not have beauty. Russian literature—road to the knowledge that American literature is not serious. Shelley—for would it not have been an excellent thing for America to have had a Shelley? Milton—for did not Milton very nearly sail in the Mayflower and found American literature? … Pleasant indeed to teach American literature, for the French poets are unfailingly interesting to survey.

This theme met with an accident which advanced a romance. He sometimes gave the themes out to fellow-students for criticism. After class he couldn’t find “The Oblique Method,” which he thought he had put aside for private comment, and next day it was handed in by Ina Gilson—and with it a most self-contained look from that young lady.

“Not serious work,” Ina had written. “Not carefully constructed and not in good taste. One is tempted to say, impertinent. Evidently written with the idea of drawing attention to the writer rather than the legitimate idea of advancing in the Writing of English.”

He was furious at himself and furious at Ina. He had meant to go and see her that night and ask her to go to the Pan Hellenic, the big dance of the year. Now came the idea of asking Brenda Munroe instead. He didn’t know why he shouldn’t ask Brenda Munroe if he wanted to! He’d like to know why Brenda Munroe shouldn’t go to that dance as well as anyone else! He’d show some people a thing or two about who was interesting and who was not!

So he wrote Miss Munroe a quite correct note, asking if he might have the pleasure, etc. And back came a primly written little missive, saying she would be pleased—and so on.

There was no theme-sparring in those next two weeks. Brenda was shy. He was shy himself—shyly excited, after the manner of a boy who for the first time in his life has asked a girl to go somewhere. He kept living it all over again.

About a week before the big night, Mrs. Shields one afternoon asked him to come in and have tea with her. And as they drank their tea she told him, with the deftness of managing matrons, that Ina had not yet decided whom to go with to the party.

“That so?” he replied, with mild interest.

“I thought,” she went on, “that some of us might have dinner here and go over together.”

“It’s a nice idea,” he said, guardedly.

“Got your girl?” she asked, bluntly.

“Got my girl,” he answered.

She looked a little dashed. Then, “Who?” she plumped at him.

“Brenda Munroe,” he plumped back. As there was silence, he looked up. “What was it about dinner?” he asked, pleasantly, as if remarking nothing unusual in the way she was looking at him.

“Nothing about dinner,” she answered.

The night came. He was ready to start for his girl. It wasn’t quite time to go, and he found it hard to put in the minutes. It must be confessed that he put in some of them looking in the glass—seeing himself as Brenda Munroe would see him. As is sometimes said of the other sex, he was “all of a flutter.”

There came a knock. “Carriage for me?” he demanded of the boy at the door.

“My sister said to give you this,” replied the youngster, and fled.

The young man who had been about to step into his carriage then read the following:

Dear Mr. Root,—I am sorry, but I can’t go to the party with you, after all.

Brenda Munroe.

Perhaps the less said about dear Mr. Root’s state of mind that night the better. A record of it would not make him appear an amiable young man. He was staggered. He was outraged. He told himself it was too much. He told himself it was not amusing. He passionately affirmed that no girl in the world could treat him like that!

He did not go to the party. How could he? He took off his gorgeous raiment and fumed and sulked and swore. He thought of Mrs. Shields. He thought of Ina Gilson. He thought of Brenda Munroe! He was still awake when he heard them coming home from the party.

That was Friday night; Saturday and Sunday passed with nothing by way of explanation. Mrs. Shields said they missed him at the dance. He replied with dignity that there had been a change of plan. Monday he never looked at Brenda Munroe—addressed no word to her in class. Further, she addressed no word to him—not even after class. Rage mounted.

On Wednesday she handed in this theme:

WHEN SOME ONE YOU LOVED
IS NOT THERE ANY MORE

Everything is different. Things the one who is gone had nothing to do with are different. Things look different. They are dimmer. You know that you are alone. You do not want to go home… . You do alone things you use to do together. That is lonesomeness.

He did not read it until evening—too late for seeing her that night. He was instantly melted to contrition, to tenderness. Someone had died. It sounded like her mother. Her mother had died the very night of the party—and he railing at her like that! He found a keen satisfaction in telling himself he was a vain, vapid cad. He longed to be with her and comfort her. How tender she was, after all. Poor, lonely little girl! A long time he sat dreaming of her.

When English 13 broke up next day he went up to her and asked, quietly, “May I walk home with you?”

“I wish you would,” she said, simply.

They remained quiet as they walked through the campus and down the street that led to the Duck Creek road. She was like a hurt child. They had crossed the bridge which left town behind before he gently ventured, “I am afraid you have had trouble.”

She nodded, mute sorrow in her strange eyes.

“I am sorry,” he said, softly. “I—of course I wondered the night of the party,” he went on; “and then your theme—”

“I was sorry about the party. I—I had wanted to go.” She said it wist fully. “And I was afraid you might not understand.” She looked at him shyly.

“I do now,” he said. “I suppose some people would think it strange to care so much,” she said, a defiant little quiver in her voice.

“Well, they must be queer people,” he retorted.

They walked a way in silence. Then, “Perhaps you have had a dog of your own?” she suggested.

“A—I beg pardon?” stammered the young man.

“A dog of your own,” she repeated, now wrapped in her own thought.

“I—oh—certainly—many dogs,” he found himself mumbling.

She began talking about Scraps. He tried to make certain adjustments. A dog! … She had picked him up in town. Nobody wanted him. He was well, a waif. Some people would hold that against him, she said , with a singular intensity—but there never lived a more loving or a smarter dog! Every afternoon he watched for her. That was what did it. He saw her coming way down the road—came running. An automobile—she saw it with her own eyes!

He drew nearer and took her arm and held her hand tight in his. They walked on like that to the place where Scraps used to sit waiting for her.

The upshot of it was that he was to try to take Scraps’s place. He smiled over that as he sat alone that night before work he should be doing and wasn’t—smiled an intimate little smile at that thought of himself taking the place of a fat, yellow dog with a corkscrew tail. It had come about quite simply. She dreaded coming to the place where Scraps was no longer waiting for her, dreaded the place where she had seen it happen. He suggested that perhaps if he came with her it wouldn’t seem so bad. He said that company did help. She accepted it in a grateful little way that moved him more than he tried to understand.

And so all the rest of the term he went on trying to fill Scraps’s place. Almost every afternoon he walked home with her. He did not stay in Scraps’s place, but made a place of his own.

She was not like any girl he had ever known. He told himself that was what interested him. He liked the way her mind worked—her flashes, her unexpected little turns. He loved her gay scorn. What he himself had been theoretically, he felt in her as an emotional reality. Defiance played through her like a lovely flame, lightly; for the most part, gaily. Well, he got on with her; after all, that was chiefly it. Before this, girls had been something apart from what he really was. She somehow cleared up what he really was. And nothing in his whole life of pleasant things had pleased him as her liking of him pleased him.

Spring came, and the homeward walks took longer. There were lingering moments still longer lingered over after he left her. It was amazing how an hour could get away from him!

And all this time, university social life was not profiting by the fruit of his rich social experience. Brenda made university social life very flat. His friendship with Ina Gilson had not advanced.

One day in “Am. Lit.” they were talking about Poe, and Ina made a smug remark about his heredity, which inspired her instructor to a defense of foundlings. Almost flamboyantly well born himself, he had long cherished a romantic feeling about waifs. Indeed, he had once written a poem about them. And as he that day wanted to give English 13 a subject for the fortnightly theme, he told them to write on Waifs.

Brenda was subdued going home that night. He found her looking at him in a way that puzzled him. She remained different all that week. She was shy, and yet her eyes were warm with a deepened friendliness. She was more gentle, more pensive, but with it all that strange intensity, that thing mysteriously potent—sometimes her eyes would flame in a way that quickened his sense of the whole life of the world.

The Waif themes were handed in the next Week. There were a few laggards, and, strangely enough, Brenda Munroe was among them; usually her themes were right on the dot. He said that all of them must be in by the next day.

And next day all of them came in save Brenda’s. Because of his friendship with her—naturally not unknown to the class—he was always anxious not to show favoritism, and so now quite welcomed this opportunity for public mention of her shortcoming.

“Miss Munroe,” he said, “I haven’t your theme on Waifs.”

Instantly the room was singularly quiet. He felt it was related to gossip about him and Brenda. In order to display a lack of self-consciousness he added, pleasantly, “I am expecting something particularly good from you on that.”

Again utter stillness; and then he had the sense of something like a collective gasp. How absurd of them! And when he went down to the library to meet Brenda he found no Brenda; and when he went out on the steps, thinking she had sauntered along through the campus, as she sometimes did, he saw her on the front seat of a wagon being driven rapidly toward the Duck Creek road.

He was disappointed and a good deal hurt. So that evening he thought he would go and see Mrs. Shields—he hadn’t been there for a long time.

“I’m glad you came,” she said. “I was thinking of sending for you.”

He murmured some inanity of appreciation.

“Do you want to know something for your own good?” she demanded.

“No,” he replied, promptly, but sat down and waited for it.

“If you are fond of Brenda Munroe,” she began, bluntly—“and goodness knows you appear to be—don’t talk to her in public about waifs.”

He stared at her.

“Because she is one,” she finished.

He could only sit there, staring.

Mrs. Shields went on to tell him what she knew. A couple of years before there was a girl in the university named Mary Greene, who came from Annisville, a town where the Munroes had once lived. It seemed they had moved around several times—Mr. Munroe apparently bein one of those farmers who always thought there was better land somewhere else. Mrs. Munroe herself told someone in Annisville that Brenda was adopted. And Mary Greene said the idea was current there that Brenda had something to do with a band of gipsies. She didn’t know the story definitely, as the Munroes got Brenda when they lived in Dakota. So whether she was gipsy, or a child the gipsies had stolen—Anyway, the Munroes got her from a band of gipsies. “I had an impulse to tell you once before,” she concluded, “but I decided it would just make her picturesque to you—well knowing what fools men are.”

He got away as soon as he could and started for the Duck Creek road. Amid much confusion of feeling stood out the impulse to see Brenda at once. His strange girl!—his dear, wonderful little imp girl! How this explained her!—intensified her. He wanted to be with her instantly and tell her he loved her. He knew now that in all the world this was the woman soul for him. Strange, wild little thing! Dear little outsider! There was something about her gallant gaiety, something in the thought of her strange, bright aloneness made his throat tight. How he loved the untamed thing in her! He must hear her say that she loved him; her eyes let him believe she did. He wanted to talk to her about what life together was going to mean—the perpetual freshness, the spirited adventure.

But the house of Milkman Munroe was dark. He struck a match and looked at his watch. After ten. Stealthily he went nearer. If only he could call to Brenda, get her to come out. He couldn’t get up the nerve to go and knock at the door at that hour. He did whistle faintly, but no response.

A long time he sat on a big stone at the side of the road—thinking, profoundly stirred. He saw Brenda as the determining thing in his life. Because of her he felt many old things slipping away; because of her he saw new things opening. He was happy, but very serious. He felt the stir of all the unknown, of all that was mysterious and wild and beautiful. It reached him through her. She made life like that.

Next morning Brenda’s place in “Am. Lit.” was vacant. In the afternoon she did not appear for English 13. So he set out to find her.

He had not come to know the Munroe family. Brenda had seemed to want to limit it to the homeward walks; he rather liked that, too—it somehow kept them more poignant. So he had to ask the blank-looking woman if she was Mrs. Munroe. And then he asked for Brenda.

“She’s gone away,” he was told.

“Gone away!” he gasped.

“On the morning train.”

“But where? Where’s she gone?”

“She’s gone to Dakota—where we lived once.”

“But why?” he demanded.

She looked at him warily then. “I don’t know what you want to know for.”

So he told her who he was and why he wanted to know. He told her that he cared for Brenda and must know. She looked a good deal awed. “Well,” she said, “Brenda left a note. She says she’s gone to find out. Why, I never knew she knew. I meant to tell her, but I just never got around to it—and, anyway, what was the use? I thought it might just make her feel bad. But she says in this note she’s known since she was seven years old. She heard me telling a woman. And then afterward a boy at school told her something—I don’t know what. I couldn’t make out what she was driving at last night when she asked me those questions about Waterburg—that town in Dakota where we lived when we got her. And I don’t know yet what’s stirred it up all of a sudden, and what she’s run off like this for—spending all that money for nothing—when all she’s got’s what she makes on the eggs. I’d have told her everything there is to tell.”

He was on the point of asking her to tell him, but something checked him. He wanted to know only what Brenda wanted him to know.

He left a note for Dr. Shields saying he had been called away. He took the night train for Dakota.

It was a horrible trip—changes and waits, and miserable, jolting cars. He thought about what he was doing: The board of regents!—his mother; his sister Margaret. He thought about the whole world he knew. He knew that everything he had been part of would be pitted against what he was doing now. And with all of that in the scale against Brenda—well, it weighed about a feather.

The middle of the next morning he saw, far across the prairie country, a town which the conductor told him was Waterburg. Sight of it flamed his imagination anew. Perhaps he was following the very path a wild, wandering little band had followed about twenty years before. He wanted to tell Brenda how he loved her for the immensity and mystery of her background. The essence of all the uncaptured life of the world reached him through her.

Then he got off, and for the first time confronted the problem of finding her. It hadn’t seemed there would be any difficulty about finding anyone—particularly Brenda!—in a little town in Dakota. He walked up and down the streets, and Waterburg grew larger and larger. He asked at the hotel. No such person there. He asked in a store—never heard of such a party. The post office—a new name to them. And then, after two anxious hours, on an outer street that marked the town off from the prairie, he saw, walking slowly toward him, head down, the girl he had come to find.

He knew at once that she had had some kind of a blow. The buoyancy seemed struck out of her. What had she heard? What could there be that was worse than she had suspected? How fortunate that he had come! She looked up and saw him, and she didn’t seem particularly surprised. She held out both hands to him. Without a word he took them, and then, after a hesitating moment, she turned and they walked slowly back in the direction she had come.

“Brenda,” he asked, softly, “do you care for me?”

She looked up into his face and nodded. Then her eyes filled. “I did,” she said. “I—I don’t know now. I seem a different person.” Her voice broke, and yet she laughed a little.

“Dearest,” he hurried on, “don’t you know that you can’t be a different person to me? Don’t you know that you are you? What do I care about anything else?”

“Are you sure of that?” she asked, in a queer little way.

“Oh, sweetheart—sure of it!” he scoffed. “And if you could know how I love the idea of what is behind you! Life that was never caught! A people of romance who wandered the earth and remained outside!”

Her face was strange. She looked a little as if she were going to cry. They turned off on a path that ran along under some willows.

“Don’t you see?” he persisted. “How it’s all a part of you? How it sets you apart? How it lights you up?”

For answer she sat down on a fallen tree and burst into tears.

“Brenda, dearest,” he murmured, and tried to comfort her.

She lifted her face, and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “That’s what I thought, too,” she choked—“that it set me apart; that it lighted me up.” She pulled at her handkerchief, and then after a moment grew quiet. Her eyes were as if fixed on something away across the prairie; she began speaking as if reading it off there. “I was about seven. We moved from here to Annisville. One day I was in the back kitchen and I heard my mother say to a woman who was making jelly with her in the kitchen: ‘Well, now, I’ll tell you though I wouldn’t want you to say anything about it—but Brenda isn’t our child. She’s adopted.’ I went out into the back yard. I couldn’t stay to hear the rest. I thought about it all the time. I wondered, ‘If I’m not their child, whose child am I?’ But I couldn’t ask. Maybe you don’t understand—I suppose you wouldn’t.”

His arm went about her, and he pressed her shoulder in token that he did understand.

“Even that made me different—that wondering. And then one day, a year or so later, a boy at school said, ‘Hello, gipsy!’ I said, ‘I’m not a gipsy!’ He said: ‘You are, too! You’re adopted. They got you from the gipsies.’” She paused. “Well, it changed me—that’s all. I felt that I was different. I felt that I wasn’t in my place—that I didn’t belong. When I was little”—her lip trembled—“I was very lonely when I was little.”

He tried to draw her a little nearer, longing to make her feel she was never going to be lonely again.

“But I came to like it,” she went on, with more spirit. “I came to like the feeling that I didn’t belong—that I was outside—by myself. It—it made me what I am.”

“Thank Heaven!” he murmured.

“And then—you,” she said, softly. “And I wasn’t alone. And—I liked that, too.”

“Sweetheart!” he murmured, in a rush of tenderness.

“And then, when you said that in class”—his arm tightened—“I got a feeling that I had to know. I remembered this woman—Mrs. Dott, a friend of ours here in this town. I’ve always had a queer feeling about her—a notion that she somehow connected me up with what I came from. So I wanted to get to her. I was afraid my mother wouldn’t tell it all—and, anyhow, I didn’t want it from my mother. Oh, I was sort of crazy, I suppose. I wanted to get as far back as I could. So I got up in the night and ran away.” Her face tightened. “Well,” she said, in a practical little voice, “I know now. I know all there is to know.”

He was smoothing her shoulder, as if to assure her again that nothing she knew could make any difference.

“I was right about Mrs. Dott. I was with her first. My mother and father died of typhoid fever—the same week. She took me till she could find a home for me.” She had picked up a branch from the fallen tree and was stirring the ground with it. “Now that I come to think of it,” she said, meditatively, “that boy always was an awful liar.”

She threw away her stick, straightened, as if to get it over with. “I have nothing to do with any gipsies.” She brought it out sharply. “Mrs. Dott was scandalized at the idea. My father mended boilers.” A silence. “I suppose he mended other things, too”—drearily. “He had a little shop. They say there never lived a kinder or a better man.”

Their eyes met, and for one instant fun threatened to run round their dismay as a tiny sprite of a blue flame will rim the decorously burning log. But Brenda hurried on:

“And my mother—my mysterious, romantic, uncaught mother!—she taught in Sunday-school. They say they never had a more faithful teacher.” It gave pause. “Of course they were legally married,” Brenda pursued, bravely. “In church. By the Baptist minister.” She jumped up. “And my name!—my strange name that I thought proved it—do you want to know how came by that name? My mother named me after a missionary her church helped support! She hoped I’d grow up and be as good as that missionary.” He was standing beside her. “So you see I’m not what you thought I was.” She would not look at him.

His arms went round her. “Dearest,” said Peyton Root, “you’re you. Do you think boilers could unmake you now? Do you think all the Baptist ministers in the world could come between us?”

Their eyes met and laughed at them, and brought them together—that pervasive sharing of amusement which had done so much in finding them for each other.

But Brenda could not at once give it over to amusement. “Beautiful, uncaptured life!” was wrung from her.

He stooped and kissed her. Then he looked into her eyes. “Beautiful, uncaptured life!” said he—and not in bitterness.

Harper’s Magazine, Jun 1916

“Finality” in Freeport

It never would have happened at all if Mr. William Wilkes, president of the Freeport Ice Company, had not stopped to look in a window at some puppies. This was very wrong of Mr. Wilkes, for as it was he had barely time to get to the library to meet his wife at four o’clock, and four o’clock, as she had impressed upon him at noon, was as late as one dared be in setting forth to look at rugs—did not daylight wane and stores close? But the puppies were tumbling over one another altogether irresistibly and so Mr. Wilkes was lured from the path of duty, and thus was the history of a town changed.

And, just as one evil always leads to another, so, as President Wilkes was about to tear himself from the puppies, along came J. E. Carsons and asked him when he was going to join the Elks. And thus passed another ten minutes in which Mrs. Wilkes sat in the reading-room and looked from Current Ideas to the clock over the door and thought how hard are the ways of women and bitterly considered the unworthiness of man.

When, at ten minutes after four, Mr. Wilkes had not arrived, Mrs. Wilkes stepped to the desk and acidly inquired whether the library possessed a copy of The Finality of Christianity. Mrs. Wilkes, in waiting for her loitering spouse, had been reading the book reviews. She was a woman who prided herself on “keeping up.” What she particularly liked was keeping up with books her acquaintances had not yet come in sight of.

Now Mrs. Wilkes inquired whether the library possessed the book in the manner of supposing of course the library didn’t. In fact she asked for the work, not so much because she wanted to see it, as because she had to be as disagreeable to someone else as Mr. Wilkes was being to her.

The girl at the desk replied that they did not have the book. Mrs. Wilkes wanted to know why. The girl didn’t know why. Mrs. Wilkes said she would like to speak to the librarian.

And as she was speaking to the librarian along came Rabbi Lewisohn. Mrs. Wilkes was a member of the Woman’s Club, before which the brilliant young rabbi had spoken just the week before on “Religious Feeling in Modern Fiction.” In fact Rabbi Lewisohn was the intellectual idol of Freeport.

Rabbi Lewisohn said he considered the book important. Yes, it was a book which the library should have. Miss Archer looked a little worried and said she would put it on her list. This was the first call for it, and of course one could not buy all the books.

“But one should buy the most important ones,” said Mrs. Wilkes impressively, looking to the rabbi for his nod of approbation. And at this moment there arrived a perspiring and guilty-looking Mr. Wilkes.

Mrs. Wilkes became immersed in house furnishings and, to tell the truth, did not think of The Finality of Christianity again until she saw Rabbi Lewisohn at the annual reception given by the Woman’s Club. And then, in the presence of women who looked upon themselves as intellectually far in advance of Mrs. Wilkes, the brilliant young rabbi exclaimed: “Oh, Mrs. Wilkes, did you know the library board refuses to buy our book?”

“Refuses?” cried Mrs. Wilkes, in a tone of tremendous incredulity, and thrilling to the inmost recesses of her brain at the “our book.”

“Deacon Judson maintains that the shelves are already too crowded with advanced theology,” laughed the rabbi.

Mrs. Wilkes set down her teacup in the manner of not having strength to hold it, and “How outrageous!” breathed she.

The other ladies crowded around for enlightenment. It was apparent that there were a few who cherished a secret sympathy with Deacon Judson. These few melted away into less advanced groups leaving a pure circle of the indignant at heart, and then and there the campaign was planned. It was said in excusing the censorship that there had been only two inquiries for this book. Very well then there should be two hundred! If necessary, let there be two thousand!

•    •    •    •

At the next monthly meeting of the library board Miss Archer tremblingly announced that there had been two hundred and forty-three inquiries for Dr. Mosher’s book, The Finality of Christianity.

The back of Deacon Judson stiffened. There were only nine members of the board present that day and four of these, led to believe that all they had long held dear was in danger of being at once swept away by this menacing body of godless fellow citizens, voted with Deacon Judson. The library board went on record as refusing to purchase a book for which two hundred and forty-three citizens clamored.

The telephone operators of Freeport were very busy that night. The next evening the Freeport Clarion, under the particularly black heading “What is Liberty?” printed a letter from Rabbi Lewisohn. “What do the citizens intend to do about this?” the young rabbi inquired with fervor.

It was immediately apparent that the first thing they intended to do was to write letters to the Clarion. That organ printed a page of letters next afternoon, apologizing for being able to print so few. The library board was attacked and defended from a dizzying variety of angles. Citizens who had not known there was such a book spoke with withering scorn of a library which did not possess it.

•    •    •    •

Three days later an enterprising bookseller announced in a sign which swung the entire length of his store, “The Finality of Christianity Is On Sale Here.” The streetcars then presented the unusual spectacle of men coming from their daily toil with heads bent menacingly over a grave-looking volume. Freeport’s leading barber practically abandoned work that he might sit in his window scowling over the learned pages, ever and anon raising his head and looking vengeance out into the street. When he did take a hand at the chairs, he would discourse to the helpless about the superiority of the work he was reading, and, emphasizing his feeling with passionate gestures along the neck of the victim, he would want to know whether we lived in a civilized country or whether we did not?

The newspaper controversy grew a little blurred. Deacon Judson, perhaps feeling he could not make out the most convincing case against a work which he said he had not read, and had gone on record as declaring principle would not permit him to read, here shifted the issue to George Sand. In a Chicago paper he read of a few kind words Professor Mosher had, in a lecture, spoken about that lady. Were the townspeople acquainted with the morals of this George Sand? Deacon Judson inquired. For fear they were not, he cited the facts of her life as given by the library’s foremost encyclopedia of biography. He gave names and dates. This to Deacon Judson’s mind appeared to prove Professor Mosher guilty and to settle for all time the question of who should select the books the people of Freeport were to read.

The Constitution of the United States also played a lively part. One of the city’s rising young attorneys discussed with heat, light, and many quotations whether the Supreme Court of the United States had ever proclaimed Christianity the official religion. Answer—It had not. This brought a volley of replies from the clergy. Then J. Herman Ketchem, the “radical” member of the library board and the town’s leading infidel, contributed a eulogy of Tom Paine, apparently under the impression that it could not fail to advance the cause of freedom in the present specific instance. And there was Socialism, which made its bow as an issue because one of the men who held that the people should have the books the people wanted chanced to be a Socialist. This brought the hot retort that Socialism was a fallacy—and that anyhow it was on the wane.

Meanwhile a steady procession of taxpayers moved up the library steps and approached the desk with the inquiry for the latest book by Dr. Mosher. Perhaps never before in the whole history of learning has a critical work been demanded by so widely varied an audience. Plumber, milliner, baker, and banker portentously demanded The Finality of Christianity.

The cause of intellectual freedom became rather hopelessly intertwined with the street-cleaning department. But then the cause of intellectual freedom has had many strange companions in its time. Lovers of liberty and seekers after justice seem bound to be joined by those who fight, either for the joy of the fighting, or because they have something against the people who are being fought. Doubtless Brutus and Martin Luther too had adherents who lined up with them because the opposing party harbored men who threw things over the back fence, or who had a dog that had killed a cat—or a cat that ate the canary. We know that human relationships have a way of balling up the purity of intellectual issues. So it was in Freeport, until there were nights when the most assiduous perusal of the Clarion could not have made it plain whether it was intellectual freedom or Pat McGuire’s record as an alderman that was making all the trouble. There were a few men and women who tried to keep the purity of the flame, but the poor little torch was almost hidden by the bizarre dance that raged around it. It was a beautiful open arena for suppressed grudges and for fighting powers ennuied by long peace.

So great was the pressure brought upon the library board that one timid soul resigned, saying he did not feel he could assume the responsibility of deciding whether or not the library should place upon its shelves a copy of The Finality of Christianity. But as this member had been absent from the first meeting the situation was not changed by his modest feeling of unworthiness for great tasks.

However, two nights before the next regular meeting of the board the Clarion electrified the town with the tremendous heading, “JOHNSON FLOPS.” Mr. Johnson, it appeared, had undergone nothing short of a conversion. He had seen the light. The people must have the books the people wanted. Perhaps it is small-spirited to mention here that Mr. Johnson ran a drygoods store, and that many of the people were finding what they wanted at a rival emporium. Mr. Johnson announced his conversion and a great bargain sale in one and the same issue. With that it was assumed that victory was at hand, but when the board gathered and the vote was taken whether two thousand people of Freeport should have a book which they wanted, it transpired that the head of Johnson Brothers was not alone in his flopping.

Mrs. Martin McFarland had also flopped—and flopped the other way! In the beginning Mrs. McFarland had stood for enlightenment. But the degree of enlightenment had been too much for her. Appalled, she ran for cover, and the library board stood precisely where it had stood before an exercised town had pressed upon it.

The passion engendered by this deadlock formed itself into what was called The Ethical Society. The personnel of this organization was unusual. Interspersed with men and women who on principle objected to being told they were not to read what Deacon Judson did not approve of their reading was a body of men who saw in The Ethical Society a possible fighting machine for the “petition of consent” which Freeport saloon-keepers would have to circulate the following year. At the first meeting of the society, spinsters who wished to appear intellectual shared benches with men who “wanted to throw it into the mayor.”

With stern enthusiasm it was voted to invite Professor Mosher to come to Freeport and address the first open meeting of the society. A somewhat bewildered letter was received saying the professor would come, and there then opened a campaign of publicity such as has perhaps never before been laid at the feet of any savant. In magnitude and quality it was unique.

•    •    •    •

A slight, stooped man of mild and gentle mien stepped from the five o’clock train on the afternoon of the great Mosher lecture in Freeport. He was one of those men who bear the marks of having walked the quiet ways of the student’s life, a man who, when out in the great world, has the manner of being somewhere else. He had devoted his life to a study of comparative religion. He looked it. With a diffident though pleasant look through his spectacles he assured Rabbi Lewisohn that he was indeed Dr. Mosher. He was introduced to Mrs. Wilkes and, apparently to his surprise, was presented to a small but impressive body of citizens who stood solemnly apart and received him in a manner of being willing to fight till the last ditch, which seemed to leave the professor rather at sea.

But being at sea was, for the time, to become Professor Mosher’s state. He was borne away in Mrs. Wilkes’ automobile to the lady’s house, where he was to be entertained at dinner. As they rounded the corner from the station the man from the halls of learning saw flung from a barber shop a huge pennant inscribed, “Mosher and Freedom!”

“Why—why—” he gasped.

They passed through a decorated town. There were tremendous banners bearing the single word, “MOSHER!” There were exhortations to crush the tyrants, there were unflattering words about a benighted administration. “Do You Believe in Liberty? Hear Mosher at the Armory Tonight!” The bookstore had flung wide its sign, “The Finality of Christianity Is On Sale Here.” From Socialist headquarters waved the red-lettered suggestion, “Why Not Let Socialism Settle the Mosher Question?” Flags flew; a band played.

In the house of President Wilkes of the Freeport Ice Company, his feet upon the very rug Mrs. Wilkes was setting forth to purchase on the day she put the momentous inquiry for a book called The Finality of Christianity, Rabbi Lewisohn told the dazed professor something of what he had done to Freeport. The author of sober, critical books which had never permeated far beyond the small group of people who were studying his subject learned now that two thousand seven hundred and thirty-two citizens of that town were demanding that his latest book be installed in the public library. He learned that old friendships were being broken because of him, that on account of The Finality of Christianity old political parties were being reshaped on new lines.

•    •    •    •

Ere he could gather himself together, a reporter from the Clarion arrived to interview him. No, he murmured weakly, he had not known of the Freeport “scrap.” He—indeed he was quite surprised to hear of it. In fact, he—couldn’t understand it. He had not thought of his book as—revolutionary. He admitted, upon demand, that it did take for granted the standpoint of the so-called higher criticism. But had not all that been fought out? the professor inquired anxiously. Not in all circles, the reporter assured him briskly. He was asked to define “finality” which he did in a stricken sort of way. Finality meant authority. No, he did not have in mind the demise of Christianity—indeed, not at all. But was it true he did not believe in the miracles? The professor replied that he believed in faith. The miracles? pressed the reporter. Not literally, replied the professor. At which the reporter took heart to inquire whether Professor Mosher did not perhaps feel it would be a better thing if Christianity were now abolished. “No!” cried the professor in distress. “Not at all!”

Rabbi Lewisohn’s amused view of the dilemma slightly rallied the lecturer, but he inquired whether it would not be possible to cancel the engagement for the evening. He thought he might do this on the ground of not having understood the situation, and of the lecture he was prepared to give being unsuitable. He confessed that he had never in his life addressed a large audience. He was accustomed to talking to students and to societies studying his subject. He had several times spoken before ethical culture societies, and he had thought, reading the letter, as he now saw, carelessly, that it was an ethical culture society which was inviting him to Freeport. It had surprised him to be called to a place so far away, but he had been pleased by the indication of interest in his subject. He had expected to speak in someone’s house, or perhaps in the Unitarian church—something of the sort. He had never dreamed, he said with a visible shudder, of speaking in a large public hall such as the Armory appeared to be. And of course he had not anticipated the—the feeling which seemed to prevail. He was accustomed to speaking to people who received him quietly. He was prepared to speak on Greek culture. Did the rabbi not agree with him that Greek culture was most unsuited to the occasion?

But the rabbi said that perhaps Greek culture would do Freeport good, and that certainly the preparations of the lecture had been on too magnificent a scale to permit the people to be disappointed. Professor Mosher would have to conquer his personal feeling and give the lecture. It is perhaps not too much to say that in the whole history of the world such a theme and such a setting never got together before. I leave it to the most sophisticated reader of this chronicle whether it is usual to receive a speaker on Greek culture with a brass band. Is it customary for flags to fly throughout a hall in which men have gathered to hear a critical appreciation of the beauties of an ancient civilization? For that matter, is it customary for two thousand people to get together in any way to hear about something that happened two thousand years before?

Dr. Mosher was introduced by the new candidate for mayor, who, after having been received with vociferous cheers, spoke fearlessly and with passion of liberty. Men had died for it in the past. Men would die for it again! (Cheers.) This magnificent audience had assembled to do honor to one who stood for liberty—prolonged cheering from the magnificent audience and uneasy shuffling on the part of the one who stood for liberty. The speaker then hastened to make plain that he, too, was one who stood for liberty. He called attention to his record to back up this assertion. He called attention to the record of a certain other person in order to demonstrate that there were men who did not stand for liberty. (Hisses.) He closed with a few eloquent words about the enlightened element of the community being seated before him and told them they were now to be addressed by one in whose hands the banner of freedom would never falter.

The professor then rose falteringly to his feet, looking as if the banner of freedom was something he hadn’t bargained with. There were cries of “Mosher! Mosher!” and the great audience had risen and was giving the student of comparative religion the Chautauqua salute. When the frenzy had finally abated, the professor, in timorous voice, began to speak of the beauties of ancient Greece.

The enlightened element of the community listened with passionate respect. The professor unfortunately pitched his voice in the ethical culture society rather than ethical society key so that only a small proportion of the enlightened element could hear what he said. But this did not greatly matter; they listened with a high defiant fervor and aggressively pronounced it an uplifting address.

•    •    •    •

Professor Mosher, looking a good deal wilted for one in whose hands the banner of freedom would never falter, escaped on the eleven o’clock train, attended to the station by a brass band. Next day the library board met and there were several interesting modifications as a result of the lecture. First, Mrs. Martin McFarland flopped back, assuaged by Greek culture. But J. Herman Ketchem, the most savagely radical person in town, Freeport’s incarnation of unbelief, flopped to the anti-Mosher camp! He gave as his reason that the lecture had been far less radical than he had been led to believe it would be. He had been deceived; this Mosher did not stand for free thought at all. J. Herman Ketchem said he could not lend his sympathy to halfway measures and that he took the stand he now did as a protest against pseudoradicalism.

Again a deadlock, and it seemed that the library board had entered upon a long and futile career of floppings annulled by crossfloppings when Miss Amy Parsons, who taught English in the high school, timidly announced that in the interests of peace she would change her vote and favor the purchase of the book. Miss Parsons hoped no one would misunderstand her. Her vote represented, not her personal conviction, but her desire to live once more in a happy and harmonious town. She ventured to say that she did not believe any harm the book could do would exceed the harm wrought by this dissension. But she did earnestly hope that she would not be misunderstood.

With that the petition of three thousand Freeport residents to place upon the library shelves a work called The Finality of Christianity was granted over the head of Deacon Judson and that gentleman straightway retired to private life. The following month the mayor also retired to private life—though not voluntarily. The new mayor lost not a week in appointing Rabbi Lewisohn to the library board. The street-cleaning department was greatly improved. The circulation of the Clarion had increased materially. Mrs. William Wilkes was elected president of the Woman’s Club and Pat McGuire was retired from office. There appeared upon the shelves of the Public Library a sober-looking volume entitled The Finality of Christianity. The three thousand citizens who had been ready to fight and die for the book managed to restrain their impatience and, doubtless on the theory that they could not all read it at once, politely waited their turn—so politely that there were many days when the book rested peacefully upon the shelves.

Professor Mosher received a singularly respectful letter from his publishers inquiring when his next book would be ready. They said that the sale on this one had encouraged them to do more with his work in the future. The mild little man continued to teach his classes in the Study of Comparative Religion, but something new was remarked in him. They said he was more “on to himself.” And doubtless a man is bound to be a little more on to himself after a brass band has played for him and two thousand people have risen to their feet to hail him as Liberator.

•    •    •    •

And then, two years after Freeport had fought for, and failed to read, The Finality of Christianity, it happened that certain churches combined and had an expert in Bible Schools come there to instruct the teachers—among them Deacon Judson. J. Herman Ketchem was standing at the library desk one day when the deacon came in to return some books. The title of one of them caught the astonished eye of Mr. Ketchem. It was The Finality of Christianity.

“You haven’t been reading that?” he demanded incredulously.

“Why shouldn’t I?” inquired the deacon belligerently.

“I thought you couldn’t read it without violating your conscience!”

“It is included in the recommended reading of our Bible School,” replied Deacon Judson with dignity.

“Well,” said Mr. Ketchem, “I hope you enjoyed it more than I did.”

“I naturally would,” replied the deacon.

Pictorial Review, Jul 1916

Miss Jessie’s Trip Abroad

All Freeport knew about Miss Jessie’s trip abroad. This included the women who had their names in the year book of the Woman’s Club. It included the members of the board of University Extension lectures. It included, of course, the members of the library board, and it even included a number of “leading society women”—those society women who were spoken of as having good minds. In a word, the people who were interested in Miss Jessie’s prospective trip abroad were the “best people”—the people who stood for culture in that Middle Western town.

The library was their meeting ground with Miss Jessie, for Miss Jessie was reference librarian. When the club programs were announced for the year the women would immediately seek out Miss Jessie to know what the library had on Renaissance art, or the new theory of germs, or the wives of Revolutionary leaders—as the program committee may have ordained. And Miss Jessie would produce information to which the card index would never have pointed the way. From the art shelves she would throw light on the social question; in works of travel she would find interesting side lights on sanitation. Anybody in Freeport who wanted to find out anything that was to be learned from books could not do better than consult Jessie Holcombe, reference librarian.

Gratitude, if nothing else, would have prompted the enlightened women of Freeport to display this kindly interest in Miss Jessie’s trip. When it became known that she was “saving,” women for whom she thumbed Poole’s Index would say: “Why, I hear you’re going abroad! How splendid! Oh, my dear,”—with a pensive sigh from behind volumes of learned reviews—“you’ll love Florence!” Returned travelers poured streams of information upon Miss Jessie—pensions in Paris, tips on shipboard, the most satisfactory kind of underwear to take.

European culture was the thing that was taking Miss Jessie to Europe. She felt that she needed it. Her father was a plumber. Not that, in her trimly pigeonholed mind, she ever out-and-out admitted to herself that she was placing her need and her father’s occupation side by side. If you have never lived in a middling-sized town in the Middle West you may make the mistake of letting the fact that Miss Jessie was the daughter of a plumber too definitely fix her place in the society of the community. As a matter of fact, Jim Holcombe was the son of one of the “old families.” His people were among the first on the spot—and old families are old families, even though plumbers. There was a Holcombe who had been a minister, a Holcombe who had been a lawyer, so that landed gentry and the highly cultural professions were behind this plumber’s family, which may make it a little confusing to one with a sense of order. But Jim Holcombe went in the shop of a friend of his father’s, who was a plumber. He married a schoolteacher—perhaps not what a plumber with a sense of a neatly arranged society should do. The schoolteacher looked upon herself as one of the custodians of learning, and respected books rather more passionately than she read them. She had four daughters, and the first three of them went through the training school for teachers, and obtained positions in the public schools. Jessie, the youngest, was set to run this same course. But Jessie became a prize-taking pupil.

“Jim,” Mrs. Holcombe would say as she sat by the evening lamp, Jessie’s newly brought home report card in her hand, “we’ve got to do everything we can for this girl. She is the brightest one of them all.”

Her voice would vibrate sternly with her sense of responsibility. Jim, in slippers before the fire, would nod a little solemnly, then likely seek relief from the subduing sense of having such a daughter by taking out his notebook and figuring over the job he was about to bid on.

When Jessie was made valedictorian of her class in the high school, her mother firmly announced that, no matter what sacrifices it might entail, they would have to send her to the state university. At the university, Jessie made the important decision that her career should be that of librarian. So, after taking a library course, she got a position in the Freeport Public Library, and soon the plumber had the satisfaction of hearing: “Well, Jim, they tell me that youngest girl of yours is a whiz.”

As a librarian Jessie crossed social boundaries that the Holcombes of that generation, at least, had not drawn near. Leading women invited her to their teas; she was even invited to dinners, such dinners as had an educational or cultural flavor—as when a distinguished lecturer was being entertained. Culture was her meeting ground with people. Not so strange then, when it was always that door which let her in, that she should come to have this priggishly exaggerated sense of the setting-one-apartness of what was called “culture.”

But it was because of Richard Shirley she decided she must have a trip abroad at the earliest possible moment. Mr. Shirley was a university extension lecturer whose home was Freeport. He worked on some of his lectures in the Freeport Library. Miss Jessie exhausted the shelves of religion, education, philosophy, biography, history, and most of the other nonfiction shelves for his series, “The Religious Tendencies of Educational Leaders.” Mr. Shirley worked in one of the small rooms used by board members and leading clubwomen and others at the heart of culture, and into this room Miss Jessie would be seen hurrying with armfuls of books—tensely, exaltedly hurrying, a willing, devout little rubber-heeled messenger of learning.

Sometimes she would emerge with brightened eyes and flushed cheeks instead of the knitted brow; at times Mr. Shirley indulged in a certain highbrow persiflage that, making use of less cultural material, would be called jollying. For Miss Jessie did not look as she may sound. She had fluffy light hair and nice hazel eyes. She had never been jollied before, for how could one very well jolly a source of information? Only a super-cultured person would think of doing it; one, in fact, who not only used but made information.

For most things there are real reasons and given reasons. The given reasons for Miss Jessie’s trip abroad were quite what one would expect an efficient reference librarian to give. The real reason grew out of a conversation overheard between Mr. Shirley and Margaret Austin when one day she was rummaging shelves on the far side of a stack before which they were talking. “I haven’t been over for two years,” he was saying pensively. “I really must try to make it next year. Anyhow, I want to do something with Flemish architecture.”

“That Square at Ypres!” breathed Margaret Austin, and it seemed to waft them into a whole fund of common feeling.

Quietly Miss Jessie pulled down the fat sociology book she was after, but it was right then and there she made up her mind that she must get to Europe with all speed. Earnestly she talked with her mother that night and told her she felt she needed what European travel could do for her. She talked about the broadening of one’s mind, the feeling for things that could come in no other way. She did not say that what she coveted in secret was the freemasonry between people who had “been.” They were as people set apart. Perhaps they really weren’t different—but they were able to seem so. Of course she did not say to herself: “When I come back, Richard Shirley may think me a cultured, sophisticated woman and want to marry me.” But to be able to talk with him as Margaret Austin talked, to move with ease in that high atmosphere of have-been-ness was the thing that made her tell her mother she felt she could not do herself justice without a trip to Europe. Mrs. Holcombe was a little staggered by the magnitude of the proposal, but fired by it, too. “I tell you,” she said, in taking it up next day with her husband, “that girl’s different, Jim. She’s ambitious—and we ought to be proud of having such a daughter, and we’ve got to push her.”

That winter Miss Jessie studied for her trip. All her reading related to the ground she would cover. She must squeeze from it the last drop of “good” by going equipped with the utmost of information. She would land at Antwerp—“do” Belgium with rare care (Richard Shirley continued his allusions to Flemish architecture), then on through France to Paris, where she would give herself over to trying to “get” Paris; England, and the earnest attempt to “get” London. No Italy. She was “saving” Italy.

And there were less intellectual preparations which so much of the town as counted followed with counseling words. Miss Jessie was getting her clothes ready as well as her mind. Never a pair of stockings was bought without weighing all the evidence at her command as to—all things considered—the most desirable kind of stockings. The week of deciding upon her suit fairly bowed her down with responsibility. She approached the things one must have for the steamer with the fervor of one about to take vows. Months before she had bought her steamer trunk and had begun storing it with veils and overshoes and guidebooks. “Lot of work to go traveling, ain’t it, Jessie?” Jim Holcombe good-humoredly said one night as he passed the open door of her room—usually it was closed—on his way to bed and saw her bending over a map. “A trip to Europe is an event, Father,” Jessie said with kind superiority.

The event seemed to set her more than ever apart at home. The family were thrilled by it; but how could they follow things they knew so little about? They had never been to Europe, had never prepared for Europe. It put them in the other section of society.

The ticket was bought; the local steamship agent had received word that the room had been reserved, thus putting upon the trip the stamp of reality, of imminence. Coming from the agent’s office, Miss Jessie met Richard Shirley. He walked part of the way home with her and left her very much fluttered, for he had asked a little favor of her—a Flemish architecture favor. There were a few observations he wanted her to take—pictures to get. In the outlaw region of her mind Miss Jessie built unacknowledged air castles of life as the wife of a university extension lecturer: Going with him sometimes on lecture trips—teas and dinners given for them, being presented to the town’s leading people with, “And this is Mrs. Shirley.” Meeting people in a gracious little way—“How charming Mrs. Shirley is, isn’t she?—and what a brain!” She gazed with adoration upon herself as such a life would make her—the ease and distinction of manner, the culture of a life of thought, one of the women spoken of as invaluable to her husband. So, under cover of decorous consideration about getting her money into express checks, she dreamed until she ran into Charlie Smith, whom the papers called “the enterprising young grocer.” Miss Jessie had gone to high school with the enterprising young grocer, and had continued to be, as she thought it, nice to him. “Charlie has—in his way, of course—a very good mind,” she had condescendingly told her father when he was once sounding “that young Smith’s” praises. Charlie had—in his way—very good looks, too, a fresh, ruddy, smiling face, and kind, happy, honest blue eyes. He frequently dropped in at the house, for he knew all the family because his family knew them all, and then, of course, he had gone to school with “Jess.” He was one of the few people who continued to call the reference librarian Jess. “Say, Jess,”—he drew his open buggy up to the curbstone, in it some groceries the boys hadn’t been able to get delivered—“how about it? Looks to me as though you might run into a war.”

“Oh, I fancy things won’t come to that,” said Miss Jessie, in the security of her intimate association with large events. “I’ve had to neglect the papers the past few days—hurried with final things, but of course the newspapers are making more of it than is really there.”

“Well, I dunno,” he said seriously, “looks to me like it might mean business.”

Her father had the evening paper spread all over the dining-room table—and it laid for supper! It was one of the things he did which exasperated Miss Jessie. She liked things to be nice, she had many times told him; one should do things right. “Look-a-here, Jessie,” he broke out as she opened the door, “looks to me like there’s going to be a war over there! ‘The Gazette,’ here, says so.”

“Oh, I think not,” she answered with composure, putting down her parcels, and with a little frown straightening a knife and fork.

“Well, I don’t know about your going,” he said with excitement.

“Father!—how utterly absurd,” she laughed tolerantly.

But it was less absurd next day. That was in the last week of July, and the next few days made it clear that nothing could be more utterly absurd than at that moment leaving America for a cultural trip through Belgium. And her steamer trunk all packed!

She was to have sailed from New York on the Vaterland, Saturday, August eighth, at 10 a.m. But practically a week before it was announced that the Vaterland would sail to Liverpool instead of to Antwerp, there was no refusing to accept that the great problem of the moment was how to get steamer trunks—and what went with them—not “over” but home; even in the tremendous disappointment of a trip deferred there was no denying that steamer trunks finding themselves still in America were immensely too fortunate for condolences.

At the first, the fact that she could not make her trip was to Miss Jessie a very much larger matter than what was going on in Europe. You see, she was so absolutely ready; not only was her steamer trunk packed, but her mind was packed as well; the key had indeed been turned on that neatly and tightly packed fund of information she would open for use in Antwerp.

But the terrific impact of those days did force her to begin looking at the war as something more than the thing keeping her at home. “England Declares War on Germany.” She sat at the reference librarian’s desk staring down at the big black letters of those world-changing words, and her own disappointment went a little pale before them. That night she did not immediately go up to her room after supper but sat talking with her father, who was aflame with war excitement. And it somehow happened that that night she did not talk to him as from another world; but as two human beings a little subdued before a staggering thing they sat discussing what it meant, what might happen.

And the next night she did not go up to her room as soon as supper was over, either. They fell into the way of sitting around the dining-room table and talking, and they began to draw upon that fund of information which Jessie had accumulated for use in Belgium. “I never heard of that town,” said Charlie Smith one night during the days when, together with the rest of the world, they were thrilling to the holding out of Liege. Jessie told them what she had learned about Liege; but somehow what she knew was simply a thing she could contribute rather than a thing setting her apart. What she knew flowed into the minds of the people about her. It brought them all closer together—tie rather than barrier. Charlie Smith was often with them. The war was finding in him something which the grocery business had not developed. While he had never heard of Liege, the feeling about Liege was a flaming thing. His kind blue eyes were alive with ideas, fine with feeling, those nights they sat and talked. You know how they talked. You know how they cried: “We wouldn’t have believed this could happen!” and, “We thought we were beyond such things!” and, “What’s the good in it?” and, “It ought to be stopped!” And you know what they felt, and could not say, knowing what you felt and could not say in those days of hurrying out to take in the evening paper. You know how it flooded their minds as they went on with plumbing, and the grocery business, and doing housework, and working in a library.

But with Jessie there was something added to all that. “I would have been there now,” she would say in an awed whisper as she laid down a paper. It made her part of it. When armies moved, she moved—moved over that ground she knew so much about, where she would have been if this had not been. And that fact that she had been about to go and had been stopped by this brought crashing right into her own life a thing so stupendous, beyond anything she had ever imagined, that it simply undermined the things she had been. She had been so sure, so complacent with her neat little armor of knowledge, so superior in her prim little aspirations to culture. Now a new look was coming to birth in her eyes: the look of thought.

And then came those other stories—the story of a brave, simple people made homeless. She pored over the picture supplements of the Sunday papers, pictures of that very ground she was to have covered in the boots now up in her closet, ground she was to have conquered, armed with the Baedeker now lying on her desk. She had known just what she would see. And now this was what there was to see. One day she sat a long time looking down at the picture of women walking along a road with bundles in their hands. And all at once it came home to her what those bundles meant. They meant that those women had nothing else—those women now covering the ground she was to have covered. It was a long time that she sat looking down at that picture. Then—a white, stern-faced, flaming-eyed Jessie Holcombe—she got up and took from her closet the suit she was to have worn in Belgium. Tears falling, she whispered: “You are to go, after all.”

She began talking to those women whom she had been so proud to know, those “best people,” about giving some of their own clothes to women who were carrying all they had in bundles. It was a new approach for Miss Jessie to those women, and it was another sort of women that approach brought her to. They had shown her that in themselves which they thought like herself. Now, to this woman melted to compassion, they showed their own hearts of compassion—fellow women sorrowing for women, aflame with the desire to do what they could.

After Louvain—she was to have gone to Louvain to see the library—she came downstairs with her steamer coat. “Jessie, dear,” her mother remonstrated, “you mustn’t give it all away. You’ll go after this is over. You’ll need those things then.”

“They need them now,” was Jessie’s answer.

She was there. It wasn’t merely that she could imagine what was happening. She was there. She walked the road with old women looking back to their burning homes; walked the road with tired, frightened little children. She sat with women dumb with woe who had just had news from the front. She watched dying men whose faces told that they had been made for noble work. She was in the trenches with young boys who went on shooting, though dead comrades lay heavy against them. She was there. And because she was there she came to know what the realities of life were; what love was, and death; what children meant; what homes were—the sweetness of the simple life of daily work. Her voice became different; her eyes came to be the eyes of a woman who has been confirmed by life.

One day as she was coming from the bank—she still made those pilgrimages to the bank, but now the money came through the other side of the little window—she met Charlie Smith. “Jess!” he cried in impetuous protest. “You’ll have to take better care of yourself. Why, you don’t look well,” he finished rebelliously.

“Lots of people in the world are not ‘well’ just now, Charlie,” she answered, a catch in her voice.

“Well, it’s not going to make it any better for you not to be,” he said in affectionate doggedness. “And it would make it a darn sight worse—for me.”

Her eyes dimmed. “Oh, I’m all right, Charlie,” she said gently as she started to cross the street to the library. She looked back at “the enterprising young grocer” and smiled, and some how it just never popped into her head that she was being “nice” to him.

The steamer trunk was all unpacked by now: the stockings, the underwear, the shoes, the waists—they had gone to Belgium, where they had been bought to go. Her imagination went out to those women in Belgium who were wearing the things she was to have worn there on her quest for European culture.

The time came when she would have been returning—returning with that atmosphere of having been. Richard Shirley had been away giving lectures, and one day, at just about the time she would have been getting back, he came into the library, came up to her desk, holding out his hand.

“You didn’t go,” he said sympathetically. “I thought about it. I felt so sorry for you.”

“No,” she said, “I—didn’t go.”

Her tone was subdued; he took it for disappointment. “Oh, well,” he consoled “you will—a little later. Perhaps to Italy. I fancy Belgium won’t be a very good place to visit very soon.”

“I suppose not,” she said rather abruptly.

He had sat down in a chair beside her desk. “Well,” he said, with a sigh, “for that matter, the war has thrown us all out.”

“It—has made a difference,” she answered.

“A big difference to me,” he went on. “If only I had had that Flemish architecture series ready! I could have done well with that this fall.”

She sat looking at him with a queer little smile.

“And it’s an awful pity I didn’t get my material for that before the war. It won’t be the same again.”

“No,” she answered, a little dully, “it won’t be the same again.”

Soon he got up and went away, and she sat looking after him, looking after this man whom she had hoped her trip to Europe would help her win. She thought of the life she had dreamed of herself having with him. She smiled a little.

When she got home at suppertime that night her father was making a fire, for it was late October, and chilly. “Well, Jessie,” he said, “we’ve got a fire.”

“Yes, Father,” she answered; and as things were between them now it was not necessary to say more.

Charlie Smith came over that evening. And after the others had gone upstairs he and Jess sat by the fire.

“You would be about getting back now, wouldn’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Well, Jess,” he went on, with a queer little laugh, “your clothes went, anyhow—and your money.”

“Everything but me,” she laughed.

He drew his chair nearer. “Jess,” he began, “did it ever seem to you that you—did go?”

She pushed back her chair in amazement—and something more. “Why—Charlie,” she whispered.

He nodded eagerly. “Oh, I got that,” he said with a pleased, bashful laugh.

Again he was looking at her in the manner of one a little awed by what he is trying to say. “I don’t know, Jess, just what you expected to get by going, that is, not all you expected to get. Of course I know a trip to Europe would have meant a lot to you. But, Jess,”—he asked it timidly, though his eyes glowed—“does it ever seem to you that—this—has meant something to you?”

Tears on her lashes, looking at him so strangely, she nodded.

“You’re different,” he said softly. “You know more.”

She did not speak, but sat there looking at him in that strange, intent way, through shining eyes dimmed by tears. She knew enough to know what he had come to mean to her; she knew enough to know her need for the things that were real. There was a little gesture expressive of all the love and tenderness and wisdom that had flowered in her heart—and next instant she was in his arms, finding joy and promise of peace.

A little later, holding her close, he whispered: “We’re together! We’ve got each other!”—and out of their sense of what was being endured in the world flamed the knowledge of what love was worth.

Woman’s Home Companion, Nov 1916

The Hearing Ear

An hour had gone by since I bade the Hoyts good night, and alone in my charming room at their house was still trying to figure out why the Hoyts puzzled me. The change was in Katherine, and in Philip’s manner toward Katherine, his wife. It wasn’t waning interest; indeed, I had never seen him as preoccupied with her. I went on turning over the memory of this word, this glance, and all at once it came to me that that look in Philip’s eyes as he watched her was a worried look.

It came to me with a shock, so completely out of line with my feeling about Katherine Hoyt was it that she should excite concern. I had known her—oh, all our lives, but I was seeing her after three years of not having seen her; for the past fifteen years I have only seen her off and on, for back there in the ’nineties I developed a lung which made it necessary I pull up stakes in Chicago and seek sunnier climes. The lung is fairly sound now, but I still seek—just for the love of the seeking.

For the most part our evening had been quite what I had anticipated. I hadn’t realized that I had had such an interesting three years. That is what Katherine can do. I suppose there are a number of people who have that same feeling I have of being at their best with her, and of course that makes her immensely popular—for who pleases you so much as the person who causes you to be pleased with yourself? She is called a brilliant conversationalist. To me that is too definite and a little ponderous for Katherine, so light is the touch with which she distils the amusing from everything, and so peculiarly personal her gift for letting the amusing go out as a light over the rest of life. When you are with Katherine things come to life anew.

She had developed since last I saw her, just as she had all along been developing. She had a more poignant wit and a subtler humor than in the days when she made more beautiful débutantes seem an insipid race. And yet, set against that was something else—or why should I be sitting there puzzled and a little disappointed? All at once the word “effort” came into my mind.

It was all very bewildering; I finally went to sleep without having worked it out at all. Katherine had always been so easy in her quickness; and the thing that was too much for me was that in a sense she was more easy now than ever before. But for all that, there was something pulling the other way, something like strain. I remembered things now which at the moment had been swamped in the pleasure of the reunion. Particularly remembered one look over at Philip, and then his going on with the talk, as if relieving her. Naturally I came to the conclusion that she was not well, that she must have been going too much and was nervous.

But next day Katherine took me to a tea where I would see old friends, and it was there something happened which made me determined I would talk to Philip that night—I was close enough to them for that.

The thing I mean isn’t much to tell about, for it was only a look which saw pass between two women when Katherine left them. But it was an unmistakable look of relief. You would need to know Katherine to appreciate how that bewildered and alarmed me.

Though I had made up my mind I would speak to Philip, it was Philip who, late that night as we lingered alone in the library, spoke to me.

“Wyman,” he asked, abruptly, “how does Katherine seem to you?”

“She puzzles me,” I answered. “There’s something I don’t understand.”

He nodded. “It’s her hearing,” he said.

I gasped, as one does when light has suddenly broken. I went over the whole thing, and at how completely it did explain it I said, with what I suppose must have been a certain satisfaction, “Oh—that’s it.”

“You don’t think it’s very good news, do you?” he asked, a little dryly.

“I see now that I must have been fearing something worse,” I explained.

He sighed. “Well, I don’t know what you had been fearing, but—Why, stop and think a minute, Wyman. Are there so many things worse than not being able to hear what people are saying?”

I was about to speak of the number of people who had difficulty with their hearing, when Phil changed my line of thinking. “For Katherine, I mean,” he added.

There was some time when I did not speak—when I thought. Then I inquired if something couldn’t be done.

He shook his head. “They seem to think not,” he said, wearily.

He told me all about it; it seemed a relief to him to talk of it, as if he had gone over it too much by himself. It was almost two ears before that he began to notice Katherine did not always hear what he said. He didn’t really think of it as failing hearing until one night at the theater when he had to repeat many of the things to her. He asked her that night if she noticed any difficulty with her hearing. She wouldn’t admit it at first, but finally acknowledged that she did. She said it must be just a little temporary thing that would go away of itself, and she had been distressed at his having remarked it. He insisted upon going to a doctor, and—well, they had been to many doctors since. Her hearing had grown worse—as they had said it would. They said it would go on growing worse.

“Probably you haven’t noticed it so much,” he said, “because you speak deliberately and clearly, and Katherine doesn’t have much trouble with you. But—she doesn’t get on so well with most people.” He said it curtly, as we say a thing that hurts.

Phil and I talked till late that night, and it was much later still when I went to sleep, trying to see Katherine as she would be, shut out from people. It was very hard to picture her so and see her Katherine. It struck at the thing definitely and peculiarly herself. Her gift was social; people were her medium. This threatened her as failing sight would threaten the artist.

As I turned it over that night I wondered, if she did more and more lose that easy communication with others, what new thing it might make of her. It was not hopeful thinking. With all my admiration of Katherine I never felt that she drew from deep roots. I could not see that she would have other resources because of the completeness with which she realized herself right there in her own special province on the surface. It was her gift for people that had given her social supremacy. She was used to that supremacy. In it she lived and moved and had her being.

I had expected to be in Chicago less than a month, but both Philip and Katherine pressed me to stay, and I felt they not only wanted but needed me. And in those three months Katherine never once spoke to me of her difficulty. Phil said she did not admit it to others simply because she was not admitting it to herself. I asked him if he thought this the wise way, and he answered, “Perhaps not the wise way, but it’s Katherine’s way.” He felt we could only help her by aiding her in helping herself after her own fashion. He said, “I know it’s hard to see her trying—but it might be harder yet to see her give up.”

I could see that there was his fear; like me, he could not see a made-over Katherine. And in the time I was with them I saw what I think I might call one of love’s miracles; more soberly speaking, I saw that love makes it possible for us to become what we could not otherwise have been. Philip had always been a quiet, serious-minded fellow, very much absorbed in what he was doing, and given to letting little things pass around him unnoticed. Socially he had always been just a little clumsy. I used to think that one reason he adored Katherine was that so many things which were hard for him were as easy as breathing for her. But now, in her need, his love gave him powers not native to him. It was as if he made himself over that Katherine might remain herself. He who had been slow became quick; he who in little things had seen little, now saw everything; where he had been shy, awkward, he came to be at ease in shaping a situation, in bridging a difficulty. He could watch Katherine without her knowing he was watching her, without making it apparent to others. He never seemed to hurt her confidence or shadow her pleasure by that most inept of all things—help which is not needed—but he had an apparently unfailing instinct for the moment when she should have help. He would join her group and with a light skill I could scarcely believe was Philip Hoyt’s he would give things a new start. I have seen her eyes call to him. He had a way of letting her know what she had missed without actually repeating what had been said; he would say the thing in a new way, as a contribution to the conversation. He literally became a new kind of person—the kind of person who could keep the channels of communication open for Katherine. I saw how she needed him one night when I saw her without him. Katherine and I went alone to a small reception for Zeering—the Chicago painter who had just returned after a number of years in Paris. It was a brilliant little affair—quite Katherine’s sort of thing, but for her it went badly from start to finish. It’s strange—the difference in our attitudes toward the deaf and the blind. The blind rouse all our tenderness, our chivalry; but we seem to resent deafness, and often we dislike the people who bring us into relation with it. The mistakes of the deaf strike us as funny; we’d hate anyone who laughed at the fumblings of the blind. It doesn’t speak very well for us, but I’ve come to the conclusion that we find deafness irritating simply because it makes trouble for us. We don’t like the awkwardness of stating our ideas in a loud voice. And we seem to think because they don’t hear well there’s something the matter with their understanding. Time and again, since Katherine has made deafness a matter of special concern to me, I have noticed really sensible people talking to the person hard of hearing, not only in a loud voice, but as if he were also simple-minded. At this little affair for Zeering, a woman began talking to Katherine as if she were one whose intellect necessitated a simplification of thought—a words-of-one-syllable manner. I saw Katherine flush and turn away. A number of times she said things which showed she had lost the thread of the conversation, and once in particular I remember how cruelly it was brought home to her that she had snarled things up. The expression of the other people made it plain that she had not gone on with what they were saying. After a moment’s awkward pause they began talking of something else.

Next day, when we were invited to a dinner at the Lingate’s—then the most conspicuous family in Chicago—to meet some English people who were visiting them, Katherine said, “Suppose we don’t go to that, Phil.” She tried to say it lightly, but she looked older and—well, as if something had gone from her. Phil said, quickly: “Why, of course we’ll go, Katherine. Why not? Henry wants to go; don’t you, Wyman?”

It was the last thing I went to in Chicago. I am glad we went, for I carried away an impression of Katherine as a woman who had brilliantly realized that piquant girl of twenty years before. It was amazing, almost incredible, the difference between the evening of the week before and now. It was a flash-up of her spirit that transcended her handicap, as if the thing that was herself, feeling itself threatened, defied the barrier that would shut her in. She was in the current, and I don’t think anyone else realized that there were several times when she would have veered from it but for the almost unseen touch of her husband. I had never seen her more radiant. The English visitors were delighted with her; she had here, at its purest, that gift of hers for heightening life, for throwing an interesting light over everything. I stood watching her as the center of an entertained group. I hold that picture of her—quick, sensitive, glowing. I noticed Katherine’s ear. It was peculiarly formed—rhythmically formed, and gave the impression of an ear within an ear—an inner ear.

I left with a feeling that it must all come right, that Katherine was too vital to break. As I thought about it on the long ride to California, I was a little sorry that, after her triumph that night at the Lingates’, I had not ventured to talk with her about her situation. It seemed that the idea of “sensitiveness” was absurd in view of her beautiful power to surmount her difficulty. I would like to have told her that she had nothing to fear, that the closing of any one door could not shut her out from the world; I wished I had assured her of my feeling that the flame in her was too strong to go out under the breath of physical adversity. But I had left without talking to her, so strong is the habit of not intruding, and even that I did not too much regret, secure in my feeling that she herself would bring it right, that the life in her would find its own way. And the more I dwelt upon it the more it seemed to me that this open current between her and Philip should make up to Katherine for the closing of many little surface channels. Katherine would indeed have failed if with time she did not come to see that she had gained more than she had lost. All of my faith in life went into the feeling that she would not fail.

Once in the Pacific, I went clear to Australia, and I was in out-of-the-way places for the next few years. But Chicago people range far, and there were several times when I met people who gave me word of the Hoyts. All that I heard vindicated the feeling of hopefulness with which I had left them. Katherine Hoyt remained the most fascinating and, in an exclusive sort of way, the most popular woman in Chicago, her townspeople assured me. Yes, she was really very hard of hearing, but she was so clever it didn’t seem to make much difference; she somehow got the point, and what she said herself was the thing that counted. A little later, in Japan, I met Anna Stephens, one of Katherine’s closest friends. She had seen what I saw—that it was Philip who kept the way open for Katherine. “He lets her know the thing necessary for going on,” she said. She told me that while she thought Katherine’s hearing had grown worse, her way of coping with it had improved so that it was less conspicuous than it had been at the first. “And the team-work gets better all the time.” She thought it had infringed very little upon Katherine’s spirit; it had roused her will and called upon new resources. She was really more interesting than ever before.

This talk made vivid all my first feeling about Philip, freshened that sense of them as two people whom love, in a time of need, had swept into special communication with each other, breaking through the barrier of our easygoing normality. It was just after Mrs. Stephens left Japan that I one day opened my Chicago paper to see Philip Hoyt’s picture on the front page. He was one of the men who went down with the Afric.

I couldn’t believe it. Even late that night, after I had read it over and over, my mind didn’t take it in. He had gone to London on a hurried business trip; his wife was not with him, but was waiting for him in New York. There was a long story, giving the facts of Philip’s life. I stared down at his picture and tried to realize that he was dead. It was for me just one of those things which can’t happen.

I tried many times to write a letter to Katherine before I got anything that I could send. For what could I say to her? Apart from everything else, how was she going to get along without Philip? I confess that I tried not to think of her—so well did I understand just where this left her. And I tried not to think of Philip. I couldn’t bear the thought with which he must have gone down. Clumsy chance seemed making sport of our finest achievement, of that sensitiveness which flowers from our tenderness.

I had no reply from Katherine; at length I wrote to Anna Stephens, who was back in Chicago, asking for word. And she told me the most amazing thing; she said that Katherine had entirely lost her hearing. Katherine said she couldn’t hear, and there was every reason to believe she could not. She made no effort to hear. She made no effort of any kind.

Again and still again I wrote to Katherine, but I did not hear from her. From the few things I heard through others I knew what it was that had happened. I knew it was not merely that she did not want to hear, but that she could not hear; but I know enough about the strange underlying life of our minds to suspect she could not hear because of the deep want not to hear.

The next spring I went to Paris. I had made up my mind that in the fall I would go to America. My reason for going there was to see Katherine. I determined that I could not leave her shut in by herself without a real attempt at reaching her. Philip’s face would come before me and tell me I must try. I knew that at the first something in her was frozen and wanted nothing but to go to sleep and die; but I know also that time itself carries a breath of life. I thought that by fall, perhaps, Katherine would not refuse to meet me, spiritually meet me, I mean.

But with me, as with millions of others, the war changed all. I had lingered in Paris through the early summer; some American friends were there with their motor, and excursions about France with them had made July pleasant. I was on the eve of going to Norway when the Germans marched out of Germany for Paris.

I could have got away with all the other fleeing Americans, but I had an instinct for staying…. Late in the fall a Chicago surgeon whom I knew came to join the American ambulance corps. Through him I had later word from Katherine. He told me that she had left Chicago, had gone with only a paid companion. He heard through her lawyer that she was living in an isolated little town on the New England coast. She was going to stay there.

He told me it was true Katherine was entirely deaf; he was convinced it was genuine. He said he believed her hearing all along had been worse than we had known, because of her skill in dealing with it—and her husband’s skill.

“It’s strange, but not impossible,” he said, “that hearing should go now. The more we work with bodies the more we have to concede to minds. Can’t you see how her whole feeling about his loss might react on those nerves which had made such a particular response to him? He helped her hear; he kept her wanting to hear. She hadn’t him any more—she didn’t want to hear—she couldn’t hear.”

I felt that he was right, but I suspected intricacies in it which were not there for him. I wondered if, added to grief and to helplessness, a dissatisfaction with self was not there as a more insidious blight. Now that she had not Philip and could not hear, I wondered if there had not come a deep revulsion from all those small things which she had spent herself—and him—in trying to hear. This idea was given substance by a letter from Mrs. Stephens later in the winter.

“I went up from New York to see Katherine,” she wrote. “I tried to get her to come away with me, but she was immovable. She seems in every sense just that. Of course it is very hard to communicate with her, particularly as she doesn’t want to be communicated with. Of this I feel sure—Katherine does not want to come back to us. Perhaps it is that she tried too hard for too long. I wonder if she feels that she lost the best of Philip through that trying—something in her eyes made me think that one night. The only interest she has is in the sea, and I doubt if that is as much an interest in life as in death. Her house is on the outskirts of a little fishing village; it might be pleasant enough in summer, but of course terribly desolate in winter. I did what I could, but there’s something in this shut-in Katherine stronger than anything in me.”

That she who had been most open to living should now be shut in alone; that Katherine Hoyt, who had stood to me for life at its most vivid, should have become that greatest negation of life—the living who are not alive—was just a part of the whole break-up of those days. I do not suppose those who have their own place in life, and a place far away, can ever understand what the war meant to us who were, in one way or another, caught into it. I was caught into the work of trying to care for the wounded and those who were left destitute.

We went through that winter, through the next summer, and began another winter. I did not forget Katherine, but I did nothing for her. I still had the resolve to go to her when I could, but I had lost the feeling of being able to do what I wanted to do. I did not write to her because I had nothing to offer. Those were days when there was not in my spirit either the power or the impulse to summon another back to living. And then one day, on the steps of the hospital, I met the Chicago surgeon of whom I have spoken. He talked a moment of what he had been doing, and as he was turning away he said:

“Oh, by the way, have you heard about your friend Mrs. Hoyt?”

“Heard what?” I asked, sharply.

“That she was dead?”

I do not know whether I stammered, “Dead?” or whether I only tried to.

“My sister wrote me that nobody seemed to know much about it,” he was going on. “The woman who lived with her wrote that she always went out in the storms and that she seemed to have no idea of taking care of herself. I suppose that’s a vile climate—anyhow, it was pneumonia. She was buried there where she was living—way off there by herself.” He stopped talking, as if halted by that last. After a moment he murmured, “She certainly had dropped out, hadn’t she?” then hurried along about his business.

The darkest moment I have ever known in my life was the moment that night when suddenly realized it was a relief to think of Katherine as dead. I have failed utterly in my narrative of her if it is not apparent what that realization meant to me. And as all along in this strange way things had been let in to me through her, so this realization of how I felt about her let in with a rush the sense of how I felt about life. It was as if old things, things simple and happy, had gone out of the world. That world in which Katherine had been so bright a point just did not exist any more. It was back in some other existence that she and I had laughed together over those amusing things that transpired through the pattern of life and lighted it up. The as it should be had gone out of the world. Again things were made meaningful through her. I thought of how Katherine had not fulfilled herself, and, when I knew that, my pain for her was in that I knew why my spirit was sick. Life was not fulfilling itself.

I said as much several months later at the home of a friend of mine who is a painter, where I had gone to meet a friend of his—Gordon, the well-known sculptor. He had left Paris the first week of the war, expecting to be back soon. He had been living in America that his work might go on undisturbed by the madness of men, but the length of the war was too long a term for him to live away from Paris, and so he had come back and opened the hastily closed studio.

It was Gordon who seemed to know what I meant by my not very cheerful remark. I had been goaded to it by exasperation; Raymonds, my painter friend, had made a smug remark about the war really not affecting the things that counted. And then I asked him if the human race counted. Raymonds merely thought I was a disagreeable guest, but I met Gordon’s eye and saw that he got something else. As I was taking leave, he asked me if I wouldn’t one day soon come round to his studio.

I went the next afternoon, for he made me feel less alone. He showed me the work he was doing, and we talked of that, and then returned to the thing we had talked of the evening before. In the midst of that he seemed oddly to interrupt himself, for he suddenly said, “There’s something I haven’t unpacked yet.” He got up and went to the back of his studio and took something from a box. As he brought it forward and placed it on the table before me it was still obscured by a little of the packing material. While he was brushing that off he said: “You say we are lost in the night. I wonder what you will think of this.”

I can’t tell it at all effectively, for the mere recounting of my first feeling affects me so strongly that I have again that feeling of being sick, of being about to sink down. The singular part of it was that I had that feeling before my mind really took in that the bust at which I was looking was a portrait of Katherine Hoyt.

I remember I brushed my hand over my eyes, as if to brush away the too-strange fancy. And then I looked again, and I knew it was no fancy. And the thing which made me know that this was Katherine and no other was that strange formation of the ear, which was as an ear within an ear—an inner ear. I suppose I must have looked for that without realizing I was doing so.

Gordon, who had brought the bust out to see its effect on me, was caught into the artist’s absorption in his own work which he is seeing after a lapse of time, and so he wasn’t noticing me. Of course there was a time when I could not speak: the utter surprise of it, for one thing; the strangeness of it—that Katherine, after she had gone, should come back into my life, that I should have word from her again.

“She wasn’t lost in the night, do you think?” he asked me at last.

One can’t take in everything at once, and it’s quite like us, it seems to me, that I had taken in first the things that were like Katherine—those definite little things of identification. But as I looked now I saw the new thing—the big thing. I looked around the studio to see if other things looked real, as they had a moment before, for the face of this friend whom I thought had died defeated was the most serenely triumphant face into which I have ever looked.

The thing I at last said must have sounded pretty banal to an artist. “But was it a good likeness?” I asked.

“If you had seen her,” he said, “you’d know one wouldn’t presume to do anything more interesting than a likeness.”

He looked at his work, then added, with authority, “As a likeness, it’s the best thing I ever did.” “But where did you see her?” I asked, and I sat down, for I felt weak.

“Last summer I went to Cape’s End,” he told me. “I don’t suppose you know it—a little neck of land way out at sea, a townful of people whose lives are made by the sea. There’s a wide reach of what they call the flats left bare at low tide. One morning I had been out to the traps with the fisherman at whose house I was staying, and just after sun rise I walked in across these flats. The wet sands were magical in that first light, and it was all so fresh and strange—the freshness of strange things. And this woman was standing just behind one of those pools of color—this ‘seeing’ look on her face. She gave me the strangest feeling of being on a threshold. The flats suddenly seemed something that reached out—not merely from land to sea, but from life to—something else. Anyhow, she gave me a feeling of being right up to the edge of things. The next day I saw her on the beach with a little boy—a little boy who limped; they were building something in the sand. Before she saw me coming along I saw her regarding him with a certain look of—Well, here, I hope I’ve got a suggestion of it—the mouth, perhaps.”

He rose and turned the bust so I could get an other aspect. “Well, I wanted to do her. She had something that I wanted to get. I felt that she knew something. I had just had word that Helot—the young Frenchman who worked with me, and who went to war the week I went to America, had been killed. It takes the personal to drive it home, doesn’t it? for I suddenly knew what war was. My picture of that boy covering up the figure he was doing and going out to get a uniform and a gun…. It’s as you said last night—lost threads, rude interruptions, unfulfilment. And so I had to get her, because with her things were going on!” He paused. “They will always go on with her, don’t you think?”

I looked at Katherine. “It seems so,” I murmured.

“It’s strange,” he mused, “how much that sense of someone having something can mean to us all. It is strange,” he repeated, after a moment, “but no matter how much may be lost—if we can feel there’s something not lost, or, rather, if we can feel that someone has got something that can’t be lost—well,” he broke off, “I wanted to do her, and I suppose the reason I had no hesitancy in asking her to sit for me was the fact that what she had was bigger than herself, and my reason for wanting it was bigger than myself. So I walked up to them as she watched the little boy building on the sands. The tide was coming in, and what was in my mind was that the house the boy was building would soon be washed away, and that it was like all the other things people had been building. But what I said was—to her through him—‘What a fine, big house!’

“She looked at me a moment and then with a smile she said, ‘It’s better to build something, even though it may be swept away.’

“I tell you it made me feel queer. She had answered, not what I said, but what I was feeling. I might as well tell you right now that she hadn’t heard what I said. She was deaf. But the other thing is the amazing part of it. Because she couldn’t hear what I said, she knew what I meant.”

I sat looking at Katherine, and as I took that in, as I really got it, my eyes grew so dim I could not see her.

“In a later talk she said to me that she had for a long time been shut out from people because she knew them only through what they said. She laughed—don’t get the impression that she is an austere person—and said that blurred things a lot.”

If he had not been himself absorbed he would have thought me very strange throughout. I made no reply to this; to me it was way beyond any reply.

“Well,” Gordon was going on, “I wrote her a note and asked her to sit for me, and she wrote back most amusingly and said she would expect pay and that she would take it in the form of a large lump of clay, that the little fellow I had seen her with might have something more stationary than sand to work with.

“She told me about him during the sittings. It seemed he had been made lame through an accident the year before. ‘He’s not used to lameness,’ she said, with a look on her face the sculptor hasn’t yet lived who could hope to get. He used to lead all the rest, and one day she saw him trying to jump with the others, and he fell very short, and afterward she found him crying. ‘I am greatly indebted to him,’ she told me, in a simple way she has, ‘for I saw something through him.’ I thought she was going to tell me what it was she saw, but she fell to thinking, and I wouldn’t for the world have disturbed her, because—” He pointed to his work.

He looked at his work, and I looked at Katherine—the quiet beauty of that seeing look, the tender, brooding understanding, the loving wisdom that may follow pain. “Perhaps she meant something in her own life,” he ventured. “I feel sure she has not always lived as quietly.”

He was called away then, and for a time I remained alone in the studio. I do not know how long a time; I only know that it was the most important time of my life. I lived more in that time than I had lived in all the time before. I saw more. As Katherine had all along in that strange way been as a glass through which I looked, she was now a clear pool through which I saw into things not often seen. I thought of her whole life—of how she had lost where she had been strongest, and how from her weakness she had won what she could not have had through her strength. I knew what it was she had seen through the little lame boy. I saw through her what she had seen through him—that channels cut off may make deeper channels, that the end may be the beginning. Of course I longed for my friend, and yet more than ever before I had my friend. A sense of the whole wonder of life, a deeply refreshing sense of the beauty of life, opened thus from Katherine’s experience, after I had thought her gone, coming back into my life—a light in the darkness. And as there was something in her stronger than anything that could happen to her, so I knew now that there was something in life stronger than anything that could happen to life. That was my deathless word from Katherine, a word which had the authority of one bright star in a clouded night.

Gordon came back and stood beside me and looked with me. He is deeply the artist, for he said not a word. At last I thanked him and went away. Once outside it occurred to me as strange that I hadn’t told him either that I knew Katherine or that she was dead. But was it strange, after all—when those two things mattered so much less than other things mattered.

Harper’s Magazine, Jan 1917

A Jury of Her Peers

BASED ON MATERIAL
FROM THE 1916 PLAY “TRIFLES”
( SEE  APPENDIX )

When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away—it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving; her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.

She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too—adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scarey and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was.

“Martha!” now came her husband’s impatient voice. “Don’t keep folks waiting out here in the cold.”

She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy.

After she had the robes tucked around her she took another look at the woman who sat beside her on the back seat. She had met Mrs. Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn’t seem like a sheriff’s wife. She was small and thin and didn’t have a strong voice. Mrs. Gorman, sheriff’s wife before Gorman went out and Peters came in, had a voice that somehow seemed to be backing up the law with every word. But if Mrs. Peters didn’t look like a sheriff’s wife, Peters made it up in looking like a sheriff. He was to a dot the kind of man who could get himself elected sheriff—a heavy man with a big voice, who was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals. And right there it came into Mrs. Hale’s mind, with a stab, that this man who was so pleasant and lively with all of them was going to the Wrights’ now as a sheriff.

“The country’s not very pleasant this time of year,” Mrs. Peters at last ventured, as if she felt they ought to be talking as well as the men.

Mrs. Hale scarcely finished her reply, for they had gone up a little hill and could see the Wright place now, and seeing it did not make her feel like talking. It looked very lonesome this cold March morning. It had always been a lonesome-looking place. It was down in a hollow, and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees. The men were looking at it and talking about what had happened. The county attorney was bending to one side of the buggy, and kept looking steadily at the place as they drew up to it.

“I’m glad you came with me,” Mrs. Peters said nervously, as the two women were about to follow the men in through the kitchen door.

Even after she had her foot on the doorstep, her hand on the knob, Martha Hale had a moment of feeling she could not cross that threshold. And the reason it seemed she couldn’t cross it now was simply because she hadn’t crossed it before. Time and time again it had been in her mind, “I ought to go over and see Minnie Foster”—she still thought of her as Minnie Foster, though for twenty years she had been Mrs. Wright. And then there was always something to do and Minnie Foster would go from her mind. But now she could come.

The men went over to the stove. The women stood close together by the door. Young Henderson, the county attorney, turned around and said, “Come up to the fire, ladies.”

Mrs. Peters took a step forward, then stopped. “I’m not—cold,” she said.

And so the two women stood by the door, at first not even so much as looking around the kitchen.

The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them, and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, and leaned his hands on the kitchen table in a way that seemed to mark the beginning of official business. “Now, Mr. Hale,” he said in a sort of semi-official voice, “before we move things about, you tell Mr. Henderson just what it was you saw when you came here yesterday morning.”

The county attorney was looking around the kitchen.

“By the way,” he said, “has anything been moved?” He turned to the sheriff. “Are things just as you left them yesterday?”

Peters looked from cupboard to sink; from that to a small worn rocker a little to one side of the kitchen table.

“It’s just the same.”

“Somebody should have been left here yesterday,” said the county attorney.

“Oh—yesterday,” returned the sheriff, with a little gesture as of yesterday having been more than he could bear to think of. “When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy—let me tell you, I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by today, George, and as long as I went over everything here myself—”

“Well, Mr. Hale,” said the county attorney, in a way of letting what was past and gone go, “tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning.”

Mrs. Hale, still leaning against the door, had that sinking feeling of the mother whose child is about to speak a piece. Lewis often wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that would just make things harder for Minnie Foster. He didn’t begin at once, and she noticed that he looked queer—as if standing in that kitchen and having to tell what he had seen there yesterday morning made him almost sick.

“Yes, Mr. Hale?” the county attorney reminded.

“Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes,” Mrs. Hale’s husband began.

Harry was Mrs. Hale’s oldest boy. He wasn’t with them now, for the very good reason that those potatoes never got to town yesterday and he was taking them this morning, so he hadn’t been home when the sheriff stopped to say he wanted Mr. Hale to come over to the Wright place and tell the county attorney his story there, where he could point it all out. With all Mrs. Hale’s other emotions came the fear now that maybe Harry wasn’t dressed warm enough—they hadn’t any of them realized how that north wind did bite.

“We come along this road,” Hale was going on, with a motion of his hand to the road over which they had just come, “and as we got in sight of the house I says to Harry, ‘I’m goin’ to see if I can’t get John Wright to take a telephone.’ You see,” he explained to Henderson, “unless I can get somebody to go in with me they won’t come out this branch road except for a price I can’t pay. I’d spoke to Wright about it once before; but he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet—guess you know about how much he talked himself. But I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before his wife, and said all the women-folks liked the telephones, and that in this lonesome stretch of road it would be a good thing—well, I said to Harry that that was what I was going to say—though I said at the same time that I didn’t know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John—”

Now, there he was!—saying things he didn’t need to say. Mrs. Hale tried to catch her husband’s eye, but fortunately the county attorney interrupted with:

“Let’s talk about that a little later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that, but I’m anxious now to get along to just what happened when you got here.”

When he began this time, it was very deliberately and carefully:

“I didn’t see or hear anything. I knocked at the door. And still it was all quiet inside. I knew they must be up—it was past eight o’clock. So I knocked again, louder, and I thought I heard somebody say, ‘Come in.’ I wasn’t sure—I’m not sure yet. But I opened the door—this door,” jerking a hand toward the door by which the two women stood, “and there, in that rocker”—pointing to it—“sat Mrs. Wright.”

Everyone in the kitchen looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale’s mind that that rocker didn’t look in the least like Minnie Foster—the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle run was gone, and the chair sagged to one side.

“How did she—look?” the county attorney was inquiring.

“Well,” said Hale, “she looked—queer.”

“How do you mean—queer?”

As he asked it he took out a notebook and pencil. Mrs. Hale did not like the sight of that pencil. She kept her eye fixed on her husband, as if to keep him from saying unnecessary things that would go into that notebook and make trouble.

Hale did speak guardedly, as if the pencil had affected him too.

“Well, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. And kind of—done up.”

“How did she seem to feel about your coming?”

“Why, I don’t think she minded—one way or other. She didn’t pay much attention. I said, ‘How do, Mrs. Wright? It’s cold, ain’t it?’ And she said, ‘Is it?’—and went on pleatin’ at her apron.

“Well, I was surprised. She didn’t ask me to come up to the stove, or to sit down, but just set there, not even lookin’ at me. And so I said: ‘I want to see John.’

“And then she—laughed. I guess you would call it a laugh.

“I thought of Harry and the team outside, so I said, a little sharp, ‘Can I see John?’ ‘No,’ says she—kind of dull like. ‘Ain’t he home?’ says I. Then she looked at me. ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s home.’ ‘Then why can’t I see him?’ I asked her, out of patience with her now. ‘’Cause he’s dead,’ says she, just as quiet and dull—and fell to pleatin’ her apron. ‘Dead?’ says I, like you do when you can’t take in what you’ve heard.

“She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin’ back and forth.

“‘Why—where is he?’ says I, not knowing what to say.

“She just pointed upstairs—like this”—pointing to the room above.

“I got up, with the idea of going up there myself. By this time I—didn’t know what to do. I walked from there to here; then I says: ‘Why, what did he die of?’

“‘He died of a rope round his neck,’ says she; and just went on pleatin’ at her apron.”

Hale stopped speaking, and stood staring at the rocker, as if he were still seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before. Nobody spoke; it was as if everyone were seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before.

“And what did you do then?” the county attorney at last broke the silence.

“I went out and called Harry. I thought I might—need help. I got Harry in, and we went upstairs.” His voice fell almost to a whisper. “There he was—lying over the—”

“I think I’d rather have you go into that upstairs,” the county attorney interrupted, “where you can point it all out. Just go on now with the rest of the story.”

“Well, my first thought was to get that rope off. It looked—”

He stopped, his face twitching.

“But Harry, he went up to him, and he said, ‘No, he’s dead all right, and we’d better not touch anything.’ So we went downstairs.

“She was still sitting that same way. ‘Has anybody been notified?’ I asked. ‘No,’ says she, unconcerned.

“‘Who did this, Mrs. Wright?’ said Harry. He said it businesslike, and she stopped pleatin’ at her apron. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You don’t know?’ says Harry. ‘Weren’t you sleepin’ in the bed with him?’ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘but I was on the inside.’ ‘Somebody slipped a rope round his neck and strangled him, and you didn’t wake up?’ says Harry. ‘I didn’t wake up,’ she said after him.

“We may have looked as if we didn’t see how that could be, for after a minute she said, ‘I sleep sound.’

“Harry was going to ask her more questions, but I said maybe that weren’t our business; maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to the coroner or the sheriff. So Harry went fast as he could over to High Road—the Rivers’ place, where there’s a telephone.”

“And what did she do when she knew you had gone for the coroner?” The attorney got his pencil in his hand all ready for writing.

“She moved from that chair to this one over here”—Hale pointed to a small chair in the corner—“and just sat there with her hands held together and looking down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to put in a telephone; and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me—scared.”

At sound of a moving pencil the man who was telling the story looked up.

“I dunno—maybe it wasn’t scared,” he hastened; “I wouldn’t like to say it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd came, and you, Mr. Peters, and so I guess that’s all I know that you don’t.”

•    •    •    •

He said that last with relief, and moved a little, as if relaxing. Everyone moved a little. The county attorney walked toward the stair door.

“I guess we’ll go upstairs first—then out to the barn and around there.”

He paused and looked around the kitchen.

“You’re convinced there was nothing important here?” he asked the sheriff. “Nothing that would—point to any motive?”

The sheriff too looked all around, as if to re-convince himself.

“Nothing here but kitchen things,” he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things.

The county attorney was looking at the cupboard—a peculiar, ungainly structure, half closet and half cupboard, the upper part of it being built in the wall, and the lower part just the old-fashioned kitchen cupboard. As if its queerness attracted him, he got a chair and opened the upper part and looked in. After a moment he drew his hand away sticky.

“Here’s a nice mess,” he said resentfully.

The two women had drawn nearer, and now the sheriff’s wife spoke.

“Oh—her fruit,” she said, looking to Mrs. Hale for sympathetic understanding. She turned back to the county attorney and explained: “She worried about that when it turned so cold last night. She said the fire would go out and her jars might burst.”

Mrs. Peters’ husband broke into a laugh.

“Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder, and worrying about her preserves!”

The young attorney set his lips.

“I guess before we’re through with her she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about.”

“Oh, well,” said Mrs. Hale’s husband, with good-natured superiority, “women are used to worrying over trifles.”

The two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke. The county attorney seemed suddenly to remember his manners—and think of his future.

“And yet,” said he, with the gallantry of a young politician, “for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?”

The women did not speak, did not unbend. He went to the sink and began washing his hands. He turned to wipe them on the roller towel—whirled it for a cleaner place.

“Dirty towels! Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?”

He kicked his foot against some dirty pans under the sink.

“There’s a great deal of work to be done on a farm,” said Mrs. Hale stiffly.

“To be sure. And yet”—with a little bow to her—“I know there are some Dickson County farm-houses that do not have such roller towels.” He gave it a pull to expose its full length again.

“Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men’s hands aren’t always as clean as they might be.”

“Ah, loyal to your sex, I see,” he laughed. He stopped and gave her a keen look. “But you and Mrs. Wright were neighbors. I suppose you were friends, too.”

Martha Hale shook her head.

“I’ve seen little enough of her of late years. I’ve not been in this house—it’s more than a year.”

“And why was that? You didn’t like her?”

“I liked her well enough,” she replied with spirit. “Farmers’ wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then—” She looked around the kitchen.

“Yes?” he encouraged.

“It never seemed a very cheerful place,” said she, more to herself than to him.

“No,” he agreed; “I don’t think anyone would call it cheerful. I shouldn’t say she had the home-making instinct.”

“Well, I don’t know as Wright had, either,” she muttered.

“You mean they didn’t get on very well?” he was quick to ask.

“No; I don’t mean anything,” she answered, with decision. As she turned a little away from him, she added: “But I don’t think a place would be any the cheerfuller for John Wright’s bein’ in it.”

“I’d like to talk to you about that a little later, Mrs. Hale,” he said. “I’m anxious to get the lay of things upstairs now.”

He moved toward the stair door, followed by the two men.

“I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does’ll be all right?” the sheriff inquired. “She was to take in some clothes for her, you know—and a few little things. We left in such a hurry yesterday.”

The county attorney looked at the two women whom they were leaving alone there among the kitchen things.

“Yes—Mrs. Peters,” he said, his glance resting on the woman who was not Mrs. Peters, the big farmer woman who stood behind the sheriff’s wife. “Of course Mrs. Peters is one of us,” he said, in a manner of entrusting responsibility. “And keep your eye out, Mrs. Peters, for anything that might be of use. No telling; you women might come upon a clue to the motive—and that’s the thing we need.”

Mr. Hale rubbed his face after the fashion of a show man getting ready for a pleasantry.

“But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?” he said; and, having delivered himself of this, he followed the others through the stair door.

The women stood motionless and silent, listening to the footsteps, first upon the stairs, then in the room above them.

Then, as if releasing herself from something strange, Mrs. Hale began to arrange the dirty pans under the sink, which the county attorney’s disdainful push of the foot had deranged.

“I’d hate to have men comin’ into my kitchen,” she said testily—“snoopin’ round and criticizin’.”

“Of course it’s no more than their duty,” said the sheriff’s wife, in her manner of timid acquiescence.

“Duty’s all right,” replied Mrs. Hale bluffly; “but I guess that deputy sheriff that come out to make the fire might have got a little of this on.” She gave the roller towel a pull. “Wish I’d thought of that sooner! Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up, when she had to come away in such a hurry.”

She looked around the kitchen. Certainly it was not “slicked up.” Her eye was held by a bucket of sugar on a low shelf. The cover was off the wooden bucket, and beside it was a paper bag—half full.

Mrs. Hale moved toward it.

“She was putting this in there,” she said to herself—slowly.

She thought of the flour in her kitchen at home—half sifted, half not sifted. She had been interrupted, and had left things half done. What had interrupted Minnie Foster? Why had that work been left half done? She made a move as if to finish it—unfinished things always bothered her—and then she glanced around and saw that Mrs. Peters was watching her—and she didn’t want Mrs. Peters to get that feeling she had got of work begun and then—for some reason—not finished.

“It’s a shame about her fruit,” she said, and walked toward the cupboard that the county attorney had opened, and got on the chair, murmuring: “I wonder if it’s all gone.”

It was a sorry enough looking sight, but “Here’s one that’s all right,” she said at last. She held it toward the light. “This is cherries, too.” She looked again. “I declare I believe that’s the only one.”

With a sigh, she got down from the chair, went to the sink, and wiped off the bottle.

“She’ll feel awful bad, after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer.”

She set the bottle on the table, and, with another sigh, started to sit down in the rocker. But she did not sit down. Something kept her from sitting down in that chair. She straightened—stepped back, and, half turned away, stood looking at it, seeing the woman who had sat there “pleatin’ at her apron.”

The thin voice of the sheriff’s wife broke in upon her: “I must be getting those things from the front room closet.” She opened the door into the other room, started in, stepped back. “You coming with me, Mrs. Hale?” she asked nervously. “You—you could help me get them.”

They were soon back—the stark coldness of that shut-up room was not a thing to linger in.

“My!” said Mrs. Peters, dropping the things on the table and hurrying to the stove.

Mrs. Hale stood examining the clothes the woman who was being detained in town had said she wanted.

“Wright was close!” she exclaimed, holding up a shabby black skirt that bore the marks of much making over. “I think maybe that’s why she kept so much to herself. I s’pose she felt she couldn’t do her part; and then, you don’t enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively—when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls, singing in the choir. But that—oh, that was twenty years ago.”

With a carefulness in which there was something tender, she folded the shabby clothes and piled them at one corner of the table. She looked up at Mrs. Peters, and there was something in the other woman’s look that irritated her.

“She don’t care,” she said to herself. “Much difference it makes to her whether Minnie Foster had pretty clothes when she was a girl.”

Then she looked again, and she wasn’t so sure; in fact, she hadn’t at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things.

“This all you was to take in?” asked Mrs. Hale.

“No,” said the sheriff’s wife; “she said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want,” she ventured in her nervous little way, “for there’s not much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. If you’re used to wearing an apron—. She said they were in the bottom drawer of this cupboard. Yes—here they are. And then her little shawl that always hung on the stair door.”

She took the small gray shawl from behind the door leading upstairs, and stood a minute looking at it.

Suddenly Mrs. Hale took a quick step toward the other woman.

“Mrs. Peters!”

“Yes, Mrs. Hale?”

“Do you think she—did it?”

A frightened look blurred the other thing in Mrs. Peters’ eyes.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, in a voice that seemed to shrink away from the subject.

“Well, I don’t think she did,” affirmed Mrs. Hale stoutly. “Asking for an apron, and her little shawl. Worryin’ about her fruit.”

“Mr. Peters says—” Footsteps were heard in the room above; she stopped, looked up, then went on in a lowered voice: “Mr. Peters says—it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in a speech, and he’s going to make fun of her saying she didn’t—wake up.”

For a moment Mrs. Hale had no answer. Then, “Well, I guess John Wright didn’t wake up—when they was slippin’ that rope under his neck,” she muttered.

“No, it’s strange,” breathed Mrs. Peters. “They think it was such a—funny way to kill a man.”

She began to laugh; at sound of the laugh, abruptly stopped.

“That’s just what Mr. Hale said,” said Mrs. Hale, in a resolutely natural voice. “There was a gun in the house. He says that’s what he can’t understand.”

“Mr. Henderson said, coming out, that what was needed for the case was a motive. Something to show anger—or sudden feeling.”

“Well, I don’t see any signs of anger around here,” said Mrs. Hale. “I don’t—”

She stopped. It was as if her mind tripped on something. Her eye was caught by a dishtowel in the middle of the kitchen table. Slowly she moved toward the table. One half of it was wiped clean, the other half messy. Her eyes made a slow, almost unwilling turn to the bucket of sugar and the half empty bag beside it. Things begun—and not finished.

After a moment she stepped back, and said, in that manner of releasing herself:

“Wonder how they’re finding things upstairs? I hope she had it a little more red up up there. You know,” —she paused, and feeling gathered,— “it seems kind of sneaking: locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her!”

“But, Mrs. Hale,” said the sheriff’s wife, “the law is the law.”

“I s’pose ’tis,” answered Mrs. Hale shortly.

She turned to the stove, saying something about that fire not being much to brag of. She worked with it a minute, and when she straightened up she said aggressively:

“The law is the law—and a bad stove is a bad stove. How’d you like to cook on this?”—pointing with the poker to the broken lining. She opened the oven door and started to express her opinion of the oven; but she was swept into her own thoughts, thinking of what it would mean, year after year, to have that stove to wrestle with. The thought of Minnie Foster trying to bake in that oven—and the thought of her never going over to see Minnie Foster—.

She was startled by hearing Mrs. Peters say: “A person gets discouraged—and loses heart.”

The sheriff’s wife had looked from the stove to the sink—to the pail of water which had been carried in from outside. The two women stood there silent, above them the footsteps of the men who were looking for evidence against the woman who had worked in that kitchen. That look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else, was in the eyes of the sheriff’s wife now. When Mrs. Hale next spoke to her, it was gently:

“Better loosen up your things, Mrs. Peters. We’ll not feel them when we go out.”

Mrs. Peters went to the back of the room to hang up the fur tippet she was wearing. A moment later she exclaimed, “Why, she was piecing a quilt,” and held up a large sewing basket piled high with quilt pieces.

Mrs. Hale spread some of the blocks out on the table.

“It’s log-cabin pattern,” she said, putting several of them together. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

They were so engaged with the quilt that they did not hear the footsteps on the stairs. Just as the stair door opened Mrs. Hale was saying:

“Do you suppose she was going to quilt it or just knot it?”

The sheriff threw up his hands.

“They wonder whether she was going to quilt it or just knot it!”

There was a laugh for the ways of women, a warming of hands over the stove, and then the county attorney said briskly:

“Well, let’s go right out to the barn and get that cleared up.”

“I don’t see as there’s anything so strange,” Mrs. Hale said resentfully, after the outside door had closed on the three men—“our taking up our time with little things while we’re waiting for them to get the evidence. I don’t see as it’s anything to laugh about.”

“Of course they’ve got awful important things on their minds,” said the sheriff’s wife apologetically.

They returned to an inspection of the block for the quilt. Mrs. Hale was looking at the fine, even sewing, and preoccupied with thoughts of the woman who had done that sewing, when she heard the sheriff’s wife say, in a queer tone:

“Why, look at this one.”

She turned to take the block held out to her.

“The sewing,” said Mrs. Peters, in a troubled way. “All the rest of them have been so nice and even—but—this one. Why, it looks as if she didn’t know what she was about!”

Their eyes met—something flashed to life, passed between them; then, as if with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other. A moment Mrs. Hale sat there, her hands folded over that sewing which was so unlike all the rest of the sewing. Then she had pulled a knot and drawn the threads.

“Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?” asked the sheriff’s wife, startled.

“Just pulling out a stitch or two that’s not sewed very good,” said Mrs. Hale mildly.

“I don’t think we ought to touch things,” Mrs. Peters said, a little helplessly.

“I’ll just finish up this end,” answered Mrs. Hale, still in that mild, matter-of-fact fashion.

She threaded a needle and started to replace bad sewing with good. For a little while she sewed in silence. Then, in that thin, timid voice, she heard:

“Mrs. Hale!”

“Yes, Mrs. Peters?”

“What do you suppose she was so—nervous about?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Hale, as if dismissing a thing not important enough to spend much time on. “I don’t know as she was—nervous. I sew awful queer sometimes when I’m just tired.”

She cut a thread, and out of the corner of her eye looked up at Mrs. Peters. The small, lean face of the sheriff’s wife seemed to have tightened up. Her eyes had that look of peering into something. But next moment she moved, and said in her thin, indecisive way:

“Well, I must get those clothes wrapped. They may be through sooner than we think. I wonder where I could find a piece of paper—and string.”

“In that cupboard, maybe,” suggested Mrs. Hale, after a glance around.

•    •    •    •

One piece of the crazy sewing remained unripped. Mrs. Peters’ back turned, Martha Hale now scrutinized that piece, compared it with the dainty, accurate sewing of the other blocks. The difference was startling. Holding this block made her feel queer, as if the distracted thoughts of the woman who had perhaps turned to it to try and quiet herself were communicating themselves to her.

Mrs. Peters’ voice roused her.

“Here’s a birdcage,” she said. “Did she have a bird, Mrs. Hale?”

“Why, I don’t know whether she did or not.” She turned to look at the cage Mrs. Peter was holding up. “I’ve not been here in so long.” She sighed. “There was a man round last year selling canaries cheap—but I don’t know as she took one. Maybe she did. She used to sing real pretty herself.”

Mrs. Peters looked around the kitchen.

“Seems kind of funny to think of a bird here.” She half laughed—an attempt to put up a barrier. “But she must have had one—or why would she have a cage? I wonder what happened to it.”

“I suppose maybe the cat got it,” suggested Mrs. Hale, resuming her sewing.

“No; she didn’t have a cat. She’s got that feeling some people have about cats—being afraid of them. When they brought her to our house yesterday, my cat got in the room, and she was real upset and asked me to take it out.”

“My sister Bessie was like that,” laughed Mrs. Hale.

The sheriff’s wife did not reply. The silence made Mrs. Hale turn round. Mrs. Peters was examining the birdcage.

“Look at this door,” she said slowly. “It’s broke. One hinge has been pulled apart.”

Mrs. Hale came nearer.

“Looks as if someone must have been—rough with it.”

Again their eyes met—startled, questioning, apprehensive. For a moment neither spoke nor stirred. Then Mrs. Hale, turning away, said brusquely:

“If they’re going to find any evidence, I wish they’d be about it. I don’t like this place.”

“But I’m awful glad you came with me, Mrs. Hale.” Mrs. Peters put the birdcage on the table and sat down. “It would be lonesome for me—sitting here alone.”

“Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?” agreed Mrs. Hale, a certain determined naturalness in her voice. She had picked up the sewing, but now it dropped in her lap, and she murmured in a different voice: “But I tell you what I do wish, Mrs. Peters. I wish I had come over sometimes when she was here. I wish—I had.”

“But of course you were awful busy, Mrs. Hale. Your house—and your children.”

“I could’ve come,” retorted Mrs. Hale shortly. “I stayed away because it weren’t cheerful—and that’s why I ought to have come. I”—she looked around—“I’ve never liked this place. Maybe because it’s down in a hollow and you don’t see the road. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a lonesome place, and always was. I wish I had come over to see Minnie Foster sometimes. I can see now—” She did not put it into words.

“Well, you mustn’t reproach yourself,” counseled Mrs. Peters. “Somehow, we just don’t see how it is with other folks till—something comes up.”

“Not having children makes less work,” mused Mrs. Hale, after a silence, “but it makes a quiet house—and Wright out to work all day—and no company when he did come in. Did you know John Wright, Mrs. Peters?”

“Not to know him. I’ve seen him in town. They say he was a good man.”

“Yes—good,” conceded John Wright’s neighbor grimly. “He didn’t drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him—.” She stopped, shivered a little. “Like a raw wind that gets to the bone.” Her eye fell upon the cage on the table before her, and she added, almost bitterly: “I should think she would’ve wanted a bird!”

Suddenly she leaned forward, looking intently at the cage. “But what do you s’pose went wrong with it?”

“I don’t know,” returned Mrs. Peters; “unless it got sick and died.”

But after she said it she reached over and swung the broken door. Both women watched it as if somehow held by it.

“You didn’t know—her?” Mrs. Hale asked, a gentler note in her voice.

“Not till they brought her yesterday,” said the sheriff’s wife.

“She—come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery. How—she—did—change.”

That held her for a long time. Finally, as if struck with a happy thought and relieved to get back to everyday things, she exclaimed:

“Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don’t you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind.”

“Why, I think that’s a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale,” agreed the sheriff’s wife, as if she too were glad to come into the atmosphere of a simple kindness. “There couldn’t possibly be any objection to that, could there? Now, just what will I take? I wonder if her patches are in here—and her things.”

They turned to the sewing basket.

“Here’s some red,” said Mrs. Hale, bringing out a roll of cloth. Underneath that was a box. “Here, maybe her scissors are in here—and her things.” She held it up. “What a pretty box! I’ll warrant that was something she had a long time ago—when she was a girl.”

She held it in her hand a moment; then, with a little sigh, opened it.

Instantly her hand went to her nose.

“Why—!”

Mrs. Peters drew nearer—then turned away.

“There’s something wrapped up in this piece of silk,” faltered Mrs. Hale.

“This isn’t her scissors,” said Mrs. Peters, in a shrinking voice.

Her hand not steady, Mrs. Hale raised the piece of silk. “Oh, Mrs. Peters!” she cried. “It’s—”

Mrs. Peters bent closer.

“It’s the bird,” she whispered.

“But, Mrs. Peters!” cried Mrs. Hale. “Look at it! Its neck—look at its neck! It’s all—other side to.”

She held the box away from her.

The sheriff’s wife again bent closer.

“Somebody wrung its neck,” said she, in a voice that was slow and deep.

And then again the eyes of the two women met—this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror. Mrs. Peters looked from the dead bird to the broken door of the cage. Again their eyes met. And just then there was a sound at the outside door.

Mrs. Hale slipped the box under the quilt pieces in the basket, and sank into the chair before it. Mrs. Peters stood holding to the table. The county attorney and the sheriff came in from outside.

“Well, ladies,” said the county attorney, as one turning from serious things to little pleasantries, “have you decided whether she was going to quilt it or knot it?”

“We think,” began the sheriff’s wife in a flurried voice, “that she was going to—knot it.”

He was too preoccupied to notice the change that came in her voice on that last.

“Well, that’s very interesting, I’m sure,” he said tolerantly. He caught sight of the birdcage. “Has the bird flown?”

“We think the cat got it,” said Mrs. Hale in a voice curiously even.

He was walking up and down, as if thinking something out.

“Is there a cat?” he asked absently.

Mrs. Hale shot a look up at the sheriff’s wife.

“Well, not now,” said Mrs. Peters. “They’re superstitious, you know; they leave.”

She sank into her chair.

The county attorney did not heed her. “No sign at all of anyone having come in from the outside,” he said to Peters, in the manner of continuing an interrupted conversation. “Their own rope. Now let’s go upstairs again and go over it, piece by piece. It would have to have been someone who knew just the—”

The stair door closed behind them and their voices were lost.

The two women sat motionless, not looking at each other, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they spoke now it was as if they were afraid of what they were saying, but as if they could not help saying it.

“She liked the bird,” said Martha Hale, low and slowly. “She was going to bury it in that pretty box.”

“When I was a girl,” said Mrs. Peters, under her breath, “my kitten—there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes—before I could get there—” She covered her face an instant. “If they hadn’t held me back I would have”—she caught herself, looked upstairs where footsteps were heard, and finished weakly—“hurt him.”

Then they sat without speaking or moving.

“I wonder how it would seem,” Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her way over strange ground—“never to have had any children around?” Her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen had meant through all the years. “No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird,” she said after that—“a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too.” Her voice tightened.

Mrs. Peters moved uneasily.

“Of course we don’t know who killed the bird.”

“I knew John Wright,” was Mrs. Hale’s answer.

“It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale,” said the sheriff’s wife. “Killing a man while he slept—slipping a thing round his neck that choked the life out of him.”

Mrs. Hale’s hand went out to the birdcage.

“His neck. Choked the life out of him.”

“We don’t know who killed him,” whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. “We don’t know.”

Mrs. Hale had not moved. “If there had been years and years of—nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still—after the bird was still.”

It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.

“I know what stillness is,” she said, in a queer, monotonous voice. “When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died—after he was two years old—and me with no other then—”

Mrs. Hale stirred.

“How soon do you suppose they’ll be through looking for the evidence?”

“I know what stillness is,” repeated Mrs. Peters, in just that same way. Then she too pulled back. “The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale,” she said in her tight little way.

“I wish you’d seen Minnie Foster,” was the answer, “when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the choir and sang.”

The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was suddenly more than she could bear.

“Oh, I wish I’d come over here once in a while!” she cried. “That was a crime! That was a crime! Who’s going to punish that?”

“We mustn’t take on,” said Mrs. Peters, with a frightened look toward the stairs.

“I might ’a’ known she needed help! I tell you, it’s queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it’s all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren’t—why do you and I understand? Why do we know—what we know this minute?”

She dashed her hand across her eyes. Then, seeing the jar of fruit on the table, she reached for it and choked out:

“If I was you I wouldn’t tell her her fruit was gone! Tell her it ain’t. Tell her it’s all right—all of it. Here—take this in to prove it to her! She—she may never know whether it was broke or not.”

She turned away.

Mrs. Peters reached out for the bottle of fruit as if she were glad to take it—as if touching a familiar thing, having something to do, could keep her from something else. She got up, looked about for something to wrap the fruit in, took a petticoat from the pile of clothes she had brought from the front room, and nervously started winding that round the bottle.

“My!” she began, in a high, false voice, “it’s a good thing the men couldn’t hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a—dead canary.” She hurried over that. “As if that could have anything to do with—with—My, wouldn’t they laugh?”

Footsteps were heard on the stairs.

“Maybe they would,” muttered Mrs. Hale—“maybe they wouldn’t.”

“No, Peters,” said the county attorney incisively; “it’s all perfectly clear, except the reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing—something to show. Something to make a story about. A thing that would connect up with this clumsy way of doing it.”

In a covert way Mrs. Hale looked at Mrs. Peters. Mrs. Peters was looking at her. Quickly they looked away from each other. The outer door opened and Mr. Hale came in.

“I’ve got the team round now,” he said. “Pretty cold out there.”

“I’m going to stay here awhile by myself,” the county attorney suddenly announced. “You can send Frank out for me, can’t you?” he asked the sheriff. “I want to go over everything. I’m not satisfied we can’t do better.”

Again, for one brief moment, the two women’s eyes found one another.

The sheriff came up to the table.

“Did you want to see what Mrs. Peters was going to take in?”

The county attorney picked up the apron. He laughed.

“Oh, I guess they’re not very dangerous things the ladies have picked out.”

Mrs. Hale’s hand was on the sewing basket in which the box was concealed. She felt that she ought to take her hand off the basket. She did not seem able to. He picked up one of the quilt blocks which she had piled on to cover the box. Her eyes felt like fire. She had a feeling that if he took up the basket she would snatch it from him.

But he did not take it up. With another little laugh, he turned away, saying:

“No; Mrs. Peters doesn’t need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff’s wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters?”

Mrs. Peters was standing beside the table. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at her; but she could not see her face. Mrs. Peters had turned away. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.

“Not—just that way,” she said.

“Married to the law!” chuckled Mrs. Peters’ husband. He moved toward the door into the front room, and said to the county attorney:

“I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows.”

“Oh—windows,” said the county attorney scoffingly.

“We’ll be right out, Mr. Hale,” said the sheriff to the farmer, who was still waiting by the door.

Hale went to look after the horses. The sheriff followed the county attorney into the other room. Again—for one final moment—the two women were alone in that kitchen.

Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it rested. At first she could not see her eyes, for the sheriff’s wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion nor flinching. Then Martha Hale’s eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman—that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through that hour.

For a moment Mrs. Peters did not move. And then she did it. With a rush forward, she threw back the quilt pieces, got the box, tried to put it in her handbag. It was too big. Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out. But there she broke—she could not touch the bird. She stood there helpless, foolish.

There was the sound of a knob turning in the inner door. Martha Hale snatched the box from the sheriff’s wife, and got it in the pocket of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back into the kitchen.

“Well, Henry,” said the county attorney facetiously, “at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what is it you call it, ladies?”

Mrs. Hale’s hand was against the pocket of her coat.

“We call it—knot it, Mr. Henderson.”

Every Week, 05 Mar 1917

Everything You Want to Plant

Letty Robbins closed the schoolhouse door, very slowly locked it, then stood there still. An idea had come into her head. Her eyes did not look as if the idea made her happy. Slowly she walked across the yard, and stood looking along the country road toward home. As she locked the schoolhouse door, she wondered how long she would go on locking it; as she walked slowly down the road now, she wondered just how much of her life she would spend walking along that road at that particular time of day.

Not that she disliked either the road or the time of day; a country road in late afternoon is a pleasant place to be when days are getting longer. But you don’t want to be anywhere because that’s where you’ve got to be; and, while it is very nice to be alone at times, it isn’t at all nice to be alone because there is no one who wants to be with you.

Letty had not had a good day at school; the children had been stupid, and she had been cross. The reason the day had not gone well was that she had been to a party the night before, and the party had not gone well.

It was a grange party, and all the young folks of the neighborhood were there, dressed in their best and doing their best. Letty had started out with a fervid determination to have a good time: she had never had a worse one.

She would be thirty next month. She felt, if nothing happened before she was thirty, nothing would happen at all. She had counted on the party: the party had dismally failed her. It was as if she had made a last stand, and lost.

Letty had three sisters—all older, all unmarried. “I guess it just doesn’t run in our family to marry,” she had heard Addie, the eldest, say the night before, to a man whose idea of social ease was to ask single women why they were not married. Letty, who was trying to talk to Joe Stewart the way Bessie Lyons was talking to Charlie Daggett, felt red spreading over a larger and larger area of her face. She went on talking very fast, and she saw Joe looking around the room at other girls, and she wanted to cry. Also she wanted to kill Addie! She hated all her sisters, looking so plain in their dress-up clothes, trying to be partyfied and looking so out of it—and putting it in people’s minds that she was out of it too! It was inhuman; but the Robbins girls were so definite a thing that it seemed if you were one of them there was no use trying to be anything else.

Though, until the very end of the party, Letty went on trying—fervently if not wisely. She had dressed to her utmost for the party, trying to get herself up the way Bessie Lyons did, because the more she looked like Bessie the less she would look like her sisters. So she had frizzed her hair and bound a pink ribbon round it. Now, Letty’s hair was never meant to be frizzed and bound with a bright pink bow. It was soft brown hair that wanted to part and curve round the ears in a very nice line all its own. But Letty desperately wore the frizzed, pink-bound hair, and tried to frivol up to it. And, just as Letty’s hair was meant to fall as it would, so Letty herself was meant to charm in a more gentle and really more subtle way than the sprightly Bessie Lyons. But it takes the perceiving eye to note the subtle charm, and the young men of that neighborhood hadn’t seen that Letty Robbins’ eyes had in them a light that did not tally with the neighborhood’s idea of the Robbins girls. And of course the light wasn’t actually there, as there was no one to see it, and there was no one far-seeing enough to see potential lights. Perhaps not simply stated, but the matter is not a simple one.

Anyway, Letty determined that at this party she would not sit around and talk with the older folks, the way her sisters did. She would be herself. What it came to was that she wasn’t herself at all; and alas! Letty frivolous was Letty rather foolish. It wasn’t Letty’s quality to say teasing things to young men the way Bessie did; and when they looked amazed or resentful or bored—or amused, she wanted to cry; and because she couldn’t cry she had to wind herself up the tighter.

She had gone in to refreshments with Joe Stewart. She saw Charlie Daggett wink at Joe. She had a sick feeling that it had something to do with her, but put down the idea. And then, after supper, because she was left alone, she went to the dressing-room, as if to get something; and on the other side of the wooden partition where the women had left their wraps she heard men’s voices, and under his breath Charlie Daggett sang:

“When the Robbins try again!”

Someone came in just then, and she had to fight down shame and angry disappointment and pretend to be fixing her hair. It was Bessie Lyons who had entered.

“Having a good time, Lett?” she asked good-humoredly.

Letty yawned. “Oh, I don’t know. Yes, in a way: But there isn’t anyone very interesting around here, do you think?”

“Why, I don’t know,” said Bessie, dabbing some powder on her nose. “I’m having a pretty good time,” she added, not so good-humoredly.

Letty was smoothing down her dress.

“I suppose I’m a little spoiled,” she said, with a sigh. “I met so many really interesting people—people with brains—at Normal last summer.”

And then, head high, she went out of the dressing-room—head high, but knees shaking—and told her sisters the air was so close it gave her a headache and she wanted to go home.

Going home her sisters talked soberly about the party. It was moonlight, and the trees threw shadows on the meadows. They spoke in comfortable fashion of what a lovely night it was. Letty was so quiet that Addie asked kindly:

“Didn’t you have a good time, Lett?”

And Letty snapped: “As good a time as a person could have at such a silly, stupid affair!”

“Why, I thought you were having a fine time,” said Emma. “We were saying we had never seen you so lively.”

Letty bit her lip hard. She wanted to say awful things to her sisters. When she got home, she snatched off the pink bow, her cheeks burning a deeper pink than the ribbon. She brushed out her frizzled hair so hard that it brought the tears to her eyes.

When she went to bed, she pulled the curtains down tight, so that the moonlight wouldn’t shine in—this despite the protest of Emma, who shared the room with her.

“Why, I like to see the moonlight coming into the room,” said Emma in uncadenced prose.

Letty wanted to tell Emma she didn’t know anything about moonlight! She lay awake, thinking bitter things about her sisters, her cheeks burning at the memory of the things she had said to the amazed Joe Stewart.

That was why, walking slowly toward home next day, she had a hopeless sense of being one of the Robbins girls. And the thing in her that was Letty, and that wanted to be part of the spring, seemed to know itself threatened and was in rebellion.

As she turned a bend in the road a young man wheeling a bicycle came out of the Stephens place. He looked at Letty, raised his hand half way to his cap, peered at her, then completed the capward gesture and said cordially: “Why, how do you do?”

Letty scrutinized in turn, and then, her face suddenly lighting with having made it out, said warmly, as if to apologize for the hesitancy:

“Why, how do you do, Mr. Gordon?”

“Gordon the tree man,” said he briskly, as if to assure getting himself completely placed.

“Oh, I know,” laughed Letty; “and rose man, and syringa and honeysuckle man.”

“Also the asparagus and strawberry and onion-set man,” he went on with it gaily.

“‘Everything you want to plant’!” bantered Letty, the Letty in her taking hold.

“‘Place your order with Gordon’!” he bantered back, not getting on his wheel, but walking along the road with her.

“Still teaching school?” he ventured.

“Yes,” said Letty, stiffening a little.

“Well,” said he, with a deep sigh, “I guess that’s a better job than selling plants.”

“Oh, I don’t think so!” cried Letty, instantly cordial again. “Why, I think selling plants is—when you come to think of it,” she said, her voice falling shyly, “selling plants is a beautiful thing to do. Going around the country and getting people to plant things that will have flowers—that will grow big and give shade. Why, just think of the things that are growing all over this county because of you.”

She laughed in an excited little way.

“Yes, there is that,” he said appreciatively. “I’ve thought of it myself. But then, there’s all the cussing you get, when things don’t grow.”

“But your things usually do grow, don’t they?” asked Letty politely.

“Oh, of course,” said the salesman hastily. “But there are people who want two trees to grow where only one was planted.”

They laughed as if that were a very amusing idea, looked at each other to make sure the other was amused, and then, eyes meeting, laughed again. The pink had come into Letty’s cheeks; her face had lighted and softened. Gordon the tree man made no move toward getting on his bicycle, but instead reached out for new avenues of conversation.

“Well,” he said, “what’s happened around these parts since I was here?”

Letty began to tell him the news. There was so little to tell that it was dispiriting. She tried to make much of trifles. Joe Evans had bought an automobile—though he had vowed he never would. The Lewis place had been sold. The Smiths were moving to town. She paused, resentful of the barrenness of these disclosures. It made her feel “one of the Robbins girls.” She looked off across the fields to a red house, and that made her think of another piece of news.

“And Ed Ridder died in January.”

She said it in a grim little voice, and she had a wild desire to laugh. The desire to laugh veered to a sudden impulse to cry. The young man who sold everything you want to plant saw that her eyes were not clear.

“Oh,” he said, with an awkward gentleness.

Letty wanted to tell about Ed Ridder, but something in that “oh” left her shyly silent. They walked for a little way in silence, she looking steadily ahead, for her eyes had not cleared. Then she had a fear that he would get on his bicycle. She looked at him and smiled. The tears had left her eyes dewy. The tree man apparently quite forgot that bicycles are made to ride on.

When they came up to the poplar trees that set the Robbins yard apart from the Robbins cornfield, Mr. Gordon said he was coming next day to see her father.

“You get home about this time of day?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Letty, flushing.

“Why, I’ll tell you,” he ventured, “I have to go to the Marks’, right there by the school. Why don’t I stop for you? And—maybe you could tell me what your father might want.”

This thought of what Letty’s father might want seemed to make them bashful. They parted like a boy and girl who didn’t know just what to do about parting.

“Wasn’t that the Gordon & Company man?” demanded Addie, when Letty opened the door—opened the door far more light-heartedly than she had closed the last one.

“It was Mr. Gordon,” said Letty, with a singing heart but a particularly dignified voice.

“Well, did you tell him the syringa died?” demanded Addie.

“Was it his fault that we had a severe winter?” said Letty.

“It shouldn’t have died,” persisted Addie. “He’ll have to give us another.”

“Addie!” admonished Letty. “How can you be so greedy?”

“Greedy!” retorted the indignant Addie. “I like that. It was you yourself said they ought to give us another!”

“Did I?” laughed Letty, and, softly singing to herself, ran upstairs.

At supper that night Mr. Robbins wanted to know why the Gordon man hadn’t come in to see him, when he was right there at the gate. Letty said he was coming tomorrow. There followed an elaborate discussion as to why he should come tomorrow when he was there today. Emma said that was one of the things the efficiency magazine taught you—never to take unnecessary steps.

“He has a bicycle,” said Letty; “he doesn’t step.”

She laughed, and something about the laugh made her family turn puzzled eyes to her. It was a sort of laugh the Robbins household was not used to. But soon attention was safely riveted on what variety of cabbage it would be best to plant.

That night Letty put the shades as high up as they would go.

“I thought you didn’t like moonlight coming into a room,” said Emma, in her voice of unfailing soberness.

“Sometimes you like one thing and sometimes another,” said Letty.

“Don’t get notional, Lett,” warned Emma. “I’ve noticed that notional people don’t make good teachers.”

At Letty’s laugh Emma retreated into dignified silence—that is to say, silence as dignified as could be retreated into by a woman who had just put her front hair into kid curlers.

Next afternoon Letty was erasing long division from the blackboard when she heard the sound of a bicycle being leaned against a fence. They had walked a quarter of a mile down the road, and nothing had been said about Mr. Robbins’ especial needs for the cultivation of his farm. In fact, little had been said about anything. And yet, Letty this time had no fear that the representative of Gordon & Company would get on his bicycle and spin away. His eyes did not have the look that Letty was all too familiar with—the look of wondering how to get somewhere else.

At last he began, in a way both impetuous and bashful: “I was glad I was to come for you today because—” He paused; Letty looked gentle encouragement. “It’s funny,” he pursued, “but when you have something to bear yourself, you like to be with a person who—has gone through something.”

Now, to tell the truth, Letty was a little bewildered. While it was true she had gone through something—what she had gone through was sorrow at having nothing to go through. And how did Mr. Gordon know she had gone through anything? And what was he bearing? Letty had not thought of him as one who silently endured sorrow. However, it seemed no time to argue the matter. The note in his voice made Letty just naturally slip into the place he had prepared for her.

“Yes,” she breathed.

“There aren’t many people who understand,” he went on.

“That’s true,” said Letty—and she meant it.

They crossed a little bridge without speaking. Then:

“Was it—this January you lost him?” the tree man asked.

Letty was on the point of asking, “Lost whom?” But some instinct—perhaps the voice that breathed o’er Eden—kept her from it. And then she knew. “Ed Ridder died in January.” She remembered how she had said it—and why she had said it that way. Her face burned. She wanted to laugh; and then, as yesterday, she wanted to cry.

“Oh—I’m so sorry,” she heard him saying.

She was thinking how to explain. And while she was thinking he continued: “I am sorry you lost the one who cared for you; and yet—it has made you so different.”

Perhaps there isn’t a shred of excuse for Letty. She could then and there have said, “No one ever cared for me.” But would she not then cease to be “different”? There is a way of saying the word “different” which makes it a very desirable thing to be. And because the note in his voice was something she had never heard before—something that stirred her and made her happy—she turned to him with a smile, and quite lost sight of the idea of getting something under false pretenses.

“You see,” he said, “I understand, because—well, because of what I have gone through myself.”

And so they walked on together, enfolded in that sense of understanding, of having gone through something that made them different.

No one was at the window this time when Letty and the “Everything You Want to Plant” man approached the Robbins place. Letty asked him if he was coming in to see her father, and he suddenly decided it would be better for him to see her father tomorrow evening. He did not in words state the advantages of the next day over the present, but his eyes said quite plainly: “That will give me another chance of seeing you.”

That night the shades were again up, and Letty could see a house over on a far hill. Suddenly she realized it was Ed Ridder’s house, and her happy thoughts grew disturbed. She was a little afraid, a little contrite, and—to state it in full—a little amused.

It was true enough that Ed Ridder had played a part in Letty’s life. Ed Ridder was so fat and ugly that as a little girl Letty used to be afraid of him. When she saw him coming, she would hide her face against her mother and in panic cry, “Man! Man! Fat man!” He had such a big red nose that, even after she was too grown up to cry, “Man! Man!” she would go out of her way to keep from passing Ed Ridder. This was the man whose death had made her “different.”

•    •    •    •

The next evening demonstrated that business and sentiment do not always combine happily. There was too much talk about the syringa and about certain unthrifty peach trees. Why did her father make so much of worms on cauliflower? It seemed to Letty that one might speak of happier things. They all sat around in the dining-room, and she would have liked to take Mr. Gordon into the sitting-room. She wished the rest of the family would go to bed instead of remaining up to say disagreeable things about the vegetable kingdom. Once, when her father said that last year’s tomato vines hadn’t been worth the manure they grew in, Letty’s eyes met those of her new friend, and a look passed between them as of two understanding souls in an alien world.

The situation became a difficult one. How were Letty and Mr. Gordon to let the Robbins family know that the business interview had ceased to be, and the social one—with which they had nothing to do—had begun?

Mr. Gordon did his best by turning the conversation to channels remote from the soil; but the Robbins family had a way of always forcing it back to plant lice or something equally inauspicious. And there came a terrible moment when Letty would probably have brought about the instant death of her entire family, could she by raising her right hand have done so. Mr. Gordon, in his attempt to indicate that he was a young man making a social call, spoke of chocolate cake as something that meant a great deal to him.

“It’s fattening,” said Emma, who was trying not to get stout.

Mr. Robbins clapped his knees and laughed:

“I wonder if ’twas chocolate cake killed Ed Ridder?”

Letty had a feeling that was like nothing so much as if the bottom of her stomach had given way. Wildly she considered what she could speak of. There was nothing to speak of. She wanted to look at Mr. Gordon, to see how he was taking it; she daren’t look.

Mr. Robbins began: “I suppose you never heard about Letty and—.”

Letty turned the conversation. Her method was drastic but effective. She turned the conversation by overturning the lamp. There are things which never fail to turn a conversation.

Mrs. Robbins averted catastrophe by deftly catching the lamp on its way to the floor. “Why, Lett,” she demanded, “why did you do that?”

“I—I was just going to move it,” said Letty, “so it wouldn’t shine in Mr. Gordon’s eyes.”

“Well,” said Emma, “I guess it’s better it should shine in Mr. Gordon’s eyes than set the house on fire.”

For some moments the conversation dealt with fires—fires that had taken place and fires that had been narrowly averted. Only once Letty looked at Mr. Gordon. He was looking at her. Letty began turning the leaves of Gordon & Company’s catalog.

And suddenly Mr. Robbins again clapped his knees.

“I’ll tell you why Lett upset the lamp!” he cried. “It’s because I was talkin’ about Ed Ridder!”

Letty had just one emotion then—a longing for death.

“Now, pa,” said Mrs. Robbins good-humoredly, “don’t talk about Ed Ridder. You know Lett don’t like to even think of him.”

“Let the dead rest,” said Emma. “Especially when they’re better off dead.”

“I must be going,” said Mr. Gordon, rising.

At the door Letty found voice. She said, “I want to ask you what you think would be the best place for that crimson rambler”—and stepped out with him.

She was sure that if Emma stepped out to join the conference about the rambler she would simply burst into tears. But Emma only said, “My, it’s raw,” and closed the door.

Letty was about to say: “I want to explain—” for she felt this situation could go on no longer. But before she could say anything he had both of her hands and was holding them tight in his.

“How could they?” he murmured tenderly. “But then, families never understand.”

“No,” Letty found herself murmuring.

“Mine doesn’t either,” he said sadly.

They stood there close together and looked into each other’s eyes. The night may have been raw—but not for them.

“Lett!” called Emma. “Don’t stay out there without anything round you. We know where we want the rambler, anyhow.”

Letty went into the house without knowing where she was going to put the rambler, but knowing that she was going riding with Mr. Gordon at three o’clock the next afternoon.

This news had to be broken to the Robbins family. It would be simple enough in most households of that community, but at the Robbinses’ such a thing was unprecedented. It meant a radical change in family life.

Letty broke her news gently. “Mr. Gordon has to drive over to the Junction this afternoon,” she said, as she wiped dishes that Sunday morning, “and he thought he would like to have me go with him for company.”

“To have you—” began the uncomprehending Addie.

“Well, I think he’s got—” burst out Emma.

But both of them left it dangling in mid-air. They got the idea. They grew quiet—so strange was this idea in that household.

It was Letty’s mother, dressing a chicken at the other table, who best rose to the occasion.

“It’ll be a pleasant day for a drive,” said she, quite as if she were used to daughters who went driving. And then, “You should have asked him to come to dinner, Lett.”

•    •    •    •

A new and grave danger beset Letty that afternoon. She was so happy that she forgot to be sad. She was reunited with her recent grief by Mr. Gordon saying:

“I am so glad you are able to—throw it off a little.”

“One has to—throw things off,” said Letty, working hard to throw off the depressing effect of this turn the conversation had taken.

“Yes,” sighed he, “or one couldn’t go on.”

Everything else merged into a wondering just what it was Mr. Gordon was trying to live down. She assumed that he had lost the one he loved. How much had he loved her? So much that he could never care again? It was wonderful that she and Mr. Gordon should have been drawn together; and yet, it would be mournful indeed if the thing drawing them together were also a thing holding them apart.

He looked at her and said softly: “I shouldn’t have spoken of it.”

“I—wish you hadn’t,” said Letty.

“I won’t again,” he promised contritely. “There are some things it is best not to talk of.”

“It seems so to me,” agreed Letty.

“You cared so much that you can not—bear to think of it?” asked the tree man wistfully.

Letty stirred uneasily.

“It isn’t that. But, you see, there were—unfortunate things—connected with it.”

“I judged so from the attitude of your family,” said he gravely. “They did not—want you to marry him?”

“No,” said Letty grimly.

“But you stood out against them all, and loved him in spite of anything anyone else might think about him.”

He voiced it admiringly, but with sadness.

“Well—yes—in a way,” stammered Letty. “Let’s talk of something else,” she said, tears close.

He put his hand over hers, as a pledge of understanding. They were almost back to the Robbins place now. After a moment he began, in the bright voice of one bent upon turning a conversation into pleasant channels:

“I wonder what’s become of the horrible old man who lived over there?”

With horror Letty saw that he was pointing to the red house in which Ed Ridder had lived and died.

“I don’t remember his name,” he went on, “and he must have gone away, because a young couple who can’t speak English are there now. But last year—” He began to laugh. “You know who I mean—the fat man with a nose like a comic valentine? I went there last year to try and get an order—and all of a sudden he came round the corner of the shed—and if I didn’t back up. I didn’t know for a minute what he was. I wonder what—”

“Oh—listen!” cried Letty. “Listen to the beautiful bird! I wonder what kind of a bird that is?”

“You love birds and things, don’t you?” said the tree man softly.

That note in his voice was sweeter to Letty than the note of any bird. It was too new and beautiful to give up. If only she knew how to let go the grief that had brought her Mr. Gordon without letting go of Mr. Gordon himself! And there were so many awkward things about it. It is hard to be supposed to be in mourning when you are happier than you, have ever been in all your life. Mr. Gordon had asked her to go to a party of the “Sons” at the Junction the next Friday night; and then, just as Letty was trying not to be too joyful in her acceptance, he said contritely: “Oh—I forgot. I’m always forgetting. Of course you wouldn’t want to go to parties now.”

Now, Letty wanted like everything to go to the party. She wanted Bessie Lyons to see her at this party. She wanted Joe Stewart to see her—and a number of others. But what was she going to do about it? She wanted to say that she didn’t think it right to nurse one’s grief—that you owed it to your friends to go on with your life and be as happy as you could. She was about to venture upon this when Mr. Gordon exclaimed, in a shocked voice: “How awful of me!” And Letty, who had joyfully glimpsed gaiety and triumph, could do nothing but discreetly retire into her grief.

•    •    •    •

For the next two weeks Mr. Gordon was in that neighborhood. It would seem that the farmers who adjoined what was called the Round Grove Schoolhouse were doing a great deal better by their farms that spring than the other farmers of the vicinity—so often did Mr. Gordon find himself on the circumference of Round Grove at just about half-past four in the afternoon. Mr. Gordon ceased to be Mr. Gordon to Letty. He said his name was Fred, and that he did not like to be called Mr. Gordon by one whom he felt understood him as Letty did. And Letty became Letty—in accordance with the law of progress.

There came a Friday afternoon when that stretch of road between Round Grove and the Robbins place was covered with reluctant feet. Fred would have to leave that night. He was called home where “Everything You Want to Plant” grew. He had had a letter from his father, “blowing him up” for being so slow in covering the territory. He and Letty laughed about this—the laugh of young people who know something their elders don’t.

“If I had my way,” said he, “I’d be all summer covering this territory.”

“Maybe you will have to come back to recover it,” said Letty, her heart thumping at her own effrontery.

“Would you like me to?”

“Yes,” breathed Letty.

A silence.

“Then I will,” said he.

And out of that another silence—one of those silences that have life.

“Do you think,” he began, “that you could—sometime—care again?”

“Yes,” said Letty, very low.

“As—much as you did before?”

“Yes,” said Letty, and added: “More.”

“You could?” he cried. “Maybe it seems queer to you to be—well, to be jealous of someone who—isn’t living; but I have been.”

“Don’t be,” said Letty. “There—isn’t any reason to be.”

“It wasn’t all—perfectly happy, was it?” he asked wistfully.

“No,” said Letty; “it was not.” “You—don’t want to tell me about it, do you?”

“I’d rather not,” said Letty. “I’d rather—forget.”

“He—drank?” gently inquired Fred.

Letty’s head was turned away. Because she didn’t want to turn it back, she nodded.

“I thought so,” said he—“the way your family acted.” Then, as one making a remark of possible interest: “I don’t drink.”

“That’s good,” said Letty, who said everything she could say truthfully with a great deal of conviction.

“I knew you had gone through hard things,” he continued. “I knew it that first day. You mustn’t—regret it too much, because it has made you so wonderful.”

“And you have gone through hard things too,” Letty ventured.

Fred cleared his throat. “Well—yes.”

Letty wanted to say “What?” But she couldn’t very well ask him to explain his sorrow, when she wasn’t explaining hers. So she only smiled. At which he exclaimed: “I want to kiss you!” and then added hastily: “But I mustn’t—yet. Not until,” he sentimentally pursued, “grief has died out of your heart.”

Letty wanted to say that perhaps if he kissed her it would help her grief to die, but she checked herself. Kissing her was scarcely feasible at the moment, anyway, on account of the automobile that was coming down the road.

They parted at the Robbins gate, sadly but happily. He was coming back. He thought he could get his father to buy him an automobile. And then, even though he was somewhere else, he could get over here sometimes. He spoke of how wonderful it was they had come together in that strange way—that mysterious way, understanding each other before they really knew each other. He wondered if there had ever been anything like it before.

Letty thought probably there hadn’t. There was something strange about it. He held her hand a long time, sheltered by the gate-post. They promised to write, and at last the sweet melancholy of parting was concluded by a man coming along and asking Letty if she knew whether her father wanted to sell his colt.

For a while after that life centered in the rural postman. Anyone else, reading Mr. Gordon’s letters, would not look upon them as infinitely to be desired. The automobile had been ordered. Baxter County was bad territory. He did not think the farmers as intelligent there as in other places. Anyway, they bought less. And the food was poorer than in other parts of the State. These bits of information would not seem things to hurry home from school for. But—“I wish I could stop at the school tonight.” Or, “I am tired tonight, and wish I could talk to someone who understands.” In parentheses—“Do you know who I mean?” Once he wrote, “I wish I could look into a certain pair of soft brown eyes and hold a certain hand. Maybe I will soon.”

On the Saturday after receiving “Maybe I will soon,” Letty went to town and bought some new clothes. She bought a pink dimity, of a pattern that somehow just suggested a person who, after having been chastened and deepened and made tender by sorrow, is ready to emerge once more, and more understandingly than ever before, into the sweet joyousness of life. Strange how a dimity could suggest all this, but it did. And Letty made it up with ruffles; and when she tried it on she parted her hair in the middle and brought it down low over the ears into a soft knot at the back.

That night she wrote a letter to which there was a postscript: “A certain person is lonely.” Bold, brazen Letty!

•    •    •    •

Late in May a certain person met a certain other person. It was when a certain automobile drew up at a certain schoolhouse door. It was a wise automobile, and knew that the longest way round can be the most desirable way home. When it reached the Robbins place, all the Robbinses were at the window, peering into the gloaming. They were about to go out and look for Letty. Letty laughed. Why should she not laugh? She was going to marry a young man who sold “Everything You Want to Plant.”

Fred had to “scoot right away,” and Letty was not sorry that he couldn’t come in. That talk in the twilight under the first stars had been too wonderful to conclude with her father’s opinion of the best manner of fertilizing potatoes. In fact, just so far as was possible, Letty kept away from her family that night—her own world was too beautiful for invasion.

Fred was there the next month, and took her to a grange party. Letty wore the pink dimity.

In the course of the evening Letty went in the dressing-room to powder her nose. And this conversation came to her across the wooden partition:

“Say,” said Joe Stewart, “do you want to know who’s the prettiest girl here tonight?”

“Bessie Lyons?” ventured a voice.

“Bessie Lyons nothing,” scornfully replied he whom Letty had one time tried in vain to fascinate. “Letty Robbins has got Bessie beat just one mile!”

Going home, Fred spoke of the past. He hoped it would not stand between them. Passionately Letty said she didn’t see why it should. He wanted to know if, when he started to kiss her, she ever thought of—that other one.

Now, this idea of thinking of Ed Ridder when about to be kissed by Fred was so preposterous that Letty laughed. Fred looked hurt. Letty tried to explain, but she was handicapped by the fear of explaining all too well. So, in wily fashion, she turned the conversation to Fred’s own dead love. Did he, when about to kiss her, think of this other whom he had kissed—and was that, demanded Letty with growing indignation, why this awful thing was in his mind about her?

It was only one of those quarrels that lovers work up in order to get the most out of their love.

Letty was going to be married in September. Bessie Lyons’ engagement to Charlie Daggett was broken, and it was not an insignificant part of Letty’s triumph that Bessie was conspicuous that summer chiefly because she was going to be Letty’s bride’s-maid. The Robbins family had the unexpected energy of a lifetime to give to Letty’s wedding, and they devoted their entire summer to it. And then, at the last, they came within an inch of spoiling everything.

For Ed Ridder came to the wedding—not, to be sure, in the flesh, the earth being happily relieved of that, but in the consciousness of the keyed-up Robbinses.

It was Mrs. Robbins who began it, while they hovered round the happy couple who were awaiting minister and guests. Arranging a fold of Letty’s dress a little more to her satisfaction, she exclaimed:

“Now, isn’t it too bad Ed Ridder isn’t here to see Letty in her wedding dress!”

Letty felt precisely as if someone had taken a tub of cold water and doused her with it. She gulped, tried to speak, couldn’t.

“Do you suppose you’d run if you saw him coming, Lett?” laughed Addie.

While still casting about for something to say—and some means of saying it—she heard Addie inquire of Fred:

“I suppose Letty has told you all about how she used to love Ed Ridder?”

“I should think,” choked Letty, “that on this day you would speak only of things—”

“Why, Lett,” said her mother, “I had no idea—”

“Why, I didn’t know you still had—” began Addie.

“Letty is right,” said Mrs. Robbins. “This is no time to talk of things that were—distressing. Come, Addie, let’s see if that frosting has hardened.”

“I call that very poor taste,” said Fred frigidly, when they were alone.

Letty raised tearful eyes.

“You didn’t love him as you do me, did you?” he demanded.

“I did not,” cried Letty. “Believe me, I did not!”

“Just the same,” said Fred, “I’m glad we aren’t going to live round here. I couldn’t stand it to be everlastingly hearing that man’s name.”

“Neither could I!” cried Letty.

They were going to live where “Everything You Want to Plant” grew. Fred was going to be in charge of the business end of things there.

It was after the ceremony had been performed, and the radiant couple were surrounded by their feasting friends, that the host, looking with satisfaction at the neighbors gathered at his board, suddenly cried in a loud voice:

“Well, well, everybody here except Ed Ridder!”

It must be confessed that Letty had an unbridelike impulse to attack her father with the knife which had just been handed her for cutting the wedding-cake.

There was a general laugh.

“Did you ever see the picture we have of Ed Ridder?” genially inquired Mr. Robbins of his new son-in-law. “Addie, get, that old album that has—”

“Now, pa,” interrupted Mrs. Robbins, “let’s let Ed Ridder rest in peace.”

“Why should we?” demanded Mr. Robbins. “We ought to keep his memory green. Eh, Letty?”

“I’ll bet Lett’ll never forget him,” laughed Bessie Lyons.

Bride and bridegroom were looking like twin thunder-clouds. Mrs. Robbins began to speak of wedding-cakes.

•    •    •    •

After tearful farewells had been spoken, and the automobile was bearing Letty from the old home toward the new, Fred burst out:

“I have never known anything more outrageous! In many ways,” Fred went on severely, “I like your father very much. But, I must say, in some ways—”

Letty’s arm stole round his neck. She kissed him. The car meandered into a ditch—happily, not a deep one.

“Letty,” he demanded, holding her close, “will you ask your family never to mention that man’s name in my presence again?”

“I will,” said Letty fervently.

“I’m glad we’re not going to live round here,” said Fred.

“I hope,” began Letty, artfully turning the thing other side to, “that where we are going to live I won’t have to hear about—her.”

“Who?” he asked.

“You know,” she whispered.

“Oh—yes,” he replied awkwardly.

He drove a little way in silence. Suddenly he slowed the machine, and turned a determined face to Letty.

“See here, Letty,” he began; “there’s something I think I ought to tell you.”

That phrase smote Letty accusingly, but she only said gently: “Yes?”

“That was all a bluff,” he blurted out.

“A——?” stammered Letty.

“Bluff,” repeated Fred. “I wanted to be like you. It’s true enough I was feeling blue that day, but it wasn’t on account of a—dead sweetheart.” He laughed. “It was because my father had roasted me like the devil for not getting more orders for our new onion sets! It made me sore, and so—I just kind of fell in with your sadness.”

Letty was silent. She was thinking.

“Don’t you see how that could happen?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes, Fred,” said Letty gently. “And there never was—anyone?” she asked after a moment.

“Oh, of course I’ve been around with girls more or less; but—no, you’re the first one I ever really loved.”

Letty was trying to say, “And you’re the first one I ever loved,”—trying to tell him that Ed Ridder was the comic valentine,—when his hand went over hers and he murmured:

“Of course I knew it would be different with you.”

He kissed her, as one who has won his love from all the world. Could Letty tell him there had been no one to win her from? Perhaps she could, but she didn’t. She told herself it would not be kind to Fred. There was a fleeting reflection upon the strangeness of life—wonderful was romance when it could flower from the failure to sell onions and the failure to make a hit at a party, the sadness of these failures merging into beauty, into love. Letty paid swift, silent tribute to this wonder of life before she cried:

“I never loved anyone half as much as I love you!”

Every Week, 13 Aug 1917

A Matter of Gesture

There isn’t one of my revolutionary friends who is not satisfied with his own conclusions about Harry Ruhl. Perhaps the reason my ideas about it haven’t counted for more with them is that I haven’t had anything as well-defined as conclusions. Indeed, I have scarcely had ideas—only gropings. I have given up trying to modify their feeling by mine, not only because of the difficulty in meeting the sure with the uncertain, but because it is perhaps kinder to Ruhl just to let it all go—and he went through enough, heaven knows. For almost two years he was forced to live face to face with himself, and with himself alone—and for a pretender that must be the ordeal that immeasurably passes strength. Only people who are real are spiritually equal to prison, it seems to me. All my other feeling about Ruhl—and it has been a pretty varied feeling—would be submerged in pity with the thought of his having to live alone with himself those days and nights,_and with himself, as he came to be, stripped of his last tatter of romance.

But this story has to do with that stripping, so I mustn’t get ahead of myself or the story-telling members of our group would not approve of me. I’m writing about Ruhl to see if I can’t make my feeling clearer to myself than I ever succeeded in making it to anyone else. Though doubtless the impulse to try to set down the truth wouldn’t have come if Bert Stephens had not produced a blaring story of Ruhl under the caption, “Remorse.”

It was my brother Mark who disturbed our summer with Ruhl. I knew that Mark was up to something when he came and sat on the sands with me and the children that June morning. He had an intimate, melancholy manner that made me sniff trouble. Mark is never so tenderly sad as when about to sacrifice me to “the cause.”

I was not in burnt-offering mood that morning, so I put on a hard shell of sprightliness and whenever that appealing note in Mark’s voice as he spoke of the seagulls perching out there on the wire posts threatened me I thought of my ruined rugs and closed in again. Mark is a friend of revolution. Well, so am I—but they really were singularly beautiful rugs. You remember the unemployed demonstrations in New York two or three years ago? Mark was in the thick of that and the unemployed overran our house—and that in particularly slushy weather. And when I complained about it, “Rugs!” cried Mark, “when they haven’t beds?” I had come with a grievance and turned away with a feeling of unworth. Mark is himself so real and simple and passionate that he can do those things to me.

But that summer—the summer following the unemployed turmoil—I wanted a little surcease from the sorrow and strenuousness of others. We were at Cape’s End, the place I love best in the world, the isolated little town by the sea where we live simply among a group of pleasant people—in the main, writer and artist folk. The distressing things of the world seemed a long way off. Happy, lazy days stretched before us. I said something of the sort, whereupon Mark said that he had that morning had a letter from Harry Ruhl.

Hope sank in my heart. For at once I knew that Mark was going to propose Ruhl for the summer, and equally well did I know that I was going to agree to the intrusion.

It was at the time that Ruhl was waiting to enter prison. Just that—waiting to enter prison. Free at the moment, out in the world, but waiting to enter prison in the fall—as one might be waiting to enter a university. Can’t you see how I resented the clutch there was in it?—the way Ruhl’s situation forced Ruhl upon me? And what finished me was that Ruhl did not at all appear, in his letter to Mark, to be proposing himself or pointing out the pathos of his situation. He wrote in reply to a letter from Mark, saying that after all he would not be with the Hudsons at their Long Island cottage, as Mrs. Hudson was going to have a baby soon, and was not well, so that they all felt it would be too hard for her to have him there—with all his presence might keep before her. For the moment he was sharing a little apartment with Gorden Willcox, who had taken him in. Gorden was himself hard up, however, and might have to let the apartment go. But something else would turn up, he hoped. He was trying all the time to get work, but there had been too much written about his case. No body wanted to get mixed up with him. He closed with an appreciative word about all Mark had done for him, thanking him again for having made it possible to appeal the case.

I did not need Mark’s reviewing of the Ruhl case to make me know I had to have Ruhl. But I listened to it, willing the thing should gain the proportions of inevitability, thus relieving me of the responsibility of my own surrender. Ruhl had swung into our ken at the time of a great mill-workers’ strike in a nearby state. Mark and the rest of the so-called intellectuals of the labor movement were immersed in this strike. And one night, after it had gone on for weeks and it seemed the workers were right up to the edge of defeat, this Harry Ruhl, almost a stranger, rose at a meeting and told the strikers that if they couldn’t win by peaceful means they’d have to win any way they could. He “advocated violence,” was arrested, tried, and sentenced to from two to seven years in the penitentiary. Not even Mark had any hope of his winning on this last appeal.

But Ruhl, out on bail which Mark had provided, was waiting through the summer. When, later in the day, my husband said that if I really didn’t want the fellow around I should have had the firmness to say so, I wept with rage—rage that he couldn’t see it. Harassed while he was yet free!—nothing to do with his precious little while of liberty—and me living in a rambling old house on the sea! Oh, well, Arthur is a sculptor, and absorbed in his work, so I mustn’t revive my rage by dwelling on this. He’s an artist—and sees what he cares to see.

Now it happened that I had never seen Ruhl, and while Mark had told me he did not suggest violence I was unprepared for the mild-looking young fellow who diffidently sat with us at luncheon that first day. The first strong feeling I had about Ruhl was one of indignation—when I looked at him, slim, boyish, shy, and thought of the judge who had sentenced him to the penitentiary for a possible seven years.

You can anticipate what happened. Mark had told me that I would not have to bother with Harry—he would look after him himself, but Mark was unable to relieve me of my own intense interest in Ruhl. I would try to check myself with the admonition that it was indelicate, that it was not nice feeling—this avid wondering what another person, and he under my roof, was feeling; but you see entertaining a man who was waiting to enter the penitentiary was scarcely an ordinary situation. And of course Ruhl himself did not know how my mind was misbehaving.

In fact, it early became apparent that Harry liked being with me better than with Mark and the little group of people then at Cape’s End who were in one way or another identified with the movement, or perhaps I should say the feeling, to which Ruhl had sacrificed himself. Because of Mark our house was the center for those people—conspicuous among them the editor of a revolutionary monthly of satirical character—and in their discussions there would usually be a moment when Ruhl would flame, as if that which in them was an intellectual interest, at best a strong social feeling, was in him a passion which took flame. They always fell back a little before him, and after his outburst Ruhl would usually get up and walk out of the room, leaving the impression of his feeling being too much for him. I can see him now as I have many times seen him after quitting the group on the porch or before the fire and alone walking rapidly along the beach, sometimes going quite from sight and not appearing again for several hours. Of course he never did that without leaving us wondering about it, speculating, interested in what his mood would be when he returned.

But as I was about to say, Ruhl spent much of his time with me and the children. He fell into the way of leaving what we called the storm center—the discussions of Mark and his friends, and coming down to the sands and there gathering shells and building houses with us. That was not difficult to understand; it was escape, of course. He had never been by the sea before; he learned to swim, to sail a boat. He had been thin and pale when he came; in the first month he filled out and browned. The way Ruhl threw himself into our play, his zest for it, somehow moved me more than anything else about him. Though there were always coming those times of breaking; he would be sailing and after an exhilarating hour would turn away as if suddenly stricken, motioning some of us to take the tiller—to be sailing the open sea and see one’s self in a cell!

I tried in what I thought adroit and not unkind ways to get Ruhl to talking about himself, but as I afterwards put it, he had a strong instinct for keeping himself a mystery. I learned more than the others knew, but most of the things Ruhl told me came indirectly, not as confidences but in the off-guard conversation of people who play around together. He came from the middle west, went to a little college out there no one had ever heard of—one of those obscure sectarian schools. I know them, for my husband comes from the middle west and we spent two years in his home town. And I don’t think I could see Ruhl as well as I feel I do see him if there had not been one of those schools in that town. Bored to death, I took a notion I would study Greek, and so for an hour each day I went to that tight, arid little school.

I think Ruhl was a little surprised by my interest when he laughingly told me one day that he had won the “state oratorical contest.” He would have been more than a little surprised had he known of the times I thought of him in relation to that state oratorical contest. Ruhl was first a student and then, without having studied anywhere else—that I gleaned out of another conversation—a teacher at this school. He “got in bad” for saying Longfellow was not a great poet—the subject, you may remember, had agitated less inconspicuous institutions at a somewhat earlier time. Ruhl was finally let out for his anti-Longfellow attitude, the trustees feeling that a blow had been struck at reverence.

There was a man in the town who had a general sympathy with dissenters—(this I got at still another time, and from another angle—it was remarkable the instinct Ruhl had against letting his life throw light upon him)—and this man got him a position with a relative of his in New York who published an encyclopedia—of a sort. Harry “made copy”—routine, tedious work. He went about to the various radical meetings the papers informed him of—was he not himself a rebel?—came to know a few people, got interested in the big strike. One night when speakers were needed at a meeting, Ruhl volunteered, and astonished them all with what they called his passion. He began figuring in the papers as one of the strike leaders and lost his position with the maker of encyclopedias—thereby growing more important as strike leader, of course. There began the talk about holding Ruhl back; men of importance in the movement talked to him about not going too far; he was written up in one of their papers as “a revolutionist with passion.” And then the strike situation grew more desperate, and one night Ruhl, in what Mark called a high passion for self-destruction, made the speech which led to his arrest.

There were times when he could make his face look like a poet’s. But there—I shouldn’t have said that at this time for it was only later I came to think of it so, and I’ll be spoiling my story if I have no “surprise” at the end. Bert Stephens, who gets large prices for his stories, says there must always be a surprise. It was Bert Stephens himself who gave Ruhl the second title—successor to “revolutionist with passion.” One night Mark and Harry were disagreeing in an argument, whereupon Bert, in his manner of knowing what the rest of us couldn’t know, said quietly: “There’s no use going on, Mark. You see you are a propagandist, while Ruhl is a poet.”

Harry gave him a startled glance, then a disdainful little laugh and turned from us and stared moodily into the fire. When I looked at him a few moments later I saw that he had attained the poet look.

That last sounds so unfeeling that there seems nothing to do but give away my hand—tell why I am writing this story, what it is about. What interests me is not the startling and tragic story itself, but the inquiry into what Ruhl really was. Was he ever sincere?—was he ever real? These were questions often and bitterly put after he had, as one might say, betrayed the faith. The rest of them arrived at conclusions which satisfied them and so could put Ruhl out of their minds—trying to forget that he had ever been. But I think I saw a little further into it, and so I never was as sure as the others. Anyhow, what is sincerity? For my part I don’t know how far anyone is sincere and how far he is tasking the part of the person he wants to appear to be.

For the rest of the summer Ruhl played the part of the poet. But he had something to work with—there was something of the poet in him. What I don’t know is how much was the poet in him and how much the desire to appear the poet. And I wonder, too, if playing the role of poet at all developed the poet. Those are interesting things to think about.

You will understand I don’t mean that Harry wrote poetry. It was his quality, his attitude, his feeling. He would frequently say things disclosing that sensitiveness to beauty, to life, which we call the feeling of the poet. Then other things sounded as if thought out for the state oratorical contest, and still others left me wondering whether they were false or true—and I suspect they were something of both.

But here was the thing that began coming home to me too hard: that he should have to go back and pay the price for having been the revolutionist with passion after he had left that and become the poet. For he had left it. His outbursts grew less frequent, less convincing. I could see that he tried to avoid the situations that might expect them from him, could see that they were painful to him. The others thought it was because of what he was facing, and of course there was that in it, too—particularly as he was facing a penalty for a thing he no longer wanted to be. And among those complex things was a simpler and more appealing thing—a summer out of doors and the thought of prison in the fall.

There were times when I was so sorry for him I didn’t care whether he was real or not. He grew afraid—his eyes were the eyes of one who is afraid; sometimes he would get up and run away from us as if driven, again he clung to us as if afraid to be left alone.

He took to leaving his door open at night. One night I heard him moving around and got up and his face just wrung my heart—fear was there, stark and distorting, and, God knows, real. And yet I’m certain there were times when he dramatized fear. I’m sure of it, and yet I’d rather not go into that—it seems too unkind to try to fix the line of reality there.

One fresh sunny September day Harry and I were down on the beach with the children. They—my little girl and boy and some of their playmates—were out on the flats digging for clams. We had brought out a volume of Yeats, and Harry had been reading to me, his voice lingering appreciatively on the magical words. He had just read the poem beginning, “Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?” and had fallen silent and lay there upon the sands, his back to me. I heard someone coming, and looking around I saw Mark. He had a telegram in his hand. I looked at the boy who had been reading “Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?” and even before I clearly saw Mark’s face I knew, as we 0 know those things, that harm was coming to him.

It was a telegram sent to Mark by Ruhl’s lawyer. The decision of the lower court was affirmed. The attorney said that Mark must bring Ruhl to town at once. The news was faintly palliated with talk of the progress of the movement for a pardon.

I shall remember always Mark’s face as he told Harry. Ruhl himself simply looked sick—just totally incapacitated. I remember that we left the volume of poems lying out there on the sands. Somebody found it and brought it home later in the day—after Harry had gone.

They left on the afternoon train. There wasn’t much eaten at luncheon that day—not by any of us. Ruhl got up and left the table before we had finished. He didn’t bid us goodbye, and as I watched him walking down the road with Mark, he looked so unable to go that I had an impulse to run after them and tell Mark he was to tell those people waiting for Harry that he was not able to come. And then I remembered who they were, what it meant, and that he would have to go whether able to or not. And there was one thing I can’t bear to think of even yet. As they were about to go down one of the side streets, Ruhl turned and looked at the sea he was leaving behind.

It had developed that even outside labor circles there was a widespread feeling that Ruhl was being too severely dealt with; and they all think that a movement to let him off under certain conditions would have gone through had another strike not broken out just the week before. As it was, Harry entered the penitentiary five days after he read Yeats to me on the sands at Cape’s End.

Mark looked as if he had been in prison himself when he came back. I never heard much about just what went on, for it was so hard for Mark to talk about it. He was with Harry as long as anyone could be with him. He said it was pretty bad, and that’s all I could get out of him then; what he said afterwards was so full of bitterness that I don’t feel I can give any clear picture of how Ruhl went through those days.

We had a beautiful fall. I sailed a great deal, and when the spray dashed around me and the wind beat upon my face I looked about me at the open sea and thought of my sailing companion of the summer. I did little speculating on Ruhl’s sincerity those days; pity was too all-encompassing, and when there crept in the wondering how he got along with no one to pretend to, I wasn’t considering it critically but only pitying him the deeper for his utter destitution.

In November came the blow—I’m thinking of Mark when I put it that way. We were still at Cape’s End. I love the fall and early winter there, and Mark and a few of his friends had come up for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was I who opened the paper that day and in astonishment read out the heading. “Harry Ruhl Recants.” An instant later they were all looking over my shoulder. Then they fell back and listened, speechless, to what I read.

I will say for them—I have many times charged them with hardness—that a more sickening recantation was never put upon paper. It was given out by Ruhl to the maker of encyclopedias in the form of a plea to the governor. He said he was sorry, said he had never really believed what he said, but had been unduly influenced by people who misrepresented to him and worked upon his sympathies. He said he could see now that agitation was wrong, that only through law-abiding methods could any good come. He affirmed his belief in all the virtues of the established order, spoke with pious horror of rebellion. Never have I known such complete and really loathsome crawling.

If you’ve never known Mark and his sort, you may find it hard to get any idea of what this meant to them. If you don’t get it, I don’t believe I can say anything to bring it to you. Though they turned against Ruhl so bitterly as to rouse in me an instinct to stay by him I don’t think I fail to understand their feeling, the blow it was to them. We sat before the fireplace until very late that night, and hard things were said against the man who had once sat there with us. You see, he hadn’t really been one of them: he had come among them, played his spectacular part—then this. And it wasn’t personal, their feeling of a wrong done was not the feeling of a wrong done them personally, but resentment and grief that what they looked upon as the most important thing in the world—what they called the fight of the workers for their own—should be repudiated by one conspicuously identified with it. And of course there was resentment because of what it would betaken to indicate of the caliber of the fighters. Naturally they felt that Ruhl had no business to go in with them if he couldn’t see it through; in making that speech he had done what they never wanted him to do, had urged him not to do—and then the whole big thing was left to suffer for his spectacular moment. They said now that he never had been real, that he had done the whole thing just to showoff—to bring himself to the front.

I couldn’t sleep after I went upstairs that night, and so I threw on my big cape and went out on the porch that almost overhangs the sea. I had more than once heard Ruhl out on that porch nights when he could not sleep. And as the tide beat in I stood there and tried to satisfy myself of the truth about Ruhl.

My mind went back to that arid little school he came from. In quality he was not unlike that school. True, he had protested there, and yet I venture to say it was arid protest Ruhl was not one who was refreshed from within. There was in him no quenchless spring, as in my brother Mark. This early protest, having to pay a price for it, made him see himself as much larger than he was. He had some imagination, but it chiefly turned upon himself as a romantic figure. He was simply not proportioned for large things. He did not have the structure for sustained feeling, as some of those friends of Mark’s have.

And yet what I brought out of my attempt to see was a new and tremendous pity. Poor Ruhl—he was in a bad fix. There was something in him which the rest of him couldn’t backup. It was not true that he did the whole thing just to showoff. I am convinced that it was not as simple as that, for there were flashes of feeling in the arid places of his soul. And yet they were not of his fiber, and so what it came to was that they simply made him craven.

Yes, what I brought out of it was a new and tremendous pity. Only the strong of soul should have to be in prison; it came to seem to me that there was something utterly intolerable in keeping a weakling there—as unbearable to think of as the idea of driving a sick horse, as expecting a woman in labor to go about and get a meal. There is something not to be borne in that idea of exacting of living things that which is immeasurably beyond their strength. As I saw it then, Ruhl should be let out of prison simply because his spirit wasn’t equal to the ordeal. The authorities would laugh at that as the most sentimental of bosh, but the more I think of it the surer I am that it is rock-bed truth.

I went in and read over the recantation. I knew Ruhl had utterly lost hold on himself or he never would have written it. For what was there left for him after this? How could he ever again play the part of the strong, the noble, the brave, the passionate? He had given up the revolutionist with passion; he had given up the poet. There was something utterly small in the thing. It hadn’t a vestige of dignity. It was a whimper. If he had not gone to pieces he never would have done it that way. He would have sought for a high sorrowfulness, for something noble in recantation. He would, had he had any hold on himself, have tried to appear standing on new and higher ground—as one speaking with new vision would he have attempted to write had fear not wrecked him. And it seemed to me then that there was something to be said for pretense. Better let a man try to appear fine than cage him until he becomes the smallest and most whimpering thing it is in him to be. Oh, no—it isn’t right. There are people too weak to be kept in prison. We haven’t the right to reduce a fellow being to the state of mind that produced Ruhl’s recantation.

And the cruel thing about it was that it disgusted the very people it was meant to move. Why, nobody wants to take a man in by such a door as that. Everybody hates it man who crawls—no matter what he’s crawling away from. “If that’s what you are, we don’t want you, either,” must have been the feeling, for there was no move from anyone to put through Ruhl’s pardon.

In a distracted effort to get out, he had surrendered all chance for appearing what he wished to appear—and then he was kept there for as long a time as he would have been kept anyhow. Desperation let him expose himself—by all odds the most desperate, the most humiliating thing Ruhl could do—and the exposure availed him nothing. He had to stay in prison, knowing that he had lost his chance—his chance to come out a hero, the chance to come out and make us feel he was one greater in soul for having been there. I used to try not to think of Ruhl—just as we try to put from us the picture of some torturing thing we have seen.

He got out just as he would have if he had not gone down on his knees and whimpered—no sooner, in no other way. In a little less than two years a new Governor went in—a man whom our family know well. It was Mark who went to him in Ruhl’s behalf. Mark had said he would never do it, but when his chance came he did. He said that he had a certain feeling for his fellow creatures—for even those who happened to be worms. Of course what he was not able to rid himself of was a sense of responsibility. He knew it was his personality that had attracted Ruhl, that the desire to appear notable before him had led him to fling off caution in the way he did. So he got Ruhl out after a two years’ imprisonment.

I thought of what that coming out would have been if only Ruhl had held his place. How they would have gathered around him—what a place they would have given him! It was too hard, too bitterly hard—to have gone through it all and to have come out of it with nothing. When Mark came back I asked him how Ruhl seemed. “He seems just what he is,” he replied, “a crawling worm. You can see in his eyes that he is a sneak and a coward and a fake. We gave him a little money to tide him over till he can get work somewhere. We’re through with him—and the best thing we can all do is simply to forget him.”

But I couldn’t; I couldn’t forget him because I wasn’t through with him. My mind wasn’t through with him. My pity wasn’t through with him. The thought of him being left to himself, stripped to the smallest thing he was, haunted me until one day I astounded Mark by suggesting we ask Ruhl to come and stay with us a while.

We had it out that night. Mark hotly gave all the reasons why we need not do anything of the kind—why the idea was preposterous. I gave my feeling—that we couldn’t leave Ruhl like that, that after he had tried to be something before us we couldn’t leave him reduced to sneak and coward and fake, that we had got to help him get something he could live up to. The passion with which Mark combated it made me know he felt there was something in it. He said that if Ruhl had a spark of decent feeling in him he wouldn’t want to come to us. I admitted that unless he was pretty desperate he wouldn’t do it and proposed that we ask him on the theory that if he was so badly off that he would come, he was in too bad a way not to take in.

He came. He was there for four weeks. Then he left us. We did our best, but I can see the truth now—we gave him no place We gave him a nice room looking out to sea; he had his place at the table, on the porch, on the beach, in the boat. But we gave him no place. We were kind to him; we did not take him in. The idea had been to let him become something again—something he could play up to. But we were not able to play the game. We never let him feel that we believed in his gesture.

His gesture—for that was what it was all through. He was one given to spiritual gesture. That speech was a gesture; himself as poet was a gesture; he tried to gesture now, but he was just all clogged up with resentment. Resentment was the thing Ruhl brought out of prison—blurring, infecund resentment. He was jaundiced with it—with resentment at having to go through what he did and then not being able to create; the illusion of being greatened by it; resentment at having paid a tremendous price—and got nothing, at having lost a tremendous chance. And perhaps he would have brought out of it something significant, something real, but for that very resentment at not being able to appear to have done so. What he had done blocked him in every way—as pretender, as to what he really was, or might have become. I mean to say that prison might have really done something for Ruhl but for Ruhl’s own chafing at having got in his own way. That absorbed him; it simply ate him up.

From any side you look at it it’s a pretty sorry thing. The very thing that might have made him something real, as this complete loss, this reduction to himself, might have done, only made him less, because all it did was to seal him in with resentment. You had only to be with him to know that Ruhl had actually grown smaller through losing his chance to appear big. He would try to pretend now, but it was no good, and he knew it was no good. He gave no sense of large things. What he would have appear tragic brooding never seemed anything greater than nursing a grievance. His poor efforts to appear separated from us by a tremendous spiritual experience gave the sense of nothing more than sullenness. It was plain that he hated us for not being swayed by him. There was something fawning about him—prison had done that to him—and yet there was a bravado-like contemptuousness, as if he would persuade himself that he cared little for people as incapable of “getting him” as we. Mark would try to talk to him, but it was so plainly an effort. Two of Marks friends came—the editor I spoke of before and another labor leader who had been with us the summer before Ruhl went to prison. They were not unkind to Ruhl, but they did not treat him as an equal.

And I suppose I was like that, too, hard though I tried. I tried to lure him back to the poet, thinking there might be healing there, but somehow the whimpering noted that recantation was between me and the soul of beauty I tried to make him think he had. He felt it and resented it. I think he resented me the most of all. I wish I had done what I once had the impulse to do. I wanted to say, “Take a brace. What have you done, after all? You couldn’t stand prison. You went to pieces. Well, you’re out now; forget that; take from it what you really got from it—there must be something—and let the rest go. You broke—that’s all—but now go on.”

Some of us should have said that certainly, but the trouble was we couldn’t have believed in it while we said it. It wasn’t as simple as that. It wasn’t what Ruhl did we despised him for. It was the light it threw on everything he had done. What it comes to is that we despised him for not being what he had tried to make us think he was. And of course that’s unfair, for if we could put up with the small thing he really was we were wrong in hating him for not being something he wasn’t. Oh, yes, I think there’s a good deal to blame ourselves for.

And then one day we received an advance copy of a book written by a man we knew who had spent eight years in prison. It is a terrible and a wonderful book—a stark, truth-telling book, but the story of a spiritual triumph. So great was our emotion that we talked about it before Ruhl, and what must have humiliated him past all control was that we just forgot all about him, as if this were a thing with which he had nothing to do. Stung beyond endurance he jumped up and broke forth at us.

“What do you know about it?” he sneered.

We were startled, and just at first he held us and thrilled us. But it wasn’t a gesture, it was a convulsion. He kept repeating, “You don’t know anything about it!”—impotently, emptily, blubberingly repeating it until it grew so pitiable that I, unable to endure the humiliating exposure, got up and left the room. It was instinctive—instinctive kindness, but I think it was the thing that led to Ruhl’s last gesture. He had to get us—had to get us someway. And more than that, he had to get himself—had to get himself someway. After the pitiful failure of his outburst he rushed from the house and he did not come back. The afternoon wore away and we began to wonder about him. I must say for ourselves that until we began to worry we did not speak of what had happened. For you see, it was the sort of thing one doesn’t speak of—not right away, anyhow; as one would not if a man tried to show his prowess in some way—lifting, jumping, and could not do it and finally stood there crying about it.

But when Ruhl was not there at dinner time, we began to talk about him. That evening we went walking in different directions, looking for him. I grew so nervous that. I had to go back home. There is something too poignantly gruesome in looking for someone you are anxious about. After a little while of it you get afraid to look. Bedtime came and Ruhl was not back. I said I couldn’t go to bed. Mark tried to reason with me. Ruhl was just being spectacular again, he said; he’d wandered off on the dunes by himself and would come back sometime in the night. It would be absurd for us to sit up waiting for him. I spoke of how he must be feeling, but he simply refused to consider anything about Ruhl important. I said I would go to bed, but I didn’t. I sat up listening to hear him returning. That is a fearful thing, too—sitting through hours growing ever later, waiting for the footstep of one you are becoming more and more concerned about. The night is so strange under circumstances like that. The world becomes unreal, your self unreal, detached from common things.

At daybreak I woke Mark, and I was by that time in such a state that my feeling communicated itself to him. I told him that something must be done—an alarm given, a search made. He said he would go with me over to the life-saving station on the other side of the cape, the “outside.” we called it. The life-savers patrolled the beach—they might have seen something of Ruhl.

Mark would try to say commonplace things as we walked across the dunes. But it is hard to be commonplace when crossing the dunes at dawn, on your way over to the outside sea, looking for a man who has disappeared. Once Mark said, with a sort of studied crossness, “Isn’t Ruhl a damned fool?” and I knew by the effort it cost him to speak like that, that he was more alarmed than I had known. Another time he said, “How silly we are,” and laughed—then cut the laugh abruptly short.

It was Mark and I who found Ruhl. We had crossed the dunes and were on the outside shore, going toward the life-saving station. The tide was out and there was an expanse of bare wet sands before the steep shelving-off which I suppose makes the dangerous undertow which has given that outside shore its bad name. There had been a big surf the day before—when searching for Ruhl in the evening we had heard it clear across the cape. As if to show we were not afraid of those sands we spoke of the man who had been drowned over there the summer before, of whether the undertow was really as dangerous as it was said to be. Mark said he doubted it—that he’d always been meaning to come over and have a plunge in that surf himself, and as he was saying that I clutched his arm. The sun had come up, and out there on the sands, some distance ahead of us, I saw something. I pointed to it. We stood looking, saying nothing. Then we started that way. Once Mark said, “There’s no use in your going out there and getting your feet wet,” but I kept on, walking silently over the wet sands toward the thing I had seen stretched there in the sunlight.

It was Ruhl. We came within a little distance of him and then stood there, still. His face was all purple and bloated, and yet as he lay stretched out in the merciless sunshine we got the feeling of something noble. It was Ruhl’s last gesture, and there was, for the moment at least, something convincing about it. Mark went up to him to see if he was indeed past help, found that he was, yet nevertheless hurried to the station a little way down the beach. And I stood there and thought about Ruhl, of the price he had paid for this final gesture.

I suppose he had to do it. He couldn’t stand not to count. He had to do something—even this—to become, not what he was, but what he wanted to appear to be. After all, that wanting was the strongest thing in him. There was a certain spiritual dignity about the bloated dead man I looked at upon the sands that morning.

Of course I came to think of it less emotionally than I could then, and the reason I have written this out is the desire to make it clearer to myself. We all talked it over and the verdict of the majority was that Ruhl could not tolerate the thought of what he had done—that is the basis of Bert Stephen’s story, “Remorse.” Mark saw it better than that; he said that what Ruhl could not tolerate was the thought that he could not be reinstated—that it was because the quality of what he had done fixed him as impossible. He said that Ruhl had killed himself in a rage at his powerlessness; that he was one who could not live without pretending, and when he saw he could not appear noble, or even interesting, he destroyed himself in very frenzy, in an “I’ll show them!” mood.

That’s nearer it—but I don’t think even Mark has the whole of it. I’ve tried to give my feeling to him, but I did it so gropingly that he thought it rather strained and sentimental. But I tell you I got something that morning as I stood there on the wet sands at sunrise looking at the poor purple swollen face of the man stretched before me. Ruhl’s dissatisfaction with himself took on noble proportions in the presence of what it had cost him. Mark says he killed himself in a pettish rage, in a frantic disappointment of vanity; but beneath that there is something else, and I see it more and more clearly now for trying to formulate it. It’s true that he was small and almost empty, but—he didn’t want to be. I never thought I liked pretenders, but there’s another way to look at it. And when a man has laid down his life to get himself believed in as finer and deeper and more beautiful than he was, I shall try to think, not of what he was, but of the intensity of the need to appear something else. You can call it vanity and you can call it insincerity, but when a man dies to try and make his life look beautiful…

McClure’s, Aug 1917

“Poor Ed”

Now he was beginning to recognize old things. There was the island where they once went camping—then he must be within ten miles of Freeport. How many times he and Henry had sailed down this river! His eyes blurred, though as he cleared them he thought he would write an essay on “Going Back.” He would make it a tribute to poor old Henry. Yes, he would be glad to do that. It would be something that would remain from Henry’s life. And, who could say? It might be one of the best things he ever wrote. Success interpreting failure—and with gentle understanding. He thought of Henry’s life and his own. In his hand was a magazine in which he was referred to as “Edward Shackleton—the eminent critic.” This appreciation said he was one of the forces molding public opinion. It did not seem to him to have the weakness of overstatement, for he had not made the mistake of less widely read essayists of getting too far ahead of his public to be able to influence it. He had not gone upon the rocks of detachment—the sale of his books could testify to that. Every time a movement showed its head he was there to analyze it, and in essays which were a real contribution to English literature—so his publishers said, and the more disciplined reviewers did not contradict them—he had given his conclusions and reflections to the American people. That was what he had done, while his brother Henry, two years older, reared in the same home and offered the same educational advantages, had remained an obscure farmer, living and dying in the house where he was born. How strange and interesting life was! What made those differences? Of course the answer was not far to seek; it was something in one’s self that made them, a power that made for righteousness—and for success. The difference between him and Henry showed way back in the country school. He got high marks and Henry did not. And Henry never cared either about attainment or public opinion. He grinned over his report card in his lazy way and said, “What’s the difference?” He wondered if Henry hadn’t thought of the difference when he received each year, and sometimes oftener, the copy of his brother’s new book—how glad he was now that he had always sent Henry his books; it must have meant something in his lonely life. Yes, Henry must have come to see that there was a difference. Poor Henry!

Peter Thompson, a neighbor of Henry’s, was at the Freeport station for him with his horse and buggy. It amused Shackleton a little to find himself riding through the streets of Freeport in that farmer’s buggy. He thought of the many people, readers of Edward Shackleton, who would be glad to have met him with their cars, claiming youthful acquaintance. But Henry’s friends were apparently all among the country people. The Shackletons were people who had lived both in town and in the country—at their farm seven miles up the river. He himself, as a young man, had been part of social affairs in town—and Freeport, though a small city, was a rich one. But poor Henry had not been any more of a success socially than any other way. And after he was expelled from college, and came home and lived on the farm, he was referred to, when people were speaking of the Shackletons, as “the wild one” or “the bad one.” In this essay, which would be a tribute to Henry, he would show that he wasn’t really wild or bad, but just lacking in initiative, in energy, in purpose. And somehow life got twisted for Henry, and he was too indifferent to untwist it.

He engaged Peter Thompson in conversation. As a student of human nature he was interested in all types, and then he wanted to freshen his mind about Henry.

“Well, Mr. Thompson,” he began, “how does the old place look?”

“’Bout the same,” said Thompson.

“Henry, I suppose, has been improving it from time to time?”

Thompson, a small man with stiff red hair which gave the impression of being a weapon of defense, looked at him in a guarded way, as if to see how much he meant by improving.

“Henry never was one to fuss much,” he said.

“That’s true,” reflected the brother, thinking of his essay.

“But he was a good enough farmer,” went on Thompson. “He got things done—well, most things.”

Apparently Henry had not changed.

“The trouble about Henry as a farmer,” went on Henry’s neighbor, “was that he had a way of doing what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it, and not always what he ought to do when it should be done.”

“Very well put,” said the eminent essayist.

“But I don’t know as ’twas about as well,” observed Thompson. He paused. “Anyhow, it’s all the same now.”

Edward was silent, entertaining his own reflections on death.

“The funniest thing of that kind I ever saw Henry do was when old Nickerson—his place joins yours at the back, you may remember—was settin’ his fence over about ten feet further ’an he had any business to set it. Well, I got wind of it, and was back there, and then I went running up to the place to tell Henry. ‘Why the old skunk,’ says he, and went on reading his book.

“‘Aren’t you comin’ back to stop him?’ said I.

“‘Soon as I finish this book,’ says Henry.”

The essayist gasped. He thought of his own essay, now a famous one, on “My Books.” Somehow he had a momentary quite unreasonable dissatisfaction with it.

“What was the book about?” he laughed.

“Well, I looked over his shoulder to see. I wanted to know, too. Near as I could make out it was something about breaking rock in Egypt.”

“Breaking rock in Egypt?” inquired Ed incredulously.

“And makin’ it into monuments. In the past, that was.”

So Henry was interested in the pyramids; more interested in, the pyramids, it would seem, than in getting all the land that was coming to him. A nice little story for—But suddenly he realized that he himself was one of the inheritors of this land.

“Well, I hope when he finished his book he came down and settled the old fellow.”

“He came down,” said Peter, “and—had fun with him. I can see him now—coming over the hill in his slow way—Henry never moved very fast you know. ‘Why Nick,’ says he, ‘why don’t you take this hill, too? It’s an awful nice hill. Don’t you like it?’—and he kept on like that till the old thief did put it back part way—Henry never threatening him or anything, just having fun with him, and himself lyin’ there in the sun on the hillside—I can see him just as plain. ‘Say, Henry,’ I says to him, by and by, ‘he’s still got some of what’s yours.’ ‘Oh, what’s the difference, Pete,’ says he. Then he kind of grinned at me—remember how he used to grin?—slow, and says, ‘I won’t have it to plow.’”

That was Henry. A farmer who did not value his land!—too indifferent even to hold his own! Need one look further for the keynote of this life? Was not right here the secret of why Henry had failed in everything?

It was fifteen years since he had been back to the old place. He would not have been here now if the telegram about Henry’s death had not reached him in Chicago, where he was giving his lecture on “A New Era in American Morals.” He had yielded to an impulse to pay Henry the respect of coming home for his funeral, and now, as just at dusk they came up a hill and saw the old Shackleton place there on the next hill, he was glad that he had come. It gave him a new sense of his own life—to say nothing of Henry’s.

Henry would be buried the next morning. This was his last night in the house where he had lived all his years. Through the evening his brother thought of those years, of what they must have meant to Henry. It was impossible to keep away from that contrast between his life and his brother’s. The people around the house that night were, of course, Henry’s friends; they were the people of the neighborhood, apparently the only friends Henry had. He tried to talk to them, but they were not articulate. And that was all Henry had known. Life was over for him and he had never lived. Poor, poor Henry!

He had the room that had been his when he was a boy. It was strange to be in it again, and think of all there was in between. It did not look as if it had been much used, probably Henry had little company. Suddenly he stood still and stared. Why, what a strange thing for Henry to do—for there, on a shelf, were his works, the uniform edition of the books which had come out through the years. So Henry had put them back in his old room—what a singular little piece of sentiment! He could see Henry, book by book, bringing them in here after he had read them.

He began looking them over; there they all were, the things Edward Shackleton had said about life. What a lot of effort and thinking they represented, what an indefatigable search to get ideas out of events—the ideas that would make essays. This was what he had done with his life—this row of books. It was not too much to say that he had been a teacher of the nation—constantly interpreting and admonishing, ever finding the significance of things which other people had not known were significant. As someone had said, he had been wise enough never to tell people to think what they wouldn’t think. This had been in a not wholly sympathetic article—one of those articles written by a less successful man—but he had found pleasure in that idea of understanding people. “New Thought,” “The New Relation Between Capital and Labor,” “The Meaning of the Boy Scout Movement,” “The Spiritual Significance of Conservation,” “New Ideals in Marriage,” “Free Verse and Restlessness”—what was there he had not fitted into its place?

He sat there a long time in the room of his boyhood with the work of his manhood, thinking of all he had written about life since he left that room. Henry must often have thought of it. Just what had Henry thought? Poor, poor old Henry!

He was looking through his latest book. He was reading the final chapter on “The Modern Woman and Responsibility,” enjoying his own flowing style. He turned the last page; he read the last word. But below the last word were two other words, penciled in Henry’s small writing. He held them close to make them out. They were: “Poor Ed.”

He dropped the book. But quickly he picked it up again. He peered at the small dim words. Of course he had been mistaken. But he had not been mistaken. It was Henry’s queer writing, and the words unmistakably were: “Poor Ed.”

He gasped; he choked; he blinked. Poor Ed? But it was poor Henry!

Why, the thing was incomprehensible! “Poor Ed!” What did it mean? To think Henry should be so ignorant—! And what could he possibly have meant?

He’d like to go and ask him! He’d just like to call upon him to explain this! But he couldn’t very well call upon him to explain, for Henry was lying dead in the room below, and the dead don’t explain. And here was what Henry had left—. Henry’s sole comment on his seventeen books! “Poor Ed.” Not even an exclamation point after it! A period, just calmly disposing of him like that!

Oh, well, of course Henry would be pretty sore. What had Henry ever done? Nothing. Precisely nothing. Failure did not often look kindly upon success. Poor Henry! Poor Henry! He thought “Poor Henry” a great many times, as if with “Poor Henry” to put down “Poor Ed.”

But poor Henry could not put down poor Ed. As he looked at the long row of his books, the work of his life, and considered that for Henry they ended with “Poor Ed,” he grew angry in a way he had never been angry in his life. It was that kind of anger which has got to do something, and the maddening thing was that there was no way of getting at Henry. He was furious at Henry for blocking him like this. He tried to find satisfaction in reviewing the fact of his brother’s life. Poor Henry! There was nothing you could think about him that didn’t fittingly end with that comment. Take college. What had Henry been at college except a total failure? The very first month he was there he got in bad by one of his stupid remarks. It was a church college their parents had sent them to, and a big revival was in process. Most of the students who didn’t belong to the church were joining it then. Of course he himself had soon passed on to more sophisticated forms of religious experience—but this was what was being done at the time. “Brother,” the revivalist had one night said to Henry, “won’t you come and be saved?” “From what?” Henry inquired, thereby giving at once the impression that he was stupid and obstinate. And then in civics class, “What do you know about this subject?” the teacher had demanded. “Nothing,” Henry had answered. “Well, when will you know something about it?” the teacher pursued. “Never,” replied Henry. “You may leave this class never to return!” cried the professor. “Oh, thank you,” said Henry—and went out and sprawled in the sun. Oh, Henry was in a fine position to say “Poor Ed!” A nice record he had made at school! While “Poor Ed,” the very first year, had won the oratorical contest and been elected to the college paper. And he himself—“Poor Ed!”—had instantly become a part of the best social life there was in college, while Henry had finally been expelled for going to a prize fight and then afterwards to a saloon with a low crowd he had picked up in the town!

And look at the difference after they came home from college. He had at once taken his place among the best people of Freeport; the Atwoods he had known—and their sort—while Henry had stayed up at the farm, and his only associates were the country louts who hung around the village store and saloon. And Henry’s marriage! If he had made a marriage like that he wouldn’t call anybody else “poor.” Henry had married a vulgar girl whose father kept the saloon. He could shudder yet—and was at great pains to shudder—in the memory of how humiliated they had all been at the marriage of a Shackleton to this common person. And the next year she left with a man who was going West to look for gold. He remembered a preposterous picture he had of Henry when he went up to see him after he heard he had been deserted by his wife—he had thought it only brotherly to go, much as he had disapproved of the marriage—he had always been good to Henry! As he came up to the door there was Henry trotting the young child of this disastrous wedlock up and down on his knee, and singing this outrageous little song—he had been so shocked that he had never forgotten it:

“Your mummy’s gone a-travelin’,

Travelin’—a-travelin’.

Your mummy’s gone a-travelin’

Into the bounding West!”

That was all marriage had meant to Henry!—while he, “Poor Ed!”—had said some of the most beautiful things about it that had ever been uttered in America!

But it would be quite too absurd to permit himself to be upset by Henry’s sorry little way of trying to evade the difference between the Shackleton boys. Apparently Henry was not big enough to face the fact that his brother had become a man of importance. He himself must be bigger than Henry; he must understand and not hold malice. After all, the thing was pretty much of a joke—that Henry should write “Poor Ed!” Poor old Henry!—not much wonder he had become a little sour. Such were Edward’s insistent reflections as he settled himself with his own books, to let them make an end of “Poor Ed.”

He opened at his essay on “Happiness.” The point of the essay was that happiness is necessary to the well rounded life, that there must be some happiness, but that all should not be happiness. It was an inquiry into just what things happiness must be mixed with in order to be most energizing. But an annoying thing was happening. He could not get into his essay because of the loud, slow ticking of the clock in the hall outside his door. The clock was beating off—“Poor—Ed,—Poor—Ed.” and when he painstakingly completed his essay on “Happiness” he had an irritating picture of Henry sprawling in the sun on the campus after he had gratefully said “Oh, thank you,” when told he needn’t return to civics class….

That clock would drive him mad! He went out to see if he could stop it, but he couldn’t get at the thing that stopped it. It grew more and more malicious. It said, “Poor Ed” until he wanted to smash it!—and he felt so insufferably helpless, as if the clock, like Henry, was something that could madden him and give him no comeback. As he stood there, full of impotent rage, his eyes filled with a rush of hot tears. Suddenly he picked up his lamp and went down to the room where Henry lay in his coffin.

He stood there looking at his dead brother. He would have given anything in the world to be able to ask him what he meant by “Poor Ed.” and to get the truth in reply. He had to get it, and he looked and looked at Henry as if by looking he would get it. Henry wasn’t going to get out of it like this! He needn’t think he could say a thing of that sort and not tell why he’d said it!

How calm Henry was. How very quiet and at rest. This was death; all death was calm and rest. His hands had gripped the coffin in that almost insane moment when he was going to force from Henry what Henry had thought about him, but now they fell away—his was such a small and helpless rage before this large calm.

And suddenly he knew that Henry had always had this large calm, and for an instant there was something he almost saw—he almost saw himself as a small thing fussing around in the place where Henry dwelt largely and serenely. He tried to think of the words about the “eminent critic” in the magazine he had upstairs. But words about the eminent critic couldn’t pierce this calm.

Henry had been a failure. Anyone would say so. What else could they say? But now Henry was dead, and the brother who stood beside him, in life and perplexed, was appalled by a feeling that Henry had not frittered away his life. He had not troubled about doing things because other people were doing them, or because good would be said of him if he did them. That must have been a happy hour Henry had reading about the pyramids. He would not let it be spoiled because someone was trying to take his land away from him. He would have let the land go rather than give up the hour. Now he lay in his coffin, and not leaving behind a few feet of land that should have been his, didn’t seem to mark him with failure, but having had the hour he wanted gave him a strange, large, quiet kind of success. It was a kind of success with which the eminent critic had no personal touch, and after a moment he had to get away from it, and so he left the room where his untroubled brother lay, and went out in the kitchen where Peter Thompson was “sitting up.”

Thompson was making coffee, and asked Ed to join him. The coffee steadied him, and the shabby kitchen and uneducated man did something toward restoring his normal appreciation of himself. “Henry must have been very lonely here,” he said, in a pitying but inquiring voice.

“Henry never was one that seemed lonely,” said Thompson quietly . After drinking some coffee in an offensive way, Henry’s neighbor volunteered: “Henry’ll certainly be missed down to Dyers.”

“Where’s Dyers?” asked Ed.

“Why, Dyers is the saloon down here at the corner,” said Thompson. This practically completed the restoration. Henry would be missed at the corner saloon! Edward thought of the things that would appear in the papers—news stories and editorials—if he himself were to die. And yet—again he only saw it through the glass of self-esteem darkly—just where would he be “missed”—speaking the word as Henry’s friend had spoken it?

“Henry drank a good deal?” he inquired hastily.

“No,” said Thompson, “Joe Dyer never made much of it off of Henry—that is, not off of what Henry drank himself. He liked his beer when the weather was hot, and something warming on a cold night, but what he was there for was to sit around with the boys and talk.”

What a life! His only companionship the loungers in a country saloon!

“Henry wasn’t much of a talker when I knew him,” said Henry’s brother.

Thompson ran his hand through his stiff red hair. “Not a big talker,” he finally admitted, “and yet I’d call him a talker.”

Ed looked at him inquiringly. “Because,” Thompson pursued, “he might say the least that was said of an evening, and yet what he said’d be all you’d remember.” The eminent critic was silent. “Did Henry ever say anything about me?” he suddenly burst out.

“Why, yes; he used to kind of—well, brag about you sometimes.”

“He did?” eagerly inquired Ed.

“That is—well, I guess you’d call it bragging.”

“What did he say?”

“I’ve heard him say, ‘My brother is the eminent critic.’”

He looked at Thompson suspiciously. “Well, what did he mean by that?” he asked sharply.

“Why, I don’t know,” said Thompson. “Henry wasn’t one to explain what he meant.”

“And was that all he ever said about me?” demanded Ed, with rising voice.

“No,” said Thompson. “No; he said other things.”

He waited, wanting to curse the man for his stupid slowness. He was forced to ask it. “What things?”

“Well,” said Thompson, “I remember once when we was arguin’ Henry said—‘It’s too bad my brother isn’t here. He’d tell us.’”

Again a pause which Thompson seemed willing to let become eternal. “And—what were you arguing about at the time?” inquired Ed, carefully casual.

“Why, I think,” said Thompson, “that was time we had the argument about space—what it did about stopping.”

Edward got up and went to the kitchen door and stood there looking out. His face was burning. He didn’t see how he could possibly write any essay about Henry! To do that he shouldn’t have come home.

“Poor Henry,” he said, turning back, “it makes me feel very sad to think of him.”

“Does it?” said Thompson so dryly that Ed flamed: “What did Henry ever have from life? Nothing—just nothing at all. Think of his marriage, for instance. What a failure! Henry died knowing nothing whatever about love.”

He had turned back to close the door and Thompson’s laugh made him spin round. “What are you laughing at?” he demanded.

“Well, if you’d live round here,” said Thompson, “you’d laugh too.”

“Laugh at what?”

“At what you just said.”

“Which that I just said?” pressed the eminent critic, pertinently if not purely.

“Henry knowing nothing about love.”

“But—but Henry didn’t marry again.”

“No—he didn’t marry again.” One of those stupid pauses! “Emil Johnson had married her first.”

“You mean Henry was involved in a scandal?” sharply asked the other Shackleton.

Thompson looked a little surprised. “We never called it such,” he said simply. “She didn’t live with her husband,” he went on, as if trying to figure out why they hadn’t called it such. “She couldn’t, not unless she lived in an insane asylum—and I guess they didn’t want her there. And then she was Rose Mason.” He screwed up an eye contemplatively. “Don’t seem to come natural to call what some folks does scandal.” Suddenly he chuckled. “Wonder what Henry would ’a done, if someone had come along and told him it was scandal.” He chuckled again as if this idea had many entertaining ramifications. “Well, here on this hill lived Henry,” he went on in a musing way, “and over on the next one she lived. My place is in the valley down between. So—kinda tickled me—Henry knowing nothing about love.” He had his knife out and took a stick from the wood-box and went to whittling, his back to Ed. “Then I was there the night she died. Henry and I walked from there together—just as it was gettin’ light. When we got to where I turn off”—he took his stick and examined it, as if his real interest was in the knot round which he whittled. “When we got to where I turn off,” he picked it up, “we stood a minute by the creek, and—if you’d seen Henry’s face then—huh!—guess you wouldn’t say it so sure—nothing from life.”

He found a new approach to the knot. “Henry was pretty lonesome this last year—just a year ago Rose died. But his face—huh!—it never lost the whole of what it had there by the creek—at sunup that morning.” The whittling became violent.

Edward again opened the door and stood looking out. Some night bird—a whippoorwill, a quail—was calling “P-o-o-r Ed”—“P-o-o-r Ed.” It did not infuriate him. He stepped out and stood looking over at the hill where the woman his brother loved had lived. He was thinking about Henry. Something big and simple and undismayed about his brother made the eminent critic almost real. Things that weren’t worth anything never touched Henry at all—as civics didn’t, or his marriage. And not being shut in with things that didn’t matter he was open to the things that counted. He stood there in the yard where he and Henry had been boys together and he wished he might have known his brother. Henry could have helped him. He wondered why it was no one had helped him, or why no one had ever really cared for him. He supposed it was because he was always trying to impress people. He had never become anything because he was always trying to seem something. Wisdom didn’t grow in the hearts of men who were thinking about appearing learned. He thought of all the things he had written about life. They had held him away from it. His years had been one nervous quest for saying a thing before someone else should say it. And people had taken this for something valuable. People were like that. No, not all of them. Henry hadn’t taken it for something valuable. He wondered if he could, after all, write about Henry—failure interpreting success… .

Next morning, as he walked from his brother’s grave, a woman stepped up to speak to him, a woman quite unlike the other people around him.

“Mr. Shackleton?” she inquired, in the subdued voice right for the situation. “I do hope I’m not intruding. I was Helen Atwood. I married Bob Owens. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten us, for its our proudest boast that we knew you.”

He assured her he had not forgotten her. And indeed he hadn’t—he wouldn’t. She was of Freeport’s “leading family.”

“If I am intruding, do say so. But now that you are here, we can’t bear not to see you. I wish I could tell you”—her voice grew sweetly serious—“what your work has meant to us. I wonder,” she went on more brightly, “if you won’t give us a chance to try to tell you? Mayn’t I take you home for a little stay with us?”

He was grateful for the comfort of her car after the poor springs of the carriage which had taken him to the cemetery. She was discreetly quiet, respecting possible grief, or at least mindful of the fitness of things. They stopped at the Shackleton place for his bag. He was glad to be leaving—tired and dispirited after the night there. On the way to Freeport she talked gently and with some eloquence of what his books had meant to her, how they had always made her know what to think. “Yes?” he would only say at first, and “I am glad,” having an instinct for keeping away from his books, as we keep away from a place that has been sore. But her words, like her car were soothing. It occurred to him that a strange situation creates over-wrought ideas. And night—night in the country, and with death there—it was peculiarly depressing; distorting, in fact. Think of the people he had reached through his books!—people whom he had guided as Helen Atwood said he had guided her.

And then, with tact, she was speaking of his brother, commenting on the retired life he led, upon the differences in families. “I hadn’t seen him for years until last Spring, when my sister took a place up the river. It seems she met Mr. Shackleton on the road one day and asked him where she could get some fertilizer for her garden, and so the next afternoon—I happened to be there at the time—he very kindly drove over with a load of manure.”

The eminent critic sighed. Drove over with a load of manure! But this load of manure was fertilizing. The essay he had first had in mind began to sprout and thrive. Yes, he would write about Henry—generously and with insight he would picture a man who had failed and yet had won from failure a certain sort of success. Perhaps—who could say? it was more satisfying than real success, with its myriad responsibilities, its ceaseless demands. He was the better for having touched Henry’s quiet life; the memory of it would sometimes flow restfully into his own busy days. And there would remain no memory of the disappointing thing—Henry’s perhaps inevitable jealousy of the brother who was counting in the world of affairs and thought. No, all of that had died with Henry. He saw the Freeport streets through misty eyes. Poor dear old Henry!

The Liberator, Mar 1918

“Beloved Husband”

For two-score years and ten Amos Owens really had something to worry about. In the first part of the first score he had to worry about his pants, for his mother made them out of his father’s pants. He had to worry about not having the guns and bats and boats that make for popularity among one’s fellows. He even had to worry about getting his school-books—not that he really wanted them, but his mother’s tone in speaking of his not being able to have them led him to associate this possibility with catastrophe too great to look in the face. And then from the time he was ten years old he began to worry about getting up early enough—at ten he got a route and began carrying morning papers, Perhaps if in those years which might have been tenderer he had just once looked the worst that could happen straight in the eye, and with bold reasonableness inquired, “Well, what if it does happen?”—if just one morning a little boy had done that, maybe the life of a man would have been different. Maybe. But his mother’s voice shaped his years. She couldn’t say, “What a beautiful sunny morning!” without giving you a sense of impending doom. And when she said, “Amos, you get to bed and right to sleep, or you’ll not be able to wake up when I call you,” he couldn’t any more have taken a good look at the possibility of not being able to wake up than he could have struck a match and looked at the monstrous figure which must be there when a door creaked in the night.

And then, from the first, he saw things from the early-morning angle. There is that about the world when people are not up to make it seem something is bound to happen to them when they do get up. The cats were too queer in the dawn. Many houses with pulled-down shades do something to you. When he got to the office and crowded in with all the other fellows the world was itself again—a place of loud voices and much edging of you out of line, but there was a certain three blocks—whistling didn’t help and running made it worse.

His early-morning life did not stop with the papers. He got a job in the fish-market and it was his business to meet the four-o’clock train and get the stuff right on ice. If he missed that train—He never finished that sentence—more’s the pity.

He began working in the fish-market at sixteen and he bought it at thirty-two. From the time he was twenty-eight he was afraid old Doe would die, or give up the business, before he had enough saved to buy it. Amos’s savings-account ran a race with old Doe’s kidneys, and there is something hounding about an opponent you can’t measure. In the second year Mr. Doe had an acute attack and was taken to the hospital—that was what made Amos an investor. To get money faster he lent the savings which were bringing him four per cent. to a man who wanted to build a house and would pay eight per cent. He never would have risked this if he could have had an accurate report on the kidneys. Having risked it was anguishing as he walked through still, gray streets; securities became as thin and unreal as that light which fills in between night and day. Of course he was going to lose his money. Money became to him a thing you are practically certain to lose. He did not lose it, and he found out how to make it, but that light which is never seen in night or day became the light in which he saw things.

When he bought the fish-market he thought how nice it was going to be to sleep mornings. For years, as he walked past those drawn shades, he had envied the people warm and unaware in their beds. But when you have done an unpleasant thing for twenty-two years it isn’t so easy to leave off doing it. Of course he continued to wake at half past three, and as that was the hour when things had long seemed all wrong, of course they continued to seem so. He could hear the whistle of the four-o’clock train, and he was sure Fred Long had not been there to meet it. It got so he couldn’t bear to lie abed and listen for that whistle. After a month of knowing Fred would not be there—a month in which Fred never once failed to be there—he told him he’d meet the train himself.

His wife told him he was crazy; when he acquired the fish-market he acquired as wife Josie Smith, bookkeeper in the grocery-store next door. “You don’t have to do it,” she told him again and again. And he couldn’t explain to her, not being able to explain it to himself, that he did have to.

There was a great deal he was never able to explain to Josie—or to himself. There were things in him that fought with other things, and his makeup brought him pain. With all his terror about his pennies he had that quite special romantic sense which points some men to money. He was a ’fraid-cat and a gambler, and all through his life the gambler tortured the ’fraid-cat. He borrowed money up to the hilt, and made money on the borrowed money. His capital was never big enough for his business. This consigned him to years most men will understand better than most women. Josie was one of the women who didn’t understand it at all. She had a tidy little bookkeeping mind which would have things balance no matter what the balance might be. Those were dreadful days in the Owens household when he had to pull out of his pocket a note for Josie to sign. Josie thought it all quite simple. They could get along very well if it weren’t for that terrible interest. She never could see that they moved from a flat on Third Street to a home on River Heights out of what the borrowed money made. She wanted what it made, but her mind—and her judgments—never got past what it cost.

And as he carried away Josie’s signature he always carried with it a nervous chill. It was true he was bearing a fearful burden of interest. Suppose the bank came down on him—as she said it would—as something in him felt sure it must. He suffered, but he went on. He had to suffer, and he had to go on. He was like that.

And then one day he made his pile He was one of three men who financed a young inventor. The ’fraid-cat had been more tortured by this than by anything he had done—and the gambler more intrigued. It was a new sort of motor engine, and there was a fortune in it. The man who every morning met the four-o’clock train was the richest man in town.

But he went right on meeting it. When Josie complained about its looking queer, he said there was nothing else to do at that hour in the morning. She spoke of sleep. What was the good of sleep if you couldn’t sleep? They bought an imposing house called The Manor—an edifice erected by a man with a romantic sense which had played him false, and at twenty minutes of our every morning this heavy mahogany door opened and there slunk out of it the master of the house, the richest man in town, Amos Owens on his old hard way to get his fish.

As he went out he sometimes met his son coming in—Walter was less inept than his father in taking his place among the wealthy. One morning, in the lower hall, he met his daughter, just home from a fancy-dress Christmas ball. Edna put out her arm, not unkindly, and cried, “Father!” at the thought of his going out in the storm. Her arm was bare and some gold thing was wound round and round it. All the way to the train it bothered him. It must have cost a great deal. Why need she have her arm bound like that? While absorbed in figuring out what the adornment must have cost he slipped on the ice and broke his ankle.

That night Josie and Walter and Edna gathered round his bed and read him the evening papers. They all had the story of how Amos Owens, on his way to the four-o’clock train from which he had long taken his fish, had slipped on the ice. Josie and Edna cried—and not over his broken ankle. Walter said it would set them back—they weren’t well enough established to be “quaint.” They argued with him, telling him he was Freeport’s leading citizen and urging him not to injure them by being queer. And because his foot hurt so much he wanted them to go away, he finally promised to give up the fish business.

So Freeport’s leading citizen tried to lie abed mornings. But the trouble was, all through his years he had felt so relieved at finding himself awake. Always there had moved just under sleep that awful idea that he might not be able to wake up. So he not only continued to wake, but continued to feel he had averted catastrophe, and on that feeling he always got right up. Now he tried to stay in bed, even though he was awake. He fought a good fight, but he couldn’t win it. He would get up and prowl round the house, trying not to be heard, for he disliked discussion of his ways. He would see things about the house that distressed him—and he didn’t have the fish to turn to. Though one morning, after finding three empty champagne bottles in the billiard-room, he did go down and watch a tall Swede take fish off the four-o’clock train. He followed him as far as the market, watched him go in, stood there a little, then started up the hill toward The Manor—a slight, stooped figure going through silent streets as if pursued.

Josie and Walter and Edna would have done better to have let him alone. The Manor was a lonely place at daybreak. Things that seemed wrong grew monstrously wrong because there was nothing to do but think about them—and no one to speak to of what he thought. He would find good food thrown away, and, unable to bear such things, he would go out and walk up and down the street. He would look about for someone to talk to. Waking up before other people do may seem an incident—but it leaves one alone in the world. More and more he came to have a need of talking at that hour, as if companionship might take the place of the fish and let him out from things that stalked him before it was really day old worries which new conditions were so queerly unable to touch. Not having other people’s habits cuts you off from the sympathies of the human race.

Everyone disliked and despised him for his queer ways. Neighbors who were light sleepers would hear him on his beat and mutter, “Old Owens, out worrying about his money; pity the old fool can’t stay in bed at this hour!”—and none of them felt sorry for him, for did he not have more money than he knew what to do with? None of them saw any pity in this broken connection between his money and his feeling about money. One morning, in a room off Josie’s bedroom, he found a dress which had come home and not been unpacked. He lifted the paper and looked at it. It was stuffed out as if there were a form within. It seemed unbearably useless, as if it were just made—and bought—to go over paper stuffing. He tiptoed into Josie’s room and opened the door and looked at the dresses. Rows and rows of them—and now she had bought another! Josie lay there asleep, turned from him. He wanted to talk to her. He sat in a chair before the closet door, hoping she would wake. It must be said for him that he never thought of waking her—sleep was to him too escaping a thing to bring anyone from it. But he couldn’t sit there any longer in the stillness, so quietly he slipped out, not looking at the stuffed-out dress in the outer room. He looked in at Edna’s door, at Walter’s—maybe one of them was awake. He wanted terribly to speak to someone. But they weren’t, and he went very softly, not to rouse them. Walter, too, had made a purchase. It was in an open drawer. He stood looking at it awhile; then, to stop looking, hurried out of the house and walked a long way—soft and fast, as if getting away from something.

After a while he found himself on that street which, as a little boy, he had taken from home to the office where he got his papers. The houses were as still and strange as they used to be. Again those three blocks did something to him. He made a quick turn toward home, and Josie. He would talk to her; maybe he could tell her about things. He must try. She stirred as he came in this time, said, “Oh, Amos!” as she saw him in overcoat and hat. Sleepily she rubbed her eyes, then exclaimed, “I think it’s just too bad for you to act like this!”

He did not answer, but stood there quiet and helpless. She cried:

“If you’re determined not to enjoy things yourself, I don’t see why you want to spoil them for me and the children!” hen she turned her back and pulled the covers up around her as if to say she’d thank him to go away and let her sleep in peace—as a sensible person should.

So he went away. He tiptoed into Walter’s room and looked again at that purchase Walter had made. He stood looking at it until he heard one of the servants on the stairs. Then he could move. Things were never so bad when someone else was up.

All through the next week he would get right out of the house, trying not to see anything, trying especially not to go in Walter’s room. He would find people to speak to—policemen, early teamsters, men collecting garbage. He would go up to them in that timidly ingratiating way of one pathetically afraid he will not be well received, wistfully trying to cover with a casual tone the importance to him of being received. He would say, “Well, this is a fine morning,” or, “There’s nothing like being up early,” and they would answer, “That’s right,” and when he went on, “The nut.” There was one policeman who really talked to him, and he could talk more to this policeman than he had ever talked to anyone. He told him how he always had got up early and now he couldn’t quit it. He could laugh with him about it. He even told how he used to feel as a little boy going through the still streets, and while he didn’t say he still felt that way, telling about it helped the way he felt now. He would walk for blocks with this policeman and talk to him about the fish business. He was a big, hearty policeman, with a warm voice—a voice not at all like the dawn.

All this while he had not lost his touch with his affairs, or his power to deal with them. He went on making money. He was not looked upon as a fool, despite the fact that some said he was “touched.” It was only before it was really day, when things were still and thin and very lonely, when they waited, that old fears cut him loose from present security and left him alone and afraid in a world not quite right. This was a week of special good fortune for him; the return on a Southwestern investment sent him ahead almost fifty thousand dollars, but this increased fortune had absolutely no reach into the anguish of finding half an uncarved chicken in the garbage-can.

And the morning after the half a chicken sent him out into the streets, something else sent him there. Going through the upper hall, he looked into the sitting-room off Josie’s bedroom and there he saw another new dress. It sat in an easy-chair as a person might sit—stuffed out with tissue-paper—another dress! In a circle which did not bring him very near he walked round it. It was a strange and to him a terrible color—that thin, weird gray in which a world not quite right waits for day. Slowly his circles came a little closer. Josie had bought this thing—this useless thing—she would have to pay for it. One arm of the dress hung limply and the other bulged grotesquely. He had to get away! As if someone were after him, he ran soft-footed into Walter’s room and took what he had tried not to know was there. Softly he closed the big front door, as so many times he had closed it while others slept.

He went a little way in the fast, still way he had all his life gone through sleeping streets. He was looking for someone. He wanted that policeman whose voice was like taking you in out of the cold. But he couldn’t find him. Frantic and bewildered, he walked round blocks like a lost child. He forgot about the policeman and just went—he didn’t care where, he didn’t know. If he stopped … Anyway, he went on. Dimly he knew there were people about him now, and then he heard a sound that had sounded through most of his years—the pounding rush of an incoming train.

He was meeting it—the four-o’clock train. He walked to the front, where they took off the fish. He saw the familiar crate come through the big door of the baggage-car. It was put on a truck. He stepped up to it. But no—it wasn’t his any more. He couldn’t take it. He looked around. Who was going to take it? He waited. And then he knew that it was happening!—the thing he had feared all his life would happen. The four-o’clock train was in and there was no one to meet it and take the fish. He waited. It was a rainy morning, and warm. The stuff must be got right to fresh ice! He ran to one end of the station, to the other. He would run back and stand there by the crate—on one foot, on the other, trying not to cry, powerless and watching the thing happen he had shaped his life to keep from happening. He waited as long as he could. And when he couldn’t bear it another second he pulled out Walter’s revolver and shot himself.

•    •    •    •

Yet it is a benign world. Things are so arranged that our deaths precede our funerals. Few of us would like our funerals, and the thought of Amos Owens enduring his is something not to be dwelt upon—as torture to an animal is not to be dwelt upon. The Owens family tried to make up for the “queerness” of his death by the munificence of his funeral. His death might be quaint—but he had such a funeral as Freeport’s leading citizen should have. In deed, never did even leading citizen have such a funeral before. The old man lay on a couch of violets—something quite new in Freeport funerals. Josie commanded the florist to be right at hand and replace withering violets with fresh ones. Violets never withered faster. It is pleasant to think—indeed necessary to believe that death is unaware. To feel fresh violets being stuck around him while old ones were really quite fresh enough—even the neighbors who had heard him at daybreak would not wish him that. The words “Beloved Husband,” which in orchids formed the back of the couch, cost just seven times as much as the dress that drove him to Walter’s room for the revolver. But not even the four-o’clock train disturbed him on his couch of violets. At last “Beloved Husband” slept through dawn.

Harper’s Magazine, Apr 1918

Good Luck

Afterward Walter realized that young Scott had been with them as far as Seventy-second street, and that it was only two blocks he and Johnnie Richards had been alone together. This was hard to believe. For one thing, he had been so afraid of seeming to hurry that he had lagged. Apparently Johnnie had had the same fear. When Walter finally reached the steps of his mother’s house and said “Good night,” their eyes met, and, neither of them wishing to seem anxious to look away, the look was longer than looks usually are.

Of course things couldn’t go on like this. Either something would have to be said, or he and Johnnie must stop seeing each other.

To stop seeing each other wasn’t simple. Giving up Johnnie would mean giving up most of the other people he knew; friends go by groups. And to give up Johnnie was itself no small thing to be thinking about. He had known him a long time. He liked him.

That was why it was so hard to believe what the evening had disclosed. He went up to his room and sat thinking about it, unable to think of anything else. He went back to the first moment he had heard the incredible thing. It was Nina Aldrich who, after gaily greeting him, exclaimed, “How proud you must be of Johnnie!”

He feared that he had looked blank. Fond as he had long been of Johnnie, it had never occurred to him to be particularly proud of him. In fact, Johnnie was the sort to leave his friends explaining why he hadn’t done more. It always seemed he was going to do some notable thing, and then he stopped just this side of it. He had studied architecture, and they all felt Johnnie would do something to architecture, but after a few years he gave it up, because, he said, there was no chance to do anything but repeat stupid things. He had a little money, just enough to save him from redoing stupid things, so he began designing stage sets. Now he had one on Broadway, a play that was having a run. This must be what Nina meant, though the light in her eyes seemed a little out of proportion to Johnnie’s achievement. But women were impetuous—anyway Nina was.

“Yes, isn’t it fine!” he had answered cordially.

“You must tell us all about it,” cried Mrs. Oliver, who had come up. “Johnnie’s so modest we can’t get much out of him.”

At this he was about to say, “I don’t believe I understand,” when Nina explained to one of the group: “Mr. Stanslaw was with Johnnie Richards when the Alsitania went down. He saw him do that superb thing.”

And then, to a Southern woman who was visiting someone, Nina told the astounding story. Johnnie, with many others, was in the water. He swam to a life-raft full of people, but as he was about to touch it, a man on the raft said: “We have too many now. If you touch us, everyone on the raft may be in the water.”

“And Johnnie,” said Nina, “waited just an instant—then said, ‘Good luck,’ and swam away.”

The Southern woman’s eyes brimmed with tears. They all stood there silent. And right then Johnnie himself came up with Mildred Howe.

“Here he is,” cried Nina, “the man who said ‘Good luck,’ and swam away.”

Then the really incredible thing happened. Johnnie kept silence.

Walter didn’t know where to look. To his horror he found he was looking at Johnnie. Johnnie’s eyes were down. Suddenly he lifted them and looked at Walter, the man he had been with the night the Alsitania sank. It was but an instant, but that night passed between them in the look. And still Walter waited for Johnnie to ask for an explanation, or to give one.

Then Mildred Howe said softly, “He doesn’t like to have us talk about it.”

Walter looked at Mildred. She was looking at Johnnie in a way he would give much to have her look at him. It had all been too much. He was glad to fall back and discuss with Mrs. Oliver safe abstractions about the psychology of imminent death.

But before his fire now, he went over and over the astounding thing. He and Johnnie had sailed on the Alsitania about four months before. In London, Walter’s house suddenly sent him to Australia. So until tonight he hadn’t seen Johnnie since that day they parted in England. He had been so busy that the sinking of the Alsitania had come to seem a long way back. He hadn’t wanted to think about it. He had tried not to. But now he had to. Finally, because he wanted to stop thinking, he set vigorously to work unpacking his trunk, though it was two o’clock in the morning.

Mildred Howe had asked him to come in for tea the next afternoon. All the way home from Australia he had been thinking of a visit alone with Mildred. As he lagged along Riverside Drive now, what he hoped was that he would not be alone with her. The nearer he got, the more unequal he felt to discussing—perhaps even describing—Johnnie’s heroism, until at last he went over to Broadway to a drug store to phone her that something had come up and he wouldn’t be able to come to see her that day. But the number was busy, and this, irrationally enough, gave him a feeling that she was not alone. She lived with her brother, who taught at Columbia. Teachers ought to be through teaching at five o’clock in the afternoon. Probably the brother would be there, and they would just talk serenely about the war.

But Mildred was alone. This gave him his first intense feeling of resentment toward Johnnie, thinking how glad he would have been to find her alone if it weren’t for this preposterous thing that dwarfed everything else about his homecoming and forced him into a situation where he couldn’t do anything but flounder.

While in Australia he had found that he was in love with Mildred. It might seem a long way to go to find it out, but Mildred’s eyes didn’t lose by distance, and they were about the only things that didn’t.

They had a certain clear sweetness through which he saw the future he wanted. He had known her a long time, as he had known Nina and some of the other girls. It is peculiarly romantic to find yourself in love with a girl you have known a long time; the whole past changes with the changing present. The whole past is a contribution. He thought back now to times when they were youngsters and he had taken Mildred skating in Central Park.

But suddenly all those things from the past which (lowed into the present and opened the future were dammed off, and the moment was without past or future, and very bleak.

“I suppose,” said Mildred, “that you have heard about me and Johnnie?”

You are very steady when you feel you are about to fall. With this steadiness he said, “No.”

“You haven’t?” laughed Mildred. “Why, how unflattering! I thought everyone would be telling you first thing.” He only waited. After an instant, “We’re going to be married,” she said, as if saying behind it, “Stupid—couldn’t you guess?”

He couldn’t say a word.

“I can’t say you seem overcome with pleasure at learning of this engagement of two old friends,” said Mildred rather sharply.

He had to do something, and quickly, without thinking it out, he threw out the personal part of it as guard for the other things—those other things which could not be dealt with without thought. “No,” he said, “I’m not overcome with pleasure at the idea of your marrying Johnnie. You see, I wanted you to marry me.”

After an astonished look Mildred laughed. “Well. Walter, you were a long time finding out what you wanted. Honestly, now, weren’t you?”

“I’m a slow person,” he said, trying to speak lightly and bitterly reflecting that it was true; so slow he had lost Mildred; so slow he didn’t know how to meet a situation at the moment it had to be met. Without a doubt, after he had gone to bed that night he would think of just the thing he should be doing now.

“Don’t you rather lack initiative, Walter?” Mildred went on, more gaily. “When Johnnie finds out he wants to marry me, you discover you want to marry me.”

Suddenly he saw just where he had left himself in acknowledging that he wanted to marry Mildred. Any reticence about Johnnie’s heroism would be put down to petty inability to be generous to a rival. And it seemed, even at this moment, that Mildred wanted to hear about Johnnie’s heroism. “Walter,” she said, in a warmer tone, “don’t you think Johnnie is pretty fine?”

If only she weren’t looking straight at him! For he was seeing it—the hardest moment of that night to forget. If he didn’t stop seeing it. she would see it, it was so real there between them. He got up and walked to the window. But he had to do something, and quickly.

“How hard women will work to make a hero!” he said, as lightly as he could.

She did not speak, and at last he turned to look at her. She was looking straight at him, and those clear eyes were not veiling what she felt. It left no doubt about where he stood with Mildred. To her amazement she was finding this small thing in him. He was not big enough to be generous—even just—to an old friend when he found him a successful rival. This was where Johnnie left him! In a rage at Johnnie, and afraid he would do some rash thing, he abruptly said goodbye. Mildred’s eyes were astonished and hurt, but mostly scornful, as he looked back from the door.

There are people who like nothing better than finding another person’s destiny in their hands. It enhances their own importance, puts them at the center of interesting speculation, and gives them the drama of choice. But if there was anything in the world Walter Stanslaw did not want on his hands, it was another person’s destiny. He left Mildred Howe furious with Johnnie Richards, and headed straight for Johnnie’s apartment to ask what he meant by this bunk about being a hero, and to inquire just what role was expected of him, who knew the truth. In the subway he made up things to say to Johnnie, those pertinent things we have such a good time saying to the other person when he isn’t there. “Wouldn’t it have been more considerate,” he would inquire sarcastically, “to have let me know in advance that I was to describe your heroism? And safer!” he would add dryly. And then he would come right out with it. “Is Mildred marrying you because you are a hero? Because if she is, you’d better tell her you aren’t.” Oh, he’d fix Johnnie!

But he couldn’t, because Johnnie wasn’t home to be fixed. Kimbal, who shared the apartment with Johnnie, was there and thought if he’d wait a little Johnnie would come in. And Kimbal undertook to entertain him by telling how Johnnie had improved. He was more serious, worked harder, was more considerate, nicer to live with. Kimbal’s theory was that Johnnie was living up to the good opinion people now had of him.

Walter left without seeing Johnnie, left when he was afraid he was going to say, “How about living up to a lie?”

He kept away from a party he had been meaning to go to that night, not wanting to run into Mildred and Johnnie, not caring to appear, a third time that day, a person who grudged Johnnie his laurels. His homecoming was being spoiled. He had to keep away from people as if he had done something small. If he didn’t go about telling the tale of Johnnie’s heroism, it would be thought he was slurring the whole thing because he himself hadn’t come out of it a heroic figure. A nice thing for Johnnie Richards to let pass!

In one of his boxes that night he came upon the ivory fan he had brought home for Mildred. It reminded him that he had lost her. Other things faded; he grew still then in the thought of her. The girl he had known all his life and had wanted to be with all the rest of his life. He thought of such odd things. When Mildred’s mother died—he and Mildred were about sixteen then—he and his mother went over there that night. His mother had been very tender with Mildred, but Mildred hadn’t seemed to want his mother, and after a while she moved over and sat by him, just sat there still, but near him. That was so vivid now. And another time, at a dance, Mildred caught her heel in her petticoat and ripped it disastrously. And though she was dancing with another fellow, “Walter!” she instantly called, “Walter, get me some pins, quick!”

There were many things like that, queer little things to remember. They wouldn’t seem to mean much by themselves, but when you strung them together—well, Mildred had counted on him. Now what? She was going to marry a man she thought had shown control and unselfishness in a moment of panic, a man, to put it romantically—doubtless she was putting it just that way—who would give up his life for others. Was it her glow about that feeling had made her think she loved Johnnie? Anyway, she thought he was like that, and he wasn’t like that at all. He was—quite different. And Johnnie was willing, apparently, to pass himself off for what he wasn’t. More than that, to keep himself well covered with glory, he left a friend, a friend who had—well, done something for him, in a place where he couldn’t appear anything but ungenerous.

Walter was a man who thought very highly of common sense. He thought it would solve most of the difficulties of life, if you’d only give it a chance. “Don’t be a fool,” was his way out for almost everything. He had always thought that people who interfered in other peoples lives would do a great deal better to mind their own business. But this was Mildred. He was letting her go ahead in the dark. If Johnnie could do this, couldn’t he do other things of like caliber? Was he the man for Mildred to bank on? But—hang it all!—it would seem his conscience was troubling him about Johnnie chiefly because his heart was troubling him about Mildred. A fine figure he’d cut now if he were to turn in and “expose” Johnnie to Mildred.

He saw nothing of them for a week, and then he went to the bazaar where all the girls he knew were selling things for the Allies. It was a crush, and he saw a good deal of Johnnie without Johnnie’s seeing much of him. He had to admit that Johnnie didn’t look like a man who had done a low-down thing; a man, to put it righteously, who was living a lie. He looked very spirited and sunny as with a certain bright fervor he bustled about for Belgian babies. That is, he was like that until he saw Walter. Walter himself grew rather sulky. Doubtless he should cease to exist. Knowing the truth, he just shouldn’t be. He was the death’s head at Johnnie’s feast, the ominous reminder. He couldn’t say he enjoyed the role!

Mildred was selling something at the bazaar. He went up to her, trying to appear natural, but her eyes no longer looked upon him in warm friendliness. So he didn’t know what she was selling. He went away hurt and angry. Pretty quick, he should say, she had been to condemn an old friend!

Through the winter he kept away from Mildred and Johnnie as much as possible. This meant that he kept away from many of his other friends, and they thought it queer and wondered what had happened to make him so different. He would hear, from time to time, of these wonderings about him. Johnnie, on the other hand, was right in the midst of things; he continued to do interesting things in his work, and to be a sweet, sunny, charming person—that was the way he heard Nina Aldrich describe him one night. Well, he granted it was true. Johnnie had always been a sweet, sunny, charming person. That was the reason he had always liked being with him. That was why he missed him even now, when he knew there were things be neath the sunniness and charm which were not so likable. It was queer that they didn’t seem to show through. It was rather a good one on the people who thought they could see through to character. Did Mildred get no glimpses? Mildred had never seemed one to have things easily put over on her. But love—apparently that kept one from glimpses love wouldn’t like.

Walking across the Park one day he met Mildred and Johnnie. They were coming along gaily. It was a blowy day, and the wind was whisking Mildred’s scarf, and Johnnie was catching at it for her. Then they saw him. Both of them stopped laughing, stopped instantly. He had a feeling that he had killed something, not a delightful feeling to have. They both tried to smile, and it was about as different from the laughter which had been real—oh, as different as any forced thing is different from the thing that comes of itself.

But Mildred seemed happy. He had thought about it—what he ought to do—until it was like something worn down, in which his thinking could no longer take fresh hold. And perhaps that was why his mind broke queer new paths, tangled, twisting paths of wondering and questionings, until he was not even sure that Johnnie was to be despised. Anyway, wouldn’t he just make things worse, as the other people did when they felt it their duty to make things better? Mildred might rather be unenlightened and happy than desolately know all. People who thought the truth always should be told didn’t always figure out just where the truth was going to leave the person who was being blessed with it.

But one day he had a jolt—a jolt which muddled him all up again. His mother was ill, and when he came home that afternoon he found Mildred there, as his mother laughingly put it. “cheering the bedridden.”

He wasn’t bedridden, but he was cheered. Mildred was more as she used to be, and as she was leaving, she very pleasantly astonished him by proposing that he walk home with her.

But they got along less well alone. There were pauses. Soon they were making talk. He saw that Mildred was troubled about something. Finally she came right out with it. “Walter,” she asked, “what’s the matter between you and Johnnie?”

He couldn’t for the life of him think what to do, so he did a stupid thing that enraged Mildred. “The matter between me and Johnnie?” he inquired, as if surprised that anyone should ask such a question.

“What’s the matter with you?” Mildred cried then. “The idea of trying to pretend! I tell you, you’ve changed, Walter. You used to be simple, and frank, and sincere.”

He supposed he was to infer that he was no longer any of those desirable things. It was rather amusing, he reflected without amusement, that Johnnie’s misdeeds should be destroying his character . Mildred seemed to feel she wasn’t doing what she had wanted to do, so more gently she began: “We’ve all been friends such a long time. Why do Johnnie and I have to lose your friendship because we’ve fallen in love with each other?”

“You haven’t lost my friendship,” he said.

“Pretty distant friendship it’s been this winter,” she laughed in a hurt way. Suddenly she looked at him very earnestly. “Walter,” she asked, “is anything wrong?”

It was straight from her to him, and she was again the girl who had sat close to him the night her mother died. Again she counted on him. And all the things he had felt about not interfering were now as unreal and trumped up as the scruples of people who felt it their duty to interfere had seemed trumped up. This holding back wasn’t the straight and simple thing. Mildred felt something wrong. If she felt it, wasn’t it there? Wasn’t it absurd to think a man could seem what he wasn’t, and that over this would fall no shadow of what he was?

In this moment, which her directness had cleared of all false things, that shadow fell between them, and he didn’t know any way of pretending it wasn’t there. So it was a long moment of pause, and he had not denied that something was wrong. The troubled look deepened in Mildred’s eyes. Suddenly it was as if the shadow took life. They had come to a halt right by one of the subway stations. Johnnie came running up the stairs from a downtown train. They were standing there as if waiting for him.

He started to say “Hello,” but saw their faces and didn’t say it. Instead of speaking, he merely joined their pause, that pause in which fears and facts not spoken took form and life. Suddenly, her voice taut, Mildred said, “I’ll leave you two together,” and turned toward home. They watched her go from them very fast, her head down.

Still they stood there. Then, as if by common consent—or, rather, by common compulsion—they looked at each other. And as they looked at each other, they both looked at that night they had faced death together. And each knew the other was looking at it. All their little evasions seemed paltry things before this force which made them look at what they had tried to ignore.

It was Johnnie who broke from it first. “Mildred told me you wanted to marry her yourself!” he cried, and everything about him was like a man fighting for his life and not going to let anything stand between. Once before Walter had seen him just like this.

And as if knowing he was a second time being like that, Johnnie suddenly rushed away, across the wide street, and Walter was left alone, standing just where Mildred had stopped him with her question, “Is anything wrong?”

Next morning it seemed to him things were about as wrong as they could be, for he got one of those big, stiff envelopes that invite you to a wedding. He opened it to find he was being asked to attend the marriage of Mildred Howe to John Richards. It came in the earliest mail. He felt sure it was after the invitations had been posted that Mildred impulsively came to see his mother and him, as if—oh, he didn’t know just what, but certainly as if something had turned her to them, as if, having stepped, she was afraid of the step she had taken.

A week went by, and nothing happened. It seemed now it was “up to them.” It had been opened up; he had not denied that there was something there. And when he didn’t hear, he decided that they had had it out between themselves. He hoped so. He didn’t see why he need be brought into it again. But he hated to hear the phone ring or to get his letters. And each day, when nothing happened, he reassured himself that Mildred and Johnnie had fixed it up themselves. He grimly told himself that everything must be all right, for the invitations had not been recalled.

But one night he sat near them at the opera, and as he watched their faces he knew that they hadn’t fixed it up between themselves. Mildred’s eyes met his, and for a moment it was as if the people in between weren’t there. It was not that her eyes called to him. They said rather: “Let me alone. I don’t want to know.” Quite plainly the hard brightness of her eyes said that before she turned with determined gaiety to the people with her. This gave him the worst hour he had had about the whole thing, for how could there he any security to happiness which had to hedge itself in like that?

During the last intermission he acted upon an impulse and went over and joined their party. He wanted, just by being there, to assure Mildred that he was her friend and that he wanted her to be happy. But a queer thing happened. As he sat with them, it was not Mildred he wanted to reach through silence. It was Johnnie. He wanted, very simply and with an intensity he did not understand, to give Johnnie his self-respect as he had once given him his life. He did not know how to do it, and so he said nothing, but in silence sat there wanting to do it.

Afterward he wondered if his wish might not have found its way through the silence. At any rate, about noon next day he got this telegram:

WALTER: BE AT MILDRED’S AT FIVE TODAY. IMPORTANT. DO NOT FAIL ME.

J. R.

All afternoon he tried not to think of it. He did a furious lot of work, trying to keep his mind engaged. But he heard it strike four, and then four-thirty, and after that there was no putting it off.

On the way uptown, the old irritation at Johnnie came back. What was Johnnie letting him in for? What business had he dragging him in like this, without asking if he might? He kept this irritation active; it wasn’t so bad as the deep dread he didn’t want to know was there. Mildred was alone. She had tea things out. That struck him as funny, and he was so nervous he almost laughed. But he didn’t feel like laughing after he’d been with Mildred a moment. She had got the tea things out just as he had tried to cover his deep shrinking with a petty grievance.

“Johnnie’ll be along in a minute or two,” she said in just a little too careful a voice. She did some things at the tea-table. “He thought it would be nice for us three to have a little visit together.” She looked up at Walter with a smile. But it was so strange, that smile, it only seemed to light the fear in her eyes.

“And so it will,” said Walter stoutly.

Abruptly Mildred inquired for his mother, and while they were still speaking of her, Johnnie came in.

After that there was no pretending, for Johnnie had stopped pretending. It was as if a light which had been thrown on him had been shifted, cruelly shifted, and without that witchery of right lighting, he looked the person who had done what he did. Mildred took a step toward him, then moved back.

There were no preliminaries.

“Walter,” said Johnnie, in a simple, tired way, “will you tell Mildred what happened the night the Alsitania went down?”

Walter jumped up angrily, glad to be angry. “Indeed I will not!” he cried and moved toward the door.

“Then I’ll have to do it,” said Johnnie, and let his head rest in his hands a moment, as if too tired to do it. “Sit down, Walter” he said, not looking at him, and with an indifference curiously authoritative. Walter looked at Mildred once, then didn’t look at her again while Johnnie was speaking. Nor did he look at Johnnie.

“Before I tell you what I did,” said Johnnie, in that voice of one too tired to care much about anything, “let me tell what I didn’t do. There was a man who swam to a life-raft that was full. They told him they couldn’t take on another. He looked around; there was nothing else near. He seemed very tired. He waited a moment, then said ‘Good luck!’ and swam away.”

He paused, as if thinking about that man. “The people on the raft told the story after the Capt. G. L. Smith had picked us up. They didn’t know who the man was. I don’t know what became of him.” Another pause. “I suppose he died.”

A maid came into an adjoining room and put a package on a table full of wedding presents. They watched her and waited till she went out.

“So much for what I didn’t do,” Johnnie said then. “What I did was about like this. Correct me, Walter, if I get it mixed. Walter and I were on the ship till almost the last. Then we had to jump, and we swam away, not to get pulled down. There was no one to pick us up. The fast swimming tired me. I expected to die.” There came into his voice the first feeling it had disclosed. “Then we saw something that had been thrown from the ship. A table. We got to it—I was first. It was light. I—I thought it was only good for one of us. So, as Walter was about to take hold, I—”

Again Walter jumped up. “I’ve had enough of this! I don’t know why I should have to listen to what a man did when he was crazy!”

“So when Walter tried to take hold of it,” Johnnie went on, “I—kicked him away.”

No one spoke; no one made any sound or looked at anyone else.

It was all wrong, that silence. Walter got the feeling that too much was happening in it, things we should struggle to keep from happening. He didn’t know what to do, but at last he moved his foot over the floor with a scraping sound.

Then Johnnie laughed; it, too, was a scraping sound. “Quite a joke, how the ‘Good luck’ story got fastened on me. Someone was telling of that man and telling I was on the boat, and some wild person—got it mixed.”

“And you didn’t—?” broke from Mildred.

Again a silence in which something seemed being sucked down. Walter was about to go. He didn’t want to stay there any longer, and if there was anything they could do, they could do it better without him. But before he went, he looked at Mildred, and by the woe of her face he measured her love for Johnnie. He couldn’t leave her to those silences, silences which judged and damned and in which the bright thing that held the chance for further living seemed pulled down to be destroyed.

But what to do? And then his mind did it—broke from those places too worn down for fresh thinking into the queer new paths, tangled, twisting paths that led from old judgments to new questionings. But his answer to that was to rise and take his hat from the table near him. Guide another where he did not know the way himself? He could not. And why should he? He wanted nothing but to get away. He had a right to get away. But again he looked at Mildred, the girl who came and sat close to him the night her mother died.

“Mildred,” he began, very quietly, “moments of great danger are queer things. They’re not at all as you would think they’d be.”

She looked at him, surprised at his tone but too desolate to care.

“And the interesting thing about it,” Walter went on. “is that they affect one person in one way, and another in quite another way. And I’m not sure that the way which results in the thing we call courage is necessarily—the finer way.”

Johnnie laughed.

Walter turned on him, angry at being scoffed at. But anger died as he saw the eyes of the man who had laughed, and more than ever he wanted to get away. To sit in the presence of shame—it made one sick. But just because it was so awful to be with humiliation, he couldn’t bring himself to go away leaving it there. It was a strange moment of mixed feeling, of resentment toward the responsibility he didn’t want to assume and couldn’t disclaim. This made his voice irritable as he broke out at Mildred:

“You talk about a brave man. You talk about a coward. How do you know who’s a brave man and who’s a coward? Can’t you see that your courage in letting a thing go has to be measured by the hold that thing has upon you? Has to be measured by the hold that thing has upon you at the moment?”

More quietly he went on: “Many men who face death aren’t really in life. The spirit of mercy does something to the imagination. But there are imaginations which”—he laughed a little—“which don’t take the anesthetic.”

Now he went slowly, feeling his way: “With me—connections cut. Isolated moment. But it wasn’t for Johnnie. Life got through—broke its opening—flooded the moment of death with a terrible sense of the beauty of life.” Eagerly he turned to Mildred. “Don’t you see? Life had him.”

They were both looking at him now. They were clinging to him. Suddenly he wanted to shake them off. He turned his back to them, not wanting to see that their hope lay through him, telling himself he had been fair now, had done enough. For this, at least, was not an isolated moment with Walter. He knew that he was outside the things for which he was compelled to speak. Why should those things have this authority over him when they left him out? He picked up a paperweight. It was a cat, a comfortably settled cat. He wanted to laugh. He pushed the thing back. He said to himself petulantly, “Let someone else speak.” And yet, standing with his back to them and looking at the silly eyes of the bronze cat, he saw Mildred’s eyes—love hurt and asking to be helped.

He turned. He looked at Johnnie. It wasn’t just Johnnie. Life hung its bright head. It was love of living which was ashamed; that gay, buoyant, charming thing was like a child left out in the cold.

“Can’t you see,” Walter began anew to Mildred, “that the beautiful things in us may make us do the thing in which there seems no beauty? What have you cared for in Johnnie? Imagination—sensitiveness. You’ve cared for his gaiety and gentleness, his charming response to life. You’ve cared for the very hold life has upon him. Well, then, you’ve got to stand for those things. And it’s stupid,” he went on, with a new flame of anger, “to judge a whole life by a—by a moment that’s standing on its head! Why should a moment of panic be more determining than any other moment? Let me tell you something, Mildred. Johnnie would seem to have failed me as a friend that night. I don’t think he failed me so badly as you failed me this winter. Why should you pick out that moment and say Johnnie wasn’t beautiful in friendship when all winter long, through thousands of usual moments, you haven’t been beautiful in friendship? Did you care to keep me—care enough to make an effort to understand? Before you judge Johnnie, look at yourself. Did you—give me a chance?

“And that other thing you’re thinking,” he hurried on, for his voice had choked up and he had to get through—“that Johnnie was a fraud. So he was. Most creative people are what you might call frauds. They build up a thing, and that thing is real to them—and they love it. It wasn’t a bit hard for Johnnie to feel he was that man—and to go a long way toward becoming him. So—oh, facts are limiting and stupid, and only feeling is real,” he concluded irritably.

But facts, it seemed, weren’t so easily talked away. Perhaps he couldn’t talk them away, and he didn’t know that he was going to stand there all night trying! He was going, but before he went he had one thing to say. “Mildred,” he said, “I think what Johnnie did this afternoon braver than anything done the night the Alsitania went down.” He was going to say more, but had an instinct to leave it for her to see herself. He gave it its chance in the silence that followed before he said “Goodbye” and moved to the door. From the door, he said. “Good luck.”

Johnnie rose. “I’ll go,” he said. “You—you stay with Mildred a while. Mildred,” he said, simply as could be, “don’t you see you’d better marry Walter? Don’t you see what an awfully decent sort he is?”

He tried to smile. And in that moment he was just a child from whom everything he loves has been taken, a brave child, trying to smile about it. Vain are words and futile argument! That look in Johnnie’s eyes—tired child trying to be brave—did what Walter’s reasoning hadn’t done and probably couldn’t do. Because he needed her beyond all way to tell his need of her, Mildred forgot herself and went to Johnnie. As Walter closed the door he heard her say, “I love you!” and by the fierce tenderness of her broken voice he knew their world would clear.

Yes, their world would clear, and Johnnie would be again his smiling, self-confident self. The sense of having at the last done the decent thing would carry him back to those delightful terms with himself which made him so pleasing to be with. Well, thank Heaven, it was over!

Walter walked slowly toward Riverside Drive. More and more tired, he sat down on a bench and watched the boats. They rested him. Because they were going to far places they took him out of himself and helped him forget what he had heard in Mildred’s voice—the love not for him. Other things, too, he wanted to forget. He had meant what he said that afternoon, but it had tired him, and he wanted now to be with simpler things. Looking at the boats made him think of plain men who went on boats and did brave things. As he thought of them, suddenly his eyes were full, his heart was warmer. Yes, he had meant what he said that afternoon, but you had to talk so much about it! Anyway, there was healing, in watching the boats and thinking of plain men who did brave things.

It was Walter now who was the tired child trying to be brave, and in this lonely moment something helped. It was good to know himself he had never told another—that it was he who said “Good luck” and swam away.

Good Housekeeping, Sep 1918

The Busy Duck

If Mora Arthur hadn’t been so pretty, of course we never would have stood for all her talk about the needs of her mind. She had deep dark-blue eyes which I think might honestly be called violet, and a woman with violet eyes has a great many privileges. She had soft curly hair. I liked to watch the dip it made round her ear. I would be thinking of this when tired of listening to her plan for furthering the working of her mind. It made it possible for me to listen a long time—and I presume Hastings and all the others had their little compensations. Anyway it doesn’t much matter what you say if you have a vibrant colorful voice for saying it. And she had such an intensity about the starved life of her mind that you felt it must end with “I love you!” It didn’t seem the kind of intensity that could be getting anywhere else.

She had come from a terrible home. She would tell us about it with a fury that made you feel she was beating her hands together. So passionate were the pictures she drew of this pinched childhood that I would have the feeling I must instantly get up and knock somebody down. It was the way her mouth quivered while her eyes blazed. Then, when I was away from flashing eye and grieving mouth and would turn over just what it was she had said, I would come to feel that perhaps, after all, such cases could be more calmly dealt with.

Her parents were rich and unintellectual—a terse and unemotional statement of the facts.

“To think of it!” Mora would cry. “When I think of those wasted years I could tear something apart!”

Dear me! We would all get terribly wrought up about it, quite unmindful of the fact that most of our own years were wasted ones.

“And so,” she would finish, plaintively, “you see what I have to make up for.”

The trouble was, she made up for it so unceasingly. You couldn’t venture upon an idea without getting Mora’s determined eye and knowing that she was now making up for some fraction of her wasted years. Then you would have to halt your idea to think about her need of it—not a condition in which your mind can function happily.

Functioning was a word of Mora’s. “My mind doesn’t function,” she would say in such angry distress that you would feel for your mind to go on doing what her mind couldn’t do was not the part of kindness or good manners. Whenever a really interesting idea was put forth, it left Mora indignant to think she had never heard this idea before. The night she met Hastings—a man of ideas—I walked home with her and she walked so fast I could scarcely keep up. She was absolutely outraged to think of how much had been withheld from her.

At her door I made a suggestion. “Don’t you think,” I said, “that it might be better now to think more about the idea itself and less about the fact that you never heard it before?”

She gave me the strangest look, getting this, and hard. Anything she got she or so hard that you almost hated to see her do it. “Why, yes!” she cried breathlessly, and laughed in her charming way. “Why—what a fool I am!”

“You’re like a horse,” I said “taken to a beautiful pasture, and so indignant to think of never having been taken to this pasture before that he can do nothing but run round snorting with indignation.”

“And never eating a thing!” cried Mora, in that way of hers which gave you the feeling she was clapping her hands. Seeing more in it, “Yes,” she said, very earnestly. Then, indignantly, “Now I never would have thought of that!” And then, seeing she was doing precisely what she had been admonished not to do, she laughed at herself as she said good night.

She was really a charming child; she was younger than the rest of us, and her eagerness and her fury had much the quality of a child’s. Of course, looks or no looks, we never would have put up with her if there hadn’t been that freshness and charm in the avidity. And no denying that we were a good deal flattered at her being so bowled over by our knowledge and originality.

She came into our group through Edna Moore, who writes a good deal about what women ought to be and aren’t. One night when I asked Edna to come to our place the next Sunday evening, to meet a fellow from South America who was lecturing at the university (no use trying any longer to conceal that I am a teacher), she asked: “Oh, could I bring poor starved little Mora Arthur? I’m trying to get her into a different atmosphere—poor dear.”

As I impolitely hesitated, not unfamiliar with the kind of woman Edna was trying to get in a different atmosphere, she added, “She won’t do a bit of harm.”

Now if there is anything you don’t want at your party it is a girl who won’t do a bit of harm. What Edna had said about the different atmosphere made me think this starved Mora Arthur was someone she had picked up on the East Side, and I hadn’t meant it to be that kind of a party. If you know people from South America, you will understand. So when Edna came in that evening with this young woman who knew so much more about coming in than Edna did, I was delighted to think there had been an exchange of prisoners, so to speak. And when she introduced me to Miss Arthur, of whom she had spoken, I wanted to say to Edna:

“Think you’re clever, don’t you?” But before I had a chance to ask Edna what she was up to, I rather came to see what she meant. There was something in the exquisite Miss Arthur’s attention as humble and as eager as I should have expected from the young woman I had been anticipating. I wish to say that those of us who are university people are the sort of university people who are always being suspected by universities, so an evening with us is not necessarily as dull as you may imagine. And many of my friends are people who maintain that universities and ideas have nothing in common—a position which I myself am inclined to think extreme. Anyway, that night people were talking interestingly, and suddenly I noticed that Miss Arthur’s face had flushed as if she were excited about something. When she bade me good night she said sternly:

“You have talked about things here tonight which I never knew existed!” and she who had entered like a young ladies’ finishing-school marched away, leaving her host in doubt as to her opinion of his hospitality. The more I thought about it the surer I was she had left in high dudgeon. I tried to recall what we had talked about that need send a young lady away offended. Of course Menger had gibed at marriage; but even in society isn’t that one of the ways of passing an evening? And had the young lady never been taken to the theater? It must have been the biological section of the conversation, when Door had such a good time explaining why certain Africans are what they are. But that was too dry to offend anyone. Finally I hit upon it. It was the facetious allusions to our unsuspected depravity as recently revealed through the study of our unconscious minds. Well next time she could stay away!

But when I saw Edna Moore she exclaimed, “My dear, it’s pitiful the time Mora Arthur had at your house the other night!”

“I don’t see that there was anything to get so huffy about,” said I, huffily.

“Huffy? Why, she’s at your feet! I should say, rather, she was at our throats demanding we give up all we had.”

“My mind needs this,” she would say, and with such simple fervor that it wasn’t as absurd as it must sound.

After all, there aren’t many people who can be naive about their minds. She was one human being who did actually treat ideas as realities. She would go anywhere to get them—take up with anyone. The trouble was, she treated them as the only realities. All the other things which enter into our estimates of people simply didn’t exist for her. She cared nothing about their morals or their clothes—not conscious of those extraneous things. She went about with me because she liked my mind and my friends. She told me so, not saying whether she liked me or not.

I lead what you might call a double life. At least there is a side of my life which is at loose ends, and at these loose ends are loose friends—people not tied to anything, people with a philosophy which sets them apart from a social order, men and women who not only carry their theories into personal relationships, but who have personal relationships as tests for theories. Some of them are tiresome frauds and some of them are the most brilliant people I know. One night I took Mora to a café where they hold forth, and after that I was compelled to go so often to this place that I would wonder how soon I was due to lose my position in the university. Mora simply ate them up—lapped them up, I want to say, for she always gave me the feeling of lapping up ideas.

And then she met Hastings. He’s the biggest person of that queer crowd. Well, he’s the biggest person I know. At least, now that I try to think of a bigger one and mull over the list of my distinguished friends, I don’t find anyone I can say matches Hastings. He sees things in new combinations which startle you out of old ones. He would be an important writer if only he would write. But he’d rather entertain himself thinking new things than bother himself writing down the ones already thought. He says that’s what makes writers so tiresome and unprofitable—they are always writing about a stale thing. And all they care about in a thing, according to Hastings, is what they can write from it. Exploiters of life—feeling, vision, the whole terror and splendor of life—something to write about. So it is not possible for writers to be pure souls. Hastings has no money, and he makes his living translating various impure souls who lived and wrote in Europe. This is to him a subordinate thing, not threatening his purity. He also does a little frankly subordinate writing—a sort of journalist of ideas. But the thing he cares about in himself—and has a right to care about—he doesn’t try to capitalize, or even capture. Laziness probably has something to do with it—impure souls really have to work. But those of us who know him get a lot from him—busily lapping. He’s splendidly prodigal, not having the slightest instinct for keeping ideas to himself in order to do something with them. What he cares about is his own satisfaction in seeing a thing. If you happen to be around while he’s seeing it you’re perfectly welcome to anything you can get out of it.

If Mora hadn’t met Hastings, I think she would have married me. Did I want to marry Mora? I don’t think I should have had much to say about it. Had she decided she could get more through me than from anyone else, she should have made up her mind to marry me, and her violet eyes would have put it through. But of course I’m nothing compared to Hastings. What she gets through me I got through somebody else. I just happened to get it before she did. Hastings creates. She perceived the difference quickly enough. One night, this after she had met Hastings two or three times, she stopped right in the middle of the street and cried:

“Why, it seems terrible to spend a moment away from him!”

Now you know most girls would never say that.

I suppose she came to see that the only way to save herself the pain of spending a moment away from him was to marry him. This wasn’t simple. Hastings was forty-five and had never married. He wasn’t at all for marriage. If there was anything he didn’t want it was someone who thought it terrible to spend a moment away from him.

I don’t think Mora would have got him if he hadn’t at this time got a cough. The thing surely would have amused Mora’s friends—those friends of her ill-spent youth—except that they would have been too outraged to be amused. Here was a beautiful well-brought-up girl of twenty-five, a girl with money and what they would call position, trying to marry a man almost twice her age, a penniless writer who had low associates, a ne’er-do-well who sat around and talked! And I am unable to conceive what they would have said (I fancy they would have been speechless) could they have known that the only reason she finally got him was that he contracted a cough which made it possible for her to persuade him he needed to be taken care of!

Mora’s father and mother were dead, which I think quite as well for them. Various aunts and cousins, who didn’t understand a thirst for ideas, made an ineffectual fuss about “the life she was leading.” A brother was what Mora called really troublesome at times, but to Mora these things simply weren’t considerations. She didn’t reject them—she didn’t have to! They just didn’t exist for her. The brother had this same singleness of purpose, only what he wanted was money—which, of course, makes him a great deal easier to understand.

So Mora turned her violet eyes up on Hastings, and there came a day when she said to me, “I’m taking John out of town.”

“Taking John out of town?” said I, dazed.

She nodded. “Think of a mind like that being threatened! Why, just think,” she expanded, in one of her bursts of fury, “what we should all lose if anything happened to him!”

I sat and stared. She struck me then as the most cold-blooded creature I had ever known.

“Do you mean that you’re going to marry Hastings, Mora?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said, indignantly.

“Does Hastings want to be married?” I asked, brutally.

She smiled. “He wants to be taken care of.”

“But, Mora,” I demanded, “are you in love with him?”

“I’m in love with his thinking.” she said.

“And you think that’s enough?” I scoffed.

“For me, yes.” She paused. “Because it’s all I care about.”

Upon my soul, I believe it was! The next day I thought all the things anyone naturally would think, and that evening I went to see Mora. But her brother was there, saying , in his fashion what I had been prepared to say in mine.

“But what does he do?” he of course demanded.

“He talks,” said Mora.

Her brother got up and moved from one chair to another, from that to the sofa, then stood up and whirled round.

“And you are going to marry a man because he talks?” he at last found it possible to say.

“What better reason for marrying a man?” asked Mora, quite honestly.

Then the brother talked. And no one would marry him for the way he talked then.

And then Mora talked. “Horace,” said she, “you married for money. I want something else and I am marrying for that thing. I congratulated you because you got what you wanted, though it isn’t at all what I want. You can’t do as much for me because you aren’t as practical as I am. So what is there for you to do but do nothing?”

Followed a few terse words about her life and her money being in her own hands. This being true, Horace took leave.

So did I, Horace having shown me how ridiculous you make yourself when you expend energy uselessly. But I was more practical than Horace; I made a little speech befitting the occasion.

“Mora,” I said, “I hope with all my heart that your intellectual development will be very happy.”

“Thank you,” said the betrothed one, happily.

Mora didn’t take John so far out of town as to make it impossible for us to go to see him. The first time I went saw Mora bearing milk to John, who was in the hammock. It would not seem there should be anything disgusting in the sight. A wife carrying a glass of milk to an ailing husband—a beautiful young wife at that—why should an uncared-for bachelor not see this as a happy domestic picture? But I had a moment of wanting to go back to town.

“Feeding him up,” thought I, sourly, “so he’ll talk. Give him a glass of milk—he may give you an idea.”

Quite so. Hastings was glad to see me in the mood for talking, and Mora sat by, getting visibly excited about her increasing wealth. It grew cooler and Mora went to the house for a rug. I was irritated by the way she came hurrying back with it—afraid she would miss something! And yet, she did go for it; so much subordination was her grasping little ego equal to. But, I considered a moment later, if she didn’t get the rug John might take a cold and cut off the supply of ideas for at least a week!

I suppose I’m unfair to her; in fact, I know I am—selecting these things from all the other things is a method as absurd as her own. Anyone not understanding Mora would have seen her as a charmingly interested woman, quite humble before her husband’s astonishing mind. But I did understand her, and I was so stirred up by what I understood that I set out to write an essay on Culture, the point of which was that you didn’t get it by trying to get it. I saw that this was not a new idea, though Mora made it seem new. I gave up the essay and thought about Mora, wondering why I was now so down on her. Of course there was the fact that she had selected the crumbs from Hastings’s table rather than from my own, but I should have been genuinely distressed had she not met Hastings and made up her mind to marry me. And after seeing her with her husband I was more than ever thankful I wasn’t the husband. It would get quite dreadful to have your thoughts hung upon like that. I should think it might in time reduce one to something like imbecility—just as a protection. Fortunately there was little danger of its doing that to Hastings. He was too absorbed in the world of his constant remaking to be aware of a lapping little mind on the outskirts. So far, at least, he hadn’t become enough aware of her to mind her. This unawareness was Mora’s salvation, as well as his own—saving her from being pushed to farther outskirts. I wondered if she would ever guess how little she mattered. And yet would she mind? It was Hastings’s counting for her that she cared about. A queer sort of egoist she was. She wasn’t vain; she didn’t want to show off. She wanted to have. I once knew a woman who wanted to have spoons. I never knew why she wanted to have them. She didn’t show them, she didn’t do anything with them, and, so far as I could see, they didn’t do anything to her. But the idea of there being a sort of spoon she didn’t have was torture to her. Well, at least no one could say Mora didn’t value the mind, and it seems odd a university man should be so upset by this trait.

As I had been all keyed up for writing something and the essay on Culture refused to be reborn, I wrote verses about a duck:

A duck, when first he saw the sea,

Cried, “This must all belong to me!”

To move it to his duck-yard pan,

He took a beakful and began.

He was too busy far to swim,

So light a thought unworth him;

From dawn till dark he waddled fast,

Because the sea was wet and vast.

His legs grew thin, his mind distrait,

His mother cried, “What is it, pray?”

“Oh, mother, do not bother me;

I’m busy bringing home the sea.”

This put me in so good a humor as to give me more kindly feelings toward Mora. Thinking of her as a perturbed duck made me enjoy going to see her. When about to be irritated by a too fervent manner I would murmur:

“From dawn till dark he waddled fast,

Because the sea was wet and vast,”

and straightway I would have the most amiable feelings in the world. Perhaps my method would not have the endorsement of our best social usages, and still anything that gives you more kindly feelings must have something to be said for it. Each visit would result in a new verse, as:

Deeper grew the path he wore

Between the duck-yard and the shore;

His beak it was a little thin

To fit the sea quite neatly in.

This might have become one of the longest poems in history had Hastings not grown so much worse as to make it necessary that Mora take him to the Southwest. I couldn’t write of her as a pop-eyed duck when her husband’s life was in question; some usages of my own saw to that, peculiar though her marriage had been. I missed the fussy duck; he had been such a companionable little absurdity.

Now my speculations about Mora took on a more serious character. You have to call it pretty hard luck. She was to give him a glass of milk, he give her an idea; now the balance shifts so that her giving the glass of milk is the enormously important thing. Many things may seem more important than living, but nothing remains important before the possibility of not going on living—quite in line with our general absurdity. In Mora’s eyes was the light of a fervent determination—the determination to get John well. I must say it was a light with which I was not unfamiliar; I had seen it in Mora’s eyes many times when she was trying to wrench an idea from my possession. This does not mean that the determination to get John well was less than it should be, but merely that it was impossible for her to be more determined now than she had been before, there being, after all, a limit to determination. She made no complaint; she was far too zealous for complaint; and I saw them off with the feeling that John would get well—he would simply have to, that being part of Mora’s program.

After they had been own there awhile I had a letter from him which worried me about Hastings and set me on a lot of new speculations about Mora. For Hastings wasn’t in that letter. The distinctive, the unique thing just wasn’t there. I never realized before what sickness can do to us. And Mora? How about it? I must confess I even went so far as to wonder whether Mora would stick. A monstrous wondering, I know, but monstrous, too, was her singleness of purpose. A sick husband might become one of the things which simply did not exist for her.

Later came a letter from Mora—very short, asking me to attend to something for her in New York, and beyond that saying only this:

“John hasn’t begun getting better. He is very sick.”

Most anything in feeling might be behind those terse sentences. I tried to see behind them.

Then another letter about a business matter, and only this which was personal:

“I think John is now beginning to get better.”

I was exasperated by this brevity. Again I tried to figure out the most likely reason for it. Trouble was, you could figure it several ways, and if you knew Mora, you might not interpret it in the most creditable to human nature.

One evening I met some interesting new people, one man, in particular, who could startle you out of stale thinking a little as Hastings used to. I came away all keyed up, and on the way home it occurred to me, “What a wonderful time Mora would have had tonight!” It brought up the old picture of the earnest duck, and I wondered what the indefatigable duck was doing now that there was so little to be indefatigable about. I got to thinking of Hastings, and it ended with my sitting down and writing them a report of the evening. I myself was much delighted with the letter. It was alive.

Mora’s reply bore witness that she was still Mora. She sent me a check and commanded I come to New Mexico at once! It was precisely Mora not to have any of the usual feelings, and not to have any idea of my having them—about the check, I mean. She said my mind was just what she and John needed. As she needed my mind, it was to her a perfectly normal matter, she having money and I not having it, that she buy the ticket which could take my mind to New Mexico. She said, in conclusion:

“Let nothing stand in the way of your coming. John needs you—and so do I.” I enjoyed the “so do I.” It was so like old times.

Well, I went. It was vacation-time—and why must one always go to Maine? Certainly, anything I could do for Hastings I should regard as time happily spent, and I had a curiosity to see what had really happened to Mora.

At first I couldn’t tell whether anything had really happened to her. She seemed older, she was quieter; she was like one who has been much alone, and alone with worry. And yet I told my self she had not changed fundamentally, that these were but matters of circumstance and only brushed the surface. What backed me up in this was the resolute light which had not died in her eyes; it was a deeper, a more intense light, but this was because she had been long biding her time. That first day I had the feeling that she was watching me, appraising. I would see her watching in her eager way when Hastings and I were talking, as if to see whether I was, after all, bringing as much as she had expected me to bring. Oh no, Mora had not changed!

The change in Hastings was the arresting thing. He was as one who has come back a long way, and he gave me a feeling that it was perhaps only a shadow of him which had come back. Through those first few days he was so much more like an invalid than he was like Hastings. He was pathetically glad to see me, and yet he seemed to be holding off from me. I wondered if it could be that the unique thing, that quality of his mind which was like a beam of sunlight darting through a veiled day like an escaped thing—had itself been caught in gray. I could not bear to think this, but in those first days no playing thing shot light and color into our talk.

Oddly enough—or should I say neatly enough?—it was a talk about death which brought Hastings to life. I was telling him of a theory one of the men at the university was working on, and suddenly we had it, that dancing beam which could play through another man’s thinking, lighting flaws, lighting beauty. Immediately the whole Hastings changed—exhilarated, confident, happy. Mora was there, but I was too delighted with the playing beam to give thought to her, beyond the amused thought that the busy duck was on the job, leaning forward with shining eyes, not going to let a thing escape! Then I forgot all about her—too interested.

I don’t know how long we talked, but finally I saw that Hastings was tired, and then I noticed that Mora was not there. I was surprised that I hadn’t known she was gone, but astounded at her doing such a thing! Mora leaving? when there were ideas to be had?

I went away, that Hastings might rest. They were living at the outskirts of a little town, in strange desert country which I didn’t know whether I liked or not. I walked along, still all aglow with the pleasure of my talk with Hastings. Ahead was a clump of those bushy things which grow in the desert, and as I made a turn, to go up the mound and sit there—I came upon Mora. Turned from me, she was lying there flat on the ground. I saw that she was crying.

I was too amazed to know what to do; but some sand slid down and Mora raised up and saw me.

She herself did not seem at all embarrassed by her red eyes. She smiled a little, then cried afresh.

“Why—Mora! Why—what did you go away for?” I asked, in the foolish way we try to make conversation with the weeping. “John was talking so wonderfully.”

“That’s why,” she gulped.

I couldn’t get my bearings, so I stayed still.

“I’d—waited too long,” said Mora, crying under her breath. “I’d—been too afraid.”

Well, that was possible, I suppose, given her preposterous intensity in having to have what she wanted.

“It’s nice to have him himself again,” I said, to fill in.

“Nice?” Mora stared at me, then laughed—a laugh which rather offended me, as if I were a person who could have no comprehension of how nice it was.

Then she jumped up. “I must go home. Did John seem tired?” She hurried along so fast it was hard to keep up with her.

As I thought of it I became increasingly puzzled. It wasn’t what she had done, erratic though that was; it was her eyes—a light in them which no amount of zeal in intellectual affairs could quite account for. And still, I assured myself, would not the intense duck become emotional if taken back to the sea after long away from it?

Next day something struck me that struck hard. Mora came in the room with a glass of milk for John. It brought back that other time when I saw her with the glass of milk and said to myself, “Give him a glass of milk, he may give you an idea.” But as she gave him this it struck me, hard, that she gave it as if expecting nothing in return.

Absurd! How could you tell a thing like that? Every time I thought upsetting things I scoffed at them. Mora was one person I understood. On my understanding of Mora I would build my church!

But my church seemed built upon one of those balanced boulders which startle you anew every time you look at them. John and Mora and I had a long talk that night, and after I went to my room it occurred to me we had been three people talking, not two people exchanging ideas and a third clutching at them as they passed. Another notion! It was merely that Mora was a little out of practice in snatching.

But two days later the really outrageous thing happened. Mora and I were out on the porch; we had been talking for an hour or more. Suddenly I jumped up and cried, in hurt astonishment:

“But, Mora, you’re a restful person!”

She was momentarily surprised at the violence of the attack, then smiled understandingly.

“But—but look here,” I thundered on, “what’s become of your mind?”

She smiled again; then her eyes went grave. She was looking over the desert, looking far, not thinking of me. Then she turned her rave eyes to me and said, simply, “I thought John was going to die.”

Her eyes—no, I can’t describe them. There’s a certain dumb look that leaves you dumb.

“So I didn’t care about anything else,” she finally said. “And after that,” she smiled, her face beautifully lighting, “oh, I knew I had the important thing, so—I could just take other things a little easier.”

Again she seemed to have forgotten me, and it was quite as well I should be forgotten! A balanced boulder had tumbled on my brain.

“But,” I finally began, “you cared about John for what John could give you. You were to give him a glass of milk,” I went on, with growing indignation, “and he was to give you an idea.”

Mora laughed. “And I got so interested in giving him the glass of milk—” She broke off, considered, then said, with something of her old eagerness, but not that thin, flurried eagerness: “Yes—how queer. You want something. You will do anything to get what you want—but what you do shapes you to a thing that wants something else. Why—what a mean trick!” But Mora laughed, as if it were a trick at which she could afford to laugh.

I did not laugh. I could not afford to. Things were all muddled up and I was indignantly trying to straighten them out. I went back and interpreted in the light I now had, and each time this present light illumined a past thing I would feel newly betrayed. That dumb look in Mora’s eyes told why Mora’s letters had been so brief. There are things we can’t talk about. Mora hadn’t sent me the check to come to New Mexico because she herself thirsted for new ideas. I had been peremptorily summoned because I might be just what was needed to bring John back to himself. She hadn’t watched me like a hawk to see whether my ideas were going to be worth their salt for her. I was just an other kind of glass of milk she could give John! And when she finally saw John himself again, she goes running away from what he has to offer to sob out her joy in merely seeing him himself!

Well, it served her quite right. Her means to an end proved a trap that had sprung, and in that trap serenely sat Mora, happily serving. She was so grasping that she had been willing to give in order to grasp, and then giving made her into something which was not grasping. One of life’s very neatest little tricks!

My indignation thus settled down into comfortable and not unfriendly gloating; but I wasn’t even left in peace with that. In the six weeks I was down there the wind was slowly taken out of the sails of my certitudes. I couldn’t even complacently think of Mora’s sweet womanliness as just punishment for her avidity, for each day it came home to me anew that, now that she had stopped lapping, she had begun getting. Her dreadful little lapping had dammed the tide. Now things had a chance to flow in. One day it came to me as quite preposterous that Mora actually thought. Fancy Mora taking time to think, and never worrying for fear she would miss something while taking this time off!

“Well, I must say, Mora,” I said to her, crossly, the last day I was there, “I never thought to see you become an interesting woman.”

“Do you think I am?” she asked, wistfully. “I want to be—because I want to interest John.”

Mora wanting to be something in order to give something! On what rock could one build a church? Perhaps the temple of truth would have to be a house-boat, and float.

This made me think of the wet, vast sea and the earnest duck, and so that last night I wrote out all the verses about the busy duck to leave as a farewell present for Mora. This might not seem a gracious return for hospitality, but I knew Mora would enjoy the picture of herself bearing the sea to her duck-yard pan.

But the poem seemed unfinished, and that wistful note in Mora’s voice made me want to write some new verses, leaving with her the picture of the hero triumphant. So thus the poem closes:

And then one day he stopped to swim,

It quite refreshed and changéd him.

“It is not good to move the sea;

I’ll leave it where it is,” said he.

So now he rides upon the waves,

And knows that ducks should not be slaves;

He contemplates the boundless sea,

And thinks, “This all belongs to me!”

Harper’s Magazine, Nov 1918

Pollen

“Ira will do it his own way,” Mrs. Mead used to say, and people believed her. They believed her because they knew Ira. “You have to let Ira alone,” was another of the sayings of Ira’s mother. And people did let him alone—again, because they knew Ira.

He had a way of not looking straight at you; not a sneaky way, but merely that, through some choice of his own, he didn’t come into direct communication with you. When you spoke you had a feeling that what you had said hadn’t come into direct communication with what he was thinking. Probably a man doesn’t have to be communicated with if he does not want to be, and as most of the people Ira knew were farmers, with a lean to the taciturn, and a feeling that it would be better if other folks minded their own business more than they did, Ira was not as much disliked as it would seem he would be—as indeed he would have been in another walk of life. He was, in fact, not a little respected for being so well able to get along without other people. “If you don’t say anything to him, he won’t say anything to you,” was their way of summing up Ira Mead, and he was not infrequently summed up as a reflection on some other person who would say something to you when you had said nothing to him.

He always seemed too preoccupied with what he was doing to pay much attention to what you were doing. Even as a little boy, he was a good deal like that. When the boys dammed the creek that ran through the Mead orchard, Ira, after a little, would go upstream and become much occupied with a dam of his own—a different sort of dam. He didn’t tell you his plans—either about catching a chicken or doing an example. “You don’t know what’s in his mind,” his mother said, and never really tried to find out—it being more impressive to regard him as unfathomable. Everyone, more or less, picked this up from her. Even Ira more or less picked it up.

When you are apart from others, what you do has to be superior to the works of others, else—why are you apart from them? Ira, going his own way, early acquired a proficiency in certain things. He could do amazing things by throwing his knife—so he threw his knife a great deal. He wasn’t good at leap-frog, so when leap-frog was being leaped he would be deep in some consideration of his own—to which he did not give voice. He was good in arithmetic and very poor at compositions. So he did arithmetic as though he had some respect for it, and as to essays gave the impression, not so much that he failed in them as that he withdrew himself from them.

When he grew older, and all the other boys had girls, he did not have a girl. You are not likely to have a girl if you have that way of saying nothing to her unless she says something to you. At least in that Birch Schoolhouse part of the county you weren’t likely to, for they were a bashful lot of girls, mostly patterning themselves after John Paxton’s girls, who, as was said of the eldest when she died, were modest and retiring. It was to one of these Paxton girls Ira almost said something even though she had said nothing. This was at the county fair, and he was going to ask Bertha Paxton to ride home with him. While he was still thinking about it, and about ready to do it, up came Joe Dietz and said, “Want to ride home behind my old nag?”—Joe’s old nag being a three-year-old that could go. Bertha pretended to be afraid, and said to Ira, “Where can I get my life insured?” which would have been Ira’s chance to say, “Come with me; you don’t need any insurance.” But this, alas! was all too true—and, Joe having the better horse, Ira became deeply absorbed in the activities of a certain machine—as one who had no concern with horses. And while he was still intently watching the machine, Bertha and Joe set out to find the charging “old nag.”

Bertha married Joe Dietz, and the bought the old Allen place to the north of the Meads’. Joe Dietz wasn’t much of a farmer. It was about this time that Ira Mead became more of a farmer than he had been. He took to spraying his trees and trying rotation of crops and doing things to the soil that had never been done to Mead soil before. In just a few years there was a great difference in the look of the Mead place and the look of the Dietz place.

Old Mr. Mead died, Ira’s sister married, his brother said he was going to get into a business the Lord didn’t have so much to do with (alluding to droughts and insect pests), and this he proceeded to do by moving to town and getting himself a job at the court-house. So there remained on the farm Ira and his mother. Ira was the pride of her life—and the thing she was proudest of was that you couldn’t reach him. Sometimes the Balches, whose place joined the Meads’ at the south, would come and ask Ira to parties—they were a great family for parties. “Well, I’ll tell him,” Mrs. Mead would say, and then to Ira: “Fred Balch was here, sayin’ everybody was to come to their place Saturday night. I told him I’d tell you.” On Saturday night Ira would have his books out, all taken up with some new thing you were to do to the soil, and when his mother would say, “Folks are goin’ by to the Balches’,” he would be too deep in his own occupations to give thought to her, or the Balches. And so she would say, with a gratified sigh, “I knew you wouldn’t go.”

When you don’t have anything to do with the people around you there grows in your mind the idea that there is something the matter with those people. “It’ll just bring them down on us,” was the way Ira and his mother disposed of every suggestion that entailed taking any matter up with the Balches. They even gave up the new fence because it might “bring them down on us.” More than likely, What the Balches would have come down with would have been an invitation to supper, but the Meads had this growing distrust of all things outside themselves.

So every bit of Ira went into the farm. The Balches, who didn’t care whether school kept or not, just so they had a good time, had a farm that was good enough if you didn’t know what a farm might be. To the north of him, Joe Dietz had a place that was running downhill, because Joe, as they said, didn’t have it in his bones to be a farmer. One day Ira saw Bertha Dietz standing by her south line, looking from her potato-field over to his.

“Those are fine potatoes of yours, Ira,” she called, in a friendly way.

“Well—they’re comin’ along,” granted Ira.

“Ours don’t seem to be doing much this year.”

For this Ira had no comment. He was not one to talk about a neighbor’s potatoes—even to telling the neighbor what he knew about draining the soil. It was five years now since Bertha Paxton had married Joe Dietz, and today she stood at the fence and saw that Ira’s potatoes were better than Joe’s. Ira wasn’t one to look an idea in the face any straighter than he looked a person. He didn’t consider that for five years he had worked for some such satisfaction as this, and so didn’t have to consider just how satisfying the moment was. Bertha’s little boy came running out after her. On his way back to the barn Ira jerked the horses’ mouths in a way not his wont. Thank Heaven he didn’t have any children to run screaming around the place!

To make his own thing perfect seemed a way of showing he needed nothing from without. Not that he and his program ever came face to face with each other. But more and more he let other folks alone, and he did his work better than the others did theirs. The thing he came to care most about was the corn. Corn was a thing to make a special appeal to a man who wanted to make his own thing perfect. It thanked you for what you did for it. It recorded your proficiency. He gave it the best soil there could be for it—rich, pulverized. He learned just when to put it out, just how deep to cultivate. He found out by trying what it would do in rows and what it would do in hills. As he planted it, sometimes without knowing he was going to say them, he would repeat lines his father used to say, one of those verses which were the old way of handing down teaching about planting:

“Four seeds I drop in every hill;

One for the worm to harm,

One for the frost to kill,

And two for the barn.”

His father had learned it, when a little boy, from his father; and when that other little boy—his father’s father—came to this Middle Western country he found the maize which the Indians were cultivating. In planting his corn Ira would sometimes find himself thinking back to the Indians. As he did things over and over the movements made for themselves a sort of rhythm, and it was as if this rhythm swung him into all that was back of him. He was less awkward at such times; he seemed less a figure outside all other things. They had never been able to interest Ira Mead in politics, and certainly he wasn’t one to sit around and talk about his country, but sometimes as he listened to his whispering field of corn he would think with a queer satisfaction that corn was American. It was here before we were; it was of the very soil of America—something bequeathed us which we carried along. He would think of all that corn did—things that could go on because of it. And then he would wonder, with a superiority in which there was a queer tinge of affection, what those Indians who had perhaps tended maize in this very field would say if they could see one of his ears of corn. Perhaps it was because he would like to have them see his corn that he sometimes had a feeling they were there. Such thoughts once in a while broke into his mind, things that said something to him even though he had said nothing to them. To the south of him, at the Balches’, where there was so often a lively crowd of young folks, where they played the piano and danced, where girls and fellows wandered around when it was moonlight—and when it wasn’t—they laughed about Ira Mead, and one gay, bold girl wondered what he’d do if she’d up and kiss him! If anybody had hinted that he had his own substratum of romance—a romance of the race, a growth of passion that seeped up under the walls which shut him in, they would have looked blank and said, “Ira Mead?” For more and more he touched that circle of life which was the Balches’ at an angle which seemed to be sending him off by himself. There was Mary Balch, gay like the rest—and then something beside gay. She had a way of saying his name—no one had ever said his name like that before. Everyone else said it all in one breath—which seemed to make it the name of a person who naturally would be by himself. But Mary Balch said it almost as if it were in a song. “Why, hello, I—ra!” she’d say, sliding down from the I to the ra in a way—well, in a way that didn’t get right out of your mind. And it was because he didn’t get it right out of his mind that he became the more preoccupied with the things he was doing by himself—just as he used to be all taken up with some other thing when leap-frog was going on. He excelled in social races as little as he had excelled in hurdling other boys’ backs, and there was this thing in him which kept him from appearing to want to do what he couldn’t do well.

To the north of him, at the Dietzes’, they’d say, when the children were bad, “Maybe you’d like us to give you to Mr. Mead?” and the children howled loudly and were good. Mr. Mead appeared all a child would not ask in a father. He did not talk to them; he did not look at them. If they said anything to him, he did not hear them. And when children speak and it is as if they hadn’t spoken—yes, indeed they’d rather be good. They were afraid of him. He was always around alone, and he was always looking the other way.

All Dietzes would have opened wide their eyes at the idea that Ira Mead had that sense of what has been and what may be in which is rooted the instinct of fatherhood. “Some joke!” Dietzes would reply. “Why, all he cares about’s corn!”

It did go to corn. He found he could create new varieties of corn. By carefully selecting the seed he could produce corn that was unlike the other corn. This was more exciting than there might seem any reason for its being. To study his seed—compare, reject; choosing that which was best, or those kernels of new life which had in common interesting differences from the old life; then to give soil the care that would give seed every chance, to watch over it when it began to grow, guarding it from all that could hurt its health, giving it those things which would let it realize its possibilities to the utmost—to do this was something more than doing his work well—though it was also the incontrovertible testimony that he did do his work well. The corn proved Ira Mead’s supremacy over Balches and Dietzes and all the other people around there. After he had been experimenting with corn for a couple of years he exhibited it at the state fair, where it made no little commotion, and was pronounced a new variety of corn, and called Mead corn.

The night after he got the letter giving an award to Mead corn he didn’t seem to want to sit inside with his mother, and thought of things to do that took him out. He went down to the barn, to make sure that he had closed the door. He stood before a full corn-bin—corn bigger and better than any corn around. He wandered down into the field, where his late corn still grew. This was a starry night—still, except for a slight breeze that set the corn to talking. He stood still and listened to it. Why was it that it seemed to run such a long way back, and to take in so many things? He walked along between the corn until he had come to the place where his corn stopped and the Balches’ corn began. And where his corn stopped and Balch corn began, big corn stopped and runty corn began. As he stood there remarking the difference he heard a laugh—not close at hand, but up by the Balches’ house—a girl’s laugh borne on the south west wind that carried from Balches’ to him. It came again, Mary Balch’s laugh—like that little way she had in saying his name, a soft sliding from one thing to another thing. Then came a man’s laugh.

The man at the dividing-line sharply turned toward home. He was thankful he didn’t have to have anything to do with slack folks like the Balches. He should think they’d be ashamed of such corn! His rancor at them mounted, and on the way back the whispering corn did not seem to be taking in so many things… . He didn’t need neighbors—and he was glad he didn’t, being such neighbors as they were! On the way back he had not that open, affectionate way of regarding his corn. It was a sort of sideways, a calculated, gloating way; the love for the thing he had created narrowed into the shrewd determination to make this thing do something more for him. Before he went in the house he looked over toward the Dietzes’. It would be a long day before Joe Dietz created a new variety of corn! Created a new variety? Why, he didn’t know what to do with varieties that had been created for him! They said the Dietz place was mortgaged. No mortgage on his farm. He went to bed that night shut in with the resolve to make this corn do something for him. He’d bring it along and show what a man could do when he minded his own business and didn’t fritter his time and his mind away on—on this and that—on nothing.

A few days later he met Fred Balch on the road. “Like to get some seed from you if I can,” he called. “Think I’ll try a little Mead corn myself.”

The originator of Mead corn seemed to be considering things which this thing only remotely touched. “Guess it’s all spoke for this year,” he said, and drove on.

Suppose he had let him have some—he went over it to himself, more directly in touch with the thought than his manner had indicated. What would he make of it? What did he know about growing corn? And so with arguments he guarded jealously this chance to have a thing that was better than the thing around him, fought with himself for this way of showing everyone—of showing himself—he needed nothing from without.

Ira Mead was now thirty years old. He seemed older than that. He himself was like an ear of corn that has fertilized itself too long and needs the golden dust from other corn to bring new life. The next year he threw all his energies into bringing Mead corn up to an even higher standard than it had had when he showed it to the world. So he watched over it carefully, and there were things that worried him—things he seemed powerless to do anything about. The Bulk of his ground he had of course planted for crop—there would be thirty-nine acres of Mead corn to sell in the fall. But there was an acre he kept for experiment—to see what Mead corn would go on doing, a plot for adventures in cross-fertilization. But the trouble was, the adventures were not all of his ordering. Corn was not at all like Ira Mead. It associated with other corn. You could fairly see it doing it. He stood one afternoon and watched the golden dust go through the air on a day of sunshine and wind—pollen from his standardized Mead corn blowing over and fertilizing his experiment corn, whose cross-fertilization he himself wanted to direct. There it came—procreate golden dust, the male flower that was in the tassel blowing over to the female flower hidden in the ear. From the depth of a bitter isolation Ira Mead hated this golden dust. Hated it and hated it impotently. For what could he do about it? Winds blew and carried seed. Winds blew and brought the life that changed other life. “Damn sociable stuff!” he said, with anger that a little astonished him.

Of course, certain things he could do. Next year he would give his corn for experiment a place farther away from other corn. He selected a place up near the house where this corn would have no neighbors. But there were other things that worried him all through this year of careful watching of his corn. There was not that year a perfect crop of Mead corn. Part of it was inferior. That part of it which was inferior was the part which grew nearest the Balches’ corn.

He tried not to know this. It was too thwarting a thing for a man like Ira Mead to recognize if there was any way of keeping from recognizing it. He’d say, “Now I wonder what’s the matter with this soil?” and under his plans for the further enrichment of the soil he’d bury what it foiled his life to know.

It was from the other side of the fence, speaking both literally and not so literally, that the truth came as if blown by wind. One day, in husking-time, he was at work over near the Dietzes’. The Dietzes were in their field. And he heard a pleased, excited voice call:

“Why, Joe! Just look at this ear of corn! Down at this end the corn’s fine.”

Truth came as if borne by wind. He stood quite still, as if knowing now there was nothing he could do, and into his sterile mind it came—it came! As if it were the golden dust that brought new life, it came. It was Bertha Dietz who cried, “Down at this end the corn’s fine!”—Bertha Paxton, who had married Joe Dietz. He had wanted to make his thing perfect that he might have what she couldn’t have. And now, because he had it, she had it, too. And he couldn’t help this. As the wind goes on blowing, it came—it came! The Balches were south of him, and a little to the west. The prevailing wind was southwest. Pollen from the Balches’ corn blew over and hurt his corn. The Dietzes were north of him, and this end of the field, to the east. Pollen from the Mead corn went over and enriched the Dietz corn. And he couldn’t help this.

He stood there within his corn—corn which was changed by the corn around it, corn which impressed itself upon the corn around it. And suddenly, not knowing he was going to do it, he had twisted a stalk of corn until it snapped. Without knowing it was coming, there was suddenly that anger which makes men kill. He wanted to be let alone. He wanted to keep to himself. Hadn’t a man a right to do that? He dug his boot into the ground where corn was rooted, wanting to hurt—hurt the corn, the earth, those things that wouldn’t let him be what he wanted to be! His closed-in years fought for what closed-in years had made him as only a trapped thing will fight.

But the wind moved the corn and the corn responded—swayed, spoke. The torn stalk he clenched drop ed from his hand. When you fight things larger than you, you only know that you are small. Because they were so much larger than he, he could let himself go with them—only a fool will fight the winds that blow. He thought. For the first time in his whole life, without trying to limit his thinking, he thought. The corn … men … nations… . And he couldn’t help this. It was that released him as wind releases life for other life.

That evening he put some seed corn in a basket. He took up his hat.

“Why, where you goin’?” asked his mother.

“To the Balches’.”

“To the Balches’?”

“To the Balches’.”

“But—what you goin’ to the Balches’ for?”

“To take them seed and tell them what I know about raising corn.”

The old woman looked at her son—he who never said anything to you unless you said something to him.

“Why—what you goin’ to do that for?” she asked, weakly.

“Because I can’t have good corn while their corn’s poor.”

It was not, after all, easy to go to the Balches’. His whole life made it hard for him to go, and tried to turn him back. But what he had last said to his mother was saying itself to him, “I can’t have good corn while their corn’s poor.” He found himself stepping to the swing of it, and that somehow kept him from turning back. He moved to this now as he used to move to the old verses his father had taught him about planting. A new rhythm…. His own creation.

It took him right up to the door. He knocked. The door opened and took him into a circle of light. And, after her first astonished moment, Mary Balch was saying, in her voice like sunshine and wind:

“Why, hel-lo, I—ra!”

Harper’s Magazine, Mar 1919

“Government Goat”

Joe Doane couldn’t get to sleep. On one side of him a family were crying because their man was dead, and on the other side a man was celebrating because he was alive.

When he couldn’t any longer stand the wails of the Cadaras, Joe moved from his bedroom to the lounge in the sitting-room. But the lounge in the sitting-room, beside making his neck go in a way no neck wants to go, brought him too close to Ignace Silva’s rejoicings in not having been in one of the dories that turned over when the schooner Lillie-Bennie was caught in the squall last Tuesday afternoon and unable to gather all her men back from the dories before the sea gathered them. Joe Cadara was in a boat that hadn’t made it—hence the wails to the left of the Doanes, for Joe Cadara left a wife and four children and they had plenty of friends who could cry, too. But Ignace Silva—more’s the pity, for at two o’clock in the morning you like to wish the person who is keeping you awake was dead—got back to the vessel. So tonight his friends were there with bottles, for when a man might be dead certainly the least you can do is to take notice of him by getting him drunk.

People weren’t sleeping in Cape’s End that night. Those who were neither mourning nor rejoicing were being kept awake by mourners or rejoicers. All the vile, diluted whiskey that could be bought on the quiet was in use for the deadening or the heightening of emotion. Joe Doane found himself wishing he had a drink. He’d like to stop thinking about dead fishermen—and hearing live ones. Everybody had been all strung up for two days ever since word came from Boston that the Lillie-Bennie was one of the boats “caught.”

They didn’t know until the Lillie-Bennie came in that afternoon just how many of her men she was bringing back with her. They were all out on Long Wharf to watch her come in and to see who would come ashore—and who wouldn’t. Women were there, and lots of children. Some of these sets of a woman and children went away with a man, holding on to him and laughing, or perhaps looking foolish to think they had ever supposed he could be dead. Others went away as they had come—maybe very still, maybe crying. There were old men who came away carrying things that had belonged to sons who weren’t coming ashore. It was all a good deal like a movie—only it didn’t rest you.

So he needed sleep, he petulantly told things as he rubbed the back of his neck, wondered why lounges were made like that, and turned over. But instead of sleeping, he thought about Joe Cadara. They were friendly thoughts he had about Joe Cadara; much more friendly than the thoughts he was having about Ignace Silva. For one thing, Joe wasn’t making any noise. Even when he was alive, Joe had made little noise. He always had his job on a vessel; he’d come up the Front street in his oilskins, turn in at his little red house, come out after a while and hoe in his garden or patch his woodshed, sit out on the wharf and listen to what Ignace Silva and other loud-mouthed Portuguese had to say—back to his little red house. He—well, he was a good deal like the sea. It came in, it went out. On Joe Cadara’s last trip in, Joe Doane met him just as he was starting out. “Well, Joe,” says Joe Doane, “off again?” “Off again,” said Joe Cadara, and that was about all there seemed to be to it. He could see him going down the street—short, stocky, slow, dumb. By dumb he meant—oh, dumb like the sea was dumb—just going on doing it. And now—

All of a sudden he couldn’t stand Ignace Silva. “Hell!” roared Joe Doane from the window, “don’t you know a man’s dead?” In an instant the only thing you could hear was the sea. In—Out—

Then he went back to his bedroom. “I’m not sleeping either,” said his wife—the way people are quick to make it plain they’re as bad off as the next one.

At first it seemed to be still at the Cadaras. The children had gone to sleep—so had the friends. Only one sound now where there had been many before. And that seemed to come out of the sea. You got it after a wave broke—as it was dying out. In that little letup between an in, an out, you knew that Mrs. Cadara had not gone to sleep, you knew that Mrs. Cadara was crying because Joe Cadara was dead in the sea.

So Joe Doane and his wife Mary lay there and listened to Annie Cadara crying for her husband, Joe Cadara.

Finally Mrs. Doane raised on her pillow and sighed. “Well, I suppose she wonders what she’ll do now—those four children.”

He could see Joe Cadara’s back going down the Front street—broad, slow, dumb. “And I suppose,” he said, as if speaking for something that had perhaps never spoken for itself, “that she feels bad because she’ll never see him again.”

“Why, of course she does,” said his wife impatiently, as if he had contradicted something she had said.

But after usurping his thought she went right back to her own. “I don’t see how she will get along. I suppose we’ll have to help them some.”

Joe Doane lay there still. He couldn’t help anybody much—more was the pity. He had his own three children—and you could be a Doane without having money to help with—though some people didn’t get that through their heads. Things used to be different with the Doanes. When the tide’s in and you awake at three in the morning it all gets a good deal like the sea—at least with Joe Doane it did now. His grandfather, Ebenezer Doane, the whaling captain—In—Out—Silas Doane—a fleet of vessels off the Grand Banks—In—Out—All the Doanes. They had helped make the Cape, but—In—Out—Suddenly Joe laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” demanded his wife.

“I was just laughing,” said Joe, “to think what those old Doanes would say if they could see us.”

“Well, it’s not anything to laugh at,” said Mrs. Doane.

“Why, I think it is,” good-humoredly insisted her husband, “it’s such a joke on them.”

“If it’s a joke,” said Mrs. Doane firmly, “it’s not on them.”

He wasn’t sure just who the joke was on. He lay thinking about it. At three in the morning, when you can’t sleep and the tide’s in, you might get it mixed—who the joke was on.

But, no, the joke was on them, that they’d had their long slow deep In—Out—their whaling and their fleets, and that what came after was him—a tinkerer with other men’s boats, a ship’s carpenter who’d even work on houses. “Get Joe Doane to do it for you.” And glad enough was Joe Doane to do it. And a Portagee livin’ to either side of him!

He laughed. “You’ve got a funny idea of what’s a joke,” his wife said indignantly.

That seemed to be so. Things he saw as jokes weren’t jokes to anybody else. Maybe that was why he sometimes seemed to be all by himself. He was beginning to get lost in an In—Out. Faintly he could hear Mrs. Cadara crying—Joe Cadara was in the sea, and faintly he heard his wife saying, “I suppose Agnes Cadara could wear Myrtie’s shoes, only—the way things are, seems Myrtie’s got to wear out her own shoes.”

Next day when he came home at noon—he was at work then helping Ed. Davis put a new coat on Still’s store—he found his two boys—the boys were younger than Myrtie—pressed against the picket fence that separated Doanes from Cadaras.

“What those kids up to?” he asked his wife, while he washed up for dinner.

“Oh, they just want to see,” she answered, speaking into the oven.

“See what?” he demanded; but this Mrs. Doane regarded as either too obvious or too difficult to answer, so he went to the door and called, “Joe! Edgar!”

“What you kids rubberin’ at?” he demanded.

Young Joe dug with his toe. “The Cadaras have got a lot of company,” said he.

“They’re crying!” triumphantly announced the younger and more truthful Edgar.

“Well, suppose they are? They got a right to cry in their own house, ain’t they? Let the Cadaras be. Find some fun at home.”

The boys didn’t seem to think this funny, nor did Mrs. Doane, but the father was chuckling to himself as they sat down to their baked flounder.

But to let the Cadaras be and find some fun at home became harder and harder to do. The Lillie-Bennie had lost her men in early Summer and the town was as full of Summer folk as the harbor was of whiting. There had never been a great deal for Summer folk to do in Cape’s End, and so the Disaster was no disaster to the Summer’s entertainment. In other words, Summer folk called upon the Cadaras. The young Doanes spent much of their time against the picket fence; sometimes young Cadaras would come out and graciously enlighten them. “A woman she brought my mother a black dress.” Or, “A lady and two little boys came in automobile and brought me a kiddie-car and white pants.” One day Joe Doane came home from work and found his youngest child crying because Tony Cadara wouldn’t lend him the kiddie-car. This was a reversal of things; heretofore Cadaras had cried for the belongings of the Doanes. Joe laughed about it, and told Edgar to cheer up, and maybe he’d have a kiddie-car himself someday—and meanwhile he had a pa.

Agnes Cadara and Myrtie Doane were about of an age. They were in the same class in high school. One day when Joe Doane was pulling in his dory after being out doing some repairs on the Lillie-Bennie he saw a beautiful young lady standing on the Cadaras’ bulkhead. Her back was to him, but you were sure she was beautiful. She had the look of someone from away, but not like the usual run of Summer folk. Myrtie was standing looking over at this distinguished person.

“Who’s that?” Joe asked of her.

“Why,” said Myrtie, in an awed whisper, “it’s Agnes Cadara—in her mourning.”

Until she turned around, he wouldn’t believe it. “Well,” said he to Myrtie, “it’s a pity more women haven’t got something to mourn about.”

“Yes,” breathed Myrtie, “isn’t she wonderful?”

Agnes’s mourning had been given her by young Mrs. MacCrea who lived up on the hill and was herself just finishing mourning. It seemed Mrs. MacCrea and Agnes were built a good deal alike—though you never would have suspected it before Agnes began to mourn. Mrs. MacCrea was from New York, and these clothes had been made by a woman Mrs. MacCrea called by her first name. Well, maybe she was a woman you’d call by her first name, but she certainly did have a way of making you look as if you weren’t native to the place you were born in. Before Agnes Cadara had anything to mourn about she was simply “one of those good-looking Portuguese girls.” There were too many of them in Cape’s End to get excited about any of them. One day he heard some women on the beach talking about how these clothes had “found” Agnes—as if she had been lost.

Mrs. MacCrea showed Agnes how to do her hair in a way that went with her clothes. One noon when Joe got home early because it rained and he couldn’t paint, when he went upstairs he saw Myrtie trying to do this to her hair. Well, it just couldn’t be done to Myrtie’s hair. Myrtie didn’t have hair you could do what you pleased with. She was all red in the face with trying, and being upset because she couldn’t do it. He had to laugh—and that didn’t help things a bit. So he said:

“Never mind, Myrtie, we can’t all go into mourning.”

“Well, I don’t care,” said Myrtie, sniffling, “it’s not fair.”

He had to laugh again and as she didn’t see what there was to laugh at, he had to try to console again. “Never mind, Myrt,” said he, “you’ve got one thing Agnes Cadara’s not got.”

“I’d like to know what,” said Myrtie, jerking at her hair.

He waited; funny she didn’t think of it herself. “Why—a father,” said he.

“Oh,” said Myrtie—the way you do when you don’t know what to say. And then, “Well—”

Again he waited—then laughed; waited again, then turned away.

Somebody gave Mrs. Cadara a fireless cooker. Mrs. Doane had no fireless cooker. So she had to stand all day over her hot stove—and this she spoke of often. “My supper’s in the fireless cooker,” Mrs. Cadara would say, and stay out in the cool yard, weeding her flowerbed bed. “It certainly would be nice to have one of those fireless cookers,” Mrs. Doane would say, as she put a meal on the table and wiped her brow with her apron.

“Well, why don’t you kill your husband?” Joe Doane would retort. “Now, if only you didn’t have a husband—you could have a fireless cooker.”

Jovially he would put the question, “Which would you rather have, a husband or a fireless cooker?” He would argue it out—and he would sometimes get them all to laughing, only the argument was never a very long one. One day it occurred to him that the debates were short because the others didn’t hold up their end. He was talking for the fireless cooker—if it was going to be a real debate, they ought to speak up for the husband. But there seemed to be so much less to be said for a husband than there was for a fireless cooker. This struck him as really quite funny, but it seemed it was a joke he had to enjoy by himself. Sometimes when he came home pretty tired—for you could get as tired at odd jobs as at jobs that weren’t odd—and heard all about what the Cadaras were that night to eat out of their fireless cooker, he would wish that someone else would do the joking. It was kind of tiresome doing it all by yourself—and kind of lonesome.

One morning he woke up feeling particularly rested and lively. He was going out to work on the Lillie-Bennie, and he always felt in better spirits when he was working on a boat.

It was a cool, fresh, sunny morning. He began a song—he had a way of making up songs. It was, “I’d rather be alive than dead.” He didn’t think of any more lines, so while he was getting into his clothes he kept singing this one, to a tune which became more and more stirring. He went over to the window by the looking-glass. From this window you looked over to the Cadaras. And then he saw that from the Cadaras a new arrival looked at him.

He stared. Then loud and long he laughed. He threw up the window and called, “Hello, there!”

The new arrival made no reply, unless a slight droop of the head could be called a reply.

“Well, you cap the climax!” called Joe Doane.

Young Doanes had discovered the addition to the Cadara family and came running out of the house.

“Pa!” Edgar called up to him, “the Cadaras have got a goat!”

“Well, do you know,” said his father, “I kind of suspected that was a goat.”

Young Cadaras came out of the house to let young Doanes know just what their privileges were to be with the goat—and what they weren’t. They could walk around and look at her; they were not to lead her by her rope.

“There’s no hope now,” said Joe, darkly shaking his head. “No man in his senses would buck up against a goat.”

The little Doanes wouldn’t come in and eat their breakfast. They’d rather stay out and walk round the goat.

“I think it’s too bad,” their mother sighed, “the kiddie-car and the ball-suit and the sailboat were enough for the children to bear—without this goat. It seems our children haven’t got any of the things the Cadaras have got.”

“Except—” said Joe, and waited for someone to fill it in. But no one did, so he filled it in with a laugh—a rather short laugh.

“Look out they don’t put you in the fireless cooker!” he called to the goat as he went off to work.

But he wasn’t joking when he came home at noon. He turned in at the front gate and the goat blocked his passage. The Cadaras had been willing to let the goat call upon the Doanes and graze while calling. “Get out of my way!” called Joe Doane in a surly way not like Joe Doane.

“Pa!” said young Joe in an awed whisper, “it’s a government goat.”

“What do I care if it is?” retorted his father. “Damn the government goat!”

Everyone fell back, as when blasphemy—as when treason—have been uttered. These Portuguese kids looking at him like that—as if they were part of the government and he outside. He was so mad that he bawled at Tony Cadara, “To hell with your government goat!”

From her side of the fence, Mrs. Cadara called, “Tony, you bring the goat right home,” as one who calls her child—and her goat—away from evil.

“And keep her there!” finished Joe Doane.

The Doanes ate their meal in stricken silence. Finally Doane burst out, “What’s the matter with you all? Such a fuss about the orderin’ off of a goat.”

“It’s a government goat,” lisped Edgar.

“It’s a government goat,” repeated his wife in a tense voice.

“What do you mean—government goat? There’s no such animal.”

But it seemed there was, the Cadaras had, not only the goat, but a book about the goat. The book was from the government. The government had raised the goat and had singled the Cadaras out as a family upon whom a government goat should be conferred. The Cadaras held her in trust for the government. Meanwhile they drank her milk.

“Tony Cadara said, if I’d dig clams for him this afternoon he’d let me help milk her tonight,” said young Joe.

This was too much. “Ain’t you kids got no spine? Kowtowing to them Portuguese because a few folks that’s sorry for them have made them presents. They’re ginnies. You’re Doanes.”

“I want a goat!” wailed Edgar. His father got up from the table.

“The children are all right,” said his wife, in her patient voice that made you impatient. “It’s natural for them to want a few of the things they see other children having.”

He’d get away! As he went through the shed he saw his line and picked it up. He’d go out on the breakwater—maybe he’d get some fish, at least have some peace.

The breakwater wasn’t very far down the beach from his house. He used to go out there every once in a while. Every once in a while he had a feeling he had to get by himself. It was half a mile long and of big rocks that had big gaps. You had to do some climbing—you could imagine you were in the mountains—and that made you feel far off and different. Only when the tide came in, the sea filled the gaps—then you had to “watch your step.”

He went way out and turned his back on the town and fished. He wasn’t to finish the work on the Lillie-Bennie. They said that morning they thought they’d have to send down the Cape for an “expert.” So he would probably go to work at the new cold storage—working with a lot of Portagee laborers. He wondered why things were this way with him. They seemed to have just happened so. When you should have had some money it didn’t come natural to do the things of people who have no money. The money went out of the “Bank” fishing about three years before his father sold his vessels. During those last three years Captain Silas Doane had spent all the money he had to keep things going, refusing to believe that the way of handling fish had changed and that the fishing between Cape’s End and the Grand Banks would no longer be what it had been. When he sold, he kept one vessel, and the next Winter she went ashore right across there on the northeast arm of the Cape. Joe Doane was aboard her that night. Myrtie was a baby then. It was of little Myrtie he thought when it seemed the vessel would pound herself to pieces before they could get off. He couldn’t be lost! He had to live and work so his little girl could have everything she wanted. After that the Doanes were without a vessel—and Doanes without a vessel were fish out of sea. They had never been folks to work on another man’s boat. He supposed he had never started any big new thing because it had always seemed he was just filling in between trips. A good many years had slipped by and he was still just putting in time. And it began to look as if there wasn’t going to be another trip.

Suddenly he had to laugh. Some joke on Joe Cadara! He could see him going down the Front street—broad, slow, dumb. Why, Joe Cadara thought his family needed him. He thought they got along because he made those trips. But had Joe Cadara ever been able to give his wife a fireless cooker? Had the government presented a goat to the Cadaras when Joe was there? Joe Doane sat out on the breakwater and laughed at the joke on Joe Cadara. When Agnes Cadara was a little girl she would run to meet her father when he came in from a trip. Joe Doane used to like to see the dash she made. But Agnes was just tickled to death with her mourning!

He sat there a long time—sat there until he didn’t know whether it was a joke or not. But he got two haddock and more whiting than he wanted to carry home. So he felt better. A man sometimes needed to get off by himself.

As he was turning in at home he saw Ignace Silva about to start out on a trip with Captain Gorspie. Silva thought he had to go. But Silva had been saved—and had his wife a fireless cooker? Suddenly Joe Doane called.

“Hey! Silva! You’re the government goat!”

The way Doane laughed made Silva know this was a joke; not having a joke of his own he just turned this one around and sent it back. “Government goat yourself!”

“Shouldn’t wonder,” returned Joe jovially.

He had every Doane laughing at supper that night. “Bear up! Bear up! True, you’ve got a father instead of a goat—but we’ve all got our cross! We all have our cross to bear!”

“Say!” said he after supper, “every woman, every kid, puts on a hat, and up we go to see if Ed. Smith might happen to have a soda.”

As they were starting out, he peered over at the Cadaras in mock surprise. “Why, what’s the matter with that goat? That goat don’t seem to be takin’ the Cadaras out for a soda.”

Next day he started to make a kiddie-car for Edgar. He promised Joe he’d make him a sailboat. But it was uphill work. The Cape’s End Summer folk gave a “Streets of Baghdad” and the “disaster families” got the proceeds. Then when the Summer folk began to go away it was quite natural to give what they didn’t want to take with them to a family that had had a disaster. The Doanes had had no disaster; anyway, the Doanes weren’t the kind of people you’d think of giving things to. True, Mr. Doane would sometimes come and put on your screen doors for you, but it was as if a neighbor had come in to lend a hand. A man who lives beside the sea and works on the land is not a picturesque figure. Then, in addition to being alive, Joe Doane wasn’t Portuguese. So the Cadaras got the underwear and the bats and preserves that weren’t to be taken back to town. No one father—certainly not a father without a steady job—could hope to compete with all that wouldn’t go into trunks.

Anyway, he couldn’t possibly make a goat. No wit or no kindness which emanated from him could do for his boys what that goat did for the Cadaras. Joe Doane came to throw an awful hate on the government goat. Portagees were only Portagees—yet they had the government goat. Why, there had been Doanes on that Cape for more than a hundred years. There had been times when everybody round there worked for the Doanes, but now the closest his boys could come to the government was beddin’ down the Cadaras’ government goat! Twenty-five years ago Cadaras had huddled in a hut on the God-forsaken Azores! If they knew there was a United States government, all they knew was that there was one. And now it was these Cadara kids were putting on airs to him about the government. He knew there was a joke behind all this, behind his getting so wrought up about it, but he would sit and watch that goat eat leaves in the vacant lot across from the Cadaras until the goat wasn’t just a goat. It was the turn things had taken. One day as he was sitting watching Tony Cadara milking his goat—wistful boys standing by—Ignace Silva, just in from a trip, called out, “Government goat yourself!” and laughed at he knew not what.

By God!—’twas true! A Doane without a vessel. A native who had let himself be crowded out by ignorant upstarts from a filthy dot in the sea! A man who hadn’t got his bearings in the turn things had taken. Of a family who had built up a place for other folks to grow fat in. Sure he was the government goat. By just being alive he kept his family from all the fancy things they might have if he was dead. Could you be more of a goat than that?

Agnes Cadara and Myrtie came up the street together. He had a feeling that Myrtie was set up because she was walking along with Agnes Cadara. Time had been when Agnes Cadara had hung around in order to go with Myrtie! Suddenly he thought of how his wife had said maybe Agnes Cadara could wear Myrtie’s shoes. He looked at Agnes Cadara’s feet—at Myrtie’s. Why, Myrtie looked like a kid from an orphan asylum walking along with the daughter of the big man of the town!

He got up and started toward town. He wouldn’t stand it! He’d show ’em! He’d buy Myrtie—Why, he’d buy Myrtie—! He put his hand in his pocket. Change from a dollar. The rest of the week’s pay had gone to Lou Hibbard for groceries. Well, he could hang it up at Wilkinson’s. He’d buy Myrtie——!

He came to a millinery store. There was a lot of black ribbon strewn around in the window. He stood and looked at it. Then he laughed. Just the thing!

“Cheer up, Myrt,” said he, when he got back home and presented it to her. “You can mourn a little. For that matter, you’ve got a little to mourn about.”

Myrtie took it doubtfully—then wound it round her throat. She liked it, and this made her father laugh. He laughed a long time—it was as if he didn’t want to be left without the sound of his laughing.

“There’s nothing so silly as to laugh when there’s nothing to laugh at,” his wife said finally.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Joe Doane.

“And while it’s very nice to make the children presents, in our circumstances it would be better to give them useful presents.”

“But what’s so useful as mourning?” demanded Doane. “Think of all Myrtie has got to mourn about. Poor, poor Myrtie—she’s got a father!”

You can say a thing until you think it’s so. You can say a thing until you make other people think it’s so. He joked about standing between them and a fireless cooker until he could see them thinking about it. All the time he hated his old job at the cold storage. A Doane had no business freezing fish. It was the business of a Doane to go out to sea and come home with a full vessel.

One day he broke through that old notion that Doanes didn’t work on other men’s boats and half in a joke proposed to Captain Cook that he fire a ginnie or two and give him a berth on the Elizabeth. And Bill Cook was rattled. Finally he laughed and said, “Why, Joe, you ought to be on your own vessel”—which was a way of saying he didn’t want him on his. Why didn’t he? Did they think because he hadn’t made a trip for so long that he wasn’t good for one? Did they think a Doane couldn’t take orders? Well, there weren’t many boats he would go on. Most of them in the harbor now were owned by Portuguese. He guessed it wouldn’t come natural to him to take orders from a Portagee—not at sea. He was taking orders from one now at the cold storage—but as the cold storage wasn’t where he belonged it didn’t make so much difference who he took orders from.

At the close of that day Bill Cook told him he ought to be on his own vessel, Joe Doane sat at the top of those steps which led from his house down to the sea and his thoughts were like the sails coming round the Point—slowly, in a procession, and from a long way off. His father’s boats used to come round that Point this same way. He was lonesome tonight. He felt half like an old man and half like a little boy.

Mrs. Cadara was standing over on the platform to the front of her house. She too was looking at the sails to the far side of the breakwater—sails coming home. He wondered if she was thinking about Joe Cadara—wishing he was on one of those boats. Did she ever think about Joe Cadara? Did she ever wish he would come home? He’d like to ask her. He’d like to know. When you went away and didn’t come back home, was all they thought about how they’d get along? And if they were getting along all right, was it true they’d just as soon be without you?

He got up. He had a sudden crazy feeling he wanted to fight for Joe Cadara. He wanted to go over there and say to that fireless cooker woman, “Trip after trip he made, in the cold and in the storm. He kept you warm and safe here at home. It was for you he went; it was to you he came back. And you’ll miss him yet. Think this is going to keep up? Think you’re going to interest those rich folks as much next year as you did this? Five years from now you’ll be on your knees with a brush to keep those kids warm and fed.”

He’d like to get the truth out of her! Somehow things wouldn’t seem so rotten if he could know that she sometimes lay in her bed at night and cried for Joe Cadara.

It was quiet tonight; all the Cadara children and all the Doanes were out looking for the government goat. The government goat was increasing her range. She seemed to know that, being a government goat, she was protected from harm. If a government goat comes in your yard, you are a little slow to fire a tin can at her—not knowing just how treasonous this may be. Nobody in Cape’s End knew the exact status of a government goat, and each one hesitated to ask for the very good reason that the person asked might know and you would then be exposed as one who knew less than someone else. So the government goat went about where she pleased, and tonight she had pleased to go far. It left the neighborhood quiet—the government goat having many guardians.

Joe Doane felt like saying something to Mrs. Cadara. Not the rough, wild thing he had wanted to say a moment before, but just say something to her. He and she were the only people around—children all away and his wife upstairs with a headache. He felt lonesome and he thought she looked that way—standing there against the sea in light that was getting dim. She and Joe Cadara used to sit out on that bulkhead. She moved toward him, as if she were lonesome and wanted to speak. On his side of the fence, he moved a little nearer her. She said,

“My, I hope the goat’s not lost!”

He said nothing.

“That goat, she’s so tame,” went on Joe Cadara’s wife with pride and affection, “she’ll follow anybody around like a dog.”

Joe Doane got up and went in the house.

It got so he didn’t talk much to anybody. He sometimes had jokes, for he’d laugh, but they were jokes he had all to himself and his laughing would come as a surprise and make others turn and stare at him. It made him seem off by himself, even when they were all sitting round the table. He laughed at things that weren’t things to laugh at, as when Myrtie said, “Agnes Cadara had a letter from Mrs. MacCrea and a mourning handkerchief.” And after he’d laughed at a thing like that which nobody else saw as a thing to laugh at, he’d sit and stare out at the water. “Do be cheerful,” his wife would say. He’d laugh at that.

But one day he burst out and said things. It was a Sunday afternoon and the Cadaras were all going to the cemetery. Every Sunday afternoon they went and took flowers to the stone that said, “Lost at Sea.” Agnes would call, “Come, Tony! We dress now for the cemetery,” in a way that made the Doane children feel that they had nothing at all to do. They filed out at the gate dressed in the best the Summer folk had left them and it seemed as if there were a fair, or a circus, and all the Doanes had to stay at home.

This afternoon he didn’t know they were going until he saw Myrtie at the window. He wondered what she could be looking at as if she wanted it so much. When he saw, he had to laugh.

“Why, Myrt,” said he, “you can go to the cemetery if you want to. There are lots of Doanes there. Go on and pay them a visit.”

“I’m sure they’d be real glad to see you,” he went on, as she stood there doubtfully. “I doubt if anybody has visited them for a long time. You could visit your great-grandfather, Ebenezer Doane. Whales were so afraid of that man that they’d send word around from sea to sea that he was coming. And Lucy Doane is there—Ebenezer’s wife. Lucy Doane was a woman who took what she wanted. Maybe the whales were afraid of Ebenezer—but Lucy wasn’t. There was a dispute between her and her brother about a quilt of their mother’s, and in the dead of night she went into his house and took it off him while he slept. Spunk up! Be like the old Doanes! Go to the cemetery and wander around from grave to grave while the Cadaras are standin’ by their one stone! My father—he’d be glad to see you. Why, if he was alive now—if Captain Silas Doane was here, he’d let the Cadaras know whether they could walk on the sidewalk or whether they were to go in the street!”

Myrtie was interested, but after a moment she turned away. “You only go for near relatives,” she sighed.

He stood staring at the place where she had been. He laughed; stopped the laugh; stood there staring. “You only go for near relatives.” Slowly he turned and walked out of the house. The government goat, left home alone, came up to him as if she thought she’d take a walk too.

“Go to hell!” said Joe Doane, and his voice showed that inside he was crying.

Head down, he walked along the beach as far as the breakwater. He started out on it, not thinking of what he was doing. So the only thing he could do for Myrtie was give her a reason for going to the cemetery. She wanted him in the cemetery—so she’d have some place to go on Sunday afternoons! She could wear black then—all black, not just a ribbon round her neck. Suddenly he stood still. Would she have any black to wear? He had thought of a joke before which all other jokes he had ever thought of were small and sick. Suppose he were to take himself out of the way and then they didn’t get the things they thought they’d have in place of him? He walked on fast—fast and crafty, picking his way among the smaller stones in between the giant stones in a fast, sure way he never could have picked it had he been thinking of where he went. He went along like a cat who is going to get a mouse. And in him grew this giant joke. Who’d give them the fireless cooker? Would it come into anybody’s head to give young Joe Doane a sailboat just because his father was dead? They’d rather have a goat than a father. But suppose they were to lose the father and get no goat? Myrtie’d be a mourner without any mourning. She’d be ashamed to go to the cemetery.

He laughed so that he found himself down, sitting down on one of the smaller rocks between the giant rocks, on the side away from town, looking out to sea.

He forgot his joke and knew that he wanted to return to the sea. Doanes belonged at sea. Ashore things struck you funny—then, after they’d once got to you, hurt. He thought about how he used to come round this Point when Myrtie was a baby. As he passed this very spot and saw the town lying there in the sun he’d think about her, and how he’d see her now, and how she’d kick and crow. But now Myrtie wanted to go and visit him—in the cemetery. Oh, it was a joke all right. But he guessed he was tired of jokes. Except the one great joke—joke that seemed to slap the whole of life right smack in the face.

The tide was coming in. In—Out—Doanes and Doanes. In—Out—Him too. In—Out—He was getting wet. He’d have to move up higher. But—why move? Perhaps this was as near as he could come to getting back to sea. Caught in the breakwater. That was about it—wasn’t it? Rocks were queer things. You could wedge yourself in where you couldn’t get yourself out. He hardly had to move. If he’d picked a place he couldn’t have picked a better one. Wedge himself in—tide almost in now—too hard to get out—pounded to pieces, like the last vessel Doanes had owned. Near as he could come to getting back to sea. Near as he deserved to come—him freezing fish with ginnies. And there’d be no fireless cooker!

He twisted his shoulders to wedge in where it wouldn’t be easy to wedge out. Face turned up, he saw something move on the great flat rock above the jagged rocks. He pulled himself up a little; he rose; he swung up to the big rock above him. On one flat-topped boulder stood Joe Doane. On the other flat-topped boulder stood the government goat.

“Go to hell!” said Joe Doane, and he was sobbing. “Go to hell!”

The government goat nodded her head a little in a way that wagged her beard and shook her bag.

“Go home! Drown yourself! Let me be! Go ’way!” It was fast, and choked, and he was shaking.

The goat would do none of these things. He sat down, his back to the government goat, and tried to forget that she was there. But there are moments when a goat is not easy to forget. He was willing there should be some joke to his death—like caught in the breakwater, but he wasn’t going to die before a goat. After all, he’d amounted to a little more than that. He’d look around to see if perhaps she had started home. But she was always standing right there looking at him.

Finally he jumped up in a fury. “What’d you come for? What do you want of me? How do you expect to get home?” Between each question he’d wait for an answer. None came.

He picked up a small rock and threw it at the government goat. She jumped, slipped, and would have fallen from the boulder if he hadn’t caught at her hind legs. Having saved her, he yelled: “You needn’t expect me to save you. Don’t expect anything from me!”

He’d have new gusts of fury at her. “What you out here for? Think you was a mountain goat? Don’t you know the tide’s comin’ in? Think you can get back easy as you got out?”

He kicked at her hind legs to make her move on. She stood and looked at the water which covered the in-between rocks on which she had picked her way out. “’Course,” said Joe Doane. “Tide’s in—you fool! You damned goat!” With the strength of a man who is full of fury he picked her up and threw her to the next boulder. “Hope you kill yourself!” was his heartening word.

But the government goat did not kill herself. She only looked around for further help.

To get away from her, he had to get her ashore. He guided and lifted, planted fore legs and shoved at hind legs, all the time telling her he hoped she’d kill herself. Once he stood still and looked all around and thought. After that he gave the government goat a shove that sent her in water above her knees. Then he had to get in too and help her to a higher rock.

It was after he had thus saved the government goat from the sea out of which the government goat had cheated him that he looked ahead to see there were watchers on the shore. Cadaras had returned from the cemetery. Cadaras and Doanes were watching him bring home the government goat.

From time to time he’d look up at them. There seemed to be no little agitation among this group. They’d hold on to each other and jump up and down like watchers whose men are being brought in from a wreck. There was one place where again he had to lift the government goat. After this he heard shouts and looked ashore to see his boys dancing up and down like little Indians.

Finally they had made it. The watchers on the shore came running out to meet them.

“Oh, Mr. Doane!” cried Mrs. Cadara, hands outstretched, “I am thankful to you! You saved my goat! I have no man myself to save my goat. I have no man. I have no man!”

Mrs. Cadara covered her face with her hands, swayed back and forth, and sobbed because her man was dead.

Young Cadaras gathered around her. They seemed of a sudden to know they had no father, and to realize that this was a thing to be deplored. Agnes even wet her mourning handkerchief.

Myrtie came up and took his arm. “Oh, Father,” said she, “I was so ’fraid you’d hurt yourself!”

He looked down into his little girl’s face. He realized that just a little while before he had expected never to look into her face again. He looked at the government goat, standing a little apart, benevolently regarding this humankind. Suddenly Joe Doane began to laugh. He laughed—laughed—and laughed. And it was a laugh.

“When I saw you lift that goat!” said his wife, in the voice of a woman who may not have a fireless cooker, but—!

Young Joe Doane, too long brow-beaten not to hold the moment of his advantage, began dancing round Tony Cadara with the taunting yell, “You ain’t got no pa to save your goat!” And Edgar lispingly chimed in, “Ain’t got no pa to save your goat!”

“Here!” cried their father, “Stop devilin’ them kids about what they can’t help. Come! Hats on! Every Doane, every Cadara, goes up to see if Ed. Smith might happen to have a soda.”

But young Joe had suffered too long to be quickly silent. “You ain’t got no pa to get you soda!” persisted he.

“Joe!” commanded his father, “stop pesterin’ them kids or I’ll lick you!”

And Joe, drunk with the joy of having what the Cadaras had not, shrieked, “You ain’t got no pa to lick you! You ain’t got no pa to lick you!”

Pictorial Review, Apr 1919

The Escape

Margaret Powers was the only person in Freeport to invite the horse into the house. And, stranger than asking the horse in, was the reason for doing so. If any other Freeport woman encouraged the horse to come into the house, she would have a reason fairly commensurate with the extraordinary proceeding. All Margaret said was that horses must wonder what houses were like. Margaret was queer. Things that other people thought astounding were to her quite simple, and much which was quite simple to others was astounding to her.

They said she was impertinent. This was because she said things to her elders which had never been said to them before. One day a neighbor came and found Margaret sitting out by the hen coop. She said this was a nervous hen who thought something was going to take her chicks.

“She knows me, so if I sit here she feels easier in her mind. And why shouldn’t I sit here as well as anywhere else?” Then she looked at her neighbor in that way they called hard. “I suppose you’d feel nervous, too, if you thought something was going to swoop down and take your children. Or would you?” she added, with interest.

“You aren’t really hard, Margaret,” Ellen Ogilvie, her best friend, said to her after Margaret had said she hated to see old people sitting around and wished they’d all go and live somewhere by themselves.

“Oh, of course not!” rallied Margaret. “A heart of gold ’neath a hard exterior!”

It was hard to be sure of a thing after Margaret had scoffed at it, so Ellen stopped thinking about what Margaret really was, and just accepted the fact that she loved her.

People wondered at Ellen loving Margaret, for Ellen herself was so tender, and Margaret would even banter about this tenderness. Though there was never a sting in her scoffing at Ellen—the sort of sting she had for Mrs. Stamp, who humanely adopted a nine-year-old girl from the orphan asylum and then, to make her feel perfectly at home, let her do most of the housework. Margaret had a good deal to say about the motherliness of Mrs. Stemp—and most of it you would just as soon not have said about you. But, “Come, Ellen dear,” Margaret would say, “while I get little brother’s ears washed. That is, if you think you can bear it to see him get his ears washed.” And Ellen, though protesting against being looked upon as a fool, would stand by and admonish, “Now, Margaret, don’t hurt him.”

Once Margaret got in the police court. It was for knocking a woman down. She and Ellen were coming along as this woman ran out of her house, came up behind her child—delightedly watching a squirrel swinging on a limb—and slapped the joy right out of the child’s face. Whereupon Margaret, rushing in from a side gate, came up behind and hauled off with a blow that knocked the woman down—which the Freeport ladies thought unladylike of Margaret. In the police court she said she knocked the woman down because if she didn’t do something her friend Ellen Ogilvie would probably have killed the woman. The justice, much embarrassed—for Margaret Powers was not what police courts were for—fined Margaret and told her she must have more restraint, which seemed to amuse her. On the way home she said:

“Now, Ellen, you see what you have got me into.”

And Ellen could only weep at the wreck that had been made of propriety and, though, as it happened, she had not even seen the child loving the squirrel, didn’t attempt to discredit her share of the blame.

Throughout the town, Ellen Ogilvie was known as a lover of animals. Margaret was not known as a lover of animals; she was known as having an outlandish way with them. She rallied them much as if they were humans. She would say:

“Betsy doesn’t feel like staying in her stall this morning,” when told the horse was eating up the front yard. “She’s not in the mood for it. How would you like to stay in your stall if you didn’t feel like it?” This she would put in her thrusting way to the seemly person who had notified her that her horse was in the front yard. Then, “Betsy,” she would say, “would you mind eating in the back yard? You are outraging the neighbors. It’s too bad we have to think of the neighbors—but we do. If they think you are not the right kind of a horse there will grow up against you a community feeling which may extend even to your colt’s colt. You don’t care what anybody thinks? You’ll go to the back yard when you get ready? Oh, very well, then—but don’t say I didn’t try to explain the world to you.”

She let the abandoned cat Ellen tearfully presented to her have kittens in the writing-desk—for a cat certainly ought to know where she wanted to have her own kittens, and she was peculiarly acquainted with bugs and toads and spiders, always listening politely to what she said they said about where they wanted to go and what they had it in mind to do when they got there. She spent considerable time taking little toads out of a cellar-window where, she explained to them, they had absolutely no chance of a career.

“Well, why were you such a fool as to hop down here again?” she would demand. Or, “Are you the toad I took out this morning? Do you think I have nothing to do but rescue you? This is the day I take my music lesson. And my mother is putting up jelly. Heavens! How I hate an inconsiderate toad!”

So while Ellen cuddled the “dear little things” of one race or another, Margaret made these eccentric attempts to give them a place in civilization. Ellen made a great fuss over the adorable little calves, but Margaret would stay home from a picnic with a lonesome cow whose calf had been taken—though saying she did so because if she didn’t Mrs. Rutch, who lived across the street, would say, “My! How your cow does bawl!” She was willing to miss the picnic if that would let her miss the way Mrs. Rutch’s voice would come down on bawl.

Margaret had a queer look in her eye at times. She seemed to stop. You can’t say much more about it than that. It would come when people laughed about sick pups, or jerked a child by the arm when the little fellow had stopped to look at something.

When Margaret was seventeen she went to visit people she knew in the West. She did not stay as long as she had meant to stay and the only comment she made on this shortened visit was that the woman was not a good woman and she couldn’t stay under her roof. This stirred up no little commotion, for it was a woman who had once lived in Freeport—and was good to the exclusion of almost everything else.

“You must stop saying that!” cried Margaret’s mother.

“It’s true,” said Margaret, like flint.

“But what do you mean by it, Margaret? Can you mean—”

“I couldn’t stay in her house,” was all she could get out of Margaret.

When she spoke of this visit, which she never did unless asked about it, she had that strange look, as if an instant she stopped. She did not hold so many conversations with animals. She was what you would call gayer unless you were a person who would stop and consider whether it really was gay. A couple of winters later she and Ellen went to New York. Margaret looked tired when she came home. She said she didn’t care to go again—at least not right away. Ellen loved it, though she tenderheartedly talked about the cruel things. One day she was telling how she hated to see the horses falling on the icy streets. After this had gone on for some time Margaret broke in:

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it furnishes them a little excitement. Their lives are so monotonous.” She seemed to flip falling horses off her mind as you’d flip a bug from your sleeve.

Her amused manner about things which other people thought very sad would make her friends decide anew that Margaret was really pretty hard.

“There is certainly something wrong with a person who jeers at feeling,” Mrs. Rutch said, after Margaret had abruptly left the tea-party the day they were telling about taking old Mr. March to the insane asylum. He liked to ride in the automobile, so they told him he was going to have a nice long ride—then left him at the asylum, which Mrs. Rutch thought touching.

“Touching?” said Margaret; in her sprightly way. “Dear, dear! what a sentimental world it is getting to be!”

“Fancy loving Margaret,” Mrs. Stemp said—she was the one who got the adopted orphan to feel perfectly at home by letting her clean the cellar. “You’d as soon think of loving a laughing iceberg.”

The subject of loving Margaret came up in discussion of Margaret’s beaus. She had her share of beaus—and then some, for she was fresh and keen and vital-looking, and it was only when a certain sort of thing was talked about that her badinage made people wish she was somewhere else. Her eyes would be lovely if they weren’t so stand-offish. Apparently a number of young men had cherished the hope she wasn’t going to be stand-offish to them, picturing her as she would be if just a little different. The town wondered at Margaret’s being so much with Will Thurber. He was a little lame, and Margaret was notoriously opposed to deformities. Kindness looked from his eyes. He was good to everything and everybody in such a simple, matter-of-course way. Margaret was quieter those days, and when you met her you didn’t have the uncomfortable feeling that she was having her real fun by thinking something about you she wasn’t saying. Then Margaret’s mother died—she had never seemed to be flipping her mother off her sleeve. They had thought Will would be just the one to be a comfort to her then, but suddenly she began treating him in that stand-offish way, and they weren’t seen around together any more. Next it was Harry Lord. Here was a match for her, said Freeport. She wouldn’t break his heart. Indeed, no—he’d see to that! He was as gay as Margaret, and in something of her way—only his bantering never left you puzzled or uncomfortable. But while they were wondering how soon this lively couple would be married, they stopped going about together, and that was the closest Margaret ever came to getting married.

Ellen married, of course, and Margaret was much amused by Ellen’s children. She paid considerable attention to them—for she was one who liked to be entertained. She had a crisp, swift way with them. She didn’t cuddle and coo—it was like a friendly surface of humor over a heart which did not give itself. The first baby was named Powers, after Margaret. But after she had played with him awhile, Margaret, for some reason of her own, renamed him Buffer, and everybody took that up. Ellen devotedly taught him to say Aunt Margaret, but Aunt Margaret was more like a big brother than an enslaved auntie.

“Now what’s the good of crying?” she would say in cool, give-and-take fashion. “It wastes an awful lot of time. Do you suppose there would be any use in my throwing this ball at you? No, I suppose not. You would probably just go out of your way to let it hit you in the nose.”

But Buffer liked his aunt Margaret better than he did the ladies who fussed over “the little darling.”

Margaret’s father died, and she was alone now at the Powers place. That is, she would have been alone if it hadn’t been for her dog. One day Ellen and Buffer brought a collie pup over to Margaret for a birthday present.

“We thought he would make the house less lonely for Aunt Margaret, didn’t we, Buffer?” Ellen said, tenderly. “Make house less lonely for Aunt Margaret,” repeated Buffer, arms full of fuzzy pup.

Margaret stood looking at him—white and yellow, wiggling and licking with delight and affection.

“I guess I don’t want him,” she said, abruptly.

“But, Aunt Margaret, he’s yours,” cried Buffer, in distress, holding the puppy up to her. “He’s company.”

To keep the dog from falling, she had to take him. Once she had him, of course the puppy won.

So Company lived with Margaret for ten years—much of the time her only company, always eager to go walking with her, home watching for her when she was out without him. You couldn’t feel you were coming home to a lonely house when you were so boundingly welcomed. Then one summer Company got sick, and the doctor for animals said he wouldn’t get well. This Margaret wouldn’t believe, and took care of him for two weeks, in which he grew all the time thinner, but would look up at her with those trusting dog eyes and wag his tail when she tried to help him. Then Company began to suffer—there was pain in his eyes. So again Margaret sent for the doctor, who said he would suffer more, and then die. The humane thing was to “have him destroyed.” So Margaret had that decision to make.

The man told how white and pulled her face was when, after a few minutes, she said, “Go ahead.” But first she kneeled down and patted his head and said, “Company?” His kind eyes had blurred, but faintly he wagged his tail. “You were that, dear dog. I shall—” But she couldn’t say it. The doctor suggested that she go away, but she did not, and the last thing Company knew was her hand on his head.

The first time Margaret went out after that, as about to turn into her gate on the way home, she met Mrs. Rutch. “Well, Margaret, I expect you’re real lonesome without your dog, aren’t you?”

Margaret just stood and looked at her; it was as if she was trying to smile in that way she smiled when people amused her.

“I was saying to Edgar, a dog is lots of company.”

Margaret looked ahead at the house where Company had been company for ten years, looked ahead at the door which she would open now—to silence. Then her eyes came back to Mrs. Rutch, and faintly and very strangely she did smile.

“I declare,” Mrs. Rutch told it, “I was afraid. While she was still smiling like that she suddenly says, ‘Get out of my way!’ and she marches along into her own gate and up the walk, not looking to right or left, then opens and shuts her door. I was so taken back I just had to stand looking at her.”

The week after Company died Margaret made a sudden decision to shut up her house and go away. Freeport did not see her again for two years. She went to different places in Europe. She wrote Ellen gay letters, which Ellen read to the interested town. Then one day came word: “I’m coming home. Freeport is no worse than any place else.” This Ellen did not read aloud.

So the shutters of the Powers place were opened, mattresses hung on the side’ fence, and soon there were once more lighted windows in the evening.

As she walked home from her first visit with Margaret, Ellen was thinking that Margaret had not changed. Suddenly Ellen had an idea that pulled her up short. Perhaps that was the startling thing about Margaret, the puzzling thing. She didn’t change—not as other people changed in the natural course of their lives. Margaret was as she was as a girl—only more so. Ellen wouldn’t have tried to make clear to anyone else what she meant. It wasn’t at all clear to her.

Buffer was seventeen now and away at school. When he came home for the holidays he and his aunt Margaret were on a hail-fellow-well-met basis, which made Ellen one day exclaim:

“I declare, Margaret, you’ll never grow old!”

This assurance seemed to age Margaret in an instant—though only for an instant.

It was the next summer that war came, and Buffer at once began about not going back to school. He would go to war!

“Get him to give up this idea, Margaret,” Ellen said, in distress.

So when next Buffer’s soldier ambitions flared out, Margaret said, in off-hand voice: “I think war’s awfully over-rated. They say it’s only greenhorns who like it.”

“Now that’s not so!” flamed Buffer.

“Men who’re really in the business smile at romantic notions about it.”

“I haven’t got romantic notions about it,” said Buffer, sullenly.

But Margaret’s method failed to work. Buffer held out for two years, then enlisted with the Canadians, telling his parents if they tried to stop him he would never speak to them again!

So there came the day when Ellen went over to tell Margaret Buffer had really done it. Margaret said nothing at all. And when Ellen looked at her she herself could say nothing.

Margaret had the look of a wild thing that has been caught. She said, “Buffer”—but not as if saying his name, as if turning over what that word meant. Then, when Ellen began to cry, Margaret pulled herself up and said, in a practical voice: “Well, probably Buffer’ll have a grand time. Boys just love war.”

Freeport did not approve of Margaret Powers’ attitude toward the war. Even after this country got into it, Margaret would say, “The war doesn’t interest me,” which, of course, did not make her any the more beloved. She stubbornly maintained that old bantering manner and would still shoot a scoffing retort through a voluble sentiment as you’d stick a pin in a toy balloon. This caused a great deal of indignation, for when you express a universally indorsed sentiment you expect to be treated with respect. Anyone would feel injured to say, “I just can’t bear to see a child suffer,” and have someone sit looking speculatively, or say, “Can’t you?” So when they said, “I can hardly bear to think what these bandages are for,” and Margaret Powers replied, brightly, “I think you’re bearing it very well,” they did not think she was the right sort of person.

“She has no heart,” was the verdict of Freeport.

And almost it was the verdict of Ellen. Ellen would come over with Buffer’s letters, or to hear the letter Margaret had had from him, and they would enjoy the things he told that were like Buffer. He wrote a great deal about a boy named Winks—“a jolly cuss, who could kill the glooms by looking at you.”

“You’d like Winks, Aunt Margaret,” he once wrote. “I told him about you, and he said you sounded like some aunt. Say, he wants to know what you named me Buffer for. Answer.”

But Ellen brooded over even the funny things, prying in under them, looking for misery with a microscope,

“Winks kills the glooms. Then there are glooms.”

“But dead glooms,” Margaret would reply. “Winks has slain them.”

“But that’s what he would be feeling if it weren’t for Winks,” Ellen would persist. And then, stopped by Margaret’s gesture, “You’re not a mother, Margaret.”

“And so have a remnant of common sense,” Margaret would finish.

But Margaret was silent the day word came that Buffer had been wounded. She was silent for some time. And then she said, shortly, “He’ll get well.”

Every time she was forced to meet Ellen’s eyes she would reaffirm in that hurried, curt way, “He’ll get well.”

He did get well—or most of him did. Buffer wrote: “I’m all right except my left leg. And we don’t have to worry about that, because it is no longer connected with me. They don’t want me hanging around here on one leg, so I’m coming home.”

It was after he had been home a week that he came over to see his aunt Margaret, greeting her with the ungracious statement, “Mother said I ought to come and see you.”

“Now what have I done to your mother,” Margaret came back with spirit, “that she should make me into a duty?”

In the week he had been home she had seen him only once. She had told Ellen: “He’ll want to rest. You’ll want to have a good visit yourself first.”

“No, I wish you’d come,” said Ellen, just that morning. “I’m not having any visit with him.” It was on the street and she was trying not to break down. Not to cry, she laughed. “I’ve read about the men who come home being—inarticulate. Well, I must say it hasn’t done that to Buffer. Come over, Margaret,” she said, and hurried on.

Margaret had been meaning to go that afternoon, but now Ellen had sent Buffer to her.

He took hold of the conversation as if it were a bull to take by the horns. “I’m out exercising my new leg,” he began. “I want it to get to feeling more at home with my other leg. Have you ever thought much about legs we weren’t born with, Aunt Margaret?” he kept on, as they went in before the fire. “They are amusing things, don’t you think? I was thinking how funny they would look—all of them, walking round by themselves—I mean all of them that are now walking with other legs. There was a fellow in Paris—”

On he went. He seldom looked at Margaret, and when he did it was a look which failed to see. He hadn’t noticed how still she had grown.

After he had gone on awhile she determinedly broke in, “How’s your friend Winks getting along?”

And then she saw happen to another what she knew for a thing that happened to her. Buffer stopped. An instant it was just that he stopped. Then he said: “Oh, Winks isn’t around any more. What’s this new building down Cedar Street?”—going to the window. “Hello! Isn’t that Helen Ashley? And Bill Bentley? Mind if I knock on the window?” He beckoned them in. “Helen’s such a jolly girl. Not a lick of sense. Don’t you think sense is awful bad for girls, Aunt Margaret? Many a really nice girl has been ruined by—” But Helen and Bill had come in.

Perhaps it was half an hour they were there, perhaps two hours. Margaret did not know. Buffer kept up his run of talk, answering the questions they would ask if they had a chance to ask them. Quite true—the trenches were not always well heated in the wintertime. When it rained you might get wet. But he had noticed that was also true in Freeport. Yes, indeed, some very good times. You played games—quite a place for games. Oh, certainly—everyone very brave. Quite remarkable. Probably they caught it from one another—like measles or fleas. He would look at them with that smile which seemed to close the gates to his spirit.

She sat little apart from the young people. Buffer was too voluble to make her quiet conspicuous. It was late afternoon of an early winter day; candles had not been lighted, and she was outside the glow from the fire. So they had no hint of what was happening to her. She sat very still as with each moment she knew more inescapably the thing he was doing for the thing she had always done.

She wanted to go away, but she was as if caught. She wanted to implore him to stop. She had another moment of being very angry. For him to do this undid what she had spent her life doing. As she saw him forming this crust over his feeling, the crust which had formed over her life’s feeling crumbled and let her down. Things of long ago were fresh things. It was as if she had to go back to them over the path of her own evasions. She and Ellen walking along the street—a look of happy wonder on a child’s face as he watched a squirrel playing in a tree. A woman, coming from behind—surprising delight—slapping him when he was happy… . A little girl coming from an institution. Margaret chanced to be at the station the day that frightened little girl got off the train—in her arms a doll, holding it tight to her as alone she stepped into a strange world. She had been sent for to do housework in an unloving home. Arrived with her doll. Nobody else seemed to care about these things. They were not important. Other things were more important. It was as if people’s own lives secured them against outside feeling. She herself in some strange way had always been—at large. Was there something all wrong with her? Big things she could bear. Pain that was recognized as important, which had its legitimate place—that wasn’t a thing she had to run away from. It was the things people would smile at you for caring about—or about which they would frame a praiseworthy sentiment, then go their way unmoved—those things sometimes made her feel she couldn’t go on living in such a world. What she couldn’t stand was the feeling that this was happening and no one cared. That time she went to visit in the West. There was a young collie dog. This woman was one who did not want anything to disturb the orderly course of her life. She kept the collie shut up in the barn. Someday he might make a dog worth having around the place. He was a nuisance now. Once a day he was let out. Overjoyed at being released, he would go bounding around, wanting in all sorts of joyful ways to show you that he loved you and would play with you. And that woman would say, “Now if you can’t behave yourself, you can just go back to the barn.” And after a little she would shut him up—shut him up because he was happy to be out. It got to be something Margaret couldn’t stand. She would watch him come bounding out and know that because he was glad to be out he would have to go back. This woman came to seem a monster to her. She was pleased with her own cold heart. Margaret went away—but she knew that the thing she had gone away from was going right on. That was what she always knew when she did things to make the present thing a little better. That was why she stopped doing them, tried to stop seeing. She didn’t marry Will Thurber because he was too good to her when her mother died. He made her know how much she cared. He would always make her know how much she cared. And yet she couldn’t marry Harry Lord. She had thought she would. With him she could live a diverting life on that crust she had built up over things she didn’t want to know were there. But one day when they were out riding he laughed at a child who was burying his dead kitten. She never spoke to him again.

What right had Buffer to bring all this back? Why, she had held away from the things one most wants from life just to keep from knowing what she was knowing now. Buffer. A buffer between her and—she hadn’t named it, but loneliness—deadness—that could sometimes hurt like caring, a fearsome thing that caring had made itself into. Company. He had made ten years less lonely. Her eyes had been burning dry, but now tears fell on the hands tight in her lap. Company wagging his tail as she spoke his name when he was dying. Then Mrs. Rutch—“Well, Margaret, I expect you’re real lonesome without your dog, aren’t you?” That was the world. Speaking of feeling as if it felt! That was why she had all her life done what Buffer was doing now to Helen Ashley. That smile. How well she understood it. Smile that said: “Now where did you get those words? Dear me, how amusing it would be if you could be forced to know—what you are talking about.”

War. He was talking about war. Trying to cover what he felt by what he said. She knew what he felt. Delight slapped out of a child’s face. A little girl stepping into a strange world with her doll. A dog shut up because he was happy to be out. Horses trying to draw heavy loads over icy streets. Children jerked by the arms when they stopped to look in windows. The wistful eyes of animals that looked at you from freight cars. And the wagging tail of a dying dog. War.

Helen and her friend were going. She could rise and say goodbye to them. They didn’t know that her life had gone to pieces. She wished Buffer would go, too. He didn’t seem to know which to do, but stayed. She knew how it was. He didn’t want to go with them—yet he didn’t want to stay with her. Uncertainly he sat down on the settle before the fire. Uncertainly she sat beside him.

He seemed tired. Of course, it did tire one. She knew that. He stared into the fire, which had about gone out. She edged a little away from him—afraid. She had an impulse to do what her whole life pulled her back from doing. She was afraid she was going to speak his name—and let him see.

And while she was saying she couldn’t, she did. She just said, “Buffer”—and he looked at her. He couldn’t see her very well, but something that he felt was there let him put his hand over on hers, too needful of what he did to consider the strangeness of doing it. They sat there silent. Then he said, whispering it:

“Winks. He was coming toward us. He was laughing. And while he was laughing—” He made a terrible gesture that told while he was laughing he was blown to pieces. Then he hid his face.

And still she tried to hold back. If she let him know—that she knew—he would always know. She could never get away again. His head was down—the baby she had named Buffer. Again she only spoke his name.

He looked up. The fire rose in a last flicker that lighted her face. “Why—Aunt Margaret!” he breathed. “Why—Aunt Margaret!” he stumbled on. “You—know!”

She nodded. “Buffer, I’ve always known. That’s why I’ve been—as I was.”

It gave them over to silence, as if gates had opened; silence bore them together where neither could have gone alone.

But after that, as one who has been long cold and must again come nearer the fire, “Blew him to pieces—while he was laughing!” He took her hands and gripped them till it seemed they’d break. Then he could cry, and with a tenderness that flooded all fear of hurt she drew this tortured child to her great mother heart.

Harper’s Magazine, Dec 1919

The Nervous Pig

If you were writing a book on the comparative civilizations of ancient and modern India, how would you like to have a young woman come bounding up to your window to tell you that the neighbor’s pig had eight little pigs?

Horace Caldwell was displeased by the information; not so much by the information as by the method and time of acquiring it. He suspended his pen over the half-written word “indigent” (he had taken great pleasure in writing it, as it was so precisely the word) and looked at the head of Vivian Truce, which vibrated there above the window-box as though it were a flower above the flowers. He did not want to think of the comparative beauties of Vivian’s face and nasturtiums; he wanted to think of the comparative attitudes toward women of ancient and modern Hindus. That was the trouble with Vivian. She took you from the thing you wanted to be thinking.

“Eight!” she squealed.

“Eight?” he repeated, helplessly, for the wind played lightly with her hair and through the nasturtium leaves—she made the Hindus remote. That was the trouble with her. She made things remote.

“Eight,” she said again, and her hands came up and fluttered with the leaves—fluttering Sanskrit back into obscurity!

“Eight,” he announced after her, as if to let her know he was quite aware of the number of pigs the neighbor’s pig had had. She continued to stand there, letting the breeze try this and that with her hair. “Well,” he added, severely pushing back his own hair, as if in rebuke to all hair, “isn’t that all right?”

Her nose went down into a nasturtium; and while her nose smelled the flower her eyes regarded him. “Why, yes,” she finally assured him, “it’s quite all right.” She again regarded him—laughed as if there were something to laugh at—was gone.

Mr. Caldwell did not enjoy finishing the word “indigent.” The neighbor’s pig had eight little pigs. Naturally, she would have eight little pigs—or thereabouts. Why need this stand between him and an old and beautiful civilization? He kept looking at the window-box. Nasturtiums were not much, after all.

And then he heard Vivian within the house, telling his sister what she had told him—a little less exuberantly, excitement having lost its flush in the first telling. Still, there was enough left; Vivian could lose a good deal of exuberance and still have enough left. “Gertrude,” she was saying, “what do you think? Mr. Moon’s pig has eight little pigs?”

“No! Not really?” rejoined Gertrude—why in the world did they act as though it were something so extraordinary?

Though with Gertrude nothing was extraordinary for long. “Vivian,” he heard her say, “I’m thinking of having this room done over. Do you think a lavender—” Then they moved into the room, thank Heaven, and he no longer heard them.

Poor Vivian—no one was properly excited. The neighbor’s pig might have eighty little pigs, and if Gertrude was thinking of turning a green bedspread lavender, eighty little pigs would be nothing to her. All the wonders of the world would never take Gertrude out of that house. At least Vivian wasn’t that way.

But thinking of the way Vivian wasn’t made him think of the way Vivian was. He moved impatiently and ran his hand back through his hair with indignation. So far no word had followed “indigent.” And the word that finally came did not follow “indigent.” It was written at the side. It was “volatile.” He waited a little while and then he wrote down “emotional.” This made him feel better, as if to assure himself his interest in Vivian was a purely scientific one, and, having pigeonholed her, he could now keep her out of the way. He would get the book he wanted from the library, then settle down. But as he passed through the hall:

“Horace,” called Gertrude, as one who imparts a pleasant bit of news, “Mr. Moon’s pig has eight little pigs.”

“I know it,” snapped Horace. He heard a laugh—Vivian’s!

He went back and wrote some very severe things about the women who had once lived in India. Women never had been—what they should be!

But by evening it pleased him to be satiric. When his brother-in-law, getting home from the city, drove up to the door, Horace rose from his place on the veranda and called, excitedly: “Ben! Ben! What do you think? Mr. Moon’s pig has eight little pigs!”

Ben appeared rather astonished at such a greeting from this source, but, being a business man, he was prepared to adjust himself to anything. “Eight little pigs?” he replied. “Well, it’s always nice to see things moving on!” Then he spoke of the price of pork.

But the news they gave Ben that night was as nothing to the news they had for him the next night.

In the afternoon Horace went with Vivian to see the little pigs. That is, they started for a walk, and Vivian proposed they stop and visit the pigs. She said the little pigs were just too darling. “Just too darling” was for Horace a new attitude toward pigs, but he smiled tolerantly upon Vivian, who in her bright sweater and gay woolly skirt was enough to make even a student of India smile. Mr. Caldwell was feeling in the best of spirits. He had had a good morning’s work and he quite approved of giving himself this pleasure of a tramp over the hills with Vivian. It was a part of his program to take walks. One worked the better for them.

But when they got to the back of Mr. Moon’s house they found something going on which was not part of anyone’s program—one of those mad things which knock programs over.

Mr. Moon was running round and round the pigsty with a pitchfork. He jabbed the air wildly with the pitchfork; he jabbed it also with wild words, “Gol-darn fool!” and words yet wilder.

“Why, Mr. Moon!” cried Vivian, running up, “what are you doing to the pigs?”

“What am I doin’ to the pigs?” retorted the outraged Moon. “What’s she doin’ to the pigs!” And he stabbed his pitchfork toward the mother pig as if to run her through. “Ask her!” he went on in fury. “Ask her where’s her eighth little pig!”

“Well,” asked Vivian, “where is it?”

“In her belly,” replied Mr. Moon, terse if not elegant.

Vivian’s mind seemed unequal to grasping the extraordinary sequence of events required to bring the eighth little pig to the place where Mr. Moon said it was. To tell the truth, this was likewise true of Mr. Caldwell’s mind, so when Vivian gasped, “She ate it?” it came to him with a shock that that was what had happened.

“She ate it,” asserted Mr. Moon. “Ate the pig she bore! That’s the kind of a sow she is.”

“I didn’t know they ate them,” said Mr. Caldwell, speaking of it as a phenomenon.

“And so they don’t,” said the raiser of pigs, with less scientific detachment; “not them that has sense. But her. That pig.” He waved his pitchfork around her—violent and ineffectual.

All this while the seven uneaten pigs were squealing. When seven little pigs squeal at once there is a large volume of discordant sound.

“Shut up!” cried Mr. Moon, turning the pitchfork on the air above the little pigs. “You want to be inside? Keep your mouths shut—or go back to the belly you came from!”

Vivian stepped back, shocked, but Horace was pleased by the phrase. It had violence; there was blood in it; it was of the earth—somehow of the race. “Back to the belly you came from!” He didn’t know whether it was bitter or largely soothing.

But Vivian was thinking of the pig. “But, Mr. Moon,” she asked, “why did she eat her own little pig?”

“Ask her,” replied Mr. Moon. As Vivian did not do this, “She’s nervous,” he said for the pig.

The pig stirred—so did the pitchfork. “I think that pitchfork makes her nervous,” ventured Vivian.

“That pitchfork is here to make her quit such foolishness,” and he was as menacing as if addressing all females with nerves.

One little pig began squealing anew; six other little pigs took it up.

“Listen to them!” he cried, transferring his wrath and his pitchfork. “Wouldn’t they make you nervous?” and here with swift unreasonableness his ire shifted to Vivian. “Squealin’ for food from the minute they strike the air!”

“Strike the air” also had scope—and gave Horace things to ponder. But Vivian kept thinking of the pigs. While Mr. Moon was barricading the little pigs from their mother, Vivian turned upon her companion, eyes live with feeling. “But how terrible!” she breathed.

It was not terrible at that moment to look at Vivian. This was one of her moments which had made Horace write on the margin, “emotional.” In such moments her eyes were darker and deeper and, in fact, rather wonderful.

She took it for granted that he, too, would think it terrible, so he disclosed no other feeling, though his own reaction to this defeat of mother-love by mother-nerves was not in truth an emotional one. For that matter, he did not think highly of emotional reactions—even though he did think highly of what those reactions made of Vivian’s eyes.

He now followed those eyes to the faithless mother pig. She was still fretted by the squealing of her seven little pigs, but she had the look of one who is not, after all, unsustained. In her rolling eye was a light which seemed to say there was one perfect little pig. There was one little pig who was still; she knew just where he was.

That night, instead of going to sleep or instead of reading Sanskrit, Mr. Caldwell kept saying, “This little pig went to market; this little pig stayed home; this little pig—” What was it he had? Whatever it was, of it the next little pig had none.

Even Gertrude had been wrought up about the pig. She was strongly of the opinion that such things shouldn’t be allowed. It was no way for a mother to act. No, not even a nervous mother—though she admitted mothers had enough to make them nervous. Ben said it was fortunate most sows weren’t so highly strung—for pigs were too valuable to be eaten by other pigs. Vivian—Vivian said little. Sometimes she said, “It’s so terrible!” and her eyes—well, Vivian was emotional—not a doubt of that.

The pig who ate her little pig turned Mr. Caldwell to reflections on life. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t reflected much on life, for he had always been studying some particular thing. Of course, he was studying the particular thing in order to—well, in order to deepen his knowledge of life and therefore his understanding of it, but he had always been too engrossed in that particular thing to—to get out of it to life. He was terribly wary of life as a thing that would take him away from the thing he was studying. This fear made him nervous. He admitted now that he was nervous. And the pig was nervous. That he and the pig should be the same thing somehow interfered with Mr. Caldwell’s segregation, drawing him into that main body of life from which he was holding away in order to pursue the studies that would—well, that would deepen his understanding of life. He thumped his pillow. He told himself to go to sleep. If there was anything more ridiculous than a nervous pig, it was a nervous man! He was determined to stop thinking, for there was something there he’d think if he went on thinking. He knew it was there; he could fairly smell it—as a cat a mouse. Only he didn’t know just what it was—and he didn’t want to know! With great persistency he turned his thoughts to his sister Gertrude. Confound that pig! What did she mean by making him turn and look at people’s lives like this? It was Vivian had brought this down upon him—bringing pigs into the house, so to speak. She was an interfering person—Vivian. But he didn’t want to think of Vivian, either. He made another determined lunge at Gertrude. It was rather entertaining—what the pig made him think about Gertrude. He’d tell her!

But he didn’t want to say anything to Gertrude until after he had done his day’s work, for it might start a discussion that would not be good for the day’s work. He decided he wouldn’t say anything to her, and yet he somehow knew he would—vaguely knew that his decision had nothing to do with it. What was the matter with him—he who had always been so perfectly controlled in his thinking!

At the very instant that he was telling himself to get right into work, “Gertrude,” said he, “why do you have this house?”

Gertrude stared, finished fixing her egg, then said, “What a silly question!”

“Can you answer it?”

“I certainly can.”

“Then do.”

Again she stared at him. “What’s the matter with you, Horace?”

“Nothing. Answer.”

“Well, I have the house to live in, of course.”

He leaned forward. “Then why—” But Vivian was there, too—having the manner of leaning forward, whether doing so or not. He would not get into a discussion. A discussion that might—Heavens!—get emotional. He had work to … Quite indignant at whatever power it was that seemed expecting him to sit there and discuss life with two women, he rose and without his second cup of coffee shut himself up with the ancient Hindus.

He was harassed by a fear that things not ancient would come in at the window—as yesterday; harassed by a fear that she would, and beset by the fear that she wouldn’t. Over by the roses he could hear a voice—not ancient. He would raise his eyes from time to time to the box of nasturtiums—but only nasturtiums fluttered there. But he had a well-disciplined mind—how did men exist who hadn’t?—and so, despite it all (he didn’t stop to classify “all”), he had a good day’s work, and of this he was proud—as of something achieved against odds.

It was then, of course, quite reasonable to go walking with Vivian that afternoon. And when she said, in a laughing voice brushed with tenderness, “Don’t you think we should stop and see the little pigs?” he responded, gaily, “I wonder how many will be there?” She said, softly, “Oh don’t!” and he had the pleasantly indulgent feeling of the male for the emotional female.

Seven were there—and playing tag. “Oh, you happy little things!” cried Vivian. Solicitously she addressed the mother pig, “And you feel lots better, don’t you?”

“Guess she’s done all she’s a-goin’ to do,” answered Mr. Moon, for the pig.

“Oh yes, I think so, too,” agreed Vivian, in an all’s-well-with-the-world voice.

“Probably it didn’t agree with her, anyhow,” added Moon.

“Oh!” shuddered Vivian. She turned to Horace. “Shall we go?”—turned to him as to one who would take her from unpleasant things.

It was to pleasant things they turned—soft little hills not too hard to climb, pleasant valleys and a broad river not far off. At last they sat down by a little river that was playing along to the big river. And there Vivian asked, “What was it you stopped saying at breakfast?”

“Gertrude is a nervous pig,” he answered, promptly.

Vivian stared; apparently she thought of saying various things—things indignant and loyal, but instead she dimpled and played the game.

“And what does she eat up?”

“Living beautifully.”

“Living beautifully?”

He nodded. “Living beautifully is the pig that is eaten.”

After enjoying her bewilderment, he explained himself. Gertrude had a beautiful house. Why would one have a beautiful house? Why, that living might be beautiful, of course. But she stopped short at having the beautiful house. She got so nervous having the beautiful house in which one might live beautifully that she quelled the thing in her that could live beautifully, for fear it would squeal, or something of the sort. He lay on the grass and brandished his stick and elaborated on the case of Gertrude, the case of Gertrude which stood between him and himself. He supposed there were lots of Gertrudes. There should be some ugly things in every house—a law about it, if necessary. Then the house beautiful would be an unattainable ideal—and many little pigs would be spared.

“It isn’t only Gertrude,” he went on, as one who plays with fire, for if he went on long enough there’d be only himself left. “Take Ben,” said he, daringly. “‘When I make my pile,’ says Ben. Then he’s going to live. But he’s got a pretty good pile already. Is he living? Not unless it’s living to make a pile! Why, Ben would run a mile at the idea of living. Ben eats the pigs up as fast as they squeal. Everyone does—’most everyone. That’s why there’s so much indigestion.”

Beset by the idea that he himself had indigestion, he got up and started briskly for home—as if walking away from something—indeed, quite rudely walking away from Vivian, who followed.

To get away from individual cases—they having a dangerous proximity to a certain individual, he generalized. “And then there are the countries that get so rasped having democracy that they eat up the squealing pigs to which democracy has given birth!”

He turned upon Vivian with suddenly inexplicable anger. “Think of eating up your own thing—the thing it’s all for, because you get so rasped getting up to the point where you can have, what it’s all for. Isn’t it funny?” he demanded of Vivian, who failed to laugh. “It’s the great joke on the human race! Getting so worn out getting ready as to exterminate the thing they’ve been getting ready for. Oh, well,” he went on, swinging his stick in a sort of “I should worry” fashion.

Suddenly he turned round, as if to take by surprise. “You thinking about it?” he demanded of Vivian.

“I’m thinking of you,” said Vivian.

This infuriated him. “Well, I’m thinking of you,” he said, viciously, and stalked on.

“How’s your indigestion, Ben?” he inquired, jauntily, of his brother-in-law as he and Vivian came up the steps.

“Never had indigestion in my life,” said Ben.

“Don’t you believe it!” called Horace from the hall.

“What’s the matter with Horace?” he heard Gertrude ask Vivian.

She asked it again after dinner, for as he ate his roast pork Horace mused: “Perhaps eight is too many to have. Six might be better.”

“What are you talking about, Horace?” asked Ben.

“He’s talking about the pig,” said Gertrude.

“No,” said Horace, “I’m talking about civilization.”

There was a pause. “I think you work too hard, Horace,” suggested Gertrude.

“Civilization works too hard,” replied Horace. Suddenly he announced, brightly, “War is civilization eating her own little pigs.”

“I do wish you’d rest while you’re here,” said Gertrude, soothingly.

“I’m here to work,” he declared with vigor. And so he was!—and work he would! Just to show what he was there for, he’d work that evening—pigs or no pigs! All right—what if Gertrude and Ben were going over to the Logan’s? Vivian could sit alone on the veranda. Did he exist in order to sit on a porch with Vivian Truce? If he thought of women at all that night, it would be Hindu women.

But it was queer; a woman would start out to be a Hindu and then turn into Vivian. Very well, then! He would banish Vivian by going out and telling her what he thought of her.

This apparently was just what she wanted him to do, for, picking herself up where he had left her that afternoon, she asked, “When you think about me, what is it you think?”

She had asked it quite simply and directly, but as he stood looking at her she seemed to grow confused. “I mean,” she laughed, “what do I eat?”

“It’s hard to say,” he said, and they sat down, as before an undertaking.

At that he did not at once undertake it. “Nice night,” he said.

“It is a nice night,” agreed Vivian.

Then they just sat there, and the night went on being nice.

Presently he said, with a dissatisfaction staringly intense, “Feeling itself isn’t enough.”

“Enough—for what?” asked Vivian, with perhaps righteous exasperation.

“There is feeling that—gets somewhere, and then there is feeling that—goes round and round and takes it out in—being feeling.”

“And you think I have the latter?” asked Vivian, after a wait.

He had at least enough gallantry to keep silent.

“I’d like to know how you’re so sure of that,” she came at him with spirit.

“Oh, it’s what all emotional women are like,” he told her.

“Is that so?” she challenged.

“I think so,” he replied.

“I suppose,” said Vivian, witheringly, “that you have had a large experience with emotional women.”

He disregarded this. “You see,” he said, “first we were apes.”

She did not reply, so he looked at her, as if to make sure she was following—not sticking there in a morass of peevishness. “First we were apes,” he repeated, giving her another chance.

“So I have been told,” said Vivian, icily.

“And you were told right. And it’s hard on us. Hard to have that ground-work of the apes we once were and yet to be that—that—”

“That what?” she pinned him down.

“That—what we might be.” As he tried to formulate it he was swept into wonder at its beauty. “That thing we might be that has never been. The furthest edge of experience. The furthest reach of consciousness—further than it has ever reached before. The other—that’s old stuff. Falling in love—living together, and all that—that’s been lived and lived and relived. Well, all right. Suppose it has. That’s what living is—reliving what has been lived. That is, in the main it is. But there’s the new thing—the ever-extending edge—where we push realizing on a little further than it has ever been before. There’s the thing that makes the eternal reliving worth while. To get up to that point where we—go further. What feeling might be is a road, and a road that makes itself as it goes. But is that what most people let it be? No—it’s a swamp. A place where you stick. Emotion is a place to hide one’s head. You just stay there. A personal experience—a passionate personal experience—it’s a limiting thing. It’s just something to engage you so you won’t try to—realize.”

He had been speaking with intensity. “So the poor super-ape,” he finished, lightly, “eats that little pig which is the furthest reach of consciousness, and just feels and feels and feels—much too taken up with feeling to do any—realizing.”

Vivian got up. She was angry—and quite splendid. “You have certainly made it plain to me,” said she, “that you think me vulgar.”

It was rather ridiculous not to kiss her. That would be the way of it. Just because he wanted to kiss her, and was determined not to, he told himself it would be the right thing to do—for that, of course, was the easiest way to keep himself from doing it. Oh yes, he speculated, probably a great many men had kissed women just in order not to appear ridiculous. Of course—there might be other reasons. True—there might be. He stood beside Vivian—and it was still a very nice night, and—to tell the truth, he wanted a limiting personal experience so fearfully that—apes must have laughed!

Why didn’t Vivian go away? As she was so angry—why didn’t she leave, instead of staying there to show how beautiful anger made her? He would have to kiss this beautiful woman who was very angry, this—emotional woman. Make her still more angry and then have all that feeling turn to passion for him, as he had a feeling it was ready to do—as he was so tantalized by suspecting it was ready to do.

A sound broke the night—or Mr. Caldwell’s distance from the apes might have been shortened then and there—the sound of the returning motor.

Horace and Vivian continued to stand there. “Well,” said Ben, “I suppose you two have been talking about pigs?”

“Apes,” said Vivian, in an emotional voice.

“Apes?” repeated Gertrude. “Apes make me nervous. They look too much like us.”

“But did you ever think, Gertrude,” inquired Horace, “how much we look like them?”

She sighed. So he escaped before she could say he worked too hard.

When he got to his room he looked in the glass—perhaps to see what resemblance he could find. When Mr. Caldwell looked in the glass what regarded him was pleasing. Perhaps the reason most scholars aren’t good-looking is that the good-looking ones aren’t permitted to be scholars. If you are very good-looking and determined to be a scholar—there is struggle in your life. There was struggle tonight in the life of Horace Caldwell. The reason he had spoken these harsh words about being emotional was, not so much that Vivian was emotional, as that Vivian made him emotional. And he wanted the decks cleared for study and reflection. Marrying Vivian would be eating his eighth little pig. He’d be damned if he would!

He sat down to his books. But he couldn’t study—he couldn’t study because he was thinking—usually he didn’t have that interference. And his thoughts crystallized to this, “Where is your eighth little pig?”

So there he was—right up against himself! He had put Gertrude in between, and Ben, and Vivian—now his pigs had come home to roost—he didn’t attempt to keep zoology straight. He had been in a rage because Vivian threatened the eighth little pig, but what was he doing to that unfortunate animal?

And after a while he was ready to admit that perhaps no one was as cannibalistic as the men who gave their lives to study. For they dealt with the very stuff out of which the life-sense must be born—and what did they do? They just stuck in a little pocket of learning—put their heads deeper and deeper and deeper in scholarship that there might not be anything of themselves left for—for moments of wonder out of which vision comes—for that greater sensitiveness to life which was man’s one chance to justify man. Heads buried in learning as other heads were buried in emotion, or in money-making, or in the house beautiful. And they had the goods, as it were. Here was he studying India—India, of all things!—and instead of this helping him to know what was in his own soul he—why, he just studied India! He was a nice one to talk to anyone else! Could frustration of purpose be more ignoble than his?

He went to the window and looked out into the beautiful night. “Well, realize,” he said to himself, savagely. He got into a rage—that horrible rage of the thwarted. “Realize—you fool!” He could laugh a little at this—but it wasn’t a laugh that helped much. What did he want? This was what he wanted. It was not speaking too highly of himself to say there was in him something of aspiration. He aspired to beauty. To the beauty that might flower from understanding. But, somehow, understanding was sterile. He was very much like the pig—very much indeed. He got so nervous in having it that he wasn’t equal to it when it came. And he and the pig weren’t’ alone in this—more was the pity of it. People got so frazzled by living that they didn’t really have life. When they came up to the moments it was all for—they could do nothing but revert to the things which existed in order to bring them up to those moments. In other words, the mechanics of living ate life up. In still other words, stomachs were full of eighth little pigs.

He slept as badly as if his stomach were full of some such thing. He dreamed that Vivian was the queen of a zoo.

She acted a good deal like a queen next day—a displeased queen. She and he and Gertrude had lunch together. Fortunately Gertrude talked a good deal about how to make woodwork look like old ivory. He didn’t know why it should look like old ivory, but he was glad someone was talking. Finally Gertrude stopped talking. Vivian did not talk. So he had to. As he couldn’t think of any extraneous thing to say, he had to say what he was thinking. He frequently did this—and got blamed for it. Apparently most people didn’t do it.

“I suppose,” he said, “that we never should have left the trees. It—it’s too much for us.”

There was a long silence. Silence is really a peculiarly articulate thing. It can make you feel—as words never can—how you are being disapproved of.

“Horace,” said Gertrude, at last, “I don’t know whether you really are ill, or whether you are merely trying to rouse apprehensions.”

“I’m not trying to rouse apprehensions,” he hastened to assure her. “I’m trying to quell them.”

He looked at Vivian. Certainly he had quelled nothing—least of all, rage.

About four o’clock he saw her starting alone for the walk they usually had together. She came to the crest of the hill and hesitated. Her hesitation was long. She didn’t know whether to visit the pigs or to cut them!

This decision became of tremendous moment to the man who watched. So rapidly did it go on increasing in importance that it was as if his whole life hung upon it. Vivian was beautiful standing there before the poplars—the wind blowing her skirt out to one side as if she were poised to fly. She herself was slim and straight and strong—but lithe—oh, much lither than a tree. And—she was going to visit the little pigs!

He snatched his hat and followed.

He found her at the pigsty. And he found there a scene of contentment good for a spirit fagged by aspiration. The little pigs were sucking. All of them were sucking. They did enjoy it! Some could sit down, but others had to stand up—those which had to reach the upper tier. So they stood on their hind legs, front paws kneading their mother—going it for all they were worth.

He and Vivian looked from the pig family to each other—laughed. No two people could stay cross at each other when seven little pigs were nursing!

Mr. Moon came along. “Well, she’s made up her mind to it,” said he.

And so she had made up her mind to it. It was a contented mother pig who gave suck to the little pigs. One of them finished his meal and came and played with her snout. She pawed him playfully. She liked her little pigs. There she lay, doing just what she should do, and happier than she could be doing anything else. Perhaps she didn’t go quite so far as to make one feel God was in His heaven—but she made one feel that the good old earth was very good indeed.

He and Vivian walked slowly away.

“Vivian,” he said, “I’ve fought a good fight and lost. I’m sorry to say I love you. Will you—you know—marry me—and all that?”

He stopped; his hands were on her shoulders, he looking into her eyes. It wasn’t going to matter much what she said. For looking into her eyes—“she had made up her mind to it.”

Though with words she resisted. “Marry you?” she choked, “and drag you down into my swamp?”

Feeling took him, then, with great mercifulness—so overwhelmingly that he had nothing to say about it. Vivian in his arms, he kissed her again and again and again—and knew nothing save that he was kissing her. “Yes—drag me there. I—Anything else is too lonely, Vivian. I—It’s all right,” he assured her, and incoherent things like that.

And it was all right. As they came back over the fields at sunset he had a moment of beauty such as had never been his before—a lift of the spirit—a widening. If he was going to be, for the most part, in a pocket, let it be a pocket of feeling rather than a pocket of learning! It wasn’t so ridiculous. And nicer.

Of course, he was probably fooling himself. He wasn’t so lost that he couldn’t see he was probably fooling himself. But perhaps that was what we had to do!

Anyway, the sun went down and the sky was purple and gold and Vivian moved in a magical light. Things smelled good. A bird was singing.

And the neighbor’s pig had eight little pigs. No—seven.

Harper’s Magazine, Feb 1920

His Smile

Laura stood across the street waiting for the people to come out from the picture-show. She couldn’t have said just why she was waiting, unless it was that she was waiting because she could not go away. She was not wearing her black; she had a reason for not wearing it when she came on these trips, and the simple lines of her dark-blue suit and the smart little hat Howie had always liked on her, somehow suggested young and happy things. Two soldiers came by; one of them said, “Hello, there, kiddo,” and the other, noting the anxiety with which she waited, assured her, “You should worry.” She looked at them, and when he saw her face the one who had said, “You should worry,” said, in sheepish fashion, “Well, I should worry,” as if to get out of the apology he didn’t know how to make. She was glad they had gone by. It hurt so to be near the soldiers.

The man behind her kept saying, “Pop-corn! Pop-corn right here.” It seemed she must buy pop-corn if she stood there. She bought some. She tried to do the thing she was expected to do—so she wouldn’t be noticed.

Then the people came pushing out from the theater. They did it just as they did it in the other towns. A new town was only the same town in a different place; and all of it was a world she was as out of as if it were passing before her in a picture. All of it except that one thing that was all she had left! She had come so far to have it tonight. She wouldn’t be cheated. She crossed the street, and as the last people were coming out of the theater she went in.

A man, yawning, was doing something to a light. He must belong to the place. His back was to her, and she stood there trying to get brave enough to speak. It had never been easy for her to open conversations with strangers. For so many years it was Howie who had seemed to connect her with the world. And suddenly she thought of how sorry Howie would be to see her waiting around in this dismal place after everyone else had gone, trying to speak to a strange man about a thing that man wouldn’t at all understand. How well Howie would understand it! He would say, “Go on home, Laura.” “Don’t do this, sweetheart.” Almost as if he had said it, she turned away. But she turned back. This was her wedding anniversary.

She went up to the man. “You didn’t give all of the picture tonight, did you?” Her voice was sharp; it mustn’t tremble.

He looked round at her in astonishment. He kept looking her up and down as if to make her out. Her trembling hands clutched the bag of pop-corn and some of it spilled. She let it all fall and put one hand to her mouth.

A man came down from upstairs. “Lady here says you didn’t give the whole show tonight,” said the first man.

The young man on the stairs paused in astonishment. He, too, looked Laura up and down. She took a step backward.

“What was left out wasn’t of any importance, lady,” said the man, looking at her, not unkindly, but puzzled.

“I think it was!” she contended in a high, sharp voice. They both stared at her. As she realized that this could happen, saw how slight was her hold on the one thing she had, she went on, desperately, “You haven’t any right to do this! It’s—it’s cheating.”

They looked then, not at her, but at each other—as the sane counsel together in the presence of what is outside their world. Oh, she knew that look! She had seen her brother and his wife doing it when first she knew about Howie.

“Now I’ll tell you, lady,” said the man to whom she had first spoken, in the voice that deals with what has to be dealt with carefully, “you just let me give you your money back, then you won’t have the feeling that you’ve been cheated.” He put his hand in his pocket.

“I don’t want my money back!” cried Laura. “I—want to see what you left out!”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” proposed the young man, taking his cue from the older one. “I’ll tell you just exactly what happened in the part that was left out.”

“I know exactly what happened,” cut in Laura. “I—I want to see—what happened.”

It was a cry from so deep that they didn’t know what to do.

“Won’t you do it for me?” she begged of the young man, going up to him. “What you left out—won’t you show it for me—now?”

He just stood there staring at her.

“It means—! It—” But how could she tell them what it meant? She looked from one to the other, as if to see what chance there was of their doing it without knowing what it meant. When she couldn’t keep sobs back, she turned away.

Even in her room at the hotel she had to try to keep from crying. She could hear the man moving around in the next room—so he, of course, could hear her, too. It was all as it was in the pictures—people crowded together, and all of it something that seemed life and really wasn’t. Even that—the one thing, the one moment—really wasn’t life. But it was all she had! If she let herself think of how little that all was—it was an emptiness she was afraid of.

The people who had tried to comfort her used to talk of how much she had had. She would wonder sometimes why they were talking on her side instead of their own. For if you have had much—does that make it easy to get along with nothing? Why couldn’t they see it? That because of what Howie had been to her—and for ten years!—she just didn’t know any way of going on living without Howie!

Tonight made fresh all her wedding anniversaries—brought happiness to life again. It almost took her in. And because she had been so near the dear, warm things in which she had lived, when morning came she couldn’t get on the train that would take her back to that house to which Howie would never come again. Once more it all seemed slipping from her. There must be something. As a frightened child runs for home, she turned to that place where—for at least a moment—it was as if Howie were there.

She went to the telegraph office and wired the company that sent out “The Cross of Diamonds,” asking where that film could be seen. She had learned that this was the way to do it. She had known nothing about such things at first; it had been hard to find out the ways of doing. It was a world she didn’t know the ways of.

When she got her answer, and found that the place where “The Cross of Diamonds” would be shown that night was more than a hundred miles away—that it meant going that much farther away from home—she told herself this was a thing she couldn’t do. She told herself this must stop—that her brother was right in the things he said against it. It wouldn’t do. He hadn’t said it was crazy, but that was what he meant—or feared. She had told him she would try to stop. Now was the time to do it—now when she would have to go so much farther away. But—it was going farther away—this glimpse of Howie—all that was left of Howie was moving away from her! And after the disappointment of the night before—She must see him once more! Then—yes, then she would stop.

She was excited when she had decided to do this. It lifted her out of the nothingness. From this meager thing her great need could in a way create the feeling that she was going to meet Howie. Once more she would see him do that thing which was so like him as to bring him back into life. Why should she turn from it? What were all the other things compared with this thing? This was one little flash of life in a world that had ceased to be alive.

So again that night, in the clothes he had most liked, she went for that poor little meeting with her husband—so pitifully little, and yet so tremendous because it was all she would ever have. Again she sat in a big, noisy place with many jostling, laughing people—and waited to see Howie. She forgot that the place had ugly red walls and sickly green lights; she could somehow separate herself from harsh voices and smells—for she was here to meet Howie!

She knew just the part of the house to sit in. Once she had sat where she couldn’t see him as he passed from sight! After that she had always come very early. So she had to sit there while other people were coming in. But she didn’t much mind that; it was like sitting in a crowded railway station when the person you love is coming soon.

But suddenly something reached over that gulf between other people and her. A word. A terrible word. Behind her someone said “munitions.” She put her hand to her eyes and pressed tight. Not to see. That was why she had to keep coming for this look at Howie. She had to see him—that she might shut out that—the picture of Howie—blown into pieces.

She hated people. They were always doing something like this to her. She hated all these people in the theater. It seemed they were all, somehow, against her. And Howie had been so good to them! He was so good to people like the people in this theater. It was because he was so good and kind to them that he was—that he was not Howie now. He was always thinking of people’s comfort—the comfort of people who had to work hard. From the time he went into his father’s factory he had always been thinking up ways of making people more comfortable in their work. To see girls working in uncomfortable chairs, or standing hour after hour at tables too low or too high for them—he couldn’t pass those things by as others passed them by. He had a certain inventive faculty, and his kindness was always making use of that. His father used to tell him he would break them all up in business if his mind went on working in that direction. He would tell him if he was going to be an inventor he had better think up some money-making inventions. Howie would laugh and reply that he’d make it all up someday. And at last one of the things he had thought out to make it better for people was really going to make it better for Howie. It was a certain kind of shade for the eyes. It had been a relief to the girls in their little factory, and it was being tried out elsewhere. It was even being used a little in one of the big munition plants. Howie was there seeing about it. And while he was there—He went in there Howie. There wasn’t even anything to carry out.

The picture had begun. She had to wait until almost half of it had passed before her moment came. The story was a tawdry, meaningless thing about the adventures of two men who had stolen a diamond cross—a strange world into which to come to find Howie. Chance had caught him into it—he was one of the people passing along a street which was being taken for the picture. His moment was prolonged by his stopping to do the kind of thing Howie would do, and now it was as if that one moment was the only thing saved out of Howie’s life. They who made the picture had apparently seen that the moment was worth keeping—they left it as a part of the stream of life that was going by while the detective of their story waited for the men for whom he had laid a trap. The story itself had little relation to real things—yet chance made it this vehicle for keeping something of the reality that had been Howie—a disclosing moment captured unawares.

She was thinking of the strangeness of all this when again the people seated back of her said a thing that came right to her. They were saying “scrap-heap.” She knew—before she knew why—that this had something to do with her. Then she found that they were talking about this film. It was ready for the scrap-heap. It was on its last legs. They laughed and said perhaps they were seeing its “last appearance.”

She tried to understand what it meant. Then even this would cease to be in the world. She had known she ought to stop following the picture around, she had even told herself this would be the last time she would come to see it—but to feel it wouldn’t any longer be there to be seen—that even this glimpse of Howie would go out—go out as life goes out—scrap-heap! She sat up straight and cleared her throat. She would have to leave. She must get air. But she looked to see where they were. Not far now. She might miss Howie! With both hands she took hold of the sides of the seat. She was not going to fall forward! Not suffocating. Not until after she had seen him.

Now. The detective has left the hotel—he is walking along the street. He comes to the cigar-store door, and there steps in to watch. And there comes the dog! Then it was not going to be cut out tonight! Along comes the little dog—pawing at his muzzle. He stops in distress in front of the cigar-store. People pass and pay no attention to the dog—there on the sidewalk. And then—in the darkened theater her hands go out, for the door has opened—and she sees her husband! Howie. There. Moving as he always moved! She fights back the tears that would blur him. That dear familiar way he moves! It is almost as if she could step up and meet him, and they could walk away together.

He starts to go the other way. Then he sees the dog. He goes up to him; he is speaking to him, wanting to know what is the matter. She can fairly hear the warmth and kindness of his voice as he speaks to the little dog. He feels of the muzzle—finds it too tight; he lets it out a notch. Dear Howie. Of course he would do that. No one else had cared, but he would care. Then he speaks to the dog—pats him—tells him he is all right now. Then Howie turns away.

But the dog thinks he will go with this nice person! Howie laughs and tells him he can’t come. A little girl has come across the street. Howie tells her to keep the dog from following him. Then again he turns to go. But just before he passes from sight the child calls something to him, and he looks back over his shoulder and smiles. She sees again the smile that has been the heart of her life. Then he passes from sight.

And he always leaves friends behind him—just as he always did leave friends behind him. There will be little murmurs of approval; sometimes there is applause. Tonight a woman near Laura said, “Say, I bet that’s an awful nice fellow.”

She never left her seat at once, as if moving would break a spell. For a little while after she had seen it, his smile would stay with her. Then it would fade, as things fade in the motion pictures. Somehow she didn’t really have it. That was why she had to keep coming—constantly reaching out for something that was not hers to keep.

When her moment had gone, she rose and walked down the aisle. It was very hard to go away tonight. There had been all the time the fear that what happened the night before would happen again—that she would not see Howie, after all. That made her so tense that she was exhausted now. And then “munitions”—and “scrap-heap.” Perhaps it was because of all this that tonight her moment had been so brief. Only for an instant Howie’s smile had brought her into life. It was gone now. It had passed.

She was so worn that when, at the door, her brother Tom stepped up to her she was not much surprised or even angry. Tom had no business to be following her about. She had told him that she would have to manage it her own way—that he would have to let her alone. Now here he was again—to trouble her, to talk to her about being brave and sane—when he didn’t know—when he didn’t have any idea what he was talking about! But it didn’t matter—not tonight. Let him do things—get the tickets—and all that. Even let him talk to her. That didn’t matter either.

But he talked very little. He seemed to think there was something wrong with her. He looked at her and said, “Oh, Laura!” reproachfully, but distressed.

“I thought you weren’t going to do this any more, Laura,” he said gently, after they had walked a little way.

“How did you know I was here?” she asked listlessly.

“They sent me word you had left home. I traced you.”

“I don’t see why you should trace me,” she said, but not as if it mattered.

“Oh, Laura!” he said again. “Well, I must say I don’t think Mrs. Edmunds was much of a friend!”

It was Mrs. Edmunds who had told Laura that there was this glimpse of her husband in “The Cross of Diamonds.” She had hesitated about telling her, but had finally said it was so characteristic and beautiful a moment she felt Laura should see it.

From the first Tom had opposed her seeing it, saying it would be nothing but torture to her. Torture it was, but it was as if that torture were all there was left of life.

Tonight everything was as a world of shadows. She knew that her brother was taking her to his home instead of back to her own. He had wanted to do this before, but she had refused. There was nothing in her now that could refuse. She went with him as if she were merely moving in a picture and had no power of her own to get out of it.

And that was the way it was through the next few weeks. Tom and his wife would talk to her about trying to interest herself in life. She made no resistance, she had no argument against this; but she had no power to do it. They didn’t know—they didn’t know how it had been with her and Howie.

She herself had never been outgoing. It was perhaps a habit of reserve built out of timidity, but she had been a girl whose life did not have a real contact with other lives. Perhaps there were many people like that—perhaps not; she did not know. She only knew that before Howie came the life in her was more as a thing unto itself than a part of the life of the world.

Then Howie came! Howie, who could get on with anyone, who found something to like in everyone; and in the warmth and strength of his feeling for people he drew her into that main body of life where she had not been before. It had been like coming into the sunshine!

Now he was gone; and they asked her to be alone what she had been through him. It was like telling one to go into the sunshine when the sun is not shining.

And the more these others tried to reach her, the more alone she felt, for it only made her know they could not reach her. When you have lived in the sunshine, days of cold mist may become more than you can bear. After a long struggle not to do so, she again went to the long-distance telephone to find out where that picture was being shown—that picture into which was caught one moment of Howie’s life as he moved through the world.

Worn by the struggle not to do what she was doing, and tormented by the fear that she had waited too long, that this one thing which was left to her might no longer be, she had to put every bit of her strength into establishing this connection with the people who could tell her what she must know. Establishing the connection with living was like this. She was far off and connected only by a tenuous thing which might any moment go into confusion and stop.

At the other end someone was making fun of her. They doubted if “The Cross of Diamonds” could be seen anywhere at all. “The Cross of Diamonds” had been double-crossed. Wasn’t it too much of a cross, anyway, to see “The Cross of Diamonds”?

Finally another man came to the phone. “The Cross of Diamonds” could be seen at a certain town in Indiana. But she’d better hurry! And she’d better look her last look. Why did she want to see it—might he ask? But Laura hung up the receiver. She must hurry!

All the rest of it was a blur and a hurry. Through the unreal confusion drove the one idea—she must get there in time! And that whole life of the world seemed pitted against her—it was as if the whole of that main body of life was thrown in between her and Howie. The train was late. It was almost the hour for pictures to begin when she got down at that lonely, faraway station. And the town, it seemed, was a mile from the station! There was a bus she must take. Every nerve of her being was hurrying that bus on—until that very anxiety made it seem it was Howie himself she would see if only she could get there in time.

And being late, the downstairs at the theater was full. “Balcony only,” said a man as she came in. “Oh, won’t you find me a good seat?” Laura besought him. “Like to know how I’ll find you a seat when there ain’t no seat,” was the answer—the whole big life of the world in between her and Howie!

Upstairs, too, it was hard to find a place. And all those people seated there—for them it meant only a few hours’ silly entertainment!

But after a moment a man directed her to a seat. There was another place beside it, and just as Laura was being seated a woman came along with two children. “We can’t all sit together,” she was saying, “so you just sit in here, Mamie. You sit right in here—beside the nice lady.”

The mother looked at Laura, as if expecting her to welcome her child. Laura did nothing. She must be alone. She was there to be with Howie.

She was not as late as she had feared. There would be time for getting ready—getting ready for Howie! She knew this would be the last time she would see Howie as he had moved through the world. For the last time she would see his face light to a smile. If she did not reach him tonight, she would never reach him. She had a feeling that she could reach him, if only something in her—if only something in her—

She could not finish that; it brought her to a place into which she could not reach, but as never before she had a feeling that he could be reached. And so when the little girl beside her twisted in her seat and she knew that the child was looking up at her she tried not to know this little girl was there—tried not to know that any of those people were there. If only she could get them all out of the way—she could reach into the shadow and feel Howie near!

But there was one thing she kept knowing—try her best not to know it! The little girl beside her, too young to be there, was going to sleep. When it came right up to the moment for her to see Howie, she was knowing that that little girl had fallen asleep in an uncomfortable position. Her head had been resting on the side of the seat—the side next Laura—and as she fell asleep it slipped from its support in a way that—Could she help it if this child was not comfortable? Angry, she tried to brush this from her consciousness as we brush dust from our eyes. This was her moment with Howie—her chance.

But when her moment came, a cruel thing happened. Something was wrong with the machine that was showing the picture. At just that moment—of all the moments!—the worn-out film seemed to be going to pieces before her eyes. After the little dog came along, and just as Howie should come out from the cigar-store, there was a flash—a blur—a jumble of movements. It was like an earthquake—it looked like life ceasing to be life. “No!” she gasped under her breath. “No!” The people around her were saying things of a different sort. “Cut it!” “What you givin’ us?” “Whoa, boy!” They laughed. They didn’t care. It got a little better; she could make out Howie bending down to fix the dog’s muzzle—but it was all dancing crazily—and people were laughing. And then—then the miracle! It was on Howie’s smile the picture steadied—that smile back over his shoulder after he had turned to go. And, as if to bring to rights what had been wrong, the smile was held, and it was as if Howie lingered, as if in leaving life he looked back over his shoulder and waited—waited for his smile to reach Laura. Out of the jumble and blur—out of the wrong and meaningless—Howie’s beautiful steady smile making it all right.

She could not have told how it happened. As Howie passed, she turned to the little girl beside her whose head was without support and, not waking her, supported the child’s head against her own arm. And after she had done this—it was after she had done it that she began to know, as if doing it let down bars.

Now she was knowing. She had wanted to push people aside and reach into the shadows for Howie. She began to see that it was not so she would reach him. It was in being as he had been—kind, caring—that she could have a sense of him near. Here was her chance—among the people she had thought stood between her and her chance. Howie had always cared for these people. On his way through the world with them he had always stopped to do the kind thing—as he stopped to make it right for the badly muzzled dog. Then there was something for her to do in the world. She could do the kind things Howie would be doing if he were there! It would somehow—keep him. It would—fulfill him. Yes, fulfill him. Howie had made her more alive—warmer and kinder. If she became as she had been before—Howie would have failed. She moved so that the little girl who rested against her could rest the better. And as she did this—it was as if Howie had smiled. The one thing the picture had never given her—the sense that it was hers to keep—that stole through her now as the things come which we know we can never lose. For the first moment since she lost him, she had him. And all the people in that theater, and all the people in the world—here was the truth! It cleared and righted as Howie’s smile had righted the picture. Insofar as she could come close to others she would come closer to him.

Pictorial Review, Jan 1921

Cherished and Shared
of Old

Though we know that never a longing mortal

Gains life best—Oh, better it is to pray for

Part in what we cherished and shared of old than

Fail to remember.

—Attributed to Sappho
—Adaptation by George Cram Cook

Thank goodness for the snow, thought Addie Morrison, as she watched the two children racing round the barn. And she was thinking it was nice there were some things that were everywhere—most everywhere: like sun and rain, like the wind and the snow, so’s when you were sent far from your home there were these things—like the stars—to make you feel a little more at home in a distant land.

“Not a soul here they ever knew before,” she would think of these two little Dutch children she’d taken into her home. They were warm now at night—not wandering on a road. They weren’t hungry now—mercy no, she’d seen to that, but what are they thinking, she’d wonder, as at times they’d sit there so gravely. She wished they’d do more things they shouldn’t, for when you’re too good you must be a little afraid.

She hadn’t been able to stand the pictures in the papers—so many tired children wanting to get back home. Her daughter Emmey, in the East, was working for little ones who had been turned out into the world. “Mother dear,” she wrote, “I can’t get home this Christmas—just can’t. But I could send you two children for whom you could make a Christmas—the way you used to for me and Jack. You’ll be so sorry for Johanna and Piet, and come to love them; perhaps you’ll want them to stay on there with you in our old home. There were always children on the Morrison place.”

So once more there were children on the old Morrison place, but could she make a happy Christmas for this little girl and boy bereft of their own? She could say “Merry Christmas,” but could she make their hearts glad? And what is Christmas if there is not warmth within?

“Maybe you’ll help,” she was saying to the turkey she crammed with savory stuffing. “And what about you?” she thought, regarding with favor the mince pies on the shelf.

She didn’t even know what they were used to for Christmas. She wished, for just five minutes, she could talk to their mother. “What would they like?” she’d ask. And their mother would reply—eagerly, so anxious: “Oh, if you would give them—” But this mother couldn’t speak up for her children—struck down trying to hurry them to safety.

Germans did that. The Schultzes were Germans—over there in their fine house on the hill. And so her heart hardened anew against Emma Schultz—and that was good, for she found it not so easy to hate Emma at Christmas.

Never a Christmas they hadn’t shared—all those years they were growing up. In this very kitchen they’d hung around sniffing and tasting. And when they weren’t here they were at the Schultzes’. She had two homes — her own and Schultzes’. And Emma had two—her own and the Morrisons’.

And then they had to act like that! Just to get a piece of land that didn’t belong to them at all they’d fought John Morrison, best friend they’d had since they came—greenhorns—into this country. Country where the Morrisons had been since first there were white men in Iowa! Not to her dying day would she forget her father’s face that late afternoon he came back from town, and standing by this very table said: “Well, they’ve won. The court has given them the strip. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know why. But I do know this! They’ve won the land—but they’ve lost the Morrisons. Never again—do you hear me, Addie?—never again can a Morrison be friend to a Schultz.”

Oh, she heard him all right, and never forgot. How could she forget, when she saw him change from that day? The land wasn’t so very important. But the defeat—bitter words spoken—from that day he began to brood, until soon people were saying: “Why Addie, seems like your father is beginning to fail.”

But Emil Schultz—he didn’t fail. As the Morrisons began to have less and less, the Schultzes had more and more. Emma Schultz’s land-grabbing father lived on till just last year—and many a snow had fallen since they carried John Morrison to the last land he would know.

So a fine daughter she was—letting into her heart memories of those long ago Christmases with Emma Schultz. Memories were tricky things—come Christmas-time. Maybe it was because you went on doing the same things. You made the cranberry sauce, trimmed the tree—doing alone the little things you’d done with someone else—with the dearest friend you’d ever had.

For no one had ever taken Emma’s place. Who could take the place of the friend with whom you’d shared all those good years of your life? Emma helped her make all her wedding things. Emma was there when her first baby was born. She’d named that daughter Emma. Later she’d thought of changing it—but not easy to change a name, and anyway she had an aunt named Emma—she got around it that way. And Walter. Emma was to have married Addie’s brother Walter. But Walter went away to war—that other time the Germans tried to wreck the world—and he never came back. And they had comforted each other then.

Yes, laughter and sorrow they had shared. And how divided now! That fought-over land connected the Morrison and Schultz farms. Connected only to divide. It wasn’t land—it was a gulf, a gulf that had widened with the years. Feeling—that is what lives on. You might even have forgotten what caused it, but it has come to have a life of its own, regardless of what it flamed from long ago. That is why there is hate in the world— (she half knew this, tried not to know) —hate unreasoning, living on because, one way or other, it got there in the first place; and when a thing has existed a long time it gives you the idea you can’t change it—even makes you think you don’t want to.

The smells of Christmas brought Emma close to her—Christmas smells trying to make her betray the legacy of hate to which she had been so bitterly loyal! And what if we did get many a Christmas dinner together, she thought. Remember the words—those very words they spoke!

Yes—the words. How cruel—and again how blessed—were words. They could carry testimony of love, the sympathy that brought heart closer to heart and warmed the world. And they could blast and wound and kill like those contraptions of the devil man used against man in war. And their life was as long as the life of man.

Longer. For the men who had fought for that land were gone now—her father and Emma’s. Walter was gone, and Addie’s husband. Her children were in homes of their own and she lived on here at the old place—running down now, and she couldn’t do anything about that—and over there on the hill, in her fine new house, lived Emma Schultz. She had a frigidaire, they said—a vacuum and everything to make life easy. She wore a sealskin coat and was proud and cold—how she’d laugh if she knew poor old Addie Morrison was thinking of the days they’d made the Christmas candy together—remembering how Emma’s stocking hung at the Morrisons’, and Addie’s at the Schultzes’.

“Come in and get warm!” she called to the children. “Stamp hard! Shake!” she cried gaily. They got in a mix-up getting off Piet’s ski pants. “You take one leg and I’ll take the other,” she said to Johanna. Johanna was the little mother, two years older than Piet, who was four. Addie made a great fuss about this, pretending she couldn’t pull so hard, letting on she was going to fall over backward, until Piet laughed out loud and Johanna smiled—her grave little smile that seemed to be feeling its way. “It will take time,” Addie told herself. Tomorrow they’d have their presents—sleds and skates, toys and new caps and mufflers and mittens. And tomorrow the Allen children were coming over to play with them. Once she heard them break out in laughter that came because it couldn’t help itself—how happy she’d be, as if a little of the weight of misery had lifted from the world. Perhaps Christmas could do that. That was what Christmas was for. She wanted them to be happy as she hadn’t wanted anything in years. That would be her Christmas present—a smile not uncertain, a laugh that was happy clear to the inside. People like Schultzes running little children out of their homes! As for her, she was an American. She didn’t hold with such things. (And way in her heart Addie Morrison knew Emma Schultz didn’t hold with them either—but this she couldn’t let herself know.)

Well, if that little fellow wasn’t edging up to the cookie-jar. Good! You must think it’s your house when you go after the cookie-jar.

Johanna said, in her new careful English, “Thank you” for the cookie; little Piet said something she didn’t understand, but he smiled and she knew it was “Thank you.”

What funny little cookies the Schultzes used to make for Christmas. Cut in all sorts of shapes—a rabbit, a star, a St. Nicholas and something called a grampus, and supposed to be for the bad child, but it had currants and nuts in it just the same, so who cared? Perhaps Johanna and Piet were used to cookies like that. Yes, Emma might know more than she did about what these children were used to. But Emma—warm in a fine sealskin coat—what did she care?

“Oh—pret-ty,” she heard Johanna murmur, and turned to find her fingering a length of red ribbon that was to be tied on the tree.

Addie stood stock-still watching her, for the little girl’s fingers moved over the bright stuff so wistfully, as if—as if she had once loved something like this. “Oh you poor little thing,” she thought, in a new wave of sympathy and tenderness—anger too. All the little fineries left behind. Only what you needed—not the pretty things to make life gay.

“Time to dress ourselves up for Christmas,” she said, slipping the bright broad ribbon under the collar of Johanna’s sweater and making a fine red bow.

And then she began to laugh—Emma running after a pig, trying to catch the pig to tie a red ribbon round his neck. That was one of the crazy things they did together—dressing up the animals for Christmas. Well, Emma caught the pig, but fell down doing it and Emma and pig rolled over and over together—the pig squirming and Emma clutching. Addie could see them now and she went on laughing, until the children, thinking there must be something very funny indeed, politely joined in.

The snow continued to fall softly, knowing it was Christmas and the world should be white, and after the dinner things were cleared away Addie wondered whether they’d like to be bundled up and go out again. That was the trouble—it was still hard to know for sure what they would like, for it wasn’t their house yet.

But suddenly it was! What in the world were they looking at out that window—dancing up and down, catching hold of each other and squealing and pointing?

Oh—dear. Now what? For there he was—that miserable Schultz dog who came bounding over as if he didn’t know a Schultz shouldn’t come to the Morrisons’. She started for the door to go chase him away but the children thought she was going to let him in, and they were right upon her, all excited and happy—natural—for the first time they really were children. And all because that ugly Schultz dog—for some crazy reason called Doc—was standing there wagging his tail as if waiting for them to come out and play with him.

“Bad dog,” she said. “German. Bad German dog,”—though she knew she shouldn’t be doing this.

But they didn’t care. It didn’t seem to make any difference to them that Doc was German. And then Addie knew. It wasn’t only the ribbons and the toys had been left behind. The dog had been left behind too….

“We’ll get a dog,” she said. “A nice dog. This is the homeliest dog ever lived.”

And Doc was a very funny-looking dog. He wasn’t any kind of dog—just Doc. He had a bulldog face and crooked legs, but he was sort of a dog of all nations, and Addie knew in her heart that the kindness of all nations came together in Doc, and that Doc was a good dog. But he was a Schultz.

She tried to interest them in the dog they would have, but they wanted Doc and wanted him right now; and as Addie saw that first flare-up of joy begin to die down into disappointment, of course she couldn’t stand it and there began a mad gay scramble to get them into their clothes so they could rush out and play with Doc Schultz.

Then she remembered they were used to having dogs draw things—pictures of Holland always had dogs drawing little carts—so she hurried into the shut-up front room, where the presents waited in secret, to get the Christmas sled—for might as well be killed for a sheep as a lamb, she thought.

Oh they were so delighted! They could scarcely wait to get out—and then they were all in a scramble together, Doc jumping on them and waving his silly tail—and for goodness sakes if the dog didn’t seem to be grinning—and the children were laughing and screaming and they all went tearing away together.

And Addie Morrison sat there thinking it was strange—so very strange—that their first happy moment on the Morrison place came through Emma Schultz. She sat there alone remembering her dogs and Emma’s — new sleds — and other mad scrambles in the Christmas snow.

•    •    •    •

Emma Schultz was remembering something herself. She was again a little girl not yet eight—new to America, a greenhorn. And the children at school stared and laughed at her because she talked funny and didn’t know their ways. But little Addie Morrison—so pretty then—came up and hooked her arm through Emma’s and said: “You and me, lets us be friends.”

More than anything else in the world she would like to walk over to Addie Morrison now, open the kitchen door just as she used to, and say—“You and me, lets us be friends.”

At Christmas it was so hard not to remember. And this Christmas most of all, because again—after all these years—Addie was befriending the stranger. How good of Addie! How good of America! And she wondered if anyone could love America as did the one who had come here a stranger and been taken in.

She was the one to do something for these children, for who could know better than she what it was to be a child among things not familiar.

She was putting in a big jar the lebkuchen, German Christmas cookies she made every year. She wouldn’t have had the heart to make them this year, but her mother hadn’t many Christmases left and clung to the things she was used to. Next week Emma’s Sunday-school class would come for their party, and they’d have these cookies and their presents. But it was lonely here today.

Ten thousand times she’d wished that land in the bottom of the sea. What island, compared to the love of friends? How gladly she would have given it back. It had changed things for the Schultzes. Her father grew hard after that and wanted to make money and didn’t care about friends. And she herself had to pretend she didn’t care, and that made one hard too. The Schultzes didn’t like being told they weren’t Americans, being shouted at they weren’t honest. They’d show them who the Schultzes were! But it had been lonely business, and at Christmas especially she knew there still lived in her heart all she and Addie had loved together, dear things shared. She’d like to cross that strip—and abolish it in crossing—open the kitchen door and see if there wasn’t something she could do for these little children against whom a wicked wrong had been worked. But what nonsense. You couldn’t change the way things were, and Addie had grown more bitter with the years. She’d shut the door—shut it in Emma Schultz’s face.

“Emma! I hear Doc barking,” her mother called out to her. “He wants to come in.”

She opened her own kitchen door, and yes—there stood Doc. But—what in the world? He was all decorated for Christmas. Red ribbon was wound round his collar and tied in a big gay bow. Now who could have done that?

And suddenly Emma Schultz sat down—so sure there was only one person in the world could have sent Doc home decorated for Christmas. She and Addie used to do that together. The dogs always had their big red Christmas bows. Addie had not forgotten! Oh, she had sent a message saying she remembered. And Emma Schultz began hurrying fast as she could—getting the cookies—presents for those she had for her Sunday-school class—for couldn’t she get others for them?—filling a big basket, hurrying into her boots, her coat, and out into the snow. It was Christmas! She ran across the strip giving it scarcely a thought, so eager to get to the Morrisons’.

But at the kitchen door she paused. So many years … Then she knocked, and Addie opened the door.

“Why—why Emma Schultz,” she said, as if she didn’t know what to say.

“Merry Christmas, Addie,” said Emma—timidly, bravely.

“Why—why—” And then all of a sudden Addie cried: “Merry Christmas yourself!”—and swiftly added: “For pity sakes come right in out of the snow!

•    •    •    •

A little later they were all sitting round the kitchen stove, nibbling the cookies Emma had brought, Emma and Addie drinking tea and the children their cocoa—so cozy in the Morrison kitchen. Yes, Johanna and Piet knew cookies like these, and great fun they had picking out now a new moon, now a little man—Johanna hugging the doll Emma had brought and Piet dangling the baby panda.

“Emma!” Addie burst out with a laugh—“do you remember the pig?”

While they were laughing came a barking and scratching at the door and Johanna and Piet ran to let in their friend Doc.

As the children were busy brushing him off. Emma said, very low: “Oh, Addie—when he came home all fixed up for Christmas—and I knew you had remembered—were telling me you remembered—”

Addie had been sitting with her back to Doc. She turned now. and saw that the bow she had tied on Johanna at this moment adorned Emma’s dog Doc.

And Emma thought she had done this! A Schultz thought a Morrison had made the first move.

Ah, there was danger in that moment—danger the world has faced time and again. Old bitter loyalties—resentments of many years—right there, ready to rush in.

But something else came flooding into that moment: It was the children had done this. The children whom hate had driven here—brought love. How strange that this could be. Like a miracle it seemed.

She was afraid she was going to cry, so when Doc came sniffing up to the stove she said, almost crossly: “Why Emma Schultz—that dog’s hungry.

“I’ll tell you, children,” she went on,“what do you say we give him our beef stew, for tomorrow we’ll have turkey.”

Doc knew it was to be for him and was dancing all around, his big bow bobbing.“Say Merry Christmas!” cried Addie, holding high the plate. Doc waved a hearty “Merry Christmas”—and they all watched Doc Schultz devour the Morrison stew.

The children clapped their hands at the speed with which he cleaned the plate. Emma and Addie smiled at each other—so much alive and warm between them. Dogs of other years were wearing their Christmas bows and cleaning the plate.

In a changing world of many sorrows it can be sad to remember alone. But when friends share dear memories—a fire in the cold, light in the darkness.

And right there the children began a great clatter, running round in circles with Doc. Why, they weren’t a bit afraid—for all the world as if they knew something had happened there amongst them. Whether they knew it or not, it was true—how blessed and true—that fear flew out through the window when love came in by the door.

Children’s book
Cherished and Shared of Old (1940)
illustrated by Alice Harvey (1894—1983)

Appendix

Trifles

A PLAY IN ONE ACT

CHARACTERS

GEORGE HENDERSON, country attorney

HENRY PETERS, sheriff

LEWIS HALE, a neighboring farmer

MRS. PETERS

MRS. HALE

Scene: The kitchen in the now abandoned farmhouse of JOHN WRIGHT, a gloomy kitchen, and left without having been put in order—unwashed pans under the sink, a loaf of bread outside the breadbox, a dish towel on the table—other signs of uncompleted work. At the rear the outer door opens, and the SHERIFF comes in, followed by the COUNTY ATTORNEY and HALE. The SHERIFF and HALE are men in middle life, the County Attorney is a young man; all are much bundled up and go at once to the stove. They are followed by the two women—the SHERIFF’s wife first; she is a slight wiry woman, a thin nervous face. MRS. HALE is larger and would ordinarily be called more comfortable looking, but she is disturbed now and looks fearfully about as she enters. The women have come in slowly and stand close together near the door.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  (Rubbing his hands.) This feels good. Come up to the fire, ladies.

MRS. PETERS:  (After taking a step forward.) I’m not—cold.

SHERIFF:  (Unbuttoning his overcoat and stepping away from the stove as if to the beginning of official business.) Now, Mr. Hale, before we move things about, you explain to Mr. Henderson just what you saw when you came here yesterday morning.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  By the way, has anything been moved? Are things just as you left them yesterday?

SHERIFF:  (Looking about.) It’s just the same. When it dropped below zero last night, I thought I’d better send Frank out this morning to make a fire for us—no use getting pneumonia with a big case on; but I told him not to touch anything except the stove—and you know Frank.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  Somebody should have been left here yesterday.

SHERIFF:  Oh—yesterday. When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy—I want you to know I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by today, and as long as I went over everything here myself—

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  Well, Mr. Hale, tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning.

HALE:  Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes. We came along the road from my place; and as I got here, I said, “I’m going to see if I can’t get John Wright to go in with me on a party telephone.” I spoke to Wright about it once before, and he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet—I guess you know about how much he talked himself; but I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before his wife, though I said to Harry that I didn’t know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John—

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  Let’s talk about that later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that, but tell now just what happened when you got to the house.

HALE:  I didn’t hear or see anything; I knocked at the door, and still it was all quiet inside. I knew they must be up, it was past eight o’clock. So I knocked again, and I thought I heard somebody say, “Come in.” I wasn’t sure, I’m not sure yet, but I opened the door—this door (Indicating the door by which the two women are still standing.) and there in that rocker—(Pointing to it.) sat Mrs. Wright.

(They all look at the rocker.)

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  What—was she doing?

HALE:  She was rockin’ back and forth. She had her apron in her hand and was kind of—pleating it.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  And how did she—look?

HALE:  Well, she looked queer.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  How do you mean—queer?

HALE:  Well, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. And kind of done up.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  How did she seem to feel about your coming?

HALE:  Why, I don’t think she minded—one way or other. She didn’t pay much attention. I said, “How do, Mrs. Wright, it’s cold, ain’t it?” And she said, “Is it?”—and went on kind of pleating at her apron. Well, I was surprised; she didn’t ask me to come up to the stove, or to set down, but just sat there, not even looking at me, so I said, “I want to see John.” And then she—laughed. I guess you would call it a laugh. I thought of Harry and the team outside, so I said a little sharp:  “Can’t I see John?” “No,” she says, kind o’ dull like. “Ain’t he home?” says I. “Yes,” says she, “he’s home.” “Then why can’t I see him?” I asked her, out of patience. “’Cause he’s dead,” says she. “Dead?” says I. She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin’ back and forth. “Why—where is he?” says I, not knowing what to say. She just pointed upstairs—like that (Himself pointing to the room above.) I got up, with the idea of going up there. I talked from there to here—then I says, “Why, what did he die of?” “He died of a rope around his neck,” says she, and just went on pleatin’ at her apron. Well, I went out and called Harry. I thought I might—need help. We went upstairs, and there he was lyin’—

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  I think I’d rather have you go into that upstairs, where you can point in all out. Just go on now with the rest of the story.

HALE:  Well, my first thought was to get that rope off. It looked … (Stops, his face twitches.) … but Harry, he went up to him, and he said, “No, he’s dead all right, and we’d better not touch anything.” So we went back downstairs. She was still sitting that same way. “Has anybody been notified?” I asked. “No,” says she, unconcerned. “Who did this, Mrs. Wright?” said Harry. He said it business-like—and she stopped pleatin’ of her apron. “I don’t know,” she says. “You don’t know?” says Harry. “No,” says she, “Weren’t you sleepin’ in the bed with him?” says Harry. “Yes,” says she, “but I was on the inside.” “Somebody slipped a rope round his neck and strangled him, and you didn’t wake up?” says Harry. “I didn’t wake up,” she said after him. We must ’a looked as if we didn’t see how that could be, for after a minute she said, “I sleep sound.” Harry was going to ask her more questions, but I said maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to the coroner, or the sheriff, so Harry went fast as he could to Rivers’ place, where there’s a telephone.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  And what did Mrs. Wright do when she knew that you had gone for the coroner?

HALE:  She moved from that chair to this over here (Pointing to a small chair in the corner) and just sat there with her hand held together and looking down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to put in a telephone, and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me—scared. (The COUNTY ATTORNEY, who has had his notebook out, makes a note.) I dunno, maybe it wasn’t scared. I wouldn’t like to say it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd came, and you, Mr. Peters, and so I guess that’s all I know that you don’t.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  (Looking around.) I guess we’ll go upstairs first—and then out to the barn and around there. (To the SHERIFF) You’re convinced that there was nothing important here—nothing that would point to any motive?

SHERIFF:  Nothing here but kitchen things.

(The COUNTY ATTORNEY, after again looking around the kitchen, opens the door of a cupboard closet. He gets up on a chair and looks on a shelf. Pulls his hand away, sticky.)

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  Here’s a nice mess.

(The women draw nearer.)

MRS. PETERS:  (To the other woman) Oh, her fruit; it did freeze. (To the COUNTY ATTORNEY) She worried about that when it turned so cold. She said the fire’d go out and her jars would break.

SHERIFF:  Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder and worryin’ about her preserves.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  I guess before we’re through she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about.

HALE:  Well, women are used to worrying over trifles.

(The two women move a little closer together.)

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  (With the gallantry of a young politician.) And yet, for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies? (The women do not unbend. He goes to the sink, takes dipperful of water from the pail and, pouring it into a basin, washes his hands. Starts to wipe them on the roller towel, turns it for a cleaner place.) Dirty towels! (Kicks his foot against the pans under the sink.) Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?

MRS. HALE:  (Stiffly.) There’s a great deal of work to be done on a farm.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  To be sure. And yet (With a little bow to her) I know there are some Dickson county farmhouses which do not have such roller towels.

(He gives it a pull to expose its full length again.)

MRS. HALE:  Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men’s hands aren’t always as clean as they might be.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  Ah, loyal to your sex, I see. But you and Mrs. Wright were neighbors. I suppose you were friends, too.

MRS. HALE:  (Shaking her head.) I’ve not seen much of her of late years. I’ve not been in this house—it’s more than a year.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  And why was that? You didn’t like her?

MRS. HALE:  I liked her all well enough. Farmers’ wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then—

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  Yes—?

MRS. HALE:  (Looking about.) It never seemed a very cheerful place.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  No—it’s not cheerful. I shouldn’t say she had the homemaking instinct.

MRS. HALE:  Well, I don’t know as Wright had, either.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  You mean that they didn’t get on very well?

MRS. HALE:  No, I don’t mean anything. But I don’t think a place’d be any cheerfuller for John Wright’s being in it.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  I’d like to talk more of that a little later. I want to get the lay of things upstairs now.

(He goes to the left, where three steps lead to a stair door.)

SHERIFF:  I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does’ll be all right. She was to take in some clothes for her, you know, and a few little things. We left in such a hurry yesterday.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  Yes, but I would like to see what you take, Mrs. Peters, and keep an eye out for anything that might be of use to us.

MRS. PETERS:  Yes, Mr. Henderson.

(The women listen to the men’s steps on the stairs, then look about the kitchen.)

MRS. HALE:  I’d hate to have men coming into my kitchen, snooping around and criticizing.

(She arranges the pans under sink which the COUNTY ATTORNEY had shoved out of place.)

MRS. PETERS:  Of course it’s no more than their duty.

MRS. HALE:  Duty’s all right, but I guess that deputy sheriff that came out to make the fire might have got a little of this on. (Gives the roller towel a pull.) Wish I’d thought of that sooner. Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up when she had to come away in such a hurry.

MRS. PETERS:  (Who has gone to a small table in the left rear corner of the room, and lifted on end of a towel that covers a pan.) She had bread set.

(Stands still.)

MRS. HALE:  (Eyes fixed on a loaf of bread beside the breadbox, which is on a low shelf at the other side of the room. Moves slowly toward it) She was going to put this in there. (Picks up loaf, then abruptly drops it. In a manner of returning to familiar things) It’s a shame about her fruit. I wonder if it’s all gone. (Gets up on the chair and looks.) I think there’s some here that’s all right, Mrs. Peters. Yes—here; (Holding it toward the window.) This is cherries, too. (Looking again.) I declare I believe that’s the only one. (Gets down, bottle in her hand. Goes to the sink and wipes it off on the outside.) She’ll feel awful bad after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer.

(She puts the bottle on the big kitchen table, center of the room. With a sigh, is about to sit down in the rocking chair. Before she is seated realizes what chair it is; with a slow look at it, steps back. The chair, which she has touched, rocks back and forth.)

MRS. PETERS:  Well, I must get those things from the front room closet. (She goes to the door at the right, but after looking into the other room, steps back.) You coming with me, Mrs. Hale? You could help me carry them.

(They go into the other room; reappear, MRS. PETERS carrying a dress and skirt, MRS. HALE following with a pair of shoes.)

MRS. PETERS:  My, it’s cold in there.

(She puts the clothes on the big table, and hurries to the stove.)

MRS HALE:  (Examining the skirt.) Wright was close. I think maybe that’s why she kept so much to herself. She didn’t even belong to the Ladies Aid. I suppose she felt she couldn’t do her part, and then you don’t enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir. But that—oh, that was thirty years ago. This all you was to take in?

MRS. PETERS:  She said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want, for there isn’t much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. She said they was in the top drawer in this cupboard. Yes, here. And then her little shawl that always hung behind the door. (Opens stair door and looks.) Yes, here it is.

(Quickly shuts door leading upstairs.)

MRS. HALE:  (Abruptly moving toward her.) Mrs. Peters?

MRS. PETERS:  Yes, Mrs. Hale?

MRS. HALE:  Do you think she did it?

MRS. PETERS:  (In a frightened voice.) Oh, I don’t know.

MRS. HALE:  Well, I don’t think she did. Asking for an apron and her little shawl. Worrying about her fruit.

MRS. PETERS:  (Starts to speak, glances up, where footsteps are heard in the room above. In a low voice.) Mr. Peters says it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in speech, and he’ll make fun of her sayin’ she didn’t wake up.

MRS. HALE:  Well, I guess John Wright didn’t wake when they was slipping that rope under his neck.

MRS. PETERS:  No, it’s strange. It must have been done awful crafty and still. They say it was such a—funny way to kill a man, rigging it all up like that.

MRS. HALE:  That’s just what Mr. Hale said. There was a gun in the house. He says that’s what he can’t understand.

MRS. PETERS:  Mr. Henderson said coming out that what was needed for the case was a motive; something to show anger or—sudden feeling.

MRS. HALE:  (who is standing by the table.) Well, I don’t see any signs of anger around here. (She puts her hand on the dish towel which lies on the table, stands looking down at the table, one half of which is clean, the other half messy.) It’s wiped here. (Makes a move as if to finish work, then turns and looks at loaf of bread outside the breadbox. Drops towel. In that voice of coming back to familiar things) Wonder how they are finding things upstairs? I hope she had it a little more red-up up there. You know, it seems kind of sneaking. Locking her up in town and then coming out here and trying to get her own house to turn against her!

MRS. PETERS:  But, Mrs. Hale, the law is the law.

MRS. HALE:  I s’pose ’tis. (Unbuttoning her coat.) Better loosen up your things, Mrs. Peters. You won’t feel them when you go out.

(MRS. PETERS takes off her fur tippet, goes to hang it on hook at the back of room, stands looking at the under part of the small corner table.)

MRS. PETERS:  She was piecing a quilt.

(She brings the large sewing basket, and they look at the bright pieces.)

MRS. HALE:  It’s log cabin pattern. Pretty, isn’t it? I wonder if she was goin’ to quilt or just knot it?

(Footsteps have been heard coming down the stairs. The SHERIFF enters, followed by HALE and the COUNTY ATTORNEY.)

SHERIFF:  They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it.

(The men laugh; the women look abashed.)

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  (Rubbing his hands over the stove.) Frank’s fire didn’t do much up there, did it? Well, let’s go out to the barn and get that cleared up.

(The men go outside.)

MRS. HALE:  (Resentfully.) I don’t know as there’s anything so strange, our takin’ up our time with little things while we’re waiting for them to get the evidence. (She sits down at the big table, smoothing out a block with decision.) I don’t see as it’s anything to laugh about.

MRS. PETERS:  (Apologetically.) Of course they’ve got awful important things on their minds.

(Pulls up a chair and joins MRS. HALE at the table.)

MRS. HALE:  (Examining another block.) Mrs. Peters, look at this one. Here, this is the one she was working on, and look at the sewing! All the rest of it has been so nice and even. And look at this! It’s all over the place! Why, it looks as if she didn’t know what she was about!

(After she has said this, they look at each other, then start to glance back at the door. After an instant MRS. HALE has pulled at a knot and ripped the sewing.)

MRS. PETERS:  Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?

MRS. HALE:  (Mildly.) Just pulling out a stitch or two that’s not sewed very good. (Threading a needle.) Bad sewing always made me fidgety.

MRS. PETERS:  (Nervously.) I don’t think we ought to touch things.

MRS. HALE:  I’ll just finish up this end. (Suddenly stopping and leaning forward.) Mrs. Peters?

MRS. PETERS:  Yes, Mrs. Hale?

MRS. HALE:  What do you suppose she was so nervous about?

MRS. PETERS:  Oh—I don’t know. I don’t know as she was nervous. I sometimes sew awful queer when I’m just tired. (MRS. HALE starts to say something looks at MRS. PETERS, then goes on sewing.) Well, I must get these things wrapped up. They may be through sooner than we think. (Putting apron and other things together.) I wonder where I can find a piece of paper, and string.

MRS. HALE:  In that cupboard, maybe.

MRS. PETERS:  (Looking in cupboard.) Why, here’s a birdcage. (Holds it up.) Did she have a bird, Mrs. Hale?

MRS. HALE:  Why, I don’t know whether she did or not—I’ve not been here for so long. There was a man around last year selling canaries cheap, but I don’t know as she took one; maybe she did. She used to sing real pretty herself.

MRS. PETERS:  (Glancing around.) Seems funny to think of a bird here. But she must have had one, or why should she have a cage? I wonder what happened to it?

MRS. HALE:  I s’pose maybe the cat got it.

MRS. PETERS:  No, she didn’t have a cat. She’s got that feeling some people have about cats—being afraid of them. My cat got in her room, and she was real upset and asked me to take it out.

MRS. HALE:  My sister Bessie was like that. Queer, ain’t it?

MRS. PETERS:  (Examining the cage.) Why, look at this door. It’s broke. One hinge is pulled apart.

MRS. HALE:  (Looking, too.) Looks as if someone must have been rough with it.

MRS. PETERS:  Why, yes.

(She brings the cage forward and puts it on the table.)

MRS. HALE:  I wish if they’re going to find any evidence they’d be about it. I don’t like this place.

MRS. PETERS:  But I’m awful glad you came with me, Mrs. Hale. It would be lonesome for me sitting here alone.

MRS. HALE:  It would, wouldn’t it? (Dropping her sewing.) But I tell you what I do wish, Mrs. Peters. I wish I had come over sometimes when she was here. I—(Looking around the room.)—wish I had.

MRS. PETERS:  But of course you were awful busy, Mrs. Hale—your house and your children.

MRS. HALE:  I could’ve come. I stayed away because it weren’t cheerful—and that’s why I ought to have come. I—I’ve never liked this place. Maybe because it’s down in a hollow, and you don’t see the road. I dunno what it is, but it’s a lonesome place and always was. I wish I had come over to see Minnie Foster sometimes. I can see now—

(Shakes her head.)

MRS. PETERS:  Well, you mustn’t reproach yourself, Mrs. Hale. Somehow we just don’t see how it is with other folks until—something comes up.

MRS. HALE:  Not having children makes less work—but it makes a quiet house, and Wright out to work all day, and no company when he did come in. Did you know John Wright, Mrs. Peters?

MRS. PETERS:  Not to know him; I’ve seen him in town. They say he was a good man.

MRS. HALE:  Yes—good; he didn’t drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him—(Shivers.) Like a raw wind that gets to the bone. (Pauses, her eye falling on the cage.) I should think she would ’a wanted a bird. But what do you suppose went with it?

MRS. PETERS:  I don’t know, unless it got sick and died.

(She reaches over and swings the broken door, swings it again; both women watch it.)

MRS. HALE:  You weren’t raised round here, were you? (MRS. PETERS shakes her head.) You didn’t know—her?

MRS. PETERS:  Not till they brought her yesterday.

MRS. HALE:  She—come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself—real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery. How—she—did—change. (Silence; then as if struck by a happy thought and relieved to get back to everyday things.) Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don’t you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind.

MRS. PETERS:  Why, I think that’s a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale. There couldn’t possible be any objection to it, could there? Now, just what would I take? I wonder if her patches are in here—and her things. (They look in the sewing basket.)

MRS. HALE:  Here’s some red. I expect this has got sewing things in it (Brings out a fancy box.) What a pretty box. Looks like something somebody would give you. Maybe her scissors are in here. (Opens box. Suddenly puts her hand to her nose.) Why—(MRS. PETERS bends nearer, then turns her face away.) There’s something wrapped up in this piece of silk.

MRS. PETERS:  Why, this isn’t her scissors.

MRS. HALE:  (Lifting the silk.) Oh, Mrs. Peters—it’s—

(Mrs. Peters bends closer.)

MRS. PETERS:  It’s the bird.

MRS. HALE:  (Jumping up.) But, Mrs. Peters—look at it. Its neck! Look at its neck! It’s all—other side to.

MRS. PETERS:  Somebody—wrung—its neck.

(Their eyes meet. A look of growing comprehension, of horror. Steps are heard outside. MRS. HALE slips box under quilt pieces, and sinks into her chair. Enter SHERIFF and COUNTY ATTORNEY. MRS. PETERS rises.)

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  (As one turning from serious thing to little pleasantries.) Well, ladies, have you decided whether she was going to quilt it or knot it?

MRS. PETERS:  We think she was going to—knot it.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  Well, that’s interesting, I’m sure. (Seeing the birdcage.) Has the bird flown?

MRS. HALE:  (Putting more quilt pieces over the box.) We think the—cat got it.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  (Preoccupied.) Is there a cat?

(Mrs. Hale glances in a quick covert way at Mrs. Peters)

MRS. PETERS:  Well, not now. They’re superstitious, you know. They leave.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  (To SHERIFF PETERS, continuing an interrupted conversation.) No sign at all of anyone having come from the outside. Their own rope. Now let’s go up again and go over it piece by piece. (They start upstairs.) It would have to have been someone who knew just the—

(Mrs. Peters sits down. The two women sit there not looking at one another, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they talk now, it is the manner of feeling their way over strange ground, as if afraid of what they are saying, but as if they cannot help saying it.)

MRS. HALE:  She liked the bird. She was going to bury it in that pretty box.

MRS. PETERS:  (In a whisper.) When I was a girl—my kitten—there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes—and before I could get there—(Covers her face for an instant.) If they hadn’t held me back, I would have—(Catches herself, looks upstairs, where steps are heard, falters weakly.)—hurt him.

MRS. HALE:  (With a slow look around her.) I wonder how it would seem never to have had any children around. (Pause.) No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird—a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too.

MRS. PETERS:  (Moving uneasily.) We don’t know who killed the bird.

MRS. HALE:  I knew John Wright.

MRS. PETERS:  It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale. Killing a man while he slept, slipping a rope around his neck that choked the life out of him.

MRS. HALE:  His neck. Choked the life out of him.

(Her hand goes out and rests on the birdcage.)

MRS. PETERS:  (With a rising voice.) We don’t know who killed him. We don’t know.

MRS. HALE:  (Her own feeling not interrupted.) If there’d been years and years of nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still, after the bird was still.

MRS. PETERS:  (Something within her speaking.) I know what stillness is. When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died—after he was two years old, and me with no other then—

MRS. HALE:  (Moving.) How soon do you suppose they’ll be through, looking for evidence?

MRS. PETERS:  I know what stillness is. (Pulling herself back.) The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale.

MRS. HALE:  (Not as if answering that.) I wish you’d seen Minnie Foster when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons and stood up there in the choir and sang. (A look around the room.) Oh, I wish I’d come over here once in a while! That was a crime! That was a crime! Who’s going to punish that?

MRS. PETERS:  (Looking upstairs.) We mustn’t—take on.

MRS. HALE:  I might have known she needed help! I know how things can be—for women. I tell you, it’s queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it’s all just a different kind of the same thing. (Brushes her eyes, then noticing the bottle of fruit, reaches out for it.) If I was you, I wouldn’t tell her fruit was gone. Tell her it ain’t. Tell her it’s all right. Take this in to prove it to her. She—she may never know whether it was broke or not.

MRS. PETERS:  (Takes the bottle, looks about for something to wrap it in; takes petticoat from the clothes brought from the other room, very nervously begins winding this around the bottle. In a false voice) My, it’s a good thing the men couldn’t hear us. Wouldn’t they just laugh! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a—dead canary. As if that could have anything to do with—with—wouldn’t they laugh!

(The men are heard coming downstairs.)

MRS. HALE:  (Under her breath.) Maybe they would—maybe they wouldn’t.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  No, Peters, it’s all perfectly clear except a reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing. Something to show—something to make a story about—a thing that would connect up with this strange way of doing it—

(The women’s eyes meet for an instant. Enter HALE from outer door.)

HALE:  Well, I’ve got the team around. Pretty cold out there.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  I’m going to stay here awhile by myself (To the SHERIFF) You can send Frank out for me, can’t you? I want to go over everything. I’m not satisfied that we can’t do better.

SHERIFF:  Do you want to see what Mrs. Peters is going to take in?

(The COUNTY ATTORNEY goes to the table, picks up the apron, laughs.)

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  Oh I guess they’re not very dangerous things the ladies have picked up. (Moves a few things about, disturbing the quilt pieces which cover the box. Steps back.) No, Mrs. Peters doesn’t need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff’s wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters?

MRS. PETERS:  Not—just that way.

SHERIFF:  (Chuckling.) Married to the law. (Moves toward the other room.) I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows.

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  (Scoffingly.) Oh, windows!

SHERIFF:  We’ll be right out, Mr. Hale.

(Hale goes outside. The Sheriff follows the County Attorney into the other room. Then MRS. HALE rises, hands tight together, looking intensely at MRS. PETERS, whose eyes take a slow turn, finally meeting MRS. HALE’s. A moment MRS. HALE holds her, then her own eyes point the way to where the box is concealed. Suddenly MRS. PETERS throws back quilt pieces and tries to put the box in the handbag she is wearing. It is too big. She opens box, starts to take the bird out, cannot touch it, goes to pieces, stands there helpless. Sound of a knob turning in the other room. MRS. HALE snatches the box and puts it in the pocket of her big coat. Enter COUNTY ATTORNEY and SHERIFF.)

COUNTY ATTORNEY:  (Facetiously.) Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what is it you call it, ladies?

MRS. HALE:  (Her hand against her pocket) We call it—knot it, Mr. Henderson.

CURTAIN

First performed by the Provincetown Players
at the Wharf Theatre,
Provincetown, Mass., August 8, 1916

Index of Titles

A

According to His Lights
[“One of Those Impossible Americans”]

Agnes of Cape’s End
Anarchist (The): His Dog
Approximation, An
At the Source
At the Turn of the Road
At Twilight

Awakening (The) of the Lieutenant-Governor
[The Preposterous Motive]

B

“Beloved Husband”
Boarder (A) of Art
Bound
Busy Duck, The

C

Cherished and Shared of Old

Contrary to Precedent

E

Escape, The

Everything You Want to Plant

F

“Finality” in Freeport
For Love of the Hills
For Tomorrow
Freckles M’Grath
From A to Z
From the Pen of Failure

G

Girl (The) from Downtown
Good Luck
“Government Goat”

H

Hearing Ear, The

Her Heritage of Ideals
[The Lie God Forgave]

Hired Man’s (The) Point of View
His America
His Smile
How the Prince Saw America

I

In the Face of His Constituents
[The Plea]

Intrusion (The) of the Personal

J

Jury (A) of Her Peers

L

Last Sixty Minutes, The

Lie (The) God Forgave
[Her Heritage of Ideals]

Looking After Clara

M

Man (The) of Flesh and Blood
Matter (A) of Gesture
Manager (The) of Crystal Sulphur Springs
Miss Jessie’s Trip Abroad

N

Nervous Pig, The

O

“One of Those Impossible Americans”
[According to His Lights]

“Out There”

P

Plea, The
[In the Face of His Constituents]

Pollen

“Poor Ed”

Preposterous Motive, The
[The Awakening of the Lieutenant-Governor]

R

Resurrection (The) and the Life

Rules (The) of the Institution

T

Tragedy (The) of a Mind

Trifles (play)

U

Unprofessional Crime, An

Unveiling Brenda

W

Whom Mince Pie Hath Joined Together

Work (The) of the Unloved Libby

About this eBook

The Collected Short Stories
OF
Susan Glaspell
(1876–1948)

Presented here, fifty-one stories by Susan Glaspell. Her stories often relate deep concerns about political and ethical issues prevalent then and now, but also describe, often with wry and witty humor, the experiences of daily life. Her characters, dealing with aspirations and disappointments, conflicts and resolutions (or lack of them), still resonate today.

A number of titles have been omitted due to unavailability of source material. The play Trifles can be found in the Appendix.

* * * *

Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 28, 1948) was an American playwright, novelist, and journalist. She is known to have composed nine novels, fifteen plays, over fifty short stories, and one biography. Often set in her native Midwest, these semi-autobiographical tales typically explore contemporary social issues, such as gender, ethics, and dissent, while featuring deep, sympathetic characters who make principled stands, and characters in search of life’s meaning.

She is today recognized as a pioneering feminist writer and America’s first important modern female playwright. Her one-act play Trifles (1916) is frequently cited as one of the great works of American theater, as well as an important piece of feminist literature. Trifles, and its short-story adaptation, “A Jury of Her Peers” have become staples of theater and Women’s Studies curricula across the United States and the world. The play Alison’s House earned Glaspell the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

This ebook was compiled and created by ECM for MobileRead.com, January 2019, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

The contents of this book were first published 1898 ~ 1940. Text is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is “Life+70” or less.

Click here for editing notes.

EDITING NOTES

>>TOC     >>ABOUT

This is my own compilation. Texts were obtained from multiple files at the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, HathiTrust, and links provided by the website of the International Susan Glaspell Society.

The following are not included in this collection, due to unavailability of source material:

The Philosophy of War (The Delphic, Oct 1898)
On the Second Down (Authors Magazine, Nov 1902)
The Benefaction of the Curse (The Argosy, Mar 1905)
The Return of Rhoda (Youth’s Companion, 26 Jan 1905)
The Boycott on Caroline (Youth’s Companion, 22 Mar 1906)
With the American Consul (The Red Book magazine, Feb 1910)
One’s Self-Respect (The Red Book magazine, Jul 1911)
The Rekindling (Designer, Oct 1910)
The Faithless Shepherd (Cornhill magazine, Jan 1926)
A Rose In The Sand (Pall Mall Magazine, May 1927)

OCR and printer’s errors were silently corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted. Some punctuation and spelling were standardized to provide consistency.

Index of Titles and cross-linked Table of Contents provide access to stories. Publication sources are cited at the end of each story.

Validation by Pagina Epub Checker.